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16,095 | Jimi Hendrix | James Marshall "Jimi" Hendrix (born Johnny Allen Hendrix; November 27, 1942 – September 18, 1970) was an American guitarist, songwriter and singer. Although his mainstream career spanned only four years, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential electric guitarists in the history of popular music, and one of the most celebrated musicians of the 20th century. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame describes him as "arguably the greatest instrumentalist in the history of rock music."
Born in Seattle, Washington, Hendrix began playing guitar at age 15. In 1961, he enlisted in the US Army, but was discharged the following year. Soon afterward, he moved to Clarksville then Nashville, Tennessee, and began playing gigs on the chitlin' circuit, earning a place in the Isley Brothers' backing band and later with Little Richard, with whom he continued to work through mid-1965. He then played with Curtis Knight and the Squires before moving to England in late 1966 after bassist Chas Chandler of the Animals became his manager. Within months, Hendrix had earned three UK top ten hits with the Jimi Hendrix Experience: "Hey Joe", "Purple Haze", and "The Wind Cries Mary". He achieved fame in the US after his performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, and in 1968 his third and final studio album, Electric Ladyland, reached number one in the US. The double LP was Hendrix's most commercially successful release and his first and only number one album. The world's highest-paid performer, he headlined the Woodstock Festival in 1969 and the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 before his accidental death in London from barbiturate-related asphyxia in September 1970.
Hendrix was inspired by American rock and roll and electric blues. He favored overdriven amplifiers with high volume and gain, and was instrumental in popularizing the previously undesirable sounds caused by guitar amplifier feedback. He was also one of the first guitarists to make extensive use of tone-altering effects units in mainstream rock, such as fuzz distortion, Octavia, wah-wah, and Uni-Vibe. He was the first musician to use stereophonic phasing effects in recordings. Holly George-Warren of Rolling Stone commented: "Hendrix pioneered the use of the instrument as an electronic sound source. Players before him had experimented with feedback and distortion, but Hendrix turned those effects and others into a controlled, fluid vocabulary every bit as personal as the blues with which he began."
Hendrix was the recipient of several music awards during his lifetime and posthumously. In 1967, readers of Melody Maker voted him the Pop Musician of the Year and in 1968, Billboard named him the Artist of the Year and Rolling Stone declared him the Performer of the Year. Disc and Music Echo honored him with the World Top Musician of 1969 and in 1970, Guitar Player named him the Rock Guitarist of the Year. The Jimi Hendrix Experience was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992 and the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2005. Rolling Stone ranked the band's three studio albums, Are You Experienced (1967), Axis: Bold as Love (1967), and Electric Ladyland (1968), among the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time", and they ranked Hendrix as the greatest guitarist and the sixth-greatest artist of all time. Hendrix was named the greatest guitarist of all time by Rolling Stone in 2023.
Hendrix was of African American and Irish descent. His paternal grandfather, Bertran Philander Ross Hendrix, was born in 1866 from an extramarital affair between a woman named Fanny and a grain merchant from Urbana, Ohio, or Illinois, one of the wealthiest men in the area at that time. Hendrix's paternal grandmother, Zenora "Nora" Rose Moore, was a former dancer and vaudeville performer who co-founded Fountain Chapel in Hogan's Alley. Hendrix and Moore relocated to Vancouver, Canada, where they had a son they named James Allen Hendrix on June 10, 1919; the family called him "Al".
In 1941, after moving to Seattle, Washington, Al met Lucille Jeter (1925–1958) at a dance; they married on March 31, 1942. Lucille's father (Jimi's maternal grandfather) was Preston Jeter (born 1875), whose mother was born in similar circumstances as Bertran Philander Ross Hendrix. Lucille's mother, Clarice (née Lawson), had African-American ancestors who had been enslaved people. Al, who had been drafted by the US Army to serve in World War II, left to begin his basic training three days after the wedding. Johnny Allen Hendrix was born on November 27, 1942, in Seattle; he was the first of Lucille's five children. In 1946, Johnny's parents changed his name to James Marshall Hendrix, in honor of Al and his late brother Leon Marshall.
Stationed in Alabama at the time of Hendrix's birth, Al was denied the standard military furlough afforded servicemen for childbirth; his commanding officer placed him in the stockade to prevent him from going AWOL to see his infant son in Seattle. He spent two months locked up without trial, and, while in the stockade, received a telegram announcing his son's birth. During Al's three-year absence, Lucille struggled to raise their son. When Al was away, Hendrix was mostly cared for by family members and friends, especially Lucille's sister Delores Hall and her friend Dorothy Harding. Al received an honorable discharge from the US Army on September 1, 1945. Two months later, unable to find Lucille, Al went to the Berkeley, California, home of a family friend named Mrs. Champ, who had taken care of and attempted to adopt Hendrix; this is where Al saw his son for the first time.
After returning from service, Al reunited with Lucille, but his inability to find steady work left the family impoverished. They both struggled with alcohol, and often fought when intoxicated. The violence sometimes drove Hendrix to withdraw and hide in a closet in their home. His relationship with his brother Leon (born 1948) was close but precarious; with Leon in and out of foster care, they lived with an almost constant threat of fraternal separation. In addition to Leon, Hendrix had three younger siblings: Joseph, born in 1949, Kathy in 1950, and Pamela in 1951, all of whom Al and Lucille gave up to foster care and adoption. The family frequently moved, staying in cheap hotels and apartments around Seattle. On occasion, family members would take Hendrix to Vancouver to stay at his grandmother's. A shy and sensitive boy, he was deeply affected by his life experiences. In later years, he confided to a girlfriend that he had been the victim of sexual abuse by a man in uniform. On December 17, 1951, when Hendrix was nine years old, his parents divorced; the court granted Al custody of him and Leon.
At Horace Mann Elementary School in Seattle during the mid-1950s, Hendrix's habit of carrying a broom with him to emulate a guitar gained the attention of the school's social worker. After more than a year of his clinging to a broom like a security blanket, she wrote a letter requesting school funding intended for underprivileged children, insisting that leaving him without a guitar might result in psychological damage. Her efforts failed, and Al refused to buy him a guitar.
In 1957, while helping his father with a side-job, Hendrix found a ukulele among the garbage they were removing from an older woman's home. She told him that he could keep the instrument, which had only one string. Learning by ear, he played single notes, following along to Elvis Presley songs, particularly "Hound Dog". By the age of 33, Hendrix's mother Lucille had developed cirrhosis of the liver, and on February 2, 1958, she died when her spleen ruptured. Al refused to take James and Leon to attend their mother's funeral; he instead gave them shots of whiskey and told them that was how men should deal with loss. In 1958, Hendrix completed his studies at Washington Junior High School and began attending, but did not graduate from, Garfield High School.
In mid-1958, at age 15, Hendrix acquired his first acoustic guitar, for $5 (equivalent to $51 in 2022). He played for hours daily, watching others and learning from more experienced guitarists, and listening to blues artists such as Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Howlin' Wolf, and Robert Johnson. The first tune Hendrix learned to play was the television theme "Peter Gunn". Around that time, Hendrix jammed with boyhood friend Sammy Drain and his keyboard-playing brother. In 1959, attending a concert by Hank Ballard & the Midnighters in Seattle, Hendrix met the group's guitarist Billy Davis. Davis showed him some guitar licks and got him a short gig with the Midnighters. The two remained friends until Hendrix's death in 1970.
Soon after he acquired the acoustic guitar, Hendrix formed his first band, the Velvetones. Without an electric guitar, he could barely be heard over the sound of the group. After about three months, he realized that he needed an electric guitar. In mid-1959, his father relented and bought him a white Supro Ozark. Hendrix's first gig was with an unnamed band in the Jaffe Room of Seattle's Temple De Hirsch, but they fired him between sets for showing off. He joined the Rocking Kings, which played professionally at venues such as the Birdland club. When his guitar was stolen after he left it backstage overnight, Al bought him a red Silvertone Danelectro.
Before Hendrix was 19 years old, law authorities had twice caught him riding in stolen cars. Given a choice between prison or joining the Army, he chose the latter and enlisted on May 31, 1961. After completing eight weeks of basic training at Fort Ord, California, he was assigned to the 101st Airborne Division and stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. He arrived on November 8, and soon afterward he wrote to his father: "There's nothing but physical training and harassment here for two weeks, then when you go to jump school ... you get hell. They work you to death, fussing and fighting." In his next letter home, Hendrix, who had left his guitar in Seattle at the home of his girlfriend Betty Jean Morgan, asked his father to send it to him as soon as possible, stating: "I really need it now." His father obliged and sent the red Silvertone Danelectro on which Hendrix had hand-painted the words "Betty Jean" to Fort Campbell. His apparent obsession with the instrument contributed to his neglect of his duties, which led to taunting and physical abuse from his peers, who at least once hid the guitar from him until he had begged for its return. In November 1961, fellow serviceman Billy Cox walked past an army club and heard Hendrix playing. Impressed by Hendrix's technique, which Cox described as a combination of "John Lee Hooker and Beethoven", Cox borrowed a bass guitar and the two jammed. Within weeks, they began performing at base clubs on the weekends with other musicians in a loosely organized band, the Casuals.
Hendrix completed his paratrooper training and, on January 11, 1962, Major General Charles W. G. Rich awarded him the prestigious Screaming Eagles patch. By February, his personal conduct had begun to draw criticism from his superiors. They labeled him an unqualified marksman and often caught him napping while on duty and failing to report for bed checks. On May 24, Hendrix's platoon sergeant, James C. Spears, filed a report in which he stated: "He has no interest whatsoever in the Army ... It is my opinion that Private Hendrix will never come up to the standards required of a soldier. I feel that the military service will benefit if he is discharged as soon as possible." On June 29, 1962, Hendrix was granted a general discharge under honorable conditions. Hendrix later spoke of his dislike of the army and that he had received a medical discharge after breaking his ankle during his 26th parachute jump, but no Army records have been produced that indicate that he received or was discharged for any injuries.
In September 1962, after Cox was discharged from the Army, he and Hendrix moved about 20 miles (32 km) across the state line from Fort Campbell to Clarksville, Tennessee, and formed a band, the King Kasuals. In Seattle, Hendrix saw Butch Snipes play with his teeth and now the Kasuals' second guitarist, Alphonso "Baby Boo" Young, was performing this guitar gimmick. Not to be upstaged, Hendrix also learned to play in this way. He later explained: "The idea of doing that came to me ... in Tennessee. Down there you have to play with your teeth or else you get shot. There's a trail of broken teeth all over the stage."
Although they began playing low-paying gigs at obscure venues, the band eventually moved to Nashville's Jefferson Street, which was the traditional heart of the city's black community and home to a thriving rhythm and blues music scene. They earned a brief residency playing at a popular venue in town, the Club del Morocco, and for the next two years Hendrix made a living performing at a circuit of venues throughout the South that were affiliated with the Theater Owners Booking Association (TOBA), widely known as the chitlin' circuit. In addition to playing in his own band, Hendrix performed as a backing musician for various soul, R&B, and blues musicians, including Wilson Pickett, Slim Harpo, Sam Cooke, Ike & Tina Turner and Jackie Wilson.
In January 1964, feeling he had outgrown the circuit artistically, and frustrated by having to follow the rules of bandleaders, Hendrix decided to venture out on his own. He moved into the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, where he befriended Lithofayne Pridgon, known as "Faye", who became his girlfriend. A Harlem native with connections throughout the area's music scene, Pridgon provided him with shelter, support, and encouragement. Hendrix also met the Allen twins, Arthur and Albert. In February 1964, Hendrix won first prize in the Apollo Theater amateur contest. Hoping to secure a career opportunity, he played the Harlem club circuit and sat in with various bands. At the recommendation of a former associate of Joe Tex, Ronnie Isley granted Hendrix an audition that led to an offer to become the guitarist with the Isley Brothers' backing band, the I.B. Specials, which he readily accepted.
In March 1964, Hendrix recorded the two-part single "Testify" with the Isley Brothers. Released in June, it failed to chart. In May, he provided guitar instrumentation for the Don Covay song, "Mercy Mercy". Issued in August by Rosemart Records and distributed by Atlantic, the track reached number 35 on the Billboard chart.
Hendrix toured with the Isleys during much of 1964, but near the end of October, after growing tired of playing the same set every night, he left the band. Soon afterward, Hendrix joined Little Richard's touring band, the Upsetters. During a stop in Los Angeles in February 1965, he recorded his first and only single with Richard, "I Don't Know What You Got (But It's Got Me)", written by Don Covay and released by Vee-Jay Records. Richard's popularity was waning at the time, and the single peaked at number 92, where it remained for one week before dropping off the chart. Hendrix met singer Rosa Lee Brooks while staying at the Wilcox Hotel in Hollywood, and she invited him to participate in a recording session for her single, which included the Arthur Lee penned "My Diary" as the A-side, and "Utee" as the B-side. Hendrix played guitar on both tracks, which also included background vocals by Lee. The single failed to chart, but Hendrix and Lee began a friendship that lasted several years; Hendrix later became an ardent supporter of Lee's band, Love.
In July 1965, Hendrix made his first television appearance on Nashville's Channel 5 Night Train. Performing in Little Richard's ensemble band, he backed up vocalists Buddy and Stacy on "Shotgun". The video recording of the show marks the earliest known footage of Hendrix performing. Richard and Hendrix often clashed over tardiness, wardrobe, and Hendrix's stage antics, and in late July, Richard's brother Robert fired him.
On July 27, Hendrix signed his first recording contract with Juggy Murray at Sue Records and Copa Management. He then briefly rejoined the Isley Brothers, and recorded a second single with them, "Move Over and Let Me Dance" backed with "Have You Ever Been Disappointed". Later that year, he joined a New York-based R&B band, Curtis Knight and the Squires, after meeting Knight in the lobby of a hotel where both men were staying. Hendrix performed with them for eight months.
In October 1965, he and Knight recorded the single, "How Would You Feel" backed with "Welcome Home". Despite his two-year contract with Sue, Hendrix signed a three-year recording contract with entrepreneur Ed Chalpin on October 15. While the relationship with Chalpin was short-lived, his contract remained in force, which later caused legal and career problems for Hendrix. During his time with Knight, Hendrix briefly toured with Joey Dee and the Starliters, and worked with King Curtis on several recordings including Ray Sharpe's two-part single, "Help Me". Hendrix earned his first composer credits for two instrumentals, "Hornets Nest" and "Knock Yourself Out", released as a Curtis Knight and the Squires single in 1966.
Feeling restricted by his experiences as an R&B sideman, Hendrix moved in 1966 to New York City's Greenwich Village, which had a vibrant and diverse music scene. There, he was offered a residency at the Cafe Wha? on MacDougal Street and formed his own band that June, Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, which included future Spirit guitarist Randy California. The Blue Flames played at several clubs in New York and Hendrix began developing his guitar style and material that he would soon use with the Experience. In September, they gave some of their last concerts at the Cafe Au Go Go in Manhattan, as the backing group for a singer and guitarist then billed as John Hammond.
By May 1966, Hendrix was struggling to earn a living wage playing the R&B circuit, so he briefly rejoined Curtis Knight and the Squires for an engagement at one of New York City's most popular nightspots, the Cheetah Club. During a performance, Linda Keith, the girlfriend of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, noticed Hendrix and was "mesmerised" by his playing. She invited him to join her for a drink, and the two became friends.
While Hendrix was playing as Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, Keith recommended him to Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham and producer Seymour Stein. They failed to see Hendrix's musical potential, and rejected him. Keith referred him to Chas Chandler, who was leaving the Animals and was interested in managing and producing artists. Chandler saw Hendrix play in Cafe Wha?, a Greenwich Village, New York City nightclub. Chandler liked the Billy Roberts song "Hey Joe", and was convinced he could create a hit single with the right artist. Impressed with Hendrix's version of the song, he brought him to London on September 24, 1966, and signed him to a management and production contract with himself and ex-Animals manager Michael Jeffery. That night, Hendrix gave an impromptu solo performance at The Scotch of St James, and began a relationship with Kathy Etchingham that lasted for two and a half years.
Following Hendrix's arrival in London, Chandler began recruiting members for a band designed to highlight his talents, the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Hendrix met guitarist Noel Redding at an audition for the New Animals, where Redding's knowledge of blues progressions impressed Hendrix, who stated that he also liked Redding's hairstyle. Chandler asked Redding if he wanted to play bass guitar in Hendrix's band; Redding agreed. Chandler began looking for a drummer and soon after contacted Mitch Mitchell through a mutual friend. Mitchell, who had recently been fired from Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames, participated in a rehearsal with Redding and Hendrix where they found common ground in their shared interest in rhythm and blues. When Chandler phoned Mitchell later that day to offer him the position, he readily accepted. Chandler also convinced Hendrix to change the spelling of his first name from Jimmy to the more exotic Jimi.
On October 1, 1966, Chandler brought Hendrix to the London Polytechnic at Regent Street, where Cream was scheduled to perform, and where Hendrix and guitarist Eric Clapton met. Clapton later said: "He asked if he could play a couple of numbers. I said, 'Of course', but I had a funny feeling about him." Halfway through Cream's set, Hendrix took the stage and performed a frantic version of the Howlin' Wolf song "Killing Floor". In 1989, Clapton described the performance: "He played just about every style you could think of, and not in a flashy way. I mean he did a few of his tricks, like playing with his teeth and behind his back, but it wasn't in an upstaging sense at all, and that was it ... He walked off, and my life was never the same again".
In mid-October 1966, Chandler arranged an engagement for the Experience as Johnny Hallyday's supporting act during a brief tour of France. Thus, the Jimi Hendrix Experience performed their first show on October 13, 1966, at the Novelty in Evreux. Their enthusiastically received 15-minute performance at the Olympia theatre in Paris on October 18 marks the earliest known recording of the band. In late October, Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, managers of the Who, signed the Experience to their newly formed label, Track Records, and the group recorded their first song, "Hey Joe", on October 23. "Stone Free", which was Hendrix's first songwriting effort after arriving in England, was recorded on November 2.
From November 8 to 11, 1966, The Jimi Hendrix Experience had a short residency at the Big Apple club in Munich, their first gigs in Germany. At this occasion Hendrix had a show experience that would define him from then on: when trying to escape in panic from a frenetic audience that had pulled him off the stage, he smashed his guitar for the first time in a sound explosion on stage, which was perceived by the audience as part of the show. Observing the audience's reaction, Chandler decided that this show of violence had to become a permanent feature of the Experience's show.
In mid-November, they performed at the Bag O'Nails nightclub in London, with Clapton, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, Brian Jones, Mick Jagger, and Kevin Ayers in attendance. Ayers described the crowd's reaction as stunned disbelief: "All the stars were there, and I heard serious comments, you know 'shit', 'Jesus', 'damn' and other words worse than that." The performance earned Hendrix his first interview, published in Record Mirror with the headline: "Mr. Phenomenon". "Now hear this ... we predict that [Hendrix] is going to whirl around the business like a tornado", wrote Bill Harry, who asked the rhetorical question: "Is that full, big, swinging sound really being created by only three people?" Hendrix said: "We don't want to be classed in any category ... If it must have a tag, I'd like it to be called, 'Free Feeling'. It's a mixture of rock, freak-out, rave and blues". Through a distribution deal with Polydor Records, the Experience's first single, "Hey Joe", backed with "Stone Free", was released on December 16, 1966. After appearances on the UK television shows Ready Steady Go! and Top of the Pops, "Hey Joe" entered the UK charts on December 29 and peaked at number six. Further success came in March 1967 with the UK number three hit "Purple Haze", and in May with "The Wind Cries Mary", which remained on the UK charts for eleven weeks, peaking at number six. On March 12, 1967, he performed at the Troutbeck Hotel, Ilkley, West Yorkshire, where, after about 900 people turned up (the hotel was licensed for 250) the local police stopped the gig due to safety concerns.
On March 31, 1967, while the Experience waited to perform at the London Astoria, Hendrix and Chandler discussed ways in which they could increase the band's media exposure. When Chandler asked journalist Keith Altham for advice, Altham suggested that they needed to do something more dramatic than the stage show of the Who, which involved the smashing of instruments. Hendrix joked: "Maybe I can smash up an elephant", to which Altham replied: "Well, it's a pity you can't set fire to your guitar". Chandler then asked road manager Gerry Stickells to procure some lighter fluid. During the show, Hendrix gave an especially dynamic performance before setting his guitar on fire at the end of a 45-minute set. In the wake of the stunt, members of London's press labeled Hendrix the "Black Elvis" and the "Wild Man of Borneo".
An enduring urban legend in the UK maintains that a possible explanation for the feral parakeets that have appeared in Great Britain since the mid-20th century may derive from a single pair of the birds that were released by Hendrix on Carnaby Street in the 1960s. According to a study, however, which mapped historical news reports of sightings of the birds, the myth is not true.
After the UK chart success of their first two singles, "Hey Joe" and "Purple Haze", the Experience began assembling material for a full-length LP. In London, recording began at De Lane Lea Studios, and later moved to the prestigious Olympic Studios. The album, Are You Experienced, features a diversity of musical styles, including blues tracks such as "Red House" and the R&B song "Remember". It also included the experimental science fiction piece, "Third Stone from the Sun" and the post-modern soundscapes of the title track, with prominent backwards guitar and drums. "I Don't Live Today" served as a medium for Hendrix's guitar feedback improvisation and "Fire" was driven by Mitchell's drumming.
Released in the UK on May 12, 1967, Are You Experienced spent 33 weeks on the charts, peaking at number two. It was prevented from reaching the top spot by the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. On June 4, 1967, Hendrix opened a show at the Saville Theatre in London with his rendition of Sgt. Pepper's title track, which was released just three days previous. Beatles manager Brian Epstein owned the Saville at the time, and both George Harrison and Paul McCartney attended the performance. McCartney described the moment: "The curtains flew back and he came walking forward playing 'Sgt. Pepper'. It's a pretty major compliment in anyone's book. I put that down as one of the great honors of my career." Released in the US on August 23 by Reprise Records, Are You Experienced reached number five on the Billboard 200.
In 1989, Noe Goldwasser, the founding editor of Guitar World, described Are You Experienced as "the album that shook the world ... leaving it forever changed". In 2005, Rolling Stone called the double-platinum LP Hendrix's "epochal debut", and they ranked it the 15th greatest album of all time, noting his "exploitation of amp howl", and characterizing his guitar playing as "incendiary ... historic in itself".
Although popular in Europe at the time, the Experience's first US single, "Hey Joe", failed to reach the Billboard Hot 100 chart upon its release on May 1, 1967. Their fortunes improved when McCartney recommended them to the organizers of the Monterey Pop Festival. He insisted that the event would be incomplete without Hendrix, whom he called "an absolute ace on the guitar". McCartney agreed to join the board of organizers on the condition that the Experience perform at the festival in mid-June.
On June 18, 1967, introduced by Brian Jones as "the most exciting performer [he had] ever heard", Hendrix opened with a fast arrangement of Howlin' Wolf's song "Killing Floor", wearing what author Keith Shadwick described as "clothes as exotic as any on display elsewhere". Shadwick wrote: "[Hendrix] was not only something utterly new musically, but an entirely original vision of what a black American entertainer should and could look like." The Experience went on to perform renditions of "Hey Joe", B.B. King's "Rock Me Baby", Chip Taylor's "Wild Thing", and Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone", and four original compositions: "Foxy Lady", "Can You See Me", "The Wind Cries Mary", and "Purple Haze". The set ended with Hendrix destroying his guitar and tossing pieces of it out to the audience. Rolling Stone's Alex Vadukul wrote:
When Jimi Hendrix set his guitar on fire at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival he created one of rock's most perfect moments. Standing in the front row of that concert was a 17-year-old boy named Ed Caraeff. Caraeff had never seen Hendrix before nor heard his music, but he had a camera with him and there was one shot left in his roll of film. As Hendrix lit his guitar, Caraeff took a final photo. It would become one of the most famous images in rock and roll.
Caraeff stood on a chair next to the edge of the stage and took four monochrome pictures of Hendrix burning his guitar. Caraeff was close enough to the fire that he had to use his camera to protect his face from the heat. Rolling Stone later colorized the image, matching it with other pictures taken at the festival before using the shot for a 1987 magazine cover. According to author Gail Buckland, the final frame of "Hendrix kneeling in front of his burning guitar, hands raised, is one of the most famous images in rock". Author and historian Matthew C. Whitaker wrote that "Hendrix's burning of his guitar became an iconic image in rock history and brought him national attention". The Los Angeles Times asserted that, upon leaving the stage, Hendrix "graduated from rumor to legend". Author John McDermott wrote that "Hendrix left the Monterey audience stunned and in disbelief at what they'd just heard and seen". According to Hendrix: "I decided to destroy my guitar at the end of a song as a sacrifice. You sacrifice things you love. I love my guitar." The performance was filmed by D. A. Pennebaker, and included in the concert documentary Monterey Pop, which helped Hendrix gain popularity with the US public.
After the festival, the Experience was booked for five concerts at Bill Graham's Fillmore, with Big Brother and the Holding Company and Jefferson Airplane. The Experience outperformed Jefferson Airplane during the first two nights, and replaced them at the top of the bill on the fifth. Following their successful West Coast introduction, which included a free open-air concert at Golden Gate Park and a concert at the Whisky a Go Go, the Experience was booked as the opening act for the first American tour of the Monkees. The Monkees requested Hendrix as a supporting act because they were fans, but their young audience disliked the Experience, who left the tour after six shows. Chandler later said he engineered the tour to gain publicity for Hendrix.
The second Experience album, Axis: Bold as Love, opens with the track "EXP", which uses microphonic and harmonic feedback in a new, creative fashion. It also showcased an experimental stereo panning effect in which sounds emanating from Hendrix's guitar move through the stereo image, revolving around the listener. The piece reflected his growing interest in science fiction and outer space. He composed the album's title track and finale around two verses and two choruses, during which he pairs emotions with personas, comparing them to colors. The song's coda features the first recording of stereo phasing. Shadwick described the composition as "possibly the most ambitious piece on Axis, the extravagant metaphors of the lyrics suggesting a growing confidence" in Hendrix's songwriting. His guitar playing throughout the song is marked by chordal arpeggios and contrapuntal motion, with tremolo-picked partial chords providing the musical foundation for the chorus, which culminates in what musicologist Andy Aledort described as "simply one of the greatest electric guitar solos ever played". The track fades out on tremolo-picked 32nd note double stops.
The scheduled release date for Axis was almost delayed when Hendrix lost the master tape of side one of the LP, leaving it in the back seat of a London taxi. With the deadline looming, Hendrix, Chandler, and engineer Eddie Kramer remixed most of side one in a single overnight session, but they could not match the quality of the lost mix of "If 6 Was 9". Redding had a tape recording of this mix, which had to be smoothed out with an iron as it had gotten wrinkled. During the verses, Hendrix doubled his singing with a guitar line which he played one octave lower than his vocals. Hendrix voiced his disappointment about having re-mixed the album so quickly, and he felt that it could have been better had they been given more time.
Axis featured psychedelic cover art that depicts Hendrix and the Experience as various avatars of Vishnu, incorporating a painting of them by Roger Law, from a photo-portrait by Karl Ferris. The painting was then superimposed on a copy of a mass-produced religious poster. Hendrix stated that the cover, which Track spent $5,000 producing, would have been more appropriate had it highlighted his American Indian heritage. He said: "You got it wrong ... I'm not that kind of Indian." Track released the album in the UK on December 1, 1967, where it peaked at number five, spending 16 weeks on the charts. In February 1968, Axis: Bold as Love reached number three in the US.
While author and journalist Richie Unterberger described Axis as the least impressive Experience album, according to author Peter Doggett, the release "heralded a new subtlety in Hendrix's work". Mitchell said: "Axis was the first time that it became apparent that Jimi was pretty good working behind the mixing board, as well as playing, and had some positive ideas of how he wanted things recorded. It could have been the start of any potential conflict between him and Chas in the studio."
Recording for the Experience's third and final studio album, Electric Ladyland, began as early as December 20, 1967, at Olympic Studios. Several songs were attempted; however, in April 1968, the Experience, with Chandler as producer and engineers Eddie Kramer and Gary Kellgren, moved the sessions to the newly opened Record Plant Studios in New York. As the sessions progressed, Chandler became increasingly frustrated with Hendrix's perfectionism and his demands for repeated takes. Hendrix also allowed numerous friends and guests to join them in the studio, which contributed to a chaotic and crowded environment in the control room and led Chandler to sever his professional relationship with Hendrix. Redding later recalled: "There were tons of people in the studio; you couldn't move. It was a party, not a session." Redding, who had formed his own band in mid-1968, Fat Mattress, found it increasingly difficult to fulfill his commitments with the Experience, so Hendrix played many of the bass parts on Electric Ladyland. The album's cover stated that it was "produced and directed by Jimi Hendrix". During the Electric Ladyland recording sessions, Hendrix began experimenting with other combinations of musicians, including Jefferson Airplane's Jack Casady and Traffic's Steve Winwood, who played bass and organ, respectively, on the 15-minute slow-blues jam, "Voodoo Chile". During the album's production, Hendrix appeared at an impromptu jam with B.B. King, Al Kooper, and Elvin Bishop. Electric Ladyland was released on October 25, and by mid-November it had reached number one in the US, spending two weeks at the top spot. The double LP was Hendrix's most commercially successful release and his only number one album. It peaked at number six in the UK, spending 12 weeks on the chart. Electric Ladyland included Hendrix's cover of a Bob Dylan song, "All Along the Watchtower", which became Hendrix's highest-selling single and his only US top 40 hit, peaking at number 20; the single reached number five in the UK. "Burning of the Midnight Lamp", his first recorded song to feature a wah-wah pedal, was added to the album. It was originally released as his fourth single in the UK in August 1967 and reached number 18 on the charts.
In 1989, Noe Goldwasser, the founding editor of Guitar World, described Electric Ladyland as "Hendrix's masterpiece". According to author Michael Heatley, "most critics agree" that the album is "the fullest realization of Jimi's far-reaching ambitions." In 2004, author Peter Doggett wrote: "For pure experimental genius, melodic flair, conceptual vision and instrumental brilliance, Electric Ladyland remains a prime contender for the status of rock's greatest album." Doggett described the LP as "a display of musical virtuosity never surpassed by any rock musician."
In January 1969, after an absence of more than six months, Hendrix briefly moved back into his girlfriend Kathy Etchingham's apartment in Brook Street, London, next door to the home of the composer Handel. After a performance of "Voodoo Child", on BBC's Happening for Lulu show in January 1969, the band stopped midway through an attempt at their first hit "Hey Joe" and then launched into an instrumental version of "Sunshine of Your Love", as a tribute to the recently disbanded band Cream, until director and producer Stanley Dorfman was forced to bring the song to a premature end. The Experience bass player Noel Redding describes in his autobiography, "as the minutes ticked by on his live show, short of running onto the set to stop us or pulling the plug, there was nothing he could do. We played past the point where Lulu might have joined us, played through the time for talking at the end, played through Stanley tearing his hair, pointing to his watch and silently screaming at us. We played out the show...Afterwards, Dorfman refused to speak to us, but the result is one of the most widely used bits of film we ever did. Certainly, it’s the most relaxed." Dorfman recalls at the BBC club after the show, he found Hendrix to be "a very sweet man, very quiet, he didn’t know he’d done anything wrong at all." However according to rock and roll legend, Hendrix was banned from working at the BBC again. During this time, the Experience toured Scandinavia, West Germany, and gave their final two performances in France. On February 18 and 24, they played sold-out concerts at London's Royal Albert Hall, which were the last European appearances of this lineup.
By February 1969, Redding had grown weary of Hendrix's unpredictable work ethic and his creative control over the Experience's music. During the previous month's European tour, interpersonal relations within the group had deteriorated, particularly between Hendrix and Redding. In his diary, Redding documented the building frustration during early 1969 recording sessions: "On the first day, as I nearly expected, there was nothing doing ... On the second it was no show at all. I went to the pub for three hours, came back, and it was still ages before Jimi ambled in. Then we argued ... On the last day, I just watched it happen for a while, and then went back to my flat." The last Experience sessions that included Redding—a re-recording of "Stone Free" for use as a possible single release—took place on April 14 at Olmstead and the Record Plant in New York. Hendrix then flew bassist Billy Cox to New York; they started recording and rehearsing together on April 21.
The last performance of the original Experience lineup took place on June 29, 1969, at Barry Fey's Denver Pop Festival, a three-day event held at Denver's Mile High Stadium that was marked by police using tear gas to control the audience. The band narrowly escaped from the venue in the back of a rental truck, which was partly crushed by fans who had climbed on top of the vehicle. Before the show, a journalist angered Redding by asking why he was there; the reporter then informed him that two weeks earlier Hendrix announced that he had been replaced with Billy Cox. The next day, Redding quit the Experience and returned to London. He announced that he had left the band and intended to pursue a solo career, blaming Hendrix's plans to expand the group without allowing for his input as a primary reason for leaving. Redding later said: "Mitch and I hung out a lot together, but we're English. If we'd go out, Jimi would stay in his room. But any bad feelings came from us being three guys who were traveling too hard, getting too tired, and taking too many drugs ... I liked Hendrix. I don't like Mitchell."
Soon after Redding's departure, Hendrix began lodging at the eight-bedroom Ashokan House, in the hamlet of Boiceville near Woodstock in upstate New York, where he had spent some time vacationing in mid-1969. Manager Michael Jeffery arranged the accommodations in the hope that the respite might encourage Hendrix to write material for a new album. During this time, Mitchell was unavailable for commitments made by Jeffery, which included Hendrix's first appearance on US TV—on The Dick Cavett Show—where he was backed by the studio orchestra, and an appearance on The Tonight Show where he appeared with Cox and session drummer Ed Shaughnessy.
By 1969, Hendrix was the world's highest-paid rock musician. In August, he headlined the Woodstock Music and Art Fair that included many of the most popular bands of the time. For the concert, he added rhythm guitarist Larry Lee and conga players Juma Sultan and Jerry Velez. The band rehearsed for less than two weeks before the performance, and according to Mitchell, they never connected musically. Before arriving at the engagement, Hendrix heard reports that the size of the audience had grown enormously, which concerned him as he did not enjoy performing for large crowds. He was an important draw for the event, and although he accepted substantially less money for the appearance than his usual fee, he was the festival's highest-paid performer.
Hendrix decided to move his midnight Sunday slot to Monday morning, closing the show. The band took the stage around 8:00 a.m, by which time Hendrix had been awake for more than three days. The audience, which peaked at an estimated 400,000 people, was reduced to 30,000. The festival MC, Chip Monck, introduced the group as "the Jimi Hendrix Experience", but Hendrix clarified: "We decided to change the whole thing around and call it 'Gypsy Sun and Rainbows'. For short, it's nothin' but a 'Band of Gypsys'."
Hendrix's performance included a rendition of the US national anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner", with copious feedback, distortion, and sustain to imitate the sounds made by rockets and bombs. Contemporary political pundits described his interpretation as a statement against the Vietnam War. Three weeks later Hendrix said: "We're all Americans ... it was like 'Go America!'... We play it the way the air is in America today. The air is slightly static, see." Immortalized in the 1970 documentary film, Woodstock, Hendrix's version became part of the sixties zeitgeist. Pop critic Al Aronowitz of the New York Post wrote: "It was the most electrifying moment of Woodstock, and it was probably the single greatest moment of the sixties." Images of the performance showing Hendrix wearing a blue-beaded white leather jacket with fringe, a red head-scarf, and blue jeans are regarded as iconic pictures that capture a defining moment of the era. He played "Hey Joe" during the encore, concluding the 31⁄2-day festival. Upon leaving the stage, he collapsed from exhaustion. In 2011, the editors of Guitar World named his performance of "The Star-Spangled Banner" the greatest performance of all time.
A legal dispute arose in 1966 regarding a record contract that Hendrix had entered into the previous year with producer Ed Chalpin. After two years of litigation, the parties agreed to a resolution that granted Chalpin the distribution rights to an album of original Hendrix material. Hendrix decided that they would record the LP, Band of Gypsys, during two live appearances. In preparation for the shows he formed an all-black power trio with Cox and drummer Buddy Miles, formerly with Wilson Pickett, the Electric Flag, and the Buddy Miles Express. Critic John Rockwell described Hendrix and Miles as jazz-rock fusionists, and their collaboration as pioneering. Others identified a funk and soul influence in their music. Concert promoter Bill Graham called the shows "the most brilliant, emotional display of virtuoso electric guitar" that he had ever heard. Biographers have speculated that Hendrix formed the band in an effort to appease members of the Black Power movement and others in the black communities who called for him to use his fame to speak up for civil rights.
Hendrix had been recording with Cox since April and jamming with Miles since September, and the trio wrote and rehearsed material which they performed at a series of four shows over two nights on December 31 and January 1, at the Fillmore East. They used recordings of these concerts to assemble the LP, which was produced by Hendrix. The album includes the track "Machine Gun", which musicologist Andy Aledort described as the pinnacle of Hendrix's career, and "the premiere example of [his] unparalleled genius as a rock guitarist ... In this performance, Jimi transcended the medium of rock music, and set an entirely new standard for the potential of electric guitar." During the song's extended instrumental breaks, Hendrix created sounds with his guitar that sonically represented warfare, including rockets, bombs, and diving planes.
The Band of Gypsys album was the only official live Hendrix LP made commercially available during his lifetime; several tracks from the Woodstock and Monterey shows were released later that year. The album was released in April 1970 by Capitol Records; it reached the top ten in both the US and the UK. That same month a single was issued with "Stepping Stone" as the A-side and "Izabella" as the B-side, but Hendrix was dissatisfied with the quality of the mastering and he demanded that it be withdrawn and re-mixed, preventing the songs from charting and resulting in Hendrix's least successful single; it was also his last.
On January 28, 1970, a third and final Band of Gypsys appearance took place; they performed during a music festival at Madison Square Garden benefiting the anti-Vietnam War Moratorium Committee titled the "Winter Festival for Peace". American blues guitarist Johnny Winter was backstage before the concert; he recalled: "[Hendrix] came in with his head down, sat on the couch alone, and put his head in his hands ... He didn't move until it was time for the show." Minutes after taking the stage he snapped a vulgar response at a woman who had shouted a request for "Foxy Lady". He then began playing "Earth Blues" before telling the audience: "That's what happens when earth fucks with space". Moments later, he briefly sat down on the drum riser before leaving the stage. Both Miles and Redding later stated that Jeffery had given Hendrix LSD before the performance. Miles believed that Jeffery gave Hendrix the drugs in an effort to sabotage the current band and bring about the return of the original Experience lineup. Jeffery fired Miles after the show and Cox quit, ending the Band of Gypsys.
Soon after the abruptly ended Band of Gypsys performance and their subsequent dissolution, Jeffery made arrangements to reunite the original Experience lineup. Although Hendrix, Mitchell, and Redding were interviewed by Rolling Stone in February 1970 as a united group, Hendrix never intended to work with Redding. When Redding returned to New York in anticipation of rehearsals with a re-formed Experience, he was told that he had been replaced with Cox. During an interview with Rolling Stone's Keith Altham, Hendrix defended the decision: "It's nothing personal against Noel, but we finished what we were doing with the Experience and Billy's style of playing suits the new group better." Although an official name was never adopted for the lineup of Hendrix, Mitchell, and Cox, promoters often billed them as the Jimi Hendrix Experience or just Jimi Hendrix.
During the first half of 1970, Hendrix sporadically worked on material for what would have been his next LP. Many of the tracks were posthumously released in 1971 as The Cry of Love. He had started writing songs for the album in 1968, but in April 1970 he told Keith Altham that the project had been abandoned. Soon afterward, he and his band took a break from recording and began the Cry of Love tour at the L.A. Forum, performing for 20,000 people. Set-lists during the tour included numerous Experience tracks as well as a selection of newer material. Several shows were recorded, and they produced some of Hendrix's most memorable live performances. At one of them, the second Atlanta International Pop Festival, on July 4, he played to the largest American audience of his career. According to authors Scott Schinder and Andy Schwartz, as many as 500,000 people attended the concert. On July 17, they appeared at the New York Pop Festival; Hendrix had again consumed too many drugs before the show, and the set was considered a disaster. The American leg of the tour, which included 32 performances, ended in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 1, 1970. This would be Hendrix's final concert appearance in the US.
In 1968, Hendrix and Jeffery jointly invested in the purchase of the Generation Club in Greenwich Village. They had initially planned to reopen the establishment, but when an audit of Hendrix's expenses revealed that he had incurred exorbitant fees by block-booking recording studios for lengthy sessions at peak rates they decided to convert the building into a studio of his own. Hendrix could then work as much as he wanted while also reducing his recording expenditures, which had reached a reported $300,000 annually. Architect and acoustician John Storyk designed Electric Lady Studios for Hendrix, who requested that they avoid right angles where possible. With round windows, an ambient lighting machine, and a psychedelic mural, Storyk wanted the studio to have a relaxing environment that would encourage Hendrix's creativity. The project took twice as long as planned and cost twice as much as Hendrix and Jeffery had budgeted, with their total investment estimated at $1 million.
Hendrix first used Electric Lady on June 15, 1970, when he jammed with Steve Winwood and Chris Wood of Traffic; the next day, he recorded his first track there, "Night Bird Flying". The studio officially opened for business on August 25, and a grand opening party was held the following day. Immediately afterwards, Hendrix left for England; he never returned to the States. He boarded an Air India flight for London with Cox, joining Mitchell for a performance as the headlining act of the Isle of Wight Festival.
When the European leg of the Cry of Love tour began, Hendrix was longing for his new studio and creative outlet, and was not eager to fulfill the commitment. On September 2, 1970, he abandoned a performance in Aarhus after three songs, stating: "I've been dead a long time". Four days later, he gave his final concert appearance, at the Isle of Fehmarn Festival in West Germany. He was met with booing and jeering from fans in response to his cancellation of a show slated for the end of the previous night's bill due to torrential rain and risk of electrocution. Immediately following the festival, Hendrix, Mitchell, and Cox traveled to London.
Three days after the performance, Cox, who was suffering from severe paranoia after either taking LSD or being given it unknowingly, quit the tour and went to stay with his parents in Pennsylvania. Within days of Hendrix's arrival in England, he had spoken with Chas Chandler, Alan Douglas, and others about leaving his manager, Michael Jeffery. On September 16, Hendrix performed in public for the last time during an informal jam at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in Soho with Eric Burdon and his latest band, War. They began by playing a few of their recent hits, and after a brief intermission Hendrix joined them during "Mother Earth" and "Tobacco Road". He died less than 48 hours later.
Hendrix entered a small club in Clarksville, Tennessee, in July 1962, drawn in by live music. He stopped for a drink and ended up spending most of the $400 ($3,924 in 2022 terms) that he had saved during his time in the Army. "I went in this jazz joint and had a drink," he explained. "I liked it and I stayed. People tell me I get foolish, good-natured sometimes. Anyway, I guess I felt real benevolent that day. I must have been handing out bills to anyone that asked me. I came out of that place with sixteen dollars left." Alcohol eventually became "the scourge of his existence, driving him to fits of pique, even rare bursts of atypical, physical violence".
Like most acid-heads, Jimi had visions and he wanted to create music to express what he saw. He would try to explain this to people, but it didn't make sense because it was not linked to reality in any way.
— Kathy Etchingham
Roby and Schreiber assert that Hendrix first used LSD when he met Linda Keith in late 1966. Shapiro and Glebbeek, however, assert that Hendrix used it in June 1967 at the earliest while attending the Monterey Pop Festival. According to Hendrix biographer Charles Cross, the subject of drugs came up one evening in 1966 at Keith's New York apartment. One of Keith's friends offered Hendrix "acid", a street name for LSD, but Hendrix asked for LSD instead, showing what Cross describes as "his naivete and his complete inexperience with psychedelics". Before that, Hendrix had only sporadically used drugs, including cannabis, hashish, amphetamines, and occasionally cocaine. After 1967, he regularly used cannabis, hashish, LSD, and amphetamines, particularly while touring. According to Cross, "few stars were as closely associated with the drug culture as Jimi".
When Hendrix drank to excess or mixed drugs with alcohol, often he became angry and violent. His friend Herbie Worthington said Hendrix "simply turned into a bastard" when he drank. According to friend Sharon Lawrence, liquor "set off a bottled-up anger, a destructive fury he almost never displayed otherwise".
In January 1968, the Experience travelled to Sweden to start a one-week tour of Europe. During the early morning hours of the first day, Hendrix got into a drunken brawl in the Hotel Opalen in Gothenburg, smashing a plate-glass window and injuring his right hand, for which he received medical treatment. The incident culminated in his arrest and release, pending a court appearance that resulted in a large fine.
In 1969, Hendrix rented a house in Benedict Canyon, California, that was burglarized. Later, while under the influence of drugs and alcohol, he accused his friend Paul Caruso of the theft, threw punches and stones at him, and chased him away from his house. A few days later Hendrix hit his girlfriend, Carmen Borrero, above her eye with a vodka bottle during a drunken, jealous rage, and gave her a cut that required stitches.
Hendrix was passing through customs at Toronto International Airport on May 3, 1969, when authorities found a small amount of heroin and hashish in his luggage, and charged him with drug possession. He was released on $10,000 bail, and was required to return on May 5 for an arraignment hearing. The incident proved stressful for Hendrix, and it weighed heavily on his mind during the seven months leading up to his December 1969 trial. For the Crown to prove possession, they had to show that Hendrix knew that the drugs were there. During the jury trial, he testified that a fan had given him a vial of what he thought was legal medication which he put in his bag. He was acquitted of the charges. Mitchell and Redding later revealed that everyone had been warned about a planned drug bust the day before flying to Toronto; both men also stated that they believed that the drugs had been planted in Hendrix's bag without his knowledge.
Details concerning Hendrix's last day and death are disputed. He spent much of September 17, 1970, in London with Monika Dannemann, the only witness to his final hours. Dannemann said that she prepared a meal for them at her apartment in the Samarkand Hotel around 11 p.m., when they shared a bottle of wine. She drove him to the residence of an acquaintance at approximately 1:45 a.m., where he remained for about an hour before she picked him up and drove them back to her flat at 3 a.m. She said that they talked until around 7 a.m., when they went to sleep. Dannemann awoke around 11 a.m. and found Hendrix breathing but unconscious and unresponsive. She called for an ambulance at 11:18 a.m., and it arrived nine minutes later. Paramedics transported Hendrix to St Mary Abbots Hospital where Dr. John Bannister pronounced him dead at 12:45 p.m. on September 18.
Coroner Gavin Thurston ordered a post-mortem examination which was performed on September 21 by Professor Robert Donald Teare, a forensic pathologist. Thurston completed the inquest on September 28 and concluded that Hendrix aspirated his own vomit and died of asphyxia while intoxicated with barbiturates. Citing "insufficient evidence of the circumstances", he declared an open verdict. Dannemann later revealed that Hendrix had taken nine of her prescribed Vesparax sleeping tablets, 18 times the recommended dosage.
Desmond Henley embalmed Hendrix's body which was flown to Seattle on September 29. Hendrix's family and friends held a service at Dunlap Baptist Church in Seattle's Rainier Valley on Thursday, October 1; his body was interred at Greenwood Cemetery in nearby Renton, the location of his mother's grave. Family and friends traveled in 24 limousines, and more than 200 people attended the funeral, including Mitch Mitchell, Noel Redding, Miles Davis, John Hammond, and Johnny Winter.
Hendrix is often cited as one example of an allegedly disproportionate number of musicians dying at age 27, including Brian Jones, Alan Wilson, Jim Morrison, and Janis Joplin in the same era, a phenomenon referred to as the 27 Club.
By 1967, as Hendrix was gaining in popularity, many of his pre-Experience recordings were marketed to an unsuspecting public as Jimi Hendrix albums, sometimes with misleading later images of Hendrix. The recordings, which came under the control of producer Ed Chalpin of PPX, with whom Hendrix had signed a recording contract in 1965, were often re-mixed between their repeated reissues, and licensed to record companies such as Decca and Capitol. Hendrix publicly denounced the releases, describing them as "malicious" and "greatly inferior", stating: "At PPX, we spent on average about one hour recording a song. Today I spend at least twelve hours on each song." These unauthorized releases have long constituted a substantial part of his recording catalogue, amounting to hundreds of albums.
Some of Hendrix's unfinished fourth studio album was released as the 1971 title The Cry of Love. Although the album reached number three in the US and number two in the UK, producers Mitchell and Kramer later complained that they were unable to make use of all the available songs because some tracks were used for 1971's Rainbow Bridge; still others were issued on 1972's War Heroes. Material from The Cry of Love was re-released in 1997 as First Rays of the New Rising Sun, along with the other tracks that Mitchell and Kramer had wanted to include. Four years after Hendrix's death, producer Alan Douglas acquired the rights to produce unreleased music by Hendrix; he attracted criticism for using studio musicians to replace or add tracks.
In 1993, MCA Records delayed a multimillion-dollar sale of Hendrix's publishing copyrights because Al Hendrix was unhappy about the arrangement. He acknowledged that he had sold distribution rights to a foreign corporation in 1974, but stated that it did not include copyrights and argued that he had retained veto power of the sale of the catalogue. Under a settlement reached in July 1995, Al Hendrix regained control of his son's song and image rights. He subsequently licensed the recordings to MCA through the family-run company Experience Hendrix LLC, formed in 1995. In August 2009, Experience Hendrix announced that it had entered a new licensing agreement with Sony Music Entertainment's Legacy Recordings division, to take effect in 2010. Legacy and Experience Hendrix launched the 2010 Jimi Hendrix Catalog Project starting with the release of Valleys of Neptune in March of that year. In the months before his death, Hendrix recorded demos for a concept album tentatively titled Black Gold, now in the possession of Experience Hendrix LLC, but it has not been released.
Hendrix played a variety of guitars, but was most associated with the Fender Stratocaster. He acquired his first in 1966, when a girlfriend loaned him enough money to purchase a used Stratocaster built around 1964. He used it often during performances and recordings. In 1967, he described the Stratocaster as "the best all-around guitar for the stuff we're doing"; he praised its "bright treble and deep bass".
Hendrix mainly played right-handed guitars that were turned upside down and restrung for left-hand playing. Because of the slant of the Stratocaster's bridge pickup, his lowest string had a brighter sound, while his highest string had a darker sound, the opposite of the intended design. Hendrix also used Fender Jazzmasters, Duosonics, two different Gibson Flying Vs, a Gibson Les Paul, three Gibson SGs, a Gretsch Corvette, and a Fender Jaguar. He used a white Gibson SG Custom for his performances on The Dick Cavett Show in September 1969, and a black Gibson Flying V during the Isle of Wight festival in 1970.
During 1965 and 1966, while Hendrix was playing back-up for soul and R&B acts in the US, he used an 85-watt Fender Twin Reverb amplifier. When Chandler brought Hendrix to England in October 1966, he supplied him with 30-watt Burns amps, which Hendrix thought were too small for his needs. After an early London gig when he was unable to use his Fender Twin, he asked about the Marshall amps he had noticed other groups using. Years earlier, Mitch Mitchell had taken drum lessons from Marshall founder Jim Marshall, and he introduced Hendrix to Marshall. At their initial meeting, Hendrix bought four speaker cabinets and three 100-watt Super Lead amplifiers; he grew accustomed to using all three in unison. The equipment arrived on October 11, 1966, and the Experience used it during their first tour.
Marshall amps were important to the development of Hendrix's overdriven sound and his use of feedback, creating what author Paul Trynka described as a "definitive vocabulary for rock guitar". Hendrix usually turned all the control knobs to the maximum level, which became known as the Hendrix setting. During the four years prior to his death, he purchased between 50 and 100 Marshall amplifiers. Jim Marshall said Hendrix was "the greatest ambassador" his company ever had.
One of Hendrix's signature effects was the wah-wah pedal, which he first heard used with an electric guitar in Cream's "Tales of Brave Ulysses", released in May 1967. That July, while performing at the Scene club in New York City, Hendrix met Frank Zappa, whose band the Mothers of Invention were performing at the adjacent Garrick Theater. Hendrix was fascinated by Zappa's application of the pedal, and he experimented with one later that evening. He used a wah pedal during the opening to "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)", creating one of the best-known wah-wah riffs of the classic rock era. He also uses the effect on "Up from the Skies", "Little Miss Lover", and "Still Raining, Still Dreaming".
Hendrix used a Dallas Arbiter Fuzz Face and a Vox wah pedal during recording sessions and performances, but also experimented with other guitar effects. He enjoyed a fruitful long-term collaboration with electronics enthusiast Roger Mayer, whom he once called "the secret" of his sound. Mayer introduced him to the Octavia, an octave-doubling effect pedal, in December 1966, and he first recorded with it during the guitar solo to "Purple Haze".
Hendrix also used the Uni-Vibe, designed to simulate the modulation effects of a rotating Leslie speaker. He uses the effect during his performance at Woodstock and on the Band of Gypsys track "Machine Gun", which prominently features the Uni-vibe along with an Octavia and a Fuzz Face. For performances, he plugged his guitar into the wah-wah, which was connected to the Fuzz Face, then the Uni-Vibe, and finally a Marshall amplifier.
As an adolescent in the 1950s, Hendrix became interested in rock and roll artists such as Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and Chuck Berry. In 1968, he told Guitar Player magazine that electric blues artists Muddy Waters, Elmore James, and B. B. King inspired him during the beginning of his career; he also cited Eddie Cochran as an early influence. Of Muddy Waters, the first electric guitarist of which Hendrix became aware, he said: "I heard one of his records when I was a little boy and it scared me to death because I heard all of these sounds." In 1970, he told Rolling Stone that he was a fan of western swing artist Bob Wills and while he lived in Nashville, the television show the Grand Ole Opry.
I don't happen to know much about jazz. I know that most of those cats are playing nothing but blues, though—I know that much.
— Hendrix on jazz music
Cox stated that during their time serving in the US military, he and Hendrix primarily listened to southern blues artists such as Jimmy Reed and Albert King. According to Cox, "King was a very, very powerful influence". Howlin' Wolf also inspired Hendrix, who performed Wolf's "Killing Floor" as the opening song of his US debut at the Monterey Pop Festival. The influence of soul artist Curtis Mayfield can be heard in Hendrix's guitar playing, and the influence of Bob Dylan can be heard in Hendrix's songwriting; he was known to play Dylan's records repeatedly, particularly Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde.
He changed everything. What don't we owe Jimi Hendrix? For his monumental rebooting of guitar culture "standards of tone", technique, gear, signal processing, rhythm playing, soloing, stage presence, chord voicings, charisma, fashion, and composition? ... He is guitar hero number one.
— Guitar Player magazine, May 2012
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame biography for the Experience states: "Jimi Hendrix was arguably the greatest instrumentalist in the history of rock music. Hendrix expanded the range and vocabulary of the electric guitar into areas no musician had ever ventured before. His boundless drive, technical ability and creative application of such effects as wah-wah and distortion forever transformed the sound of rock and roll." Musicologist Andy Aledort described Hendrix as "one of the most creative" and "influential musicians that has ever lived". Music journalist Chuck Philips wrote: "In a field almost exclusively populated by white musicians, Hendrix has served as a role model for a cadre of young black rockers. His achievement was to reclaim title to a musical form pioneered by black innovators like Little Richard and Chuck Berry in the 1950s."
Hendrix favored overdriven amplifiers with high volume and gain. He was instrumental in developing the previously undesirable technique of guitar amplifier feedback, and helped to popularize use of the wah-wah pedal in mainstream rock. He rejected the standard barre chord fretting technique used by most guitarists in favor of fretting the low 6th string root notes with his thumb. He applied this technique during the beginning bars of "Little Wing", which allowed him to sustain the root note of chords while also playing melody. This method has been described as piano style, with the thumb playing what a pianist's left hand would play and the other fingers playing melody as a right hand. Having spent several years fronting a trio, he developed an ability to play rhythm chords and lead lines together, giving the audio impression that more than one guitarist was performing. He was the first artist to incorporate stereophonic phasing effects in rock music recordings. Holly George-Warren of Rolling Stone wrote: "Hendrix pioneered the use of the instrument as an electronic sound source. Players before him had experimented with feedback and distortion, but Hendrix turned those effects and others into a controlled, fluid vocabulary every bit as personal as the blues with which he began."
While creating his unique musical voice and guitar style, Hendrix synthesized diverse genres, including blues, R&B, soul, British rock, American folk music, 1950s rock and roll, and jazz. Musicologist David Moskowitz emphasized the importance of blues music in Hendrix's playing style, and according to authors Steven Roby and Brad Schreiber, "[He] explored the outer reaches of psychedelic rock". His influence is evident in a variety of popular music formats, and he has contributed significantly to the development of hard rock, heavy metal, funk, post-punk, grunge, and hip hop music. His lasting influence on modern guitar players is difficult to overstate; his techniques and delivery have been abundantly imitated by others. Despite his hectic touring schedule and notorious perfectionism, he was a prolific recording artist who left behind numerous unreleased recordings. More than 40 years after his death, Hendrix remains as popular as ever, with annual album sales exceeding that of any year during his lifetime.
As with his contemporary Sly Stone, Hendrix embraced the experimentalism of white musicians in progressive rock in the late 1960s and inspired a wave of progressive soul musicians that emerged by the next decade. He has directly influenced numerous funk and funk rock artists, including Prince, George Clinton, John Frusciante of Red Hot Chili Peppers, Eddie Hazel of Funkadelic, and Ernie Isley of the Isley Brothers. Hendrix influenced post-punk guitarists such as John McGeoch of Siouxsie and the Banshees and Robert Smith of The Cure. Grunge guitarists such as Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains, and Mike McCready and Stone Gossard of Pearl Jam have cited Hendrix as an influence. Hendrix's influence also extends to many hip hop artists, including De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, Digital Underground, Beastie Boys, and Run–D.M.C. Miles Davis was deeply impressed by Hendrix, and he compared Hendrix's improvisational abilities with those of saxophonist John Coltrane. Desert blues artists from the Sahara desert region including Mdou Moctar and Tinariwen have also acknowledged Hendrix's influence.
Rock and roll fans still debate whether Hendrix actually said that Chicago co-founder Terry Kath was a better guitar player than him, but Kath named Hendrix as a major influence: "But then there was Hendrix, man. Jimi was really the last cat to freak me. Jimi was playing all the stuff I had in my head. I couldn't believe it, when I first heard him. Man, no one can ever do what he did with a guitar. No one can ever take his place."
Hendrix also influenced Black Sabbath, industrial artist Marilyn Manson, blues musician Stevie Ray Vaughan, Randy Hansen, Uli Jon Roth, pop singer Halsey, Kiss's Ace Frehley, Metallica's Kirk Hammett, Aerosmith's Brad Whitford, Judas Priest's Richie Faulkner, instrumental rock guitarist Joe Satriani, King's X singer/bassist Doug Pinnick, Adrian Belew, and heavy metal virtuoso Yngwie Malmsteen, who said: "[Hendrix] created modern electric playing, without question ... He was the first. He started it all. The rest is history." "For many", Hendrix was "the preeminent black rocker", according to Jon Caramanica. Members of the Soulquarians, an experimental black music collective active during the late 1990s and early 2000s, were influenced by the creative freedom in Hendrix's music and extensively used Electric Lady Studios to work on their own music.
Hendrix received several prestigious rock music awards during his lifetime and posthumously. In 1967, readers of Melody Maker voted him the Pop Musician of the Year. In 1968, Rolling Stone declared him the Performer of the Year. Also in 1968, the City of Seattle gave him the keys to the city. Disc & Music Echo newspaper honored him with the World Top Musician of 1969 and in 1970 Guitar Player magazine named him the Rock Guitarist of the Year.
Rolling Stone ranked his three non-posthumous studio albums, Are You Experienced (1967), Axis: Bold as Love (1967), and Electric Ladyland (1968) among the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. They ranked Hendrix number one on their list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time, and number six on their list of the 100 greatest artists of all time. Guitar World's readers voted six of Hendrix's solos among the top 100 Greatest Guitar Solos of All Time: "Purple Haze" (70), "The Star-Spangled Banner" (52; from Live at Woodstock), "Machine Gun" (32; from Band of Gypsys), "Little Wing" (18), "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)" (11), and "All Along the Watchtower" (5). Rolling Stone placed seven of his recordings in their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time: "Purple Haze" (17), "All Along the Watchtower" (47) "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)" (102), "Foxy Lady" (153), "Hey Joe" (201), "Little Wing" (366), and "The Wind Cries Mary" (379). They also included three of Hendrix's songs in their list of the 100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time: "Purple Haze" (2), "Voodoo Child" (12), and "Machine Gun" (49).
A star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was dedicated to Hendrix on November 14, 1991, at 6627 Hollywood Boulevard. The Jimi Hendrix Experience was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992, and the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2005. In 1998, Hendrix was inducted into the Native American Music Hall of Fame during its first year. In 1999, readers of Rolling Stone and Guitar World ranked Hendrix among the most important musicians of the 20th century. In 2005, his debut album, Are You Experienced, was one of 50 recordings added that year to the US National Recording Registry in the Library of Congress, "[to] be preserved for all time ... [as] part of the nation's audio legacy". In Seattle, November 27, 1992, which would have been Hendrix's 50th birthday, was made Jimi Hendrix Day, largely due to the efforts of his boyhood friend, guitarist Sammy Drain.
The blue plaque identifying Hendrix's former residence at 23 Brook Street, London, was the first issued by English Heritage to commemorate a pop star. Next door is the former residence of George Frideric Handel, 25 Brook Street, which opened to the public as the Handel House Museum in 2001. From 2016 the museum made use of the upper floors of 23 for displays about Hendrix and was rebranded as Handel & Hendrix in London.
A memorial statue of Hendrix playing a Stratocaster stands near the corner of Broadway and Pine Streets in Seattle. In May 2006, the city renamed a park near its Central District Jimi Hendrix Park, in his honor. In 2012, an official historic marker was erected on the site of the July 1970 Second Atlanta International Pop Festival near Byron, Georgia. The marker text reads, in part: "Over thirty musical acts performed, including rock icon Jimi Hendrix playing to the largest American audience of his career."
Hendrix's music has received a number of Hall of Fame Grammy awards, starting with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1992, followed by two Grammys in 1999 for his albums Are You Experienced and Electric Ladyland; Axis: Bold as Love received a Grammy in 2006. In 2000, he received a Hall of Fame Grammy award for his original composition, "Purple Haze", and in 2001, for his recording of Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower". Hendrix's rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner" was honored with a Grammy in 2009.
The United States Postal Service issued a commemorative postage stamp honoring Hendrix in 2014. On August 21, 2016, Hendrix was inducted into the Rhythm and Blues Music Hall of Fame in Dearborn, Michigan. The James Marshall "Jimi" Hendrix United States Post Office in Renton Highlands near Seattle, about a mile from Hendrix's grave and memorial, was renamed for Hendrix in 2019.
On June 23, 2019, the Band of Gypsys were inducted into the Rhythm and Blues Music Hall of Fame, at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African-American History in Detroit, Michigan. Billy Cox, the last surviving member of the group, was on hand to accept, along with representatives of the Buddy Miles and Hendrix estates.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience
Jimi Hendrix/Band of Gypsys | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "James Marshall \"Jimi\" Hendrix (born Johnny Allen Hendrix; November 27, 1942 – September 18, 1970) was an American guitarist, songwriter and singer. Although his mainstream career spanned only four years, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential electric guitarists in the history of popular music, and one of the most celebrated musicians of the 20th century. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame describes him as \"arguably the greatest instrumentalist in the history of rock music.\"",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Born in Seattle, Washington, Hendrix began playing guitar at age 15. In 1961, he enlisted in the US Army, but was discharged the following year. Soon afterward, he moved to Clarksville then Nashville, Tennessee, and began playing gigs on the chitlin' circuit, earning a place in the Isley Brothers' backing band and later with Little Richard, with whom he continued to work through mid-1965. He then played with Curtis Knight and the Squires before moving to England in late 1966 after bassist Chas Chandler of the Animals became his manager. Within months, Hendrix had earned three UK top ten hits with the Jimi Hendrix Experience: \"Hey Joe\", \"Purple Haze\", and \"The Wind Cries Mary\". He achieved fame in the US after his performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, and in 1968 his third and final studio album, Electric Ladyland, reached number one in the US. The double LP was Hendrix's most commercially successful release and his first and only number one album. The world's highest-paid performer, he headlined the Woodstock Festival in 1969 and the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 before his accidental death in London from barbiturate-related asphyxia in September 1970.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Hendrix was inspired by American rock and roll and electric blues. He favored overdriven amplifiers with high volume and gain, and was instrumental in popularizing the previously undesirable sounds caused by guitar amplifier feedback. He was also one of the first guitarists to make extensive use of tone-altering effects units in mainstream rock, such as fuzz distortion, Octavia, wah-wah, and Uni-Vibe. He was the first musician to use stereophonic phasing effects in recordings. Holly George-Warren of Rolling Stone commented: \"Hendrix pioneered the use of the instrument as an electronic sound source. Players before him had experimented with feedback and distortion, but Hendrix turned those effects and others into a controlled, fluid vocabulary every bit as personal as the blues with which he began.\"",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Hendrix was the recipient of several music awards during his lifetime and posthumously. In 1967, readers of Melody Maker voted him the Pop Musician of the Year and in 1968, Billboard named him the Artist of the Year and Rolling Stone declared him the Performer of the Year. Disc and Music Echo honored him with the World Top Musician of 1969 and in 1970, Guitar Player named him the Rock Guitarist of the Year. The Jimi Hendrix Experience was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992 and the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2005. Rolling Stone ranked the band's three studio albums, Are You Experienced (1967), Axis: Bold as Love (1967), and Electric Ladyland (1968), among the \"500 Greatest Albums of All Time\", and they ranked Hendrix as the greatest guitarist and the sixth-greatest artist of all time. Hendrix was named the greatest guitarist of all time by Rolling Stone in 2023.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Hendrix was of African American and Irish descent. His paternal grandfather, Bertran Philander Ross Hendrix, was born in 1866 from an extramarital affair between a woman named Fanny and a grain merchant from Urbana, Ohio, or Illinois, one of the wealthiest men in the area at that time. Hendrix's paternal grandmother, Zenora \"Nora\" Rose Moore, was a former dancer and vaudeville performer who co-founded Fountain Chapel in Hogan's Alley. Hendrix and Moore relocated to Vancouver, Canada, where they had a son they named James Allen Hendrix on June 10, 1919; the family called him \"Al\".",
"title": "Ancestry and childhood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In 1941, after moving to Seattle, Washington, Al met Lucille Jeter (1925–1958) at a dance; they married on March 31, 1942. Lucille's father (Jimi's maternal grandfather) was Preston Jeter (born 1875), whose mother was born in similar circumstances as Bertran Philander Ross Hendrix. Lucille's mother, Clarice (née Lawson), had African-American ancestors who had been enslaved people. Al, who had been drafted by the US Army to serve in World War II, left to begin his basic training three days after the wedding. Johnny Allen Hendrix was born on November 27, 1942, in Seattle; he was the first of Lucille's five children. In 1946, Johnny's parents changed his name to James Marshall Hendrix, in honor of Al and his late brother Leon Marshall.",
"title": "Ancestry and childhood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Stationed in Alabama at the time of Hendrix's birth, Al was denied the standard military furlough afforded servicemen for childbirth; his commanding officer placed him in the stockade to prevent him from going AWOL to see his infant son in Seattle. He spent two months locked up without trial, and, while in the stockade, received a telegram announcing his son's birth. During Al's three-year absence, Lucille struggled to raise their son. When Al was away, Hendrix was mostly cared for by family members and friends, especially Lucille's sister Delores Hall and her friend Dorothy Harding. Al received an honorable discharge from the US Army on September 1, 1945. Two months later, unable to find Lucille, Al went to the Berkeley, California, home of a family friend named Mrs. Champ, who had taken care of and attempted to adopt Hendrix; this is where Al saw his son for the first time.",
"title": "Ancestry and childhood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "After returning from service, Al reunited with Lucille, but his inability to find steady work left the family impoverished. They both struggled with alcohol, and often fought when intoxicated. The violence sometimes drove Hendrix to withdraw and hide in a closet in their home. His relationship with his brother Leon (born 1948) was close but precarious; with Leon in and out of foster care, they lived with an almost constant threat of fraternal separation. In addition to Leon, Hendrix had three younger siblings: Joseph, born in 1949, Kathy in 1950, and Pamela in 1951, all of whom Al and Lucille gave up to foster care and adoption. The family frequently moved, staying in cheap hotels and apartments around Seattle. On occasion, family members would take Hendrix to Vancouver to stay at his grandmother's. A shy and sensitive boy, he was deeply affected by his life experiences. In later years, he confided to a girlfriend that he had been the victim of sexual abuse by a man in uniform. On December 17, 1951, when Hendrix was nine years old, his parents divorced; the court granted Al custody of him and Leon.",
"title": "Ancestry and childhood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "At Horace Mann Elementary School in Seattle during the mid-1950s, Hendrix's habit of carrying a broom with him to emulate a guitar gained the attention of the school's social worker. After more than a year of his clinging to a broom like a security blanket, she wrote a letter requesting school funding intended for underprivileged children, insisting that leaving him without a guitar might result in psychological damage. Her efforts failed, and Al refused to buy him a guitar.",
"title": "Ancestry and childhood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In 1957, while helping his father with a side-job, Hendrix found a ukulele among the garbage they were removing from an older woman's home. She told him that he could keep the instrument, which had only one string. Learning by ear, he played single notes, following along to Elvis Presley songs, particularly \"Hound Dog\". By the age of 33, Hendrix's mother Lucille had developed cirrhosis of the liver, and on February 2, 1958, she died when her spleen ruptured. Al refused to take James and Leon to attend their mother's funeral; he instead gave them shots of whiskey and told them that was how men should deal with loss. In 1958, Hendrix completed his studies at Washington Junior High School and began attending, but did not graduate from, Garfield High School.",
"title": "Ancestry and childhood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In mid-1958, at age 15, Hendrix acquired his first acoustic guitar, for $5 (equivalent to $51 in 2022). He played for hours daily, watching others and learning from more experienced guitarists, and listening to blues artists such as Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Howlin' Wolf, and Robert Johnson. The first tune Hendrix learned to play was the television theme \"Peter Gunn\". Around that time, Hendrix jammed with boyhood friend Sammy Drain and his keyboard-playing brother. In 1959, attending a concert by Hank Ballard & the Midnighters in Seattle, Hendrix met the group's guitarist Billy Davis. Davis showed him some guitar licks and got him a short gig with the Midnighters. The two remained friends until Hendrix's death in 1970.",
"title": "Ancestry and childhood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Soon after he acquired the acoustic guitar, Hendrix formed his first band, the Velvetones. Without an electric guitar, he could barely be heard over the sound of the group. After about three months, he realized that he needed an electric guitar. In mid-1959, his father relented and bought him a white Supro Ozark. Hendrix's first gig was with an unnamed band in the Jaffe Room of Seattle's Temple De Hirsch, but they fired him between sets for showing off. He joined the Rocking Kings, which played professionally at venues such as the Birdland club. When his guitar was stolen after he left it backstage overnight, Al bought him a red Silvertone Danelectro.",
"title": "Ancestry and childhood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Before Hendrix was 19 years old, law authorities had twice caught him riding in stolen cars. Given a choice between prison or joining the Army, he chose the latter and enlisted on May 31, 1961. After completing eight weeks of basic training at Fort Ord, California, he was assigned to the 101st Airborne Division and stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. He arrived on November 8, and soon afterward he wrote to his father: \"There's nothing but physical training and harassment here for two weeks, then when you go to jump school ... you get hell. They work you to death, fussing and fighting.\" In his next letter home, Hendrix, who had left his guitar in Seattle at the home of his girlfriend Betty Jean Morgan, asked his father to send it to him as soon as possible, stating: \"I really need it now.\" His father obliged and sent the red Silvertone Danelectro on which Hendrix had hand-painted the words \"Betty Jean\" to Fort Campbell. His apparent obsession with the instrument contributed to his neglect of his duties, which led to taunting and physical abuse from his peers, who at least once hid the guitar from him until he had begged for its return. In November 1961, fellow serviceman Billy Cox walked past an army club and heard Hendrix playing. Impressed by Hendrix's technique, which Cox described as a combination of \"John Lee Hooker and Beethoven\", Cox borrowed a bass guitar and the two jammed. Within weeks, they began performing at base clubs on the weekends with other musicians in a loosely organized band, the Casuals.",
"title": "Military service"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Hendrix completed his paratrooper training and, on January 11, 1962, Major General Charles W. G. Rich awarded him the prestigious Screaming Eagles patch. By February, his personal conduct had begun to draw criticism from his superiors. They labeled him an unqualified marksman and often caught him napping while on duty and failing to report for bed checks. On May 24, Hendrix's platoon sergeant, James C. Spears, filed a report in which he stated: \"He has no interest whatsoever in the Army ... It is my opinion that Private Hendrix will never come up to the standards required of a soldier. I feel that the military service will benefit if he is discharged as soon as possible.\" On June 29, 1962, Hendrix was granted a general discharge under honorable conditions. Hendrix later spoke of his dislike of the army and that he had received a medical discharge after breaking his ankle during his 26th parachute jump, but no Army records have been produced that indicate that he received or was discharged for any injuries.",
"title": "Military service"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In September 1962, after Cox was discharged from the Army, he and Hendrix moved about 20 miles (32 km) across the state line from Fort Campbell to Clarksville, Tennessee, and formed a band, the King Kasuals. In Seattle, Hendrix saw Butch Snipes play with his teeth and now the Kasuals' second guitarist, Alphonso \"Baby Boo\" Young, was performing this guitar gimmick. Not to be upstaged, Hendrix also learned to play in this way. He later explained: \"The idea of doing that came to me ... in Tennessee. Down there you have to play with your teeth or else you get shot. There's a trail of broken teeth all over the stage.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Although they began playing low-paying gigs at obscure venues, the band eventually moved to Nashville's Jefferson Street, which was the traditional heart of the city's black community and home to a thriving rhythm and blues music scene. They earned a brief residency playing at a popular venue in town, the Club del Morocco, and for the next two years Hendrix made a living performing at a circuit of venues throughout the South that were affiliated with the Theater Owners Booking Association (TOBA), widely known as the chitlin' circuit. In addition to playing in his own band, Hendrix performed as a backing musician for various soul, R&B, and blues musicians, including Wilson Pickett, Slim Harpo, Sam Cooke, Ike & Tina Turner and Jackie Wilson.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In January 1964, feeling he had outgrown the circuit artistically, and frustrated by having to follow the rules of bandleaders, Hendrix decided to venture out on his own. He moved into the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, where he befriended Lithofayne Pridgon, known as \"Faye\", who became his girlfriend. A Harlem native with connections throughout the area's music scene, Pridgon provided him with shelter, support, and encouragement. Hendrix also met the Allen twins, Arthur and Albert. In February 1964, Hendrix won first prize in the Apollo Theater amateur contest. Hoping to secure a career opportunity, he played the Harlem club circuit and sat in with various bands. At the recommendation of a former associate of Joe Tex, Ronnie Isley granted Hendrix an audition that led to an offer to become the guitarist with the Isley Brothers' backing band, the I.B. Specials, which he readily accepted.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In March 1964, Hendrix recorded the two-part single \"Testify\" with the Isley Brothers. Released in June, it failed to chart. In May, he provided guitar instrumentation for the Don Covay song, \"Mercy Mercy\". Issued in August by Rosemart Records and distributed by Atlantic, the track reached number 35 on the Billboard chart.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Hendrix toured with the Isleys during much of 1964, but near the end of October, after growing tired of playing the same set every night, he left the band. Soon afterward, Hendrix joined Little Richard's touring band, the Upsetters. During a stop in Los Angeles in February 1965, he recorded his first and only single with Richard, \"I Don't Know What You Got (But It's Got Me)\", written by Don Covay and released by Vee-Jay Records. Richard's popularity was waning at the time, and the single peaked at number 92, where it remained for one week before dropping off the chart. Hendrix met singer Rosa Lee Brooks while staying at the Wilcox Hotel in Hollywood, and she invited him to participate in a recording session for her single, which included the Arthur Lee penned \"My Diary\" as the A-side, and \"Utee\" as the B-side. Hendrix played guitar on both tracks, which also included background vocals by Lee. The single failed to chart, but Hendrix and Lee began a friendship that lasted several years; Hendrix later became an ardent supporter of Lee's band, Love.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In July 1965, Hendrix made his first television appearance on Nashville's Channel 5 Night Train. Performing in Little Richard's ensemble band, he backed up vocalists Buddy and Stacy on \"Shotgun\". The video recording of the show marks the earliest known footage of Hendrix performing. Richard and Hendrix often clashed over tardiness, wardrobe, and Hendrix's stage antics, and in late July, Richard's brother Robert fired him.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "On July 27, Hendrix signed his first recording contract with Juggy Murray at Sue Records and Copa Management. He then briefly rejoined the Isley Brothers, and recorded a second single with them, \"Move Over and Let Me Dance\" backed with \"Have You Ever Been Disappointed\". Later that year, he joined a New York-based R&B band, Curtis Knight and the Squires, after meeting Knight in the lobby of a hotel where both men were staying. Hendrix performed with them for eight months.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In October 1965, he and Knight recorded the single, \"How Would You Feel\" backed with \"Welcome Home\". Despite his two-year contract with Sue, Hendrix signed a three-year recording contract with entrepreneur Ed Chalpin on October 15. While the relationship with Chalpin was short-lived, his contract remained in force, which later caused legal and career problems for Hendrix. During his time with Knight, Hendrix briefly toured with Joey Dee and the Starliters, and worked with King Curtis on several recordings including Ray Sharpe's two-part single, \"Help Me\". Hendrix earned his first composer credits for two instrumentals, \"Hornets Nest\" and \"Knock Yourself Out\", released as a Curtis Knight and the Squires single in 1966.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Feeling restricted by his experiences as an R&B sideman, Hendrix moved in 1966 to New York City's Greenwich Village, which had a vibrant and diverse music scene. There, he was offered a residency at the Cafe Wha? on MacDougal Street and formed his own band that June, Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, which included future Spirit guitarist Randy California. The Blue Flames played at several clubs in New York and Hendrix began developing his guitar style and material that he would soon use with the Experience. In September, they gave some of their last concerts at the Cafe Au Go Go in Manhattan, as the backing group for a singer and guitarist then billed as John Hammond.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "By May 1966, Hendrix was struggling to earn a living wage playing the R&B circuit, so he briefly rejoined Curtis Knight and the Squires for an engagement at one of New York City's most popular nightspots, the Cheetah Club. During a performance, Linda Keith, the girlfriend of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, noticed Hendrix and was \"mesmerised\" by his playing. She invited him to join her for a drink, and the two became friends.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "While Hendrix was playing as Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, Keith recommended him to Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham and producer Seymour Stein. They failed to see Hendrix's musical potential, and rejected him. Keith referred him to Chas Chandler, who was leaving the Animals and was interested in managing and producing artists. Chandler saw Hendrix play in Cafe Wha?, a Greenwich Village, New York City nightclub. Chandler liked the Billy Roberts song \"Hey Joe\", and was convinced he could create a hit single with the right artist. Impressed with Hendrix's version of the song, he brought him to London on September 24, 1966, and signed him to a management and production contract with himself and ex-Animals manager Michael Jeffery. That night, Hendrix gave an impromptu solo performance at The Scotch of St James, and began a relationship with Kathy Etchingham that lasted for two and a half years.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Following Hendrix's arrival in London, Chandler began recruiting members for a band designed to highlight his talents, the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Hendrix met guitarist Noel Redding at an audition for the New Animals, where Redding's knowledge of blues progressions impressed Hendrix, who stated that he also liked Redding's hairstyle. Chandler asked Redding if he wanted to play bass guitar in Hendrix's band; Redding agreed. Chandler began looking for a drummer and soon after contacted Mitch Mitchell through a mutual friend. Mitchell, who had recently been fired from Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames, participated in a rehearsal with Redding and Hendrix where they found common ground in their shared interest in rhythm and blues. When Chandler phoned Mitchell later that day to offer him the position, he readily accepted. Chandler also convinced Hendrix to change the spelling of his first name from Jimmy to the more exotic Jimi.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "On October 1, 1966, Chandler brought Hendrix to the London Polytechnic at Regent Street, where Cream was scheduled to perform, and where Hendrix and guitarist Eric Clapton met. Clapton later said: \"He asked if he could play a couple of numbers. I said, 'Of course', but I had a funny feeling about him.\" Halfway through Cream's set, Hendrix took the stage and performed a frantic version of the Howlin' Wolf song \"Killing Floor\". In 1989, Clapton described the performance: \"He played just about every style you could think of, and not in a flashy way. I mean he did a few of his tricks, like playing with his teeth and behind his back, but it wasn't in an upstaging sense at all, and that was it ... He walked off, and my life was never the same again\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In mid-October 1966, Chandler arranged an engagement for the Experience as Johnny Hallyday's supporting act during a brief tour of France. Thus, the Jimi Hendrix Experience performed their first show on October 13, 1966, at the Novelty in Evreux. Their enthusiastically received 15-minute performance at the Olympia theatre in Paris on October 18 marks the earliest known recording of the band. In late October, Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, managers of the Who, signed the Experience to their newly formed label, Track Records, and the group recorded their first song, \"Hey Joe\", on October 23. \"Stone Free\", which was Hendrix's first songwriting effort after arriving in England, was recorded on November 2.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "From November 8 to 11, 1966, The Jimi Hendrix Experience had a short residency at the Big Apple club in Munich, their first gigs in Germany. At this occasion Hendrix had a show experience that would define him from then on: when trying to escape in panic from a frenetic audience that had pulled him off the stage, he smashed his guitar for the first time in a sound explosion on stage, which was perceived by the audience as part of the show. Observing the audience's reaction, Chandler decided that this show of violence had to become a permanent feature of the Experience's show.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In mid-November, they performed at the Bag O'Nails nightclub in London, with Clapton, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, Brian Jones, Mick Jagger, and Kevin Ayers in attendance. Ayers described the crowd's reaction as stunned disbelief: \"All the stars were there, and I heard serious comments, you know 'shit', 'Jesus', 'damn' and other words worse than that.\" The performance earned Hendrix his first interview, published in Record Mirror with the headline: \"Mr. Phenomenon\". \"Now hear this ... we predict that [Hendrix] is going to whirl around the business like a tornado\", wrote Bill Harry, who asked the rhetorical question: \"Is that full, big, swinging sound really being created by only three people?\" Hendrix said: \"We don't want to be classed in any category ... If it must have a tag, I'd like it to be called, 'Free Feeling'. It's a mixture of rock, freak-out, rave and blues\". Through a distribution deal with Polydor Records, the Experience's first single, \"Hey Joe\", backed with \"Stone Free\", was released on December 16, 1966. After appearances on the UK television shows Ready Steady Go! and Top of the Pops, \"Hey Joe\" entered the UK charts on December 29 and peaked at number six. Further success came in March 1967 with the UK number three hit \"Purple Haze\", and in May with \"The Wind Cries Mary\", which remained on the UK charts for eleven weeks, peaking at number six. On March 12, 1967, he performed at the Troutbeck Hotel, Ilkley, West Yorkshire, where, after about 900 people turned up (the hotel was licensed for 250) the local police stopped the gig due to safety concerns.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "On March 31, 1967, while the Experience waited to perform at the London Astoria, Hendrix and Chandler discussed ways in which they could increase the band's media exposure. When Chandler asked journalist Keith Altham for advice, Altham suggested that they needed to do something more dramatic than the stage show of the Who, which involved the smashing of instruments. Hendrix joked: \"Maybe I can smash up an elephant\", to which Altham replied: \"Well, it's a pity you can't set fire to your guitar\". Chandler then asked road manager Gerry Stickells to procure some lighter fluid. During the show, Hendrix gave an especially dynamic performance before setting his guitar on fire at the end of a 45-minute set. In the wake of the stunt, members of London's press labeled Hendrix the \"Black Elvis\" and the \"Wild Man of Borneo\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "An enduring urban legend in the UK maintains that a possible explanation for the feral parakeets that have appeared in Great Britain since the mid-20th century may derive from a single pair of the birds that were released by Hendrix on Carnaby Street in the 1960s. According to a study, however, which mapped historical news reports of sightings of the birds, the myth is not true.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "After the UK chart success of their first two singles, \"Hey Joe\" and \"Purple Haze\", the Experience began assembling material for a full-length LP. In London, recording began at De Lane Lea Studios, and later moved to the prestigious Olympic Studios. The album, Are You Experienced, features a diversity of musical styles, including blues tracks such as \"Red House\" and the R&B song \"Remember\". It also included the experimental science fiction piece, \"Third Stone from the Sun\" and the post-modern soundscapes of the title track, with prominent backwards guitar and drums. \"I Don't Live Today\" served as a medium for Hendrix's guitar feedback improvisation and \"Fire\" was driven by Mitchell's drumming.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Released in the UK on May 12, 1967, Are You Experienced spent 33 weeks on the charts, peaking at number two. It was prevented from reaching the top spot by the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. On June 4, 1967, Hendrix opened a show at the Saville Theatre in London with his rendition of Sgt. Pepper's title track, which was released just three days previous. Beatles manager Brian Epstein owned the Saville at the time, and both George Harrison and Paul McCartney attended the performance. McCartney described the moment: \"The curtains flew back and he came walking forward playing 'Sgt. Pepper'. It's a pretty major compliment in anyone's book. I put that down as one of the great honors of my career.\" Released in the US on August 23 by Reprise Records, Are You Experienced reached number five on the Billboard 200.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In 1989, Noe Goldwasser, the founding editor of Guitar World, described Are You Experienced as \"the album that shook the world ... leaving it forever changed\". In 2005, Rolling Stone called the double-platinum LP Hendrix's \"epochal debut\", and they ranked it the 15th greatest album of all time, noting his \"exploitation of amp howl\", and characterizing his guitar playing as \"incendiary ... historic in itself\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Although popular in Europe at the time, the Experience's first US single, \"Hey Joe\", failed to reach the Billboard Hot 100 chart upon its release on May 1, 1967. Their fortunes improved when McCartney recommended them to the organizers of the Monterey Pop Festival. He insisted that the event would be incomplete without Hendrix, whom he called \"an absolute ace on the guitar\". McCartney agreed to join the board of organizers on the condition that the Experience perform at the festival in mid-June.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "On June 18, 1967, introduced by Brian Jones as \"the most exciting performer [he had] ever heard\", Hendrix opened with a fast arrangement of Howlin' Wolf's song \"Killing Floor\", wearing what author Keith Shadwick described as \"clothes as exotic as any on display elsewhere\". Shadwick wrote: \"[Hendrix] was not only something utterly new musically, but an entirely original vision of what a black American entertainer should and could look like.\" The Experience went on to perform renditions of \"Hey Joe\", B.B. King's \"Rock Me Baby\", Chip Taylor's \"Wild Thing\", and Bob Dylan's \"Like a Rolling Stone\", and four original compositions: \"Foxy Lady\", \"Can You See Me\", \"The Wind Cries Mary\", and \"Purple Haze\". The set ended with Hendrix destroying his guitar and tossing pieces of it out to the audience. Rolling Stone's Alex Vadukul wrote:",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "When Jimi Hendrix set his guitar on fire at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival he created one of rock's most perfect moments. Standing in the front row of that concert was a 17-year-old boy named Ed Caraeff. Caraeff had never seen Hendrix before nor heard his music, but he had a camera with him and there was one shot left in his roll of film. As Hendrix lit his guitar, Caraeff took a final photo. It would become one of the most famous images in rock and roll.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Caraeff stood on a chair next to the edge of the stage and took four monochrome pictures of Hendrix burning his guitar. Caraeff was close enough to the fire that he had to use his camera to protect his face from the heat. Rolling Stone later colorized the image, matching it with other pictures taken at the festival before using the shot for a 1987 magazine cover. According to author Gail Buckland, the final frame of \"Hendrix kneeling in front of his burning guitar, hands raised, is one of the most famous images in rock\". Author and historian Matthew C. Whitaker wrote that \"Hendrix's burning of his guitar became an iconic image in rock history and brought him national attention\". The Los Angeles Times asserted that, upon leaving the stage, Hendrix \"graduated from rumor to legend\". Author John McDermott wrote that \"Hendrix left the Monterey audience stunned and in disbelief at what they'd just heard and seen\". According to Hendrix: \"I decided to destroy my guitar at the end of a song as a sacrifice. You sacrifice things you love. I love my guitar.\" The performance was filmed by D. A. Pennebaker, and included in the concert documentary Monterey Pop, which helped Hendrix gain popularity with the US public.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "After the festival, the Experience was booked for five concerts at Bill Graham's Fillmore, with Big Brother and the Holding Company and Jefferson Airplane. The Experience outperformed Jefferson Airplane during the first two nights, and replaced them at the top of the bill on the fifth. Following their successful West Coast introduction, which included a free open-air concert at Golden Gate Park and a concert at the Whisky a Go Go, the Experience was booked as the opening act for the first American tour of the Monkees. The Monkees requested Hendrix as a supporting act because they were fans, but their young audience disliked the Experience, who left the tour after six shows. Chandler later said he engineered the tour to gain publicity for Hendrix.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "The second Experience album, Axis: Bold as Love, opens with the track \"EXP\", which uses microphonic and harmonic feedback in a new, creative fashion. It also showcased an experimental stereo panning effect in which sounds emanating from Hendrix's guitar move through the stereo image, revolving around the listener. The piece reflected his growing interest in science fiction and outer space. He composed the album's title track and finale around two verses and two choruses, during which he pairs emotions with personas, comparing them to colors. The song's coda features the first recording of stereo phasing. Shadwick described the composition as \"possibly the most ambitious piece on Axis, the extravagant metaphors of the lyrics suggesting a growing confidence\" in Hendrix's songwriting. His guitar playing throughout the song is marked by chordal arpeggios and contrapuntal motion, with tremolo-picked partial chords providing the musical foundation for the chorus, which culminates in what musicologist Andy Aledort described as \"simply one of the greatest electric guitar solos ever played\". The track fades out on tremolo-picked 32nd note double stops.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The scheduled release date for Axis was almost delayed when Hendrix lost the master tape of side one of the LP, leaving it in the back seat of a London taxi. With the deadline looming, Hendrix, Chandler, and engineer Eddie Kramer remixed most of side one in a single overnight session, but they could not match the quality of the lost mix of \"If 6 Was 9\". Redding had a tape recording of this mix, which had to be smoothed out with an iron as it had gotten wrinkled. During the verses, Hendrix doubled his singing with a guitar line which he played one octave lower than his vocals. Hendrix voiced his disappointment about having re-mixed the album so quickly, and he felt that it could have been better had they been given more time.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Axis featured psychedelic cover art that depicts Hendrix and the Experience as various avatars of Vishnu, incorporating a painting of them by Roger Law, from a photo-portrait by Karl Ferris. The painting was then superimposed on a copy of a mass-produced religious poster. Hendrix stated that the cover, which Track spent $5,000 producing, would have been more appropriate had it highlighted his American Indian heritage. He said: \"You got it wrong ... I'm not that kind of Indian.\" Track released the album in the UK on December 1, 1967, where it peaked at number five, spending 16 weeks on the charts. In February 1968, Axis: Bold as Love reached number three in the US.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "While author and journalist Richie Unterberger described Axis as the least impressive Experience album, according to author Peter Doggett, the release \"heralded a new subtlety in Hendrix's work\". Mitchell said: \"Axis was the first time that it became apparent that Jimi was pretty good working behind the mixing board, as well as playing, and had some positive ideas of how he wanted things recorded. It could have been the start of any potential conflict between him and Chas in the studio.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Recording for the Experience's third and final studio album, Electric Ladyland, began as early as December 20, 1967, at Olympic Studios. Several songs were attempted; however, in April 1968, the Experience, with Chandler as producer and engineers Eddie Kramer and Gary Kellgren, moved the sessions to the newly opened Record Plant Studios in New York. As the sessions progressed, Chandler became increasingly frustrated with Hendrix's perfectionism and his demands for repeated takes. Hendrix also allowed numerous friends and guests to join them in the studio, which contributed to a chaotic and crowded environment in the control room and led Chandler to sever his professional relationship with Hendrix. Redding later recalled: \"There were tons of people in the studio; you couldn't move. It was a party, not a session.\" Redding, who had formed his own band in mid-1968, Fat Mattress, found it increasingly difficult to fulfill his commitments with the Experience, so Hendrix played many of the bass parts on Electric Ladyland. The album's cover stated that it was \"produced and directed by Jimi Hendrix\". During the Electric Ladyland recording sessions, Hendrix began experimenting with other combinations of musicians, including Jefferson Airplane's Jack Casady and Traffic's Steve Winwood, who played bass and organ, respectively, on the 15-minute slow-blues jam, \"Voodoo Chile\". During the album's production, Hendrix appeared at an impromptu jam with B.B. King, Al Kooper, and Elvin Bishop. Electric Ladyland was released on October 25, and by mid-November it had reached number one in the US, spending two weeks at the top spot. The double LP was Hendrix's most commercially successful release and his only number one album. It peaked at number six in the UK, spending 12 weeks on the chart. Electric Ladyland included Hendrix's cover of a Bob Dylan song, \"All Along the Watchtower\", which became Hendrix's highest-selling single and his only US top 40 hit, peaking at number 20; the single reached number five in the UK. \"Burning of the Midnight Lamp\", his first recorded song to feature a wah-wah pedal, was added to the album. It was originally released as his fourth single in the UK in August 1967 and reached number 18 on the charts.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "In 1989, Noe Goldwasser, the founding editor of Guitar World, described Electric Ladyland as \"Hendrix's masterpiece\". According to author Michael Heatley, \"most critics agree\" that the album is \"the fullest realization of Jimi's far-reaching ambitions.\" In 2004, author Peter Doggett wrote: \"For pure experimental genius, melodic flair, conceptual vision and instrumental brilliance, Electric Ladyland remains a prime contender for the status of rock's greatest album.\" Doggett described the LP as \"a display of musical virtuosity never surpassed by any rock musician.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "In January 1969, after an absence of more than six months, Hendrix briefly moved back into his girlfriend Kathy Etchingham's apartment in Brook Street, London, next door to the home of the composer Handel. After a performance of \"Voodoo Child\", on BBC's Happening for Lulu show in January 1969, the band stopped midway through an attempt at their first hit \"Hey Joe\" and then launched into an instrumental version of \"Sunshine of Your Love\", as a tribute to the recently disbanded band Cream, until director and producer Stanley Dorfman was forced to bring the song to a premature end. The Experience bass player Noel Redding describes in his autobiography, \"as the minutes ticked by on his live show, short of running onto the set to stop us or pulling the plug, there was nothing he could do. We played past the point where Lulu might have joined us, played through the time for talking at the end, played through Stanley tearing his hair, pointing to his watch and silently screaming at us. We played out the show...Afterwards, Dorfman refused to speak to us, but the result is one of the most widely used bits of film we ever did. Certainly, it’s the most relaxed.\" Dorfman recalls at the BBC club after the show, he found Hendrix to be \"a very sweet man, very quiet, he didn’t know he’d done anything wrong at all.\" However according to rock and roll legend, Hendrix was banned from working at the BBC again. During this time, the Experience toured Scandinavia, West Germany, and gave their final two performances in France. On February 18 and 24, they played sold-out concerts at London's Royal Albert Hall, which were the last European appearances of this lineup.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "By February 1969, Redding had grown weary of Hendrix's unpredictable work ethic and his creative control over the Experience's music. During the previous month's European tour, interpersonal relations within the group had deteriorated, particularly between Hendrix and Redding. In his diary, Redding documented the building frustration during early 1969 recording sessions: \"On the first day, as I nearly expected, there was nothing doing ... On the second it was no show at all. I went to the pub for three hours, came back, and it was still ages before Jimi ambled in. Then we argued ... On the last day, I just watched it happen for a while, and then went back to my flat.\" The last Experience sessions that included Redding—a re-recording of \"Stone Free\" for use as a possible single release—took place on April 14 at Olmstead and the Record Plant in New York. Hendrix then flew bassist Billy Cox to New York; they started recording and rehearsing together on April 21.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The last performance of the original Experience lineup took place on June 29, 1969, at Barry Fey's Denver Pop Festival, a three-day event held at Denver's Mile High Stadium that was marked by police using tear gas to control the audience. The band narrowly escaped from the venue in the back of a rental truck, which was partly crushed by fans who had climbed on top of the vehicle. Before the show, a journalist angered Redding by asking why he was there; the reporter then informed him that two weeks earlier Hendrix announced that he had been replaced with Billy Cox. The next day, Redding quit the Experience and returned to London. He announced that he had left the band and intended to pursue a solo career, blaming Hendrix's plans to expand the group without allowing for his input as a primary reason for leaving. Redding later said: \"Mitch and I hung out a lot together, but we're English. If we'd go out, Jimi would stay in his room. But any bad feelings came from us being three guys who were traveling too hard, getting too tired, and taking too many drugs ... I liked Hendrix. I don't like Mitchell.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Soon after Redding's departure, Hendrix began lodging at the eight-bedroom Ashokan House, in the hamlet of Boiceville near Woodstock in upstate New York, where he had spent some time vacationing in mid-1969. Manager Michael Jeffery arranged the accommodations in the hope that the respite might encourage Hendrix to write material for a new album. During this time, Mitchell was unavailable for commitments made by Jeffery, which included Hendrix's first appearance on US TV—on The Dick Cavett Show—where he was backed by the studio orchestra, and an appearance on The Tonight Show where he appeared with Cox and session drummer Ed Shaughnessy.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "By 1969, Hendrix was the world's highest-paid rock musician. In August, he headlined the Woodstock Music and Art Fair that included many of the most popular bands of the time. For the concert, he added rhythm guitarist Larry Lee and conga players Juma Sultan and Jerry Velez. The band rehearsed for less than two weeks before the performance, and according to Mitchell, they never connected musically. Before arriving at the engagement, Hendrix heard reports that the size of the audience had grown enormously, which concerned him as he did not enjoy performing for large crowds. He was an important draw for the event, and although he accepted substantially less money for the appearance than his usual fee, he was the festival's highest-paid performer.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Hendrix decided to move his midnight Sunday slot to Monday morning, closing the show. The band took the stage around 8:00 a.m, by which time Hendrix had been awake for more than three days. The audience, which peaked at an estimated 400,000 people, was reduced to 30,000. The festival MC, Chip Monck, introduced the group as \"the Jimi Hendrix Experience\", but Hendrix clarified: \"We decided to change the whole thing around and call it 'Gypsy Sun and Rainbows'. For short, it's nothin' but a 'Band of Gypsys'.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Hendrix's performance included a rendition of the US national anthem, \"The Star-Spangled Banner\", with copious feedback, distortion, and sustain to imitate the sounds made by rockets and bombs. Contemporary political pundits described his interpretation as a statement against the Vietnam War. Three weeks later Hendrix said: \"We're all Americans ... it was like 'Go America!'... We play it the way the air is in America today. The air is slightly static, see.\" Immortalized in the 1970 documentary film, Woodstock, Hendrix's version became part of the sixties zeitgeist. Pop critic Al Aronowitz of the New York Post wrote: \"It was the most electrifying moment of Woodstock, and it was probably the single greatest moment of the sixties.\" Images of the performance showing Hendrix wearing a blue-beaded white leather jacket with fringe, a red head-scarf, and blue jeans are regarded as iconic pictures that capture a defining moment of the era. He played \"Hey Joe\" during the encore, concluding the 31⁄2-day festival. Upon leaving the stage, he collapsed from exhaustion. In 2011, the editors of Guitar World named his performance of \"The Star-Spangled Banner\" the greatest performance of all time.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "A legal dispute arose in 1966 regarding a record contract that Hendrix had entered into the previous year with producer Ed Chalpin. After two years of litigation, the parties agreed to a resolution that granted Chalpin the distribution rights to an album of original Hendrix material. Hendrix decided that they would record the LP, Band of Gypsys, during two live appearances. In preparation for the shows he formed an all-black power trio with Cox and drummer Buddy Miles, formerly with Wilson Pickett, the Electric Flag, and the Buddy Miles Express. Critic John Rockwell described Hendrix and Miles as jazz-rock fusionists, and their collaboration as pioneering. Others identified a funk and soul influence in their music. Concert promoter Bill Graham called the shows \"the most brilliant, emotional display of virtuoso electric guitar\" that he had ever heard. Biographers have speculated that Hendrix formed the band in an effort to appease members of the Black Power movement and others in the black communities who called for him to use his fame to speak up for civil rights.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Hendrix had been recording with Cox since April and jamming with Miles since September, and the trio wrote and rehearsed material which they performed at a series of four shows over two nights on December 31 and January 1, at the Fillmore East. They used recordings of these concerts to assemble the LP, which was produced by Hendrix. The album includes the track \"Machine Gun\", which musicologist Andy Aledort described as the pinnacle of Hendrix's career, and \"the premiere example of [his] unparalleled genius as a rock guitarist ... In this performance, Jimi transcended the medium of rock music, and set an entirely new standard for the potential of electric guitar.\" During the song's extended instrumental breaks, Hendrix created sounds with his guitar that sonically represented warfare, including rockets, bombs, and diving planes.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The Band of Gypsys album was the only official live Hendrix LP made commercially available during his lifetime; several tracks from the Woodstock and Monterey shows were released later that year. The album was released in April 1970 by Capitol Records; it reached the top ten in both the US and the UK. That same month a single was issued with \"Stepping Stone\" as the A-side and \"Izabella\" as the B-side, but Hendrix was dissatisfied with the quality of the mastering and he demanded that it be withdrawn and re-mixed, preventing the songs from charting and resulting in Hendrix's least successful single; it was also his last.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "On January 28, 1970, a third and final Band of Gypsys appearance took place; they performed during a music festival at Madison Square Garden benefiting the anti-Vietnam War Moratorium Committee titled the \"Winter Festival for Peace\". American blues guitarist Johnny Winter was backstage before the concert; he recalled: \"[Hendrix] came in with his head down, sat on the couch alone, and put his head in his hands ... He didn't move until it was time for the show.\" Minutes after taking the stage he snapped a vulgar response at a woman who had shouted a request for \"Foxy Lady\". He then began playing \"Earth Blues\" before telling the audience: \"That's what happens when earth fucks with space\". Moments later, he briefly sat down on the drum riser before leaving the stage. Both Miles and Redding later stated that Jeffery had given Hendrix LSD before the performance. Miles believed that Jeffery gave Hendrix the drugs in an effort to sabotage the current band and bring about the return of the original Experience lineup. Jeffery fired Miles after the show and Cox quit, ending the Band of Gypsys.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Soon after the abruptly ended Band of Gypsys performance and their subsequent dissolution, Jeffery made arrangements to reunite the original Experience lineup. Although Hendrix, Mitchell, and Redding were interviewed by Rolling Stone in February 1970 as a united group, Hendrix never intended to work with Redding. When Redding returned to New York in anticipation of rehearsals with a re-formed Experience, he was told that he had been replaced with Cox. During an interview with Rolling Stone's Keith Altham, Hendrix defended the decision: \"It's nothing personal against Noel, but we finished what we were doing with the Experience and Billy's style of playing suits the new group better.\" Although an official name was never adopted for the lineup of Hendrix, Mitchell, and Cox, promoters often billed them as the Jimi Hendrix Experience or just Jimi Hendrix.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "During the first half of 1970, Hendrix sporadically worked on material for what would have been his next LP. Many of the tracks were posthumously released in 1971 as The Cry of Love. He had started writing songs for the album in 1968, but in April 1970 he told Keith Altham that the project had been abandoned. Soon afterward, he and his band took a break from recording and began the Cry of Love tour at the L.A. Forum, performing for 20,000 people. Set-lists during the tour included numerous Experience tracks as well as a selection of newer material. Several shows were recorded, and they produced some of Hendrix's most memorable live performances. At one of them, the second Atlanta International Pop Festival, on July 4, he played to the largest American audience of his career. According to authors Scott Schinder and Andy Schwartz, as many as 500,000 people attended the concert. On July 17, they appeared at the New York Pop Festival; Hendrix had again consumed too many drugs before the show, and the set was considered a disaster. The American leg of the tour, which included 32 performances, ended in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 1, 1970. This would be Hendrix's final concert appearance in the US.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "In 1968, Hendrix and Jeffery jointly invested in the purchase of the Generation Club in Greenwich Village. They had initially planned to reopen the establishment, but when an audit of Hendrix's expenses revealed that he had incurred exorbitant fees by block-booking recording studios for lengthy sessions at peak rates they decided to convert the building into a studio of his own. Hendrix could then work as much as he wanted while also reducing his recording expenditures, which had reached a reported $300,000 annually. Architect and acoustician John Storyk designed Electric Lady Studios for Hendrix, who requested that they avoid right angles where possible. With round windows, an ambient lighting machine, and a psychedelic mural, Storyk wanted the studio to have a relaxing environment that would encourage Hendrix's creativity. The project took twice as long as planned and cost twice as much as Hendrix and Jeffery had budgeted, with their total investment estimated at $1 million.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Hendrix first used Electric Lady on June 15, 1970, when he jammed with Steve Winwood and Chris Wood of Traffic; the next day, he recorded his first track there, \"Night Bird Flying\". The studio officially opened for business on August 25, and a grand opening party was held the following day. Immediately afterwards, Hendrix left for England; he never returned to the States. He boarded an Air India flight for London with Cox, joining Mitchell for a performance as the headlining act of the Isle of Wight Festival.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "When the European leg of the Cry of Love tour began, Hendrix was longing for his new studio and creative outlet, and was not eager to fulfill the commitment. On September 2, 1970, he abandoned a performance in Aarhus after three songs, stating: \"I've been dead a long time\". Four days later, he gave his final concert appearance, at the Isle of Fehmarn Festival in West Germany. He was met with booing and jeering from fans in response to his cancellation of a show slated for the end of the previous night's bill due to torrential rain and risk of electrocution. Immediately following the festival, Hendrix, Mitchell, and Cox traveled to London.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Three days after the performance, Cox, who was suffering from severe paranoia after either taking LSD or being given it unknowingly, quit the tour and went to stay with his parents in Pennsylvania. Within days of Hendrix's arrival in England, he had spoken with Chas Chandler, Alan Douglas, and others about leaving his manager, Michael Jeffery. On September 16, Hendrix performed in public for the last time during an informal jam at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in Soho with Eric Burdon and his latest band, War. They began by playing a few of their recent hits, and after a brief intermission Hendrix joined them during \"Mother Earth\" and \"Tobacco Road\". He died less than 48 hours later.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Hendrix entered a small club in Clarksville, Tennessee, in July 1962, drawn in by live music. He stopped for a drink and ended up spending most of the $400 ($3,924 in 2022 terms) that he had saved during his time in the Army. \"I went in this jazz joint and had a drink,\" he explained. \"I liked it and I stayed. People tell me I get foolish, good-natured sometimes. Anyway, I guess I felt real benevolent that day. I must have been handing out bills to anyone that asked me. I came out of that place with sixteen dollars left.\" Alcohol eventually became \"the scourge of his existence, driving him to fits of pique, even rare bursts of atypical, physical violence\".",
"title": "Drugs and alcohol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Like most acid-heads, Jimi had visions and he wanted to create music to express what he saw. He would try to explain this to people, but it didn't make sense because it was not linked to reality in any way.",
"title": "Drugs and alcohol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "— Kathy Etchingham",
"title": "Drugs and alcohol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Roby and Schreiber assert that Hendrix first used LSD when he met Linda Keith in late 1966. Shapiro and Glebbeek, however, assert that Hendrix used it in June 1967 at the earliest while attending the Monterey Pop Festival. According to Hendrix biographer Charles Cross, the subject of drugs came up one evening in 1966 at Keith's New York apartment. One of Keith's friends offered Hendrix \"acid\", a street name for LSD, but Hendrix asked for LSD instead, showing what Cross describes as \"his naivete and his complete inexperience with psychedelics\". Before that, Hendrix had only sporadically used drugs, including cannabis, hashish, amphetamines, and occasionally cocaine. After 1967, he regularly used cannabis, hashish, LSD, and amphetamines, particularly while touring. According to Cross, \"few stars were as closely associated with the drug culture as Jimi\".",
"title": "Drugs and alcohol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "When Hendrix drank to excess or mixed drugs with alcohol, often he became angry and violent. His friend Herbie Worthington said Hendrix \"simply turned into a bastard\" when he drank. According to friend Sharon Lawrence, liquor \"set off a bottled-up anger, a destructive fury he almost never displayed otherwise\".",
"title": "Drugs and alcohol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "In January 1968, the Experience travelled to Sweden to start a one-week tour of Europe. During the early morning hours of the first day, Hendrix got into a drunken brawl in the Hotel Opalen in Gothenburg, smashing a plate-glass window and injuring his right hand, for which he received medical treatment. The incident culminated in his arrest and release, pending a court appearance that resulted in a large fine.",
"title": "Drugs and alcohol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "In 1969, Hendrix rented a house in Benedict Canyon, California, that was burglarized. Later, while under the influence of drugs and alcohol, he accused his friend Paul Caruso of the theft, threw punches and stones at him, and chased him away from his house. A few days later Hendrix hit his girlfriend, Carmen Borrero, above her eye with a vodka bottle during a drunken, jealous rage, and gave her a cut that required stitches.",
"title": "Drugs and alcohol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Hendrix was passing through customs at Toronto International Airport on May 3, 1969, when authorities found a small amount of heroin and hashish in his luggage, and charged him with drug possession. He was released on $10,000 bail, and was required to return on May 5 for an arraignment hearing. The incident proved stressful for Hendrix, and it weighed heavily on his mind during the seven months leading up to his December 1969 trial. For the Crown to prove possession, they had to show that Hendrix knew that the drugs were there. During the jury trial, he testified that a fan had given him a vial of what he thought was legal medication which he put in his bag. He was acquitted of the charges. Mitchell and Redding later revealed that everyone had been warned about a planned drug bust the day before flying to Toronto; both men also stated that they believed that the drugs had been planted in Hendrix's bag without his knowledge.",
"title": "Drugs and alcohol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Details concerning Hendrix's last day and death are disputed. He spent much of September 17, 1970, in London with Monika Dannemann, the only witness to his final hours. Dannemann said that she prepared a meal for them at her apartment in the Samarkand Hotel around 11 p.m., when they shared a bottle of wine. She drove him to the residence of an acquaintance at approximately 1:45 a.m., where he remained for about an hour before she picked him up and drove them back to her flat at 3 a.m. She said that they talked until around 7 a.m., when they went to sleep. Dannemann awoke around 11 a.m. and found Hendrix breathing but unconscious and unresponsive. She called for an ambulance at 11:18 a.m., and it arrived nine minutes later. Paramedics transported Hendrix to St Mary Abbots Hospital where Dr. John Bannister pronounced him dead at 12:45 p.m. on September 18.",
"title": "Death, post-mortem, and burial"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Coroner Gavin Thurston ordered a post-mortem examination which was performed on September 21 by Professor Robert Donald Teare, a forensic pathologist. Thurston completed the inquest on September 28 and concluded that Hendrix aspirated his own vomit and died of asphyxia while intoxicated with barbiturates. Citing \"insufficient evidence of the circumstances\", he declared an open verdict. Dannemann later revealed that Hendrix had taken nine of her prescribed Vesparax sleeping tablets, 18 times the recommended dosage.",
"title": "Death, post-mortem, and burial"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Desmond Henley embalmed Hendrix's body which was flown to Seattle on September 29. Hendrix's family and friends held a service at Dunlap Baptist Church in Seattle's Rainier Valley on Thursday, October 1; his body was interred at Greenwood Cemetery in nearby Renton, the location of his mother's grave. Family and friends traveled in 24 limousines, and more than 200 people attended the funeral, including Mitch Mitchell, Noel Redding, Miles Davis, John Hammond, and Johnny Winter.",
"title": "Death, post-mortem, and burial"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Hendrix is often cited as one example of an allegedly disproportionate number of musicians dying at age 27, including Brian Jones, Alan Wilson, Jim Morrison, and Janis Joplin in the same era, a phenomenon referred to as the 27 Club.",
"title": "Death, post-mortem, and burial"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "By 1967, as Hendrix was gaining in popularity, many of his pre-Experience recordings were marketed to an unsuspecting public as Jimi Hendrix albums, sometimes with misleading later images of Hendrix. The recordings, which came under the control of producer Ed Chalpin of PPX, with whom Hendrix had signed a recording contract in 1965, were often re-mixed between their repeated reissues, and licensed to record companies such as Decca and Capitol. Hendrix publicly denounced the releases, describing them as \"malicious\" and \"greatly inferior\", stating: \"At PPX, we spent on average about one hour recording a song. Today I spend at least twelve hours on each song.\" These unauthorized releases have long constituted a substantial part of his recording catalogue, amounting to hundreds of albums.",
"title": "Unauthorized and posthumous releases"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Some of Hendrix's unfinished fourth studio album was released as the 1971 title The Cry of Love. Although the album reached number three in the US and number two in the UK, producers Mitchell and Kramer later complained that they were unable to make use of all the available songs because some tracks were used for 1971's Rainbow Bridge; still others were issued on 1972's War Heroes. Material from The Cry of Love was re-released in 1997 as First Rays of the New Rising Sun, along with the other tracks that Mitchell and Kramer had wanted to include. Four years after Hendrix's death, producer Alan Douglas acquired the rights to produce unreleased music by Hendrix; he attracted criticism for using studio musicians to replace or add tracks.",
"title": "Unauthorized and posthumous releases"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "In 1993, MCA Records delayed a multimillion-dollar sale of Hendrix's publishing copyrights because Al Hendrix was unhappy about the arrangement. He acknowledged that he had sold distribution rights to a foreign corporation in 1974, but stated that it did not include copyrights and argued that he had retained veto power of the sale of the catalogue. Under a settlement reached in July 1995, Al Hendrix regained control of his son's song and image rights. He subsequently licensed the recordings to MCA through the family-run company Experience Hendrix LLC, formed in 1995. In August 2009, Experience Hendrix announced that it had entered a new licensing agreement with Sony Music Entertainment's Legacy Recordings division, to take effect in 2010. Legacy and Experience Hendrix launched the 2010 Jimi Hendrix Catalog Project starting with the release of Valleys of Neptune in March of that year. In the months before his death, Hendrix recorded demos for a concept album tentatively titled Black Gold, now in the possession of Experience Hendrix LLC, but it has not been released.",
"title": "Unauthorized and posthumous releases"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Hendrix played a variety of guitars, but was most associated with the Fender Stratocaster. He acquired his first in 1966, when a girlfriend loaned him enough money to purchase a used Stratocaster built around 1964. He used it often during performances and recordings. In 1967, he described the Stratocaster as \"the best all-around guitar for the stuff we're doing\"; he praised its \"bright treble and deep bass\".",
"title": "Equipment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Hendrix mainly played right-handed guitars that were turned upside down and restrung for left-hand playing. Because of the slant of the Stratocaster's bridge pickup, his lowest string had a brighter sound, while his highest string had a darker sound, the opposite of the intended design. Hendrix also used Fender Jazzmasters, Duosonics, two different Gibson Flying Vs, a Gibson Les Paul, three Gibson SGs, a Gretsch Corvette, and a Fender Jaguar. He used a white Gibson SG Custom for his performances on The Dick Cavett Show in September 1969, and a black Gibson Flying V during the Isle of Wight festival in 1970.",
"title": "Equipment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "During 1965 and 1966, while Hendrix was playing back-up for soul and R&B acts in the US, he used an 85-watt Fender Twin Reverb amplifier. When Chandler brought Hendrix to England in October 1966, he supplied him with 30-watt Burns amps, which Hendrix thought were too small for his needs. After an early London gig when he was unable to use his Fender Twin, he asked about the Marshall amps he had noticed other groups using. Years earlier, Mitch Mitchell had taken drum lessons from Marshall founder Jim Marshall, and he introduced Hendrix to Marshall. At their initial meeting, Hendrix bought four speaker cabinets and three 100-watt Super Lead amplifiers; he grew accustomed to using all three in unison. The equipment arrived on October 11, 1966, and the Experience used it during their first tour.",
"title": "Equipment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Marshall amps were important to the development of Hendrix's overdriven sound and his use of feedback, creating what author Paul Trynka described as a \"definitive vocabulary for rock guitar\". Hendrix usually turned all the control knobs to the maximum level, which became known as the Hendrix setting. During the four years prior to his death, he purchased between 50 and 100 Marshall amplifiers. Jim Marshall said Hendrix was \"the greatest ambassador\" his company ever had.",
"title": "Equipment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "One of Hendrix's signature effects was the wah-wah pedal, which he first heard used with an electric guitar in Cream's \"Tales of Brave Ulysses\", released in May 1967. That July, while performing at the Scene club in New York City, Hendrix met Frank Zappa, whose band the Mothers of Invention were performing at the adjacent Garrick Theater. Hendrix was fascinated by Zappa's application of the pedal, and he experimented with one later that evening. He used a wah pedal during the opening to \"Voodoo Child (Slight Return)\", creating one of the best-known wah-wah riffs of the classic rock era. He also uses the effect on \"Up from the Skies\", \"Little Miss Lover\", and \"Still Raining, Still Dreaming\".",
"title": "Equipment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Hendrix used a Dallas Arbiter Fuzz Face and a Vox wah pedal during recording sessions and performances, but also experimented with other guitar effects. He enjoyed a fruitful long-term collaboration with electronics enthusiast Roger Mayer, whom he once called \"the secret\" of his sound. Mayer introduced him to the Octavia, an octave-doubling effect pedal, in December 1966, and he first recorded with it during the guitar solo to \"Purple Haze\".",
"title": "Equipment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Hendrix also used the Uni-Vibe, designed to simulate the modulation effects of a rotating Leslie speaker. He uses the effect during his performance at Woodstock and on the Band of Gypsys track \"Machine Gun\", which prominently features the Uni-vibe along with an Octavia and a Fuzz Face. For performances, he plugged his guitar into the wah-wah, which was connected to the Fuzz Face, then the Uni-Vibe, and finally a Marshall amplifier.",
"title": "Equipment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "As an adolescent in the 1950s, Hendrix became interested in rock and roll artists such as Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and Chuck Berry. In 1968, he told Guitar Player magazine that electric blues artists Muddy Waters, Elmore James, and B. B. King inspired him during the beginning of his career; he also cited Eddie Cochran as an early influence. Of Muddy Waters, the first electric guitarist of which Hendrix became aware, he said: \"I heard one of his records when I was a little boy and it scared me to death because I heard all of these sounds.\" In 1970, he told Rolling Stone that he was a fan of western swing artist Bob Wills and while he lived in Nashville, the television show the Grand Ole Opry.",
"title": "Influences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "I don't happen to know much about jazz. I know that most of those cats are playing nothing but blues, though—I know that much.",
"title": "Influences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "— Hendrix on jazz music",
"title": "Influences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Cox stated that during their time serving in the US military, he and Hendrix primarily listened to southern blues artists such as Jimmy Reed and Albert King. According to Cox, \"King was a very, very powerful influence\". Howlin' Wolf also inspired Hendrix, who performed Wolf's \"Killing Floor\" as the opening song of his US debut at the Monterey Pop Festival. The influence of soul artist Curtis Mayfield can be heard in Hendrix's guitar playing, and the influence of Bob Dylan can be heard in Hendrix's songwriting; he was known to play Dylan's records repeatedly, particularly Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde.",
"title": "Influences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "He changed everything. What don't we owe Jimi Hendrix? For his monumental rebooting of guitar culture \"standards of tone\", technique, gear, signal processing, rhythm playing, soloing, stage presence, chord voicings, charisma, fashion, and composition? ... He is guitar hero number one.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "— Guitar Player magazine, May 2012",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame biography for the Experience states: \"Jimi Hendrix was arguably the greatest instrumentalist in the history of rock music. Hendrix expanded the range and vocabulary of the electric guitar into areas no musician had ever ventured before. His boundless drive, technical ability and creative application of such effects as wah-wah and distortion forever transformed the sound of rock and roll.\" Musicologist Andy Aledort described Hendrix as \"one of the most creative\" and \"influential musicians that has ever lived\". Music journalist Chuck Philips wrote: \"In a field almost exclusively populated by white musicians, Hendrix has served as a role model for a cadre of young black rockers. His achievement was to reclaim title to a musical form pioneered by black innovators like Little Richard and Chuck Berry in the 1950s.\"",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Hendrix favored overdriven amplifiers with high volume and gain. He was instrumental in developing the previously undesirable technique of guitar amplifier feedback, and helped to popularize use of the wah-wah pedal in mainstream rock. He rejected the standard barre chord fretting technique used by most guitarists in favor of fretting the low 6th string root notes with his thumb. He applied this technique during the beginning bars of \"Little Wing\", which allowed him to sustain the root note of chords while also playing melody. This method has been described as piano style, with the thumb playing what a pianist's left hand would play and the other fingers playing melody as a right hand. Having spent several years fronting a trio, he developed an ability to play rhythm chords and lead lines together, giving the audio impression that more than one guitarist was performing. He was the first artist to incorporate stereophonic phasing effects in rock music recordings. Holly George-Warren of Rolling Stone wrote: \"Hendrix pioneered the use of the instrument as an electronic sound source. Players before him had experimented with feedback and distortion, but Hendrix turned those effects and others into a controlled, fluid vocabulary every bit as personal as the blues with which he began.\"",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "While creating his unique musical voice and guitar style, Hendrix synthesized diverse genres, including blues, R&B, soul, British rock, American folk music, 1950s rock and roll, and jazz. Musicologist David Moskowitz emphasized the importance of blues music in Hendrix's playing style, and according to authors Steven Roby and Brad Schreiber, \"[He] explored the outer reaches of psychedelic rock\". His influence is evident in a variety of popular music formats, and he has contributed significantly to the development of hard rock, heavy metal, funk, post-punk, grunge, and hip hop music. His lasting influence on modern guitar players is difficult to overstate; his techniques and delivery have been abundantly imitated by others. Despite his hectic touring schedule and notorious perfectionism, he was a prolific recording artist who left behind numerous unreleased recordings. More than 40 years after his death, Hendrix remains as popular as ever, with annual album sales exceeding that of any year during his lifetime.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "As with his contemporary Sly Stone, Hendrix embraced the experimentalism of white musicians in progressive rock in the late 1960s and inspired a wave of progressive soul musicians that emerged by the next decade. He has directly influenced numerous funk and funk rock artists, including Prince, George Clinton, John Frusciante of Red Hot Chili Peppers, Eddie Hazel of Funkadelic, and Ernie Isley of the Isley Brothers. Hendrix influenced post-punk guitarists such as John McGeoch of Siouxsie and the Banshees and Robert Smith of The Cure. Grunge guitarists such as Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains, and Mike McCready and Stone Gossard of Pearl Jam have cited Hendrix as an influence. Hendrix's influence also extends to many hip hop artists, including De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, Digital Underground, Beastie Boys, and Run–D.M.C. Miles Davis was deeply impressed by Hendrix, and he compared Hendrix's improvisational abilities with those of saxophonist John Coltrane. Desert blues artists from the Sahara desert region including Mdou Moctar and Tinariwen have also acknowledged Hendrix's influence.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "Rock and roll fans still debate whether Hendrix actually said that Chicago co-founder Terry Kath was a better guitar player than him, but Kath named Hendrix as a major influence: \"But then there was Hendrix, man. Jimi was really the last cat to freak me. Jimi was playing all the stuff I had in my head. I couldn't believe it, when I first heard him. Man, no one can ever do what he did with a guitar. No one can ever take his place.\"",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "Hendrix also influenced Black Sabbath, industrial artist Marilyn Manson, blues musician Stevie Ray Vaughan, Randy Hansen, Uli Jon Roth, pop singer Halsey, Kiss's Ace Frehley, Metallica's Kirk Hammett, Aerosmith's Brad Whitford, Judas Priest's Richie Faulkner, instrumental rock guitarist Joe Satriani, King's X singer/bassist Doug Pinnick, Adrian Belew, and heavy metal virtuoso Yngwie Malmsteen, who said: \"[Hendrix] created modern electric playing, without question ... He was the first. He started it all. The rest is history.\" \"For many\", Hendrix was \"the preeminent black rocker\", according to Jon Caramanica. Members of the Soulquarians, an experimental black music collective active during the late 1990s and early 2000s, were influenced by the creative freedom in Hendrix's music and extensively used Electric Lady Studios to work on their own music.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "Hendrix received several prestigious rock music awards during his lifetime and posthumously. In 1967, readers of Melody Maker voted him the Pop Musician of the Year. In 1968, Rolling Stone declared him the Performer of the Year. Also in 1968, the City of Seattle gave him the keys to the city. Disc & Music Echo newspaper honored him with the World Top Musician of 1969 and in 1970 Guitar Player magazine named him the Rock Guitarist of the Year.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "Rolling Stone ranked his three non-posthumous studio albums, Are You Experienced (1967), Axis: Bold as Love (1967), and Electric Ladyland (1968) among the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. They ranked Hendrix number one on their list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time, and number six on their list of the 100 greatest artists of all time. Guitar World's readers voted six of Hendrix's solos among the top 100 Greatest Guitar Solos of All Time: \"Purple Haze\" (70), \"The Star-Spangled Banner\" (52; from Live at Woodstock), \"Machine Gun\" (32; from Band of Gypsys), \"Little Wing\" (18), \"Voodoo Child (Slight Return)\" (11), and \"All Along the Watchtower\" (5). Rolling Stone placed seven of his recordings in their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time: \"Purple Haze\" (17), \"All Along the Watchtower\" (47) \"Voodoo Child (Slight Return)\" (102), \"Foxy Lady\" (153), \"Hey Joe\" (201), \"Little Wing\" (366), and \"The Wind Cries Mary\" (379). They also included three of Hendrix's songs in their list of the 100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time: \"Purple Haze\" (2), \"Voodoo Child\" (12), and \"Machine Gun\" (49).",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "A star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was dedicated to Hendrix on November 14, 1991, at 6627 Hollywood Boulevard. The Jimi Hendrix Experience was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992, and the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2005. In 1998, Hendrix was inducted into the Native American Music Hall of Fame during its first year. In 1999, readers of Rolling Stone and Guitar World ranked Hendrix among the most important musicians of the 20th century. In 2005, his debut album, Are You Experienced, was one of 50 recordings added that year to the US National Recording Registry in the Library of Congress, \"[to] be preserved for all time ... [as] part of the nation's audio legacy\". In Seattle, November 27, 1992, which would have been Hendrix's 50th birthday, was made Jimi Hendrix Day, largely due to the efforts of his boyhood friend, guitarist Sammy Drain.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "The blue plaque identifying Hendrix's former residence at 23 Brook Street, London, was the first issued by English Heritage to commemorate a pop star. Next door is the former residence of George Frideric Handel, 25 Brook Street, which opened to the public as the Handel House Museum in 2001. From 2016 the museum made use of the upper floors of 23 for displays about Hendrix and was rebranded as Handel & Hendrix in London.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "A memorial statue of Hendrix playing a Stratocaster stands near the corner of Broadway and Pine Streets in Seattle. In May 2006, the city renamed a park near its Central District Jimi Hendrix Park, in his honor. In 2012, an official historic marker was erected on the site of the July 1970 Second Atlanta International Pop Festival near Byron, Georgia. The marker text reads, in part: \"Over thirty musical acts performed, including rock icon Jimi Hendrix playing to the largest American audience of his career.\"",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "Hendrix's music has received a number of Hall of Fame Grammy awards, starting with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1992, followed by two Grammys in 1999 for his albums Are You Experienced and Electric Ladyland; Axis: Bold as Love received a Grammy in 2006. In 2000, he received a Hall of Fame Grammy award for his original composition, \"Purple Haze\", and in 2001, for his recording of Dylan's \"All Along the Watchtower\". Hendrix's rendition of \"The Star-Spangled Banner\" was honored with a Grammy in 2009.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "The United States Postal Service issued a commemorative postage stamp honoring Hendrix in 2014. On August 21, 2016, Hendrix was inducted into the Rhythm and Blues Music Hall of Fame in Dearborn, Michigan. The James Marshall \"Jimi\" Hendrix United States Post Office in Renton Highlands near Seattle, about a mile from Hendrix's grave and memorial, was renamed for Hendrix in 2019.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "On June 23, 2019, the Band of Gypsys were inducted into the Rhythm and Blues Music Hall of Fame, at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African-American History in Detroit, Michigan. Billy Cox, the last surviving member of the group, was on hand to accept, along with representatives of the Buddy Miles and Hendrix estates.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "The Jimi Hendrix Experience",
"title": "Discography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "Jimi Hendrix/Band of Gypsys",
"title": "Discography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "",
"title": "External links"
}
]
| James Marshall "Jimi" Hendrix was an American guitarist, songwriter and singer. Although his mainstream career spanned only four years, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential electric guitarists in the history of popular music, and one of the most celebrated musicians of the 20th century. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame describes him as "arguably the greatest instrumentalist in the history of rock music." Born in Seattle, Washington, Hendrix began playing guitar at age 15. In 1961, he enlisted in the US Army, but was discharged the following year. Soon afterward, he moved to Clarksville then Nashville, Tennessee, and began playing gigs on the chitlin' circuit, earning a place in the Isley Brothers' backing band and later with Little Richard, with whom he continued to work through mid-1965. He then played with Curtis Knight and the Squires before moving to England in late 1966 after bassist Chas Chandler of the Animals became his manager. Within months, Hendrix had earned three UK top ten hits with the Jimi Hendrix Experience: "Hey Joe", "Purple Haze", and "The Wind Cries Mary". He achieved fame in the US after his performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, and in 1968 his third and final studio album, Electric Ladyland, reached number one in the US. The double LP was Hendrix's most commercially successful release and his first and only number one album. The world's highest-paid performer, he headlined the Woodstock Festival in 1969 and the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 before his accidental death in London from barbiturate-related asphyxia in September 1970. Hendrix was inspired by American rock and roll and electric blues. He favored overdriven amplifiers with high volume and gain, and was instrumental in popularizing the previously undesirable sounds caused by guitar amplifier feedback. He was also one of the first guitarists to make extensive use of tone-altering effects units in mainstream rock, such as fuzz distortion, Octavia, wah-wah, and Uni-Vibe. He was the first musician to use stereophonic phasing effects in recordings. Holly George-Warren of Rolling Stone commented: "Hendrix pioneered the use of the instrument as an electronic sound source. Players before him had experimented with feedback and distortion, but Hendrix turned those effects and others into a controlled, fluid vocabulary every bit as personal as the blues with which he began." Hendrix was the recipient of several music awards during his lifetime and posthumously. In 1967, readers of Melody Maker voted him the Pop Musician of the Year and in 1968, Billboard named him the Artist of the Year and Rolling Stone declared him the Performer of the Year. Disc and Music Echo honored him with the World Top Musician of 1969 and in 1970, Guitar Player named him the Rock Guitarist of the Year. The Jimi Hendrix Experience was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992 and the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2005. Rolling Stone ranked the band's three studio albums, Are You Experienced (1967), Axis: Bold as Love (1967), and Electric Ladyland (1968), among the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time", and they ranked Hendrix as the greatest guitarist and the sixth-greatest artist of all time. Hendrix was named the greatest guitarist of all time by Rolling Stone in 2023. | 2001-10-23T04:08:06Z | 2023-12-07T06:08:39Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimi_Hendrix |
16,097 | Johann Elert Bode | Johann Elert Bode (German: [ˈboːdə]; 19 January 1747 – 23 November 1826) was a German astronomer known for his reformulation and popularisation of the Titius–Bode law. Bode determined the orbit of Uranus and suggested the planet's name.
Bode was born in Hamburg. As a youth, he suffered from a serious eye disease that particularly damaged his right eye; he continued to have trouble with his eyes throughout his life.
His early promise in mathematics brought him to the attention of Johann Georg Büsch, who allowed Bode to use his own library for study. He began his career with the publication of a short work on the solar eclipse of 5 August 1766. This was followed by an elementary treatise on astronomy entitled Anleitung zur Kenntniss des gestirnten Himmels (1768, 10th ed. 1844), the success of which led to his being invited to Berlin by Johann Heinrich Lambert in 1772 for the purpose of computing ephemerides on an improved plan. There he founded, in 1774, the well-known Astronomisches Jahrbuch, 51 yearly volumes of which he compiled and issued.
He became director of the Berlin Observatory in 1786, from which he retired in 1825. There he published the Uranographia in 1801, a celestial atlas that aimed both at scientific accuracy in showing the positions of stars and other astronomical objects, as well as the artistic interpretation of the stellar constellation figures. The Uranographia marks the climax of an epoch of artistic representation of the constellations. Later atlases showed fewer and fewer elaborate figures until they were no longer printed on such tables.
Bode also published another small star atlas, intended for astronomical amateurs (Vorstellung der Gestirne). He is credited with the discovery of Bode's Galaxy (M81). Comet Bode (C/1779 A1) is named after him; its orbit was calculated by Erik Prosperin. Asteroid 998 Bodea, discovered on 6 August 1923 by Karl Reinmuth at Heidelberg, was also christened in his honour, the letter 'a' added to its name to fulfil the convention that asteroids were given feminine names.
His name became attached to the 'law' discovered by Johann Daniel Titius in 1766. Bode first makes mention of it in the Anleitung zur Kenntniss des gestirnten Himmels in a footnote, and although it is often officially called the Titius–Bode law, it is also commonly just called Bode's law. This law attempts to explain the distances of the planets from the Sun in a formula although ironically it breaks down for the planet Neptune which was later discovered in Berlin. It was the discovery of Uranus at a position predicted by the law which aroused great interest in it. There was a gap (with no planet) between Mars and Jupiter, and Bode urged a search for a planet in this region which culminated in a group formed for this purpose, the so-called "celestial police". However before the group initiated a search, they were trumped by the discovery of the asteroid Ceres by Giuseppe Piazzi from Palermo in 1801, at Bode's predicted position.
Latterly, the law fell out of favour when it was realised that Ceres was only one of a small number of asteroids and when Neptune was found not to be in a position required by the law. The discovery of planets around other stars has brought the law back into discussion.
Bode himself was directly involved in research leading from the discovery of a planet – that of Uranus in 1781. Although Uranus was the first planet to be discovered by telescope, it is just about visible with the naked eye. Bode consulted older star charts and found numerous examples of the planet's position being given while being mistaken for a star, for example, John Flamsteed, Astronomer Royal in Britain, had listed it in his catalogue of 1690 as a star with the name 34 Tauri. These earlier sightings allowed an exact calculation of the orbit of the new planet.
Bode was also responsible for giving the new planet its name. The discoverer William Herschel proposed to name it after George III which was not accepted so readily in other countries. Bode opted for Uranus, with the apparent logic that just as Saturn was the father of Jupiter, the new planet should be named after the father of Saturn. There were further alternatives proposed, but ultimately Bode's suggestion became the most widely used – however it had to wait until 1850 before gaining official acceptance in Britain when the Nautical Almanac Office switched from using the name Georgium Sidus to Uranus. In 1789, Bode's Royal Academy colleague Martin Klaproth was inspired by Bode's name for the planet to name his newly discovered element "uranium".[37]
From 1787 to 1825 Bode was director of the Astronomisches Rechen-Institut. In 1794, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In April 1789 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society.
Bode died in Berlin on 23 November 1826, aged 79.
His works were highly effective in diffusing throughout Germany a taste for astronomy. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Johann Elert Bode (German: [ˈboːdə]; 19 January 1747 – 23 November 1826) was a German astronomer known for his reformulation and popularisation of the Titius–Bode law. Bode determined the orbit of Uranus and suggested the planet's name.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Bode was born in Hamburg. As a youth, he suffered from a serious eye disease that particularly damaged his right eye; he continued to have trouble with his eyes throughout his life.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "His early promise in mathematics brought him to the attention of Johann Georg Büsch, who allowed Bode to use his own library for study. He began his career with the publication of a short work on the solar eclipse of 5 August 1766. This was followed by an elementary treatise on astronomy entitled Anleitung zur Kenntniss des gestirnten Himmels (1768, 10th ed. 1844), the success of which led to his being invited to Berlin by Johann Heinrich Lambert in 1772 for the purpose of computing ephemerides on an improved plan. There he founded, in 1774, the well-known Astronomisches Jahrbuch, 51 yearly volumes of which he compiled and issued.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "He became director of the Berlin Observatory in 1786, from which he retired in 1825. There he published the Uranographia in 1801, a celestial atlas that aimed both at scientific accuracy in showing the positions of stars and other astronomical objects, as well as the artistic interpretation of the stellar constellation figures. The Uranographia marks the climax of an epoch of artistic representation of the constellations. Later atlases showed fewer and fewer elaborate figures until they were no longer printed on such tables.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Bode also published another small star atlas, intended for astronomical amateurs (Vorstellung der Gestirne). He is credited with the discovery of Bode's Galaxy (M81). Comet Bode (C/1779 A1) is named after him; its orbit was calculated by Erik Prosperin. Asteroid 998 Bodea, discovered on 6 August 1923 by Karl Reinmuth at Heidelberg, was also christened in his honour, the letter 'a' added to its name to fulfil the convention that asteroids were given feminine names.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "His name became attached to the 'law' discovered by Johann Daniel Titius in 1766. Bode first makes mention of it in the Anleitung zur Kenntniss des gestirnten Himmels in a footnote, and although it is often officially called the Titius–Bode law, it is also commonly just called Bode's law. This law attempts to explain the distances of the planets from the Sun in a formula although ironically it breaks down for the planet Neptune which was later discovered in Berlin. It was the discovery of Uranus at a position predicted by the law which aroused great interest in it. There was a gap (with no planet) between Mars and Jupiter, and Bode urged a search for a planet in this region which culminated in a group formed for this purpose, the so-called \"celestial police\". However before the group initiated a search, they were trumped by the discovery of the asteroid Ceres by Giuseppe Piazzi from Palermo in 1801, at Bode's predicted position.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Latterly, the law fell out of favour when it was realised that Ceres was only one of a small number of asteroids and when Neptune was found not to be in a position required by the law. The discovery of planets around other stars has brought the law back into discussion.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Bode himself was directly involved in research leading from the discovery of a planet – that of Uranus in 1781. Although Uranus was the first planet to be discovered by telescope, it is just about visible with the naked eye. Bode consulted older star charts and found numerous examples of the planet's position being given while being mistaken for a star, for example, John Flamsteed, Astronomer Royal in Britain, had listed it in his catalogue of 1690 as a star with the name 34 Tauri. These earlier sightings allowed an exact calculation of the orbit of the new planet.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Bode was also responsible for giving the new planet its name. The discoverer William Herschel proposed to name it after George III which was not accepted so readily in other countries. Bode opted for Uranus, with the apparent logic that just as Saturn was the father of Jupiter, the new planet should be named after the father of Saturn. There were further alternatives proposed, but ultimately Bode's suggestion became the most widely used – however it had to wait until 1850 before gaining official acceptance in Britain when the Nautical Almanac Office switched from using the name Georgium Sidus to Uranus. In 1789, Bode's Royal Academy colleague Martin Klaproth was inspired by Bode's name for the planet to name his newly discovered element \"uranium\".[37]",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "From 1787 to 1825 Bode was director of the Astronomisches Rechen-Institut. In 1794, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In April 1789 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Bode died in Berlin on 23 November 1826, aged 79.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "His works were highly effective in diffusing throughout Germany a taste for astronomy.",
"title": "Selected writings"
}
]
| Johann Elert Bode was a German astronomer known for his reformulation and popularisation of the Titius–Bode law. Bode determined the orbit of Uranus and suggested the planet's name. | 2001-09-26T18:53:56Z | 2023-12-02T03:47:37Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Elert_Bode |
16,099 | Janet Reno | Janet Wood Reno (July 21, 1938 – November 7, 2016) was an American lawyer and public official who served as the first female and 78th United States attorney general. Reno, a member of the Democratic Party, held the position from 1993 to 2001, making her the second-longest serving attorney general, behind only William Wirt.
Reno was born and raised in Miami, Florida. After leaving to attend Cornell University and Harvard Law School, she returned to Miami where she started her career at private law firms. Her first foray into government was as a staff member for the Judiciary Committee of the Florida House of Representatives. She then worked for the Dade County State Attorney's Office before returning to private practice. She was elected to the Office of State Attorney five times and was the first woman to serve as a state attorney in Florida. President Bill Clinton appointed her attorney general in 1993, a position she held until Clinton left office in 2001.
Reno was born in Miami, Florida. Reno's mother, Jane Wallace (née Wood), wrote a weekly home improvement column for The Miami News under a male pseudonym and later became an investigative reporter for the paper. Janet's father, Henry Olaf Reno (né Rasmussen), was an emigrant from Denmark and a reporter for the Miami Herald for 43 years. Janet Reno had three younger siblings: Mark; writer Robert Reno; and Maggy Hurchalla. In 1943, the Reno family moved to a house in then-rural South Miami; it came with enough land to keep farm animals, including cows, chicken, ducks, goats, and turkeys. Reno helped her parents churn butter, which the family sold to make ends meet.
As the family expanded, they outgrew the house and couldn't afford a larger one. Jane Reno decided to build a new home herself near the Everglades, learning masonry, electrical work, and plumbing for the task. The Reno family moved to the house Jane built when Janet 8 was years old. The house would be Reno's lifelong home and a source of inspiration; she later said, "the house is a symbol to me that you can do anything you really want if it's the right thing to do and you put your mind to it." The Renos' lot for the house originally was 21 acres, some of which they later sold to pay for the children's education.
Reno attended public school in Miami-Dade County, Florida. After she completed middle school in 1951, Reno's parents sent her to stay with her uncle who served as a U.S. military judge in Regensburg, Germany. There, Janet continued her education and traveled around Europe during breaks from school. After a year, Reno returned to Florida where she was a debating champion and salutatorian at Coral Gables Senior High School. In 1956 she enrolled at Cornell University, where she majored in chemistry, became president of the Women's Self-Government Association, and earned her room and board. After graduating from Cornell, Reno enrolled at Harvard Law School, one of 16 women in a class of 500 students. She graduated from Harvard in 1963.
From 1963 to 1971, Reno worked as an attorney for two Miami law firms. In 1971, she joined the staff of the Judiciary Committee of the Florida House of Representatives. The following year, Reno unsuccessfully ran for a seat in Florida's state house. In 1973, she worked on a project to revise the state's system of rules and regulations for criminal procedures. Later in the same year, she accepted a position with the Dade County State Attorney's Office led by Richard Gerstein. Shortly after joining the office, Gerstein made Reno his chief assistant. Reno did not try any cases during her time working for Gerstein. She worked for the Judiciary Circuit, and left the state attorney's office in 1976 to become a partner in a private law firm, Steel, Hector & Davis. Gerstein decided to retire in 1977, creating a vacancy with Florida governor Reubin Askew to appoint a successor. Reno was one of two candidates Gerstein recommended to replace him.
In January 1978, Governor Askew appointed Reno the State Attorney for Dade County (now called Miami-Dade County). She was the first woman to serve as a state attorney in Florida. She was elected to the Office of State Attorney in November 1978 and was returned to office by the voters four more times. Reno ran as a liberal, pro-choice Democrat even though Miami-Dade was a conservative county. Reno did not always face serious challengers, although in 1984 Cuban-American lawyer Jose Garcia-Pedrosa ran against Reno, and picked up the endorsement of the Miami Herald editorial board. In spite of his support among Miami's Hispanic voters, Reno won the election decisively.
The office she led included 95 attorneys and an annual caseload that included 15,000 felonies and 40,000 misdemeanors. As state attorney, she developed a reputation for ethical behavior, going so far as to purchase a car at sticker price to avoid the appearance of impropriety.
She established a drug court which was later replicated in other parts of the country. She worked actively in various civic organizations, including the Miami Coalition for a Safe and Drug Free Community and the Beacon Council, which was formed to address Miami-Dade's economic development.
In May 1980, Reno prosecuted five white policemen who were accused of beating a black insurance salesman, Arthur McDuffie, to death. The policemen were all acquitted. During the resulting 1980 Miami riots, eighteen people were killed, with looters in Liberty City angrily chanting "Reno! Reno! Reno!" Reno met with nearly all of her critics, and a few months later, she won reelection in a landslide.
During Reno's tenure as state attorney, she began what the PBS series Frontline described as a "crusade" against accused child abusers. Reno pioneered the "Miami Method", "a controversial technique for eliciting intimate details from young children and inspired passage of a law allowing them to testify by closed-circuit television, out of the possibly intimidating presence of their suspected molesters." Bobby Fijnje, "a 14-year-old boy, was acquitted after his attorneys discredited the children's persistent interrogations by a psychologist who called herself the 'yucky secrets doctor'." Grant Snowden was acquitted, retried, convicted, and eventually freed by a federal appeals court after 12 years in prison."
Reno's "model case" was against Frank Fuster, co-owner of the Country Walk Babysitting Service in a suburb of Miami, Florida. In 1984, he was found guilty of 14 counts of abuse and sentenced to prison with a minimum of 165 years. Fuster was convicted based in large part on the testimony of his 18-year-old wife, Ileana Flores, who pleaded guilty and testified against him, after allegedly being tortured. In a 2002 episode of Frontline, Flores maintained that she and her ex-husband were innocent, and that Reno personally pressured her to confess. The number and timing of Reno's visits are in dispute. As of 2020, Fuster remains imprisoned.
In 1989, as Florida state attorney, Reno pressed adult charges against 13-year-old Bobby Fijnje, who was accused of sexually molesting 21 children in his care during church services. The charges were driven by the testimony of children interviewed by mental-health professionals using techniques later discredited. Fijnje refused plea-bargain offers. During the trial, the prosecution was unable to present any witnesses to the alleged abuse. After two years of investigation and trial, Fijnje was acquitted of all charges.
When Reno was nominated for attorney general in the Clinton administration, the Nation and Miami New Times raised questions about her handling of these cases, Debbie Nathan's journal article was faxed to the White House, and Fijnje's father (a Dutch diplomat) "sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee". However, Reno was not directly questioned about them. When she was asked in 2002, Reno said that she lacked the time to review the Country Walk case files.
Although Reno personally opposed the death penalty, her office secured 80 capital punishment convictions during her tenure. None of these were executed during her tenure, but five were later executed.
President-elect Bill Clinton had vowed to assemble an administration that "looked like America", and it was widely assumed that one of the major cabinet posts would go to a woman. On February 11, 1993, Clinton introduced Reno as his nominee for United States Attorney General, stating that he wanted to hire a woman for the job but had also considered multiple male candidates. Both of his previous choices, Zoë Baird and Kimba Wood, faced problems because both had employed undocumented immigrants as nannies. Clinton said he had discounted Reno early in his search because she did not have experience in the Justice Department or federal law, but ultimately he came to understand that she had experience with a variety of criminal law issues from her role as State Attorney. On March 11, 1993, the Senate confirmed Reno by a vote of 98 to 0. She was sworn in the next day, becoming the first woman to serve as U.S. Attorney General. As Attorney General, Reno oversaw the Justice Department and its 95,000 employees. Reno remained Attorney General for the rest of Clinton's presidency, making her the longest-serving Attorney General since William Wirt in 1829.
In 1994, Reno tasked the Justice Department with compiling a report on DNA exoneration. The science was still new at that point in time. Reno commissioned the report after reading about the exoneration of a death row inmate. She wanted to know how many cases existed like the one she read about and what the Department of Justice could learn from it. The resulting report concluded there was a strong possibility that many more wrongful convictions that could be cleared with DNA evidence existed. Reno changed policies on how to interview eyewitnesses and laboratory protocols in response.
The following Department of Justice actions occurred during Reno's tenure:
In 1994, Reno appointed Robert Fiske special counsel to investigate Bill Clinton's involvement in Whitewater, a controversy stemming from Clinton's business dealings during his time as Governor of Arkansas. Fiske wrapped up his criminal investigation within six months, and found no link between Whitewater and the suicide of former Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster. Congress reauthorized the investigation and in August 1994, a panel of judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals overseeing the special counsel refused to reappoint Fiske. The panel considered it a conflict of interest for Fiske to investigate Clinton because Reno, a member of the Clinton Administration, appointed Fiske. Instead, the panel appointed former member of the Reagan and Bush Administrations Ken Starr to continue the Whitewater investigation. Starr concluded the Whitewater investigation in December 1997 due to insufficient evidence. The following month, Starr received permission from Reno to redirect his probe into conduct related to the Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky affairs. Starr's Report, issued in September 1998, listed eleven grounds for impeachment against Clinton.
In 1998, the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, in a party line vote, voted to recommend the House cite Reno for contempt of Congress for not turning over two internal Justice Department memos related to a campaign finance controversy during the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. Reno contended she refused to turn over the documents sought because the documents would reveal prosecutor strategy in an ongoing investigation. Reno argued that her actions were in defense of the principle that prosecutors should be free of political influence. The full House of Representatives never voted on the resolution and the documents were turned over to the House.
Reno ran for Governor of Florida in 2002, but lost in the Democratic primary to Bill McBride 44% to 44.4%. Voting problems arose in the election, and she did not concede defeat until a week later.
After her tenure as United States Attorney General and her unsuccessful gubernatorial bid, Reno toured the country giving speeches on topics relating to the criminal justice system. On March 31, 2006, she spoke at a criminology conference at the University of Pennsylvania. She stated that she believed the education system in the United States needs to be improved, as there is a link between the quality of education and the crime rate. She also believed that too much money has been diverted away from the juvenile court system and that the government should find some way to make the juvenile courts work effectively, so as to prevent problems in troubled children and adolescents before these problems are exacerbated by the time they reach adulthood.
Reno was a founding member of the board of directors for the Innocence Project, a nonprofit organization which assists prisoners who may be exonerated through DNA testing, in 2004. By 2013 she was director emeritus of the board of directors.
Reno never married and did not have children. She took Spanish lessons during her time as state attorney. She remained active after her diagnosis of Parkinson's disease in 1995; she learned inline skating in 1996. After her mother's death in 1992, Reno inherited her childhood home. In response to a 1998 Saturday Night Live sketch, which portrayed her as lonely, former Justice Department public affairs director Carl Stern said, "Both in Florida and in Washington she has a great many friends whose homes she visits, and she goes to plays, her dance card is full."
Reno died from Parkinson's disease on November 7, 2016. She was surrounded by friends and family at the end of her life, including her sister Maggy and her goddaughter. Upon her death, President Barack Obama praised Reno for her "intellect, integrity, and fierce commitment to justice" and President Clinton released a statement thanking Reno "for her service, counsel, and friendship".
Glamour magazine named Reno one of its "Women of the Year" for 1993. In 2000, Reno was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. In March 2008, Reno received the Council on Litigation Management's Professionalism Award, which recognizes and commemorates an individual who has demonstrated the unique ability to lead others by example in the highest standard of their profession.
On April 17, 2009, Reno was awarded the Justice Award by the American Judicature Society. Eric Holder, Attorney General in the Obama Administration, presented the award to Reno. Seth Andersen, Executive Vice President of AJS said the award recognizes "her commitment to improving our systems of justice and educating Americans about our great common enterprise – to ensure equality under the law". The award is the highest given by the AJS, and recognizes significant contributions toward improvements in the administration of justice within the United States.
Reno had a higher profile than many of her immediate predecessors. She appeared on the cover of Time and was the subject of a Vanity Fair profile. Late night hosts frequently joked about her height and perceived lack of traditional femininity, and Will Ferrell repeatedly portrayed Reno on Saturday Night Live. In 2001, Reno appeared alongside Ferrell on Saturday Night Live in the final installment of the recurring sketch "Janet Reno's Dance Party". On a 2007 Super Bowl XLI TV commercial, Reno was among the guests at Chad Ochocinco's Super Bowl party. Reno curated a compilation of old-time American songs performed by contemporary artists, titled Song of America. Reno worked with music producer Ed Pettersen (her niece's husband) on the project. Reno said her goal with the project was to share music with her great-nieces and great-nephews. In 2013, Reno voiced herself for the "Dark Knight Court" episode of The Simpsons. She was depicted by Jane Lynch in Manhunt: Unabomber, a fictionalized account of the true story of the FBI's hunt for the Unabomber. Anquette, an R&B girl group from Miami, dedicated a song to her on their 1988 album Respect. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Janet Wood Reno (July 21, 1938 – November 7, 2016) was an American lawyer and public official who served as the first female and 78th United States attorney general. Reno, a member of the Democratic Party, held the position from 1993 to 2001, making her the second-longest serving attorney general, behind only William Wirt.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Reno was born and raised in Miami, Florida. After leaving to attend Cornell University and Harvard Law School, she returned to Miami where she started her career at private law firms. Her first foray into government was as a staff member for the Judiciary Committee of the Florida House of Representatives. She then worked for the Dade County State Attorney's Office before returning to private practice. She was elected to the Office of State Attorney five times and was the first woman to serve as a state attorney in Florida. President Bill Clinton appointed her attorney general in 1993, a position she held until Clinton left office in 2001.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Reno was born in Miami, Florida. Reno's mother, Jane Wallace (née Wood), wrote a weekly home improvement column for The Miami News under a male pseudonym and later became an investigative reporter for the paper. Janet's father, Henry Olaf Reno (né Rasmussen), was an emigrant from Denmark and a reporter for the Miami Herald for 43 years. Janet Reno had three younger siblings: Mark; writer Robert Reno; and Maggy Hurchalla. In 1943, the Reno family moved to a house in then-rural South Miami; it came with enough land to keep farm animals, including cows, chicken, ducks, goats, and turkeys. Reno helped her parents churn butter, which the family sold to make ends meet.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "As the family expanded, they outgrew the house and couldn't afford a larger one. Jane Reno decided to build a new home herself near the Everglades, learning masonry, electrical work, and plumbing for the task. The Reno family moved to the house Jane built when Janet 8 was years old. The house would be Reno's lifelong home and a source of inspiration; she later said, \"the house is a symbol to me that you can do anything you really want if it's the right thing to do and you put your mind to it.\" The Renos' lot for the house originally was 21 acres, some of which they later sold to pay for the children's education.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Reno attended public school in Miami-Dade County, Florida. After she completed middle school in 1951, Reno's parents sent her to stay with her uncle who served as a U.S. military judge in Regensburg, Germany. There, Janet continued her education and traveled around Europe during breaks from school. After a year, Reno returned to Florida where she was a debating champion and salutatorian at Coral Gables Senior High School. In 1956 she enrolled at Cornell University, where she majored in chemistry, became president of the Women's Self-Government Association, and earned her room and board. After graduating from Cornell, Reno enrolled at Harvard Law School, one of 16 women in a class of 500 students. She graduated from Harvard in 1963.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "From 1963 to 1971, Reno worked as an attorney for two Miami law firms. In 1971, she joined the staff of the Judiciary Committee of the Florida House of Representatives. The following year, Reno unsuccessfully ran for a seat in Florida's state house. In 1973, she worked on a project to revise the state's system of rules and regulations for criminal procedures. Later in the same year, she accepted a position with the Dade County State Attorney's Office led by Richard Gerstein. Shortly after joining the office, Gerstein made Reno his chief assistant. Reno did not try any cases during her time working for Gerstein. She worked for the Judiciary Circuit, and left the state attorney's office in 1976 to become a partner in a private law firm, Steel, Hector & Davis. Gerstein decided to retire in 1977, creating a vacancy with Florida governor Reubin Askew to appoint a successor. Reno was one of two candidates Gerstein recommended to replace him.",
"title": "Early career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In January 1978, Governor Askew appointed Reno the State Attorney for Dade County (now called Miami-Dade County). She was the first woman to serve as a state attorney in Florida. She was elected to the Office of State Attorney in November 1978 and was returned to office by the voters four more times. Reno ran as a liberal, pro-choice Democrat even though Miami-Dade was a conservative county. Reno did not always face serious challengers, although in 1984 Cuban-American lawyer Jose Garcia-Pedrosa ran against Reno, and picked up the endorsement of the Miami Herald editorial board. In spite of his support among Miami's Hispanic voters, Reno won the election decisively.",
"title": "Early career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The office she led included 95 attorneys and an annual caseload that included 15,000 felonies and 40,000 misdemeanors. As state attorney, she developed a reputation for ethical behavior, going so far as to purchase a car at sticker price to avoid the appearance of impropriety.",
"title": "Early career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "She established a drug court which was later replicated in other parts of the country. She worked actively in various civic organizations, including the Miami Coalition for a Safe and Drug Free Community and the Beacon Council, which was formed to address Miami-Dade's economic development.",
"title": "Early career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In May 1980, Reno prosecuted five white policemen who were accused of beating a black insurance salesman, Arthur McDuffie, to death. The policemen were all acquitted. During the resulting 1980 Miami riots, eighteen people were killed, with looters in Liberty City angrily chanting \"Reno! Reno! Reno!\" Reno met with nearly all of her critics, and a few months later, she won reelection in a landslide.",
"title": "Early career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "During Reno's tenure as state attorney, she began what the PBS series Frontline described as a \"crusade\" against accused child abusers. Reno pioneered the \"Miami Method\", \"a controversial technique for eliciting intimate details from young children and inspired passage of a law allowing them to testify by closed-circuit television, out of the possibly intimidating presence of their suspected molesters.\" Bobby Fijnje, \"a 14-year-old boy, was acquitted after his attorneys discredited the children's persistent interrogations by a psychologist who called herself the 'yucky secrets doctor'.\" Grant Snowden was acquitted, retried, convicted, and eventually freed by a federal appeals court after 12 years in prison.\"",
"title": "Early career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Reno's \"model case\" was against Frank Fuster, co-owner of the Country Walk Babysitting Service in a suburb of Miami, Florida. In 1984, he was found guilty of 14 counts of abuse and sentenced to prison with a minimum of 165 years. Fuster was convicted based in large part on the testimony of his 18-year-old wife, Ileana Flores, who pleaded guilty and testified against him, after allegedly being tortured. In a 2002 episode of Frontline, Flores maintained that she and her ex-husband were innocent, and that Reno personally pressured her to confess. The number and timing of Reno's visits are in dispute. As of 2020, Fuster remains imprisoned.",
"title": "Early career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In 1989, as Florida state attorney, Reno pressed adult charges against 13-year-old Bobby Fijnje, who was accused of sexually molesting 21 children in his care during church services. The charges were driven by the testimony of children interviewed by mental-health professionals using techniques later discredited. Fijnje refused plea-bargain offers. During the trial, the prosecution was unable to present any witnesses to the alleged abuse. After two years of investigation and trial, Fijnje was acquitted of all charges.",
"title": "Early career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "When Reno was nominated for attorney general in the Clinton administration, the Nation and Miami New Times raised questions about her handling of these cases, Debbie Nathan's journal article was faxed to the White House, and Fijnje's father (a Dutch diplomat) \"sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee\". However, Reno was not directly questioned about them. When she was asked in 2002, Reno said that she lacked the time to review the Country Walk case files.",
"title": "Early career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Although Reno personally opposed the death penalty, her office secured 80 capital punishment convictions during her tenure. None of these were executed during her tenure, but five were later executed.",
"title": "Early career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "President-elect Bill Clinton had vowed to assemble an administration that \"looked like America\", and it was widely assumed that one of the major cabinet posts would go to a woman. On February 11, 1993, Clinton introduced Reno as his nominee for United States Attorney General, stating that he wanted to hire a woman for the job but had also considered multiple male candidates. Both of his previous choices, Zoë Baird and Kimba Wood, faced problems because both had employed undocumented immigrants as nannies. Clinton said he had discounted Reno early in his search because she did not have experience in the Justice Department or federal law, but ultimately he came to understand that she had experience with a variety of criminal law issues from her role as State Attorney. On March 11, 1993, the Senate confirmed Reno by a vote of 98 to 0. She was sworn in the next day, becoming the first woman to serve as U.S. Attorney General. As Attorney General, Reno oversaw the Justice Department and its 95,000 employees. Reno remained Attorney General for the rest of Clinton's presidency, making her the longest-serving Attorney General since William Wirt in 1829.",
"title": "U.S. Attorney General"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In 1994, Reno tasked the Justice Department with compiling a report on DNA exoneration. The science was still new at that point in time. Reno commissioned the report after reading about the exoneration of a death row inmate. She wanted to know how many cases existed like the one she read about and what the Department of Justice could learn from it. The resulting report concluded there was a strong possibility that many more wrongful convictions that could be cleared with DNA evidence existed. Reno changed policies on how to interview eyewitnesses and laboratory protocols in response.",
"title": "U.S. Attorney General"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The following Department of Justice actions occurred during Reno's tenure:",
"title": "U.S. Attorney General"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In 1994, Reno appointed Robert Fiske special counsel to investigate Bill Clinton's involvement in Whitewater, a controversy stemming from Clinton's business dealings during his time as Governor of Arkansas. Fiske wrapped up his criminal investigation within six months, and found no link between Whitewater and the suicide of former Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster. Congress reauthorized the investigation and in August 1994, a panel of judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals overseeing the special counsel refused to reappoint Fiske. The panel considered it a conflict of interest for Fiske to investigate Clinton because Reno, a member of the Clinton Administration, appointed Fiske. Instead, the panel appointed former member of the Reagan and Bush Administrations Ken Starr to continue the Whitewater investigation. Starr concluded the Whitewater investigation in December 1997 due to insufficient evidence. The following month, Starr received permission from Reno to redirect his probe into conduct related to the Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky affairs. Starr's Report, issued in September 1998, listed eleven grounds for impeachment against Clinton.",
"title": "U.S. Attorney General"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In 1998, the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, in a party line vote, voted to recommend the House cite Reno for contempt of Congress for not turning over two internal Justice Department memos related to a campaign finance controversy during the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. Reno contended she refused to turn over the documents sought because the documents would reveal prosecutor strategy in an ongoing investigation. Reno argued that her actions were in defense of the principle that prosecutors should be free of political influence. The full House of Representatives never voted on the resolution and the documents were turned over to the House.",
"title": "U.S. Attorney General"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Reno ran for Governor of Florida in 2002, but lost in the Democratic primary to Bill McBride 44% to 44.4%. Voting problems arose in the election, and she did not concede defeat until a week later.",
"title": "Later career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "After her tenure as United States Attorney General and her unsuccessful gubernatorial bid, Reno toured the country giving speeches on topics relating to the criminal justice system. On March 31, 2006, she spoke at a criminology conference at the University of Pennsylvania. She stated that she believed the education system in the United States needs to be improved, as there is a link between the quality of education and the crime rate. She also believed that too much money has been diverted away from the juvenile court system and that the government should find some way to make the juvenile courts work effectively, so as to prevent problems in troubled children and adolescents before these problems are exacerbated by the time they reach adulthood.",
"title": "Later career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Reno was a founding member of the board of directors for the Innocence Project, a nonprofit organization which assists prisoners who may be exonerated through DNA testing, in 2004. By 2013 she was director emeritus of the board of directors.",
"title": "Later career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Reno never married and did not have children. She took Spanish lessons during her time as state attorney. She remained active after her diagnosis of Parkinson's disease in 1995; she learned inline skating in 1996. After her mother's death in 1992, Reno inherited her childhood home. In response to a 1998 Saturday Night Live sketch, which portrayed her as lonely, former Justice Department public affairs director Carl Stern said, \"Both in Florida and in Washington she has a great many friends whose homes she visits, and she goes to plays, her dance card is full.\"",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Reno died from Parkinson's disease on November 7, 2016. She was surrounded by friends and family at the end of her life, including her sister Maggy and her goddaughter. Upon her death, President Barack Obama praised Reno for her \"intellect, integrity, and fierce commitment to justice\" and President Clinton released a statement thanking Reno \"for her service, counsel, and friendship\".",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Glamour magazine named Reno one of its \"Women of the Year\" for 1993. In 2000, Reno was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. In March 2008, Reno received the Council on Litigation Management's Professionalism Award, which recognizes and commemorates an individual who has demonstrated the unique ability to lead others by example in the highest standard of their profession.",
"title": "Awards and honors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "On April 17, 2009, Reno was awarded the Justice Award by the American Judicature Society. Eric Holder, Attorney General in the Obama Administration, presented the award to Reno. Seth Andersen, Executive Vice President of AJS said the award recognizes \"her commitment to improving our systems of justice and educating Americans about our great common enterprise – to ensure equality under the law\". The award is the highest given by the AJS, and recognizes significant contributions toward improvements in the administration of justice within the United States.",
"title": "Awards and honors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Reno had a higher profile than many of her immediate predecessors. She appeared on the cover of Time and was the subject of a Vanity Fair profile. Late night hosts frequently joked about her height and perceived lack of traditional femininity, and Will Ferrell repeatedly portrayed Reno on Saturday Night Live. In 2001, Reno appeared alongside Ferrell on Saturday Night Live in the final installment of the recurring sketch \"Janet Reno's Dance Party\". On a 2007 Super Bowl XLI TV commercial, Reno was among the guests at Chad Ochocinco's Super Bowl party. Reno curated a compilation of old-time American songs performed by contemporary artists, titled Song of America. Reno worked with music producer Ed Pettersen (her niece's husband) on the project. Reno said her goal with the project was to share music with her great-nieces and great-nephews. In 2013, Reno voiced herself for the \"Dark Knight Court\" episode of The Simpsons. She was depicted by Jane Lynch in Manhunt: Unabomber, a fictionalized account of the true story of the FBI's hunt for the Unabomber. Anquette, an R&B girl group from Miami, dedicated a song to her on their 1988 album Respect.",
"title": "In popular culture"
}
]
| Janet Wood Reno was an American lawyer and public official who served as the first female and 78th United States attorney general. Reno, a member of the Democratic Party, held the position from 1993 to 2001, making her the second-longest serving attorney general, behind only William Wirt. Reno was born and raised in Miami, Florida. After leaving to attend Cornell University and Harvard Law School, she returned to Miami where she started her career at private law firms. Her first foray into government was as a staff member for the Judiciary Committee of the Florida House of Representatives. She then worked for the Dade County State Attorney's Office before returning to private practice. She was elected to the Office of State Attorney five times and was the first woman to serve as a state attorney in Florida. President Bill Clinton appointed her attorney general in 1993, a position she held until Clinton left office in 2001. | 2001-09-26T22:09:15Z | 2023-12-22T05:34:07Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Reno |
16,103 | John Wayne | Marion Robert Morrison (May 26, 1907 – June 11, 1979), professionally known as John Wayne and nicknamed The Duke or Duke Wayne, was an American actor who became a popular icon through his starring roles in films which were produced during Hollywood's Golden Age, especially through his starring roles in Western and war movies. His career flourished from the silent era of the 1920s through the American New Wave, as he appeared in a total of 179 film and television productions. He was among the top box-office draws for three decades, and appeared with many other important Hollywood stars of his era. In 1999, the American Film Institute selected Wayne as one of the greatest male stars of classic American cinema.
Wayne was born in Winterset, Iowa, but grew up in Southern California. After losing his football scholarship to the University of Southern California from a bodysurfing accident, he began working for the Fox Film Corporation. He appeared mostly in small parts, but his first leading role came in Raoul Walsh's Western The Big Trail (1930), an early widescreen film epic that was a box-office failure. He played leading roles in numerous B movies during the 1930s, most of them also Westerns, without becoming a major name. John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) made Wayne a mainstream star, and he starred in 142 motion pictures altogether. According to one biographer, "John Wayne personified for millions the nation's frontier heritage."
Wayne's other roles in Westerns include a cattleman driving his herd on the Chisholm Trail in Red River (1948), a Civil War veteran whose niece is abducted by a tribe of Comanches in The Searchers (1956), a troubled rancher competing with a lawyer (James Stewart) for a woman's hand in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), and a cantankerous one-eyed marshal in True Grit (1969), for which he received the Academy Award for Best Actor. He is also remembered for his roles in The Quiet Man (1952) with Maureen O'Hara, Rio Bravo (1959) with Dean Martin, and The Longest Day (1962). In his final screen performance, he starred as an aging gunfighter battling cancer in The Shootist (1976). He made his last public appearance at the Academy Awards ceremony on April 9, 1979, and died of stomach cancer two months later. In 1980, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor of the United States.
Wayne was born Marion Robert Morrison on May 26, 1907, at 224 South Second Street in Winterset, Iowa. The local paper, Winterset Madisonian, reported on page 4 of the edition of May 30, 1907, that Wayne weighed 13 lb (around 6 kg) at birth. Wayne claimed his middle name was soon changed from Robert to Michael when his parents decided to name their next son Robert, but extensive research has found no such legal change, although it might have been changed informally or the documentation may have been lost. Wayne's legal name apparently remained Marion Robert Morrison his entire life although to this day his original name is almost always referred to as Marion Michael Morrison.
Wayne's father, Clyde Leonard Morrison (1884–1937), was the son of American Civil War veteran Marion Mitchell Morrison (1845–1915). Wayne's mother, the former Mary "Molly" Alberta Brown (1885–1970), was from Lancaster County, Nebraska. Wayne had Scottish, Scotch-Irish, English, and Irish ancestry. His great-great-grandfather Robert Morrison (b. 1782) left County Antrim, Ireland, with his mother, arriving in New York in 1799 and eventually settling in Adams County, Ohio. The Morrisons were originally from the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland. He was raised Presbyterian.
Wayne's family moved to Palmdale, California, and then in 1916 to Glendale at 404 Isabel Street, where his father worked as a pharmacist. He attended Glendale Union High School, where he performed well in both sports and academics. Wayne was part of his high school's football team and its debating team. He was also the president of the Latin Society and contributed to the school's newspaper sports column.
A local fireman at the station on his route to school in Glendale started calling him "Little Duke" because he never went anywhere without his huge Airedale Terrier, Duke. He preferred "Duke" to "Marion", and the nickname stuck. Wayne attended Wilson Middle School in Glendale. As a teen, he worked in an ice-cream shop for a man who shod horses for Hollywood studios. He was also active as a member of the Order of DeMolay. He played football for the 1924 league champion Glendale High School team.
Wayne applied to the U.S. Naval Academy, but was not accepted due to poor grades. Instead, he attended the University of Southern California (USC), majoring in pre-law. He was a member of the Trojan Knights and Sigma Chi fraternities. Wayne, who stood 6 feet 4+1⁄2 inches (1.94 metres) tall, also played on the USC football team under coach Howard Jones. A broken collarbone injury curtailed his athletic career; Wayne later noted that he was too terrified of Jones' reaction to reveal the actual cause of his injury, a bodysurfing accident. He lost his athletic scholarship, and without funds, had to leave the university.
As a favor to coach Jones, who had given silent Western film star Tom Mix tickets to USC games, director John Ford and Mix hired Wayne as a prop boy and extra. Wayne later credited his walk, talk, and persona to his acquaintance with Wyatt Earp, who was good friends with Tom Mix. Wayne soon moved to bit parts, establishing a longtime friendship with the director who provided most of those roles, John Ford. Early in this period, he had a minor, uncredited role as a guard in the 1926 film Bardelys the Magnificent. Wayne also appeared with his USC teammates playing football in Brown of Harvard (1926), The Dropkick (1927), and Salute (1929) and Columbia's Maker of Men (filmed in 1930, released in 1931).
While working for Fox Film Corporation in bit roles, Wayne was given on-screen credit as "Duke Morrison" only once, in Words and Music (1929). Director Raoul Walsh saw him moving studio furniture while working as a prop boy and cast him in his first starring role in The Big Trail (1930). For his screen name, Walsh suggested "Anthony Wayne", after Revolutionary War General "Mad" Anthony Wayne. Fox Studios chief Winfield Sheehan rejected it as sounding "too Italian". Walsh then suggested "John Wayne". Sheehan agreed, and the name was set. Wayne was not even present for the discussion. His pay was raised to $105 a week.
The Big Trail was to be the first big-budget outdoor spectacle of the sound era, made at a then-staggering cost over $2 million (over $32.8 million equivalent in 2021), using hundreds of extras and wide vistas of the American Southwest, still largely unpopulated at the time. To take advantage of the breathtaking scenery, it was filmed in two versions, a standard 35 mm version and another in the new 70 mm Grandeur film process, using an innovative camera and lenses. Many in the audience who saw it in Grandeur stood and cheered, but only a handful of theaters were equipped to show the film in its widescreen process, and the effort was largely wasted at the time. The film was considered a huge box-office flop at the time, but came to be highly regarded by modern critics.
After the commercial failure of The Big Trail, Wayne was relegated to small roles in A pictures, including Columbia's The Deceiver (1931), in which he played a corpse. He appeared in the serial The Three Musketeers (1933), an updated version of the Alexandre Dumas novel in which the protagonists were soldiers in the French Foreign Legion in then-contemporary North Africa. He played the lead, with his name over the title, in many low-budget Poverty Row Westerns, mostly at Monogram Pictures and serials for Mascot Pictures Corporation. By Wayne's own estimation, he appeared in about 80 of these horse operas from 1930 to 1939. In Riders of Destiny (1933), he became one of the first singing cowboys of film, albeit via dubbing. Wayne also appeared in some of the Three Mesquiteers Westerns, whose title was a play on the Dumas classic. He was mentored by stuntmen in riding and other Western skills. Stuntman Yakima Canutt and Wayne developed and perfected stunts and onscreen fisticuffs techniques that are still in use. One of the main innovations with which Wayne is credited in these early Poverty Row Westerns is allowing the good guys to fight as convincingly as the bad guys, by not always making them fight clean. Wayne claimed, "Before I came along, it was standard practice that the hero must always fight clean. The heavy was allowed to hit the hero in the head with a chair or throw a kerosene lamp at him or kick him in the stomach, but the hero could only knock the villain down politely and then wait until he rose. I changed all that. I threw chairs and lamps. I fought hard and I fought dirty. I fought to win."
Wayne's second breakthrough role came with John Ford's Stagecoach (1939). Because of Wayne's B-movie status and track record in low-budget Westerns throughout the 1930s, Ford had difficulty getting financing for what was to be an A-budget film. After rejection by all the major studios, Ford struck a deal with independent producer Walter Wanger in which Claire Trevor—a much bigger star at the time—received top billing. Stagecoach was a huge critical and financial success, and Wayne became a mainstream star. Cast member Louise Platt credited Ford as saying at the time that Wayne would become the biggest star ever because of his appeal as the archetypal "everyman".
America's entry into World War II resulted in a deluge of support for the war effort from all sectors of society, and Hollywood was no exception. Wayne was exempted from service due to his age (34 at the time of Pearl Harbor) and family status (classified as 3-A – family deferment). Wayne repeatedly wrote to John Ford saying he wanted to enlist, on one occasion inquiring whether he could get into Ford's military unit. Wayne did not attempt to prevent his reclassification as 1-A (draft eligible), but Republic Studios was emphatically resistant to losing him, since he was their only A-list actor under contract. Herbert J. Yates, president of Republic, threatened Wayne with a lawsuit if he walked away from his contract, and Republic Pictures intervened in the Selective Service process, requesting Wayne's further deferment.
U.S. National Archives records indicate that Wayne, in fact, did make an application to serve in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), precursor to the modern CIA, but his bid was ultimately unsuccessful. Wayne toured U.S. bases and hospitals in the South Pacific for three months in 1943 and 1944, with the USO. During this trip, he carried out a request from William J. Donovan, head of the OSS, to assess whether General Douglas MacArthur, commander of the South West Pacific Area, or his staff were hindering the work of the OSS. Donovan later issued Wayne an OSS Certificate of Service to memorialize Wayne's contribution to the OSS mission.
By many accounts, his failure to serve in the military later became the most painful part of his life. His widow later suggested that his patriotism in later decades sprang from guilt, writing: "He would become a 'superpatriot' for the rest of his life trying to atone for staying home."
Wayne's first color film was Shepherd of the Hills (1941), in which he co-starred with his longtime friend Harry Carey. The following year, he appeared in his only film directed by Cecil B. DeMille, the Technicolor epic Reap the Wild Wind (1942), in which he co-starred with Ray Milland and Paulette Goddard; it was one of the rare times he played a character with questionable values.
Like most Hollywood stars of his era, Wayne appeared as a guest on radio programs, such as: The Hedda Hopper Show and The Louella Parsons Show. He made a number of appearances in dramatic roles, mainly recreations for radio of his own film roles, on such programs as Screen Directors Playhouse and Lux Radio Theatre. For six months in 1942, Wayne starred in his own radio adventure series, Three Sheets to the Wind, produced by film director Tay Garnett. In the series, an international spy/detective show, Wayne played Dan O'Brien, a detective who used alcoholism as a mask for his investigatory endeavors. The show was intended by Garnett to be a pilot of sorts for a film version, though the motion picture never came to fruition. No episodes of the series featuring Wayne seem to have survived, though a demonstration episode with Brian Donlevy in the leading role does exist. Wayne, not Donlevy, played the role throughout the series' run on NBC.
Director Robert Rossen offered the starring role in All the King's Men (1949) to Wayne, but he refused, believing the script to be un-American in many ways. Broderick Crawford, who was eventually cast in the role, won the 1949 Oscar for best male actor, ironically beating out Wayne, who had been nominated for Sands of Iwo Jima (1949).
He lost the leading role of Jimmy Ringo in The Gunfighter (1950) to Gregory Peck due to his refusal to work for Columbia Pictures because its chief, Harry Cohn, had mistreated him years before when he was a young contract player. Cohn had bought the project for Wayne, but Wayne's grudge was too deep, and Cohn sold the script to Twentieth Century Fox, which cast Peck in the role Wayne badly wanted, but for which he refused to bend.
Batjac, the production company co-founded by Wayne in 1952, was named after the fictional shipping company Batjak in Wake of the Red Witch (1948), a film based on the novel by Garland Roark. (A spelling error by Wayne's secretary was allowed to stand, accounting for the variation.) Batjac (and its predecessor, Wayne-Fellows Productions) was the arm through which Wayne produced many films for himself and other stars. Its best-known non-Wayne productions were Seven Men From Now (1956), which started the classic collaboration between director Budd Boetticher and star Randolph Scott, and Gun the Man Down (1956) with contract player James Arness as an outlaw.
One of Wayne's most popular roles was in The High and the Mighty (1954), directed by William Wellman, and based on a novel by Ernest K. Gann. His portrayal of a heroic copilot won widespread acclaim. Wayne also portrayed aviators in Flying Tigers (1942), Flying Leathernecks (1951), Island in the Sky (1953), The Wings of Eagles (1957), and Jet Pilot (1957).
He appeared in nearly two dozen of John Ford's films over 20 years, including She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), The Quiet Man (1952), The Wings of Eagles (1957). The first movie in which he called someone "Pilgrim", Ford's The Searchers (1956), is often considered to contain Wayne's finest and most complex performance.
On May 14, 1958, Hal Kanter's I Married a Woman starring George Gobel and Diana Dors had its Los Angeles opening. In it, Wayne had a cameo as himself. On October 2, John Huston's The Barbarian and the Geisha, in which Wayne played the lead and clashed with his director all the way, had its New York opening.
Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo premiered on March 18, 1959. In it, Wayne plays the lead with a supporting cast including Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, Angie Dickinson, Walter Brennan and Ward Bond. John Ford's The Horse Soldiers had its world premiere in Shreveport, Louisiana on June 18. Set during the Civil War, Wayne shares the lead with William Holden.
Wayne notoriously portrayed Genghis Khan in The Conqueror (1956), which was panned by critics.
In 1960, Wayne directed and produced The Alamo portraying Davy Crockett, with Richard Widmark as Jim Bowie. Wayne was nominated for an Oscar as the producer in the Best Picture category. That year Wayne also played the lead in Henry Hathaway's North to Alaska also starring Stewart Granger and Ernie Kovacs. In 1961, Wayne shared the lead with Stuart Whitman in Michael Curtiz's The Comancheros.
On May 23, 1962, Wayne starred in John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance with James Stewart. May 29 marked the premiere of Howard Hawks's Hatari!, shot on location in Africa with Wayne playing the lead capturing wild animals from the beds of trucks; all the scenes with animals in the film are real. On October 4, The Longest Day started its theatrical run, with Wayne memorably acting with an ensemble cast. Although the other top-level actors in the film accepted a token payment of only $10,000 each to play their roles, making the all-star cast feasible for the budget, Wayne was paid a quarter of a million dollars due to an earlier dispute with producer Darryl F. Zanuck. During this time, the cast of the television drama, Combat!, were preparing for the inaugural season. The principal cast (including Vic Morrow) were to go through a week of basic training at the Army's Infantry Training Center at Fort Ord in northern California. Morrow noted that the instructors who worked with the cast at Fort Ord had one common request: not to act like John Wayne. "Poor John," Morrow told a reporter. "I wonder if he knows he's almost a dirty word in the Army."
On February 20, 1963, Wayne acted in a segment of How the West Was Won directed by John Ford. On June 12, Wayne played the lead in his final John Ford film, Donovan's Reef, co-starring Lee Marvin. On November 13, another film starring Wayne premiered, Andrew V. McLaglen's McLintock!, once again opposite Maureen O'Hara.
In 1964, Wayne played the leading role in Henry Hathaway's Circus World with Claudia Cardinale and Rita Hayworth.
On February 15, 1965, Wayne played the brief cameo role of a centurion in George Stevens's The Greatest Story Ever Told. On April 6, he shared the screen with Kirk Douglas and Patricia Neal in Otto Preminger's In Harm's Way. On June 13, he acted in Henry Hathaway's The Sons of Katie Elder with Dean Martin.
In 1966, Wayne appeared in a cameo role for Melville Shavelson's Cast a Giant Shadow starring Kirk Douglas.
On May 24, 1967, Wayne played the lead in Burt Kennedy's The War Wagon with Kirk Douglas as the second lead. His second movie that year, Howard Hawks's El Dorado, a highly successful partial remake of Rio Bravo with Robert Mitchum playing Dean Martin's original role, premiered on June 7.
In 1968, Wayne co-directed with Ray Kellogg The Green Berets. the only major film made during the Vietnam War in support of the war. Wayne wanted to make this movie because at that time Hollywood had little interest in making movies about the Vietnam War. During the filming of The Green Berets, the Degar or Montagnard people of Vietnam's Central Highlands, fierce fighters against communism, bestowed on Wayne a brass bracelet that he wore in the film and all subsequent films. Also that year, Wayne played the lead in Andrew V. McLaglen's Hellfighters, a film about the crews who put out oil rig fires. Katharine Ross played a supporting role.
On June 13, 1969, Henry Hathaway's True Grit premiered. For his role as Rooster Cogburn, Wayne won the Best Actor Oscar at the Academy Awards. In November of that year another film starring Wayne was released, Andrew V. McLaglen's The Undefeated with Rock Hudson.
On June 24, 1970, Andrew V. McLaglen's Chisum started to play in cinemas. Wayne took the role of the owner of a cattle ranch, who finds out that a businessman is trying to own neighboring land illegally. On September 16, Howard Hawks' Rio Lobo premiered. Wayne played Col. Cord McNally, who confronts Confederate soldiers who stole a shipment of gold at the end of the Civil War. This was another remake of Rio Bravo albeit without a second lead the box office calibre of Dean Martin or Robert Mitchum.
In June 1971, George Sherman's Big Jake made its debut. Wayne played the role of an estranged father who must track down a gang who kidnapped his grandson. The film was a critically acclaimed hit.
In 1972, Wayne starred in Mark Rydell's The Cowboys. Vincent Canby of The New York Times, who did not particularly care for the film, wrote: "Wayne is, of course, marvelously indestructible, and he has become an almost perfect father figure". The same year, he was selected in the last round of the NFL draft by the Atlanta Falcons for his past football experience, though the pick was disallowed by league officials as he was 64 years old at the time.
On February 7, 1973, Burt Kennedy's The Train Robbers opened; Wayne appeared alongside Ann-Margret, Rod Taylor and Ben Johnson. On June 27, Andrew V. McLaglen's Cahill U.S. Marshal premiered, with Wayne, George Kennedy and Gary Grimes. It was a box office failure.
In 1974, Wayne took on the role of the eponymous detective in John Sturges's crime drama McQ.
On March 25, 1975, Douglas Hickox's Brannigan premiered. In it, Wayne played a Chicago police lieutenant named Jim Brannigan on the hunt in London for an organized-crime leader. On October 17, Rooster Cogburn started its theatrical run; Wayne reprised his role as U.S. Marshal Reuben J. "Rooster" Cogburn with strong elements of the plot of The African Queen along with Katharine Hepburn as his leading lady.
In 1976, Wayne starred in Don Siegel's The Shootist, also starring Lauren Bacall, Ron Howard and James Stewart. It was Wayne's final cinematic role, whose main character, J. B. Books, was dying of cancer, to which Wayne himself succumbed three years later. It contains numerous plot similarities to The Gunfighter of nearly 30 years before, a role which Wayne had wanted, but turned down. Upon its theatrical release, it grossed $13,406,138 domestically. About $6 million were earned as US theatrical rentals. The film received positive reviews. It was named one of the Ten Best Films of 1976 by the National Board of Review. Film critic Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times ranked The Shootist number 10 on his list of the 10 best films of 1976. The film was nominated for an Oscar, a Golden Globe, a BAFTA film award, and a Writers Guild of America award.
Wayne was married three times and divorced twice. His wives included one of Spanish American descent, Josephine Alicia Saenz, and two from Latin America, Esperanza Baur and Pilar Pallete. He had four children with Josephine: Michael Wayne (1934–2003), Mary Antonia "Toni" Wayne LaCava (1936–2000), Patrick Wayne (born 1939), and Melinda Wayne Munoz (1940–2022). He had three more children with Pilar: Aissa Wayne (born 1956), John Ethan Wayne (born 1962), and Marisa Wayne (born 1966).
Several of Wayne's children entered the film and television industry. Son Ethan was billed as John Ethan Wayne in a few films, and played one of the leads in the 1990s update of the Adam-12 television series. Ethan has also appeared on the History Channel show Pawn Stars to help authenticate merchandise supposedly related to his father's career. Granddaughter Jennifer Wayne, daughter of Aissa, is a member of the country music group Runaway June.
In 1973, Wayne was encouraged by Pilar, an avid tennis player, to build the John Wayne Tennis Club in Newport Beach, California. In 1995, the club was sold to Ken Stuart, former general manager, and became the Palisades Tennis Club. In The Quiet Man (1952), Wayne tells Michaeleen "Óge" Flynn (portrayed by Barry Fitzgerald) that he is six feet "four and a half" (194 cm), an assertion corroborated by Pilar's book John Wayne: My Life With the Duke.
His divorce from Esperanza Baur, a Mexican former actress, was stormy. She believed that Wayne and co-star Gail Russell were having an affair, a claim that both Wayne and Russell denied. The night the film Angel and the Badman (1947) wrapped, the usual party was held for cast and crew, and Wayne came home very late. Esperanza was in a drunken rage by the time he arrived, and she attempted to shoot him as he walked through the front door.
Wayne had several high-profile affairs, including one with Merle Oberon that lasted from 1938 to 1947. After his separation from Pilar, in 1973, Wayne became romantically involved and lived with his former secretary Pat Stacy (1941–1995) until his death in 1979. Stacy published a book about her life with him in 1983, titled Duke: A Love Story.
Wayne's hair began to thin in the 1940s, and he had begun to wear a hairpiece by the end of the decade. He was occasionally seen in public without the hairpiece (such as, according to Life, at Gary Cooper's funeral). During an appearance at Harvard University, Wayne was asked by a student, "Is it true that your toupée is real hair?" He responded: "Well sir, that's real hair. Not mine, but real hair."
A close friend, California Congressman Alphonzo E. Bell Jr., wrote of Wayne: "Duke's personality and sense of humor were very close to what the general public saw on the big screen. It is perhaps best shown in these words he had engraved on a plaque: 'Each of us is a mixture of some good and some not so good qualities. In considering one's fellow man, it's important to remember the good things. ... We should refrain from making judgments just because a fella happens to be a dirty, rotten S.O.B.'"
Wayne was fond of literature, his favorite authors being Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Agatha Christie. His favorite books were David Copperfield, and Conan Doyle's historical novels The White Company and Sir Nigel.
Wayne was a chess player. Roger Ebert recalls that on the set of Chisum, "we were playing a chess game, both of us bending over the board on an upended apple crate. Wayne, slouched in his old stitched leather director's chair, had a crowd of kibitzers: wranglers, extras, old cronies, drinking buddies, a couple of Mexican stuntmen. He studied the board, roared with laughter, and said, 'God...damn it! You've trapped my queen!' We studied the board. I made a decisive move. 'Why the hell did I just say that?' he asked. If I hadn't-a...said it, you wouldn't-a...seen it.'" According to Michael Munn, when Wayne was asked about Rock Hudson's sexuality, he replied, "Who the hell cares if he's a queer? The man plays great chess."
He used the same 1873 Colt Single Action Army revolver in many of the Westerns in which he appeared.
Wayne had been a chain smoker of cigarettes since young adulthood and was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1964. He underwent successful surgery to remove his entire left lung and two ribs. Despite efforts by his business associates to prevent him from going public with his illness for fear that it would cost him work, Wayne announced he had cancer and called on the public to get preventive examinations. Five years later, Wayne was declared cancer-free. Wayne has been credited with coining the term "the Big C" as a euphemism for cancer. Wayne biographer Michael Munn chronicled Wayne's drinking habits. According to Sam O'Steen's memoir, Cut to the Chase, studio directors knew to shoot Wayne's scenes before noon, because by afternoon, he "was a mean drunk". Roger Ebert quotes him as saying: "Tequila makes your head hurt. Not from your hangover. From falling over and hitting your head."
He was a Freemason, a Master Mason in Marion McDaniel Lodge No. 56 F&AM, in Tucson, Arizona. He became a 32nd Degree Scottish Rite Mason and later joined the Al Malaikah Shrine Temple in Los Angeles. He became a member of the York Rite. During the early 1960s, Wayne traveled often to Panama, and he purchased the island of Taborcillo off that nation's Pacific coast. It was sold by his estate at his death.
Wayne's yacht, the Wild Goose, was one of his favorite possessions. He kept it docked in Newport Beach Harbor, and it was listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places in 2011.
Throughout most of his life, Wayne was a vocally prominent conservative Republican in Hollywood, supporting anti-communist positions. However, he voted for Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1936 presidential election and expressed admiration for Roosevelt's successor, fellow Democratic President Harry S. Truman, despite having supported Republican candidate Thomas E. Dewey in 1948. He took part in creating the conservative Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals in February 1944 before being elected its president in 1949. An ardent anti-communist and vocal supporter of the House Un-American Activities Committee, he made Big Jim McLain (1952) with himself as a HUAC investigator to demonstrate his support for the cause of anti-communism. His personal views found expression as a proactive inside enforcer of the "Black List", denying employment and undermining careers of many actors and writers who had expressed their personal political beliefs earlier in life. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin is alleged to have said that Wayne should be assassinated for his frequently espoused anti-communist politics, despite being a fan of his movies. Wayne was a supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Wayne supported Vice President Richard Nixon in the presidential election of 1960, but expressed his vision of patriotism when John F. Kennedy won the election: "I didn't vote for him, but he's my president, and I hope he does a good job." He used his star power to support conservative causes, including rallying support for the Vietnam War by producing, co-directing, and starring in the financially successful film The Green Berets (1968). In 1960, he joined the anti-communist John Birch Society, but quit after the organization denounced fluoridation of water supplies as a communist plot. In 1964, Wayne was a staunch supporter of Barry Goldwater, and actively campaigned for him.
Due to his status as the highest-profile Republican star in Hollywood, wealthy Texas Republican Party backers asked Wayne to run for national office in 1968, like his friend and fellow actor Senator George Murphy. He declined, joking that he did not believe the public would seriously consider an actor in the White House. Instead, he supported his friend Ronald Reagan's campaigns for Governor of California in 1966 and 1970. He was asked to be the running mate for Democratic Alabama Governor George Wallace, who had been nominated for president by the American Independent Party, in his 1968 campaign, but he immediately rejected the offer and actively campaigned for Richard Nixon; Wayne addressed the 1968 Republican National Convention on its opening day.
In 1971, Wayne wrote to President Richard Nixon, who was a friend, to oppose Nixon's planned trip to China. Wayne enclosed some hate literature on "that Jew, Kissinger," who had negotiated the historic meeting with Chinese leaders.
Wayne openly differed with many conservatives over the issue of returning the Panama Canal, as he supported the Panama Canal Treaty in the mid-1970s; while Republican leaders such as Reagan, Jesse Helms, and Strom Thurmond had wanted the U.S. to retain full control of the canal, Wayne and fellow conservative William F. Buckley believed that the Panamanians had the right to the canal and sided with President Jimmy Carter. Wayne was a close friend of Panamanian leader Omar Torrijos Herrera, and Wayne's first wife Josephine was a native of Panama. His support of the treaty brought him hate mail for the first time in his life.
In 1973 actor Marlon Brando refused an Oscar he had won, due to "the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry"; Brando did not attend the award ceremony but asked Native American civil rights activist Sacheen Littlefeather to attend and deliver a refusal speech in the event that he won. Wayne, who has been described as "serial slaughterer of Native Americans on-screen and self-professed white supremacist off it", was in the wings, and was so angry about her presence there that Littlefeather said "he was coming towards me to forcibly take me off the stage, and he had to be restrained by six security men to prevent him from doing so." However, an investigation in 2022 found that this is unlikely to have happened, and Littlefeather had no way of witnessing this take place.
Roger Ebert writes that Wayne had a sense of humor about his politics. He recalls Wayne giving him a tour of his house: "He pointed out autographed photos of Eisenhower, Nixon, Goldwater, and J. Edgar Hoover. I said I had to take a pee. On the wall of the bathroom opening off the den, he had a photo of Hubert Humphrey, inscribed 'with warm appreciation for your continued Support.'" Colorado Congresswoman Pat Schroeder recalled that "John Wayne gave me a silver cigarette lighter during the Vietnam War that said 'Fuck Communism' on it. I didn't know how to do that. I still don't."
Left-wing activist Abbie Hoffman paid tribute to Wayne's singularity, saying, "I like Wayne's wholeness, his style. As for his politics, well—I suppose even cavemen felt a little admiration for the dinosaurs that were trying to gobble them up."
In May 1971, Playboy magazine published an interview with Wayne, in which he expressed his support for the Vietnam War, and made headlines for his opinions about social issues and race relations in the United States:
With a lot of blacks, there's quite a bit of resentment along with their dissent, and possibly rightfully so. But we can't all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks. I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. ... I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from the Indians. Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.
In the same Playboy interview, he also responded to questions about whether social programs were good for the country:
I know all about that. In the late '20s, when I was a sophomore at USC, I was a socialist myself—but not when I left. The average college kid idealistically wishes everybody could have ice cream and cake for every meal, but as he gets older and gives more thought to his and his fellow man's responsibilities, he finds that it can't work out that way—that some people just won't carry their load ... I believe in welfare—a welfare work program. I don't think a fella should be able to sit on his backside and receive welfare. I'd like to know why well-educated idiots keep apologizing for lazy and complaining people who think the world owes them a living. I'd like to know why they make excuses for cowards who spit in the faces of the police and then run behind the judicial sob sisters. I can't understand these people who carry placards to save the life of some criminal, yet have no thought for the innocent victim.
In February 2019, the Playboy interview resurfaced, which resulted in calls for John Wayne Airport to be renamed. John Wayne's son, Ethan, defended him, stating, "It would be an injustice to judge someone based on an interview that's being used out of context." The calls for changing the airport's name back to Orange County Airport were renewed during the George Floyd protests in June 2020. In October 2019, USC student activists called for removing an exhibit dedicated to Wayne, citing the interview. In July 2020, it was announced that the exhibit would be removed.
Although he enrolled in a cancer vaccine study in an attempt to ward off the disease, Wayne died of stomach cancer on June 11, 1979, at the UCLA Medical Center. He was buried in the Pacific View Memorial Park Cemetery in Corona del Mar, Newport Beach. According to his son Patrick and his grandson Matthew Muñoz, who was a priest in the California Diocese of Orange, Wayne converted to Roman Catholicism shortly before his death. He requested that his tombstone read "Feo, Fuerte y Formal", a Spanish epitaph Wayne described as meaning "ugly, strong, and dignified". His grave, which was unmarked for 20 years, has been marked since 1999 with the quotation:
Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday.
In 1974, film critic Charles Champlin wrote of Wayne: "Wayne is a motion picture actor, first, last and always, who defined as powerfully as anyone else what that means. From the lean and intense early days, in those low-cost dusters which still play on morning television, Wayne has had a presence which got through the lenses and shutters and onto the film undiminished." John Ford said of him: "He's not something out of a book, governed by acting rules. He portrays John Wayne, a rugged American guy. He's not one of those method actors, like they send out here from drama schools in New York. He's real, perfectly natural." Lee Strasberg observed that Wayne was similar to fellow actors Spencer Tracy and Gary Cooper, who "try not to act but be themselves".
Wayne thought of himself as a reactor rather than an actor, and felt that the difference between good and bad acting was in acting and reacting. He explained this difference: "In a bad picture, you see them acting all over the place. In a good picture, they react in a logical way to a situation they're in, so the audience can identify with the actors." When asked about his approach to acting, Wayne commented: "I read dramatic lines undramatically and react to situations normally. This is not as simple as it sounds. I've spent a major portion of my life trying to do it well and I am not past learning it yet." Much like many actors of his generation, Wayne disliked method acting, and once said of them: "Let those actors who picked their noses get all the dialogue, just give me the close-up of reaction."
Howard Hawks, who directed him in five films, felt that after losing one of his lungs, Wayne became a much better actor. Hawks explained: "Because of the lung Wayne lost, he reads his lines differently. He pauses in the strangest places simply because he hasn't got the breath he used to have. This device is terribly effective, because you keep your eyes on him and wait for him to finish, because you don't know what's coming next." Raoul Walsh noted: "Wayne underacts, and it's mighty effective, not because he tries to underact–it's a hard thing to do if you try–but because he can't overact."
Despite his popularity at the box office, Wayne was often criticized for playing the same type of character during most of his career. In a 1969 interview with Roger Ebert, Wayne remarked: "Of course, they give me that John Wayne stuff so much, claim I always play the same role. Seems like nobody remembers how different the fellows were in The Quiet Man or Iwo Jima, or Yellow Ribbon, where I was 35 playing a man of 65. To stay a star, you have to bring along some of your own personality. Thousands of good actors can carry a scene, but a star has to carry the scene and still, without intruding, allow some of his character into it."
Gene Hackman said that Wayne "was one of the best actors ever. You must admire how really good he was as an actor, in command of the scene and with such great charisma."
Wayne's enduring status as an iconic American was formally recognized by the U.S. government in the form of the two highest civilian decorations. On his 72nd birthday on May 26, 1979, Wayne was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. Hollywood figures and American leaders from across the political spectrum, including Maureen O'Hara, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, Mike Frankovich, Katharine Hepburn, General and Mrs. Omar Bradley, Gregory Peck, Robert Stack, James Arness, and Kirk Douglas, testified to Congress in support of the award. Robert Aldrich, president of the Directors Guild of America, made a particularly notable statement:
It is important for you to know that I am a registered Democrat, and to my knowledge, share none of the political views espoused by Duke. However, whether he is ill disposed or healthy, John Wayne is far beyond the normal political sharpshooting in this community. Because of his courage, his dignity, his integrity, and because of his talents as an actor, his strength as a leader, his warmth as a human being throughout his illustrious career, he is entitled to a unique spot in our hearts and minds. In this industry, we often judge people, sometimes unfairly, by asking whether they have paid their dues. John Wayne has paid his dues over and over, and I'm proud to consider him a friend and am very much in favor of my government recognizing in some important fashion the contribution that Mr. Wayne has made.
Wayne was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom on June 9, 1980, by President Jimmy Carter. He had attended Carter's inaugural ball in 1977 "as a member of the loyal opposition", as he described it. In 1998, he was awarded the Naval Heritage Award by the US Navy Memorial Foundation for his support of the Navy and military during his film career. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Wayne 13th among the Greatest Male Screen Legends of classic Hollywood cinema.
In the essay "John Wayne: A Love Song", Joan Didion recalls the first time she saw Wayne in a movie: "it was there, that summer of 1943 while the hot wind blew outside, that I first saw John Wayne. Saw the walk, heard the voice. Heard him tell the girl in a picture called War of the Wildcats that he would build her a house, 'at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.' As it happened I did not grow up to be kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I want to hear... When John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours, he determined forever the shapes of certain of our dreams. It did not seem possible that such a man could fall ill, could carry within him that most inexplicable and ungovernable of diseases."
Wayne's most enduring image is that of the displaced loner uncomfortable with the very civilization he is helping to establish and preserve...At his first appearance, we usually sense a very private person with some wound, loss or grievance from the past. At his very best he is much closer to a tragic vision of life...projecting the kind of mystery associated with great acting.
– Film historian Andrew Sarris (1979)
Various public locations are named in honor of Wayne, including the John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California, where a 9-foot (2.7 m) bronze equestrian statue of him stands at the entrance; the John Wayne Marina for which Wayne bequeathed the land, near Sequim, Washington; John Wayne Elementary School (P.S. 380) in Brooklyn, New York, which boasts a 38-foot (12 m) mosaic mural commission by New York artist Knox Martin entitled "John Wayne and the American Frontier"; and over 100 miles (160 km) named the "John Wayne Pioneer Trail" in Washington's Iron Horse State Park. A larger-than-life-sized bronze statue of Wayne atop a horse was erected at the corner of La Cienega Boulevard and Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, California, at the former offices of the Great Western Savings and Loan Corporation, for which Wayne had made a number of commercials. In the city of Maricopa, Arizona, part of Arizona State Route 347 is named John Wayne Parkway, which runs through the center of town.
In 2006, friends of Wayne and his former Arizona business partner, Louis Johnson, inaugurated the "Louie and the Duke Classics" events benefiting the John Wayne Cancer Foundation and the American Cancer Society. The weekend-long event each fall in Casa Grande, Arizona, includes a golf tournament, an auction of John Wayne memorabilia, and a team roping competition.
Several celebrations took place on May 26, 2007, the centennial of Wayne's birth. A celebration at the John Wayne birthplace in Winterset, Iowa, included chuck-wagon suppers, concerts by Michael Martin Murphey and Riders in the Sky, a Wild West Revue in the style of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, and a Cowboy Symposium with Wayne's costars, producers, and costumers. Wayne's films ran continuously at the local theater. Ground was broken for the new John Wayne Birthplace Museum and Learning Center at a ceremony consisting of over 30 of Wayne's family members, including Melinda Wayne Muñoz, Aissa, Ethan, and Marisa Wayne. Later that year, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver inducted Wayne into the California Hall of Fame, located at the California Museum in Sacramento.
In 2016, Republican assemblyman Matthew Harper proposed marking May 26 as "John Wayne Day" in California. This resolution was struck down by a vote of 35 to 20, due to Wayne's views on race and his support of controversial organizations such as the John Birch Society and the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Wayne rose beyond the typical recognition for a famous actor to that of an enduring icon who symbolized and communicated American values and ideals. Using the power of communication through silent films and radio, Wayne was instrumental in creating a national culture from disparate areas of the US, and made the creation of a national hero possible. By the middle of his career, Wayne had developed a larger-than-life image, and as his career progressed, he selected roles that would not compromise his off-screen image. Wayne embodied the icon of strong American masculinity and rugged individualism in both his films and his life. At a party in 1957, Wayne confronted actor Kirk Douglas about the latter's decision to play the role of Vincent van Gogh in the film Lust for Life, saying: "Christ, Kirk, how can you play a part like that? There's so goddamn few of us left. We got to play strong, tough characters. Not these weak queers." However, actor Marlon Brando was notably critical of Wayne's public persona and of the cultural insensitivity of Wayne's characters, arguing on The Dick Cavett Show that, "We [Americans] like to see ourselves as perhaps John Wayne sees us. That we are a country that stands for freedom, for rightness, for justice," before adding that "it just simply doesn't apply."
Wayne's rise to being the quintessential movie war hero began to take shape four years after World War II, when Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) was released. His footprints at Grauman's Chinese theater in Hollywood were laid in concrete that contained sand from Iwo Jima. His status grew so large and legendary that when Japanese Emperor Hirohito visited the United States in 1975, he asked to meet John Wayne, the symbolic representation of his country's former enemy. Likewise when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev visited the United States in 1959, he made two requests: to visit Disneyland and meet Wayne.
In the Motion Picture Herald Top Ten Money-Making Western Stars poll, Wayne was listed in 1936 and 1939. He appeared in the similar Box Office poll in 1939 and 1940. While these two polls are really an indication only of the popularity of series stars, Wayne also appeared in the Top Ten Money Makers Poll of all films from 1949 to 1957 and 1958 to 1974, taking first place in 1950, 1951, 1954, and 1971. With a total of 25 years on the list, Wayne has more appearances than any other star, surpassing Clint Eastwood (21) who is in second place.
Wayne is the only actor to appear in every edition of the annual Harris Poll of Most Popular Film Actors, and the only actor to appear on the list after his death. Wayne was in the top 10 in this poll for 19 consecutive years, starting in 1994, 15 years after his death.
Mylène Demongeot declared in a 2015 filmed interview: "Gary Cooper was sublime, there I have to say, now he, was part of the stars, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, John Wayne, those great Americans who I've met really were unbelievable guys, there aren't any like them anymore."
The John Wayne Cancer Foundation was founded in 1985 in honor of John Wayne, after his family granted the use of his name (and limited funding) for the continued fight against cancer. The foundation's mission is to "bring courage, strength, and grit to the fight against cancer". The foundation provides funds for innovative programs that improve cancer patient care, including research, education, awareness, and support.
Newport Beach, California-based John Wayne Enterprises, a business operated by Wayne's heirs, sells products, including Kentucky straight Bourbon, bearing the "Duke" brand and using Wayne's picture. When the company tried to trademark the image appearing on one of the bottles, Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, filed a notice of opposition. According to court documents, Duke has tried three times since 2005 to stop the company from trademarking the name. The company sought a declaration permitting registration of their trademark. The company's complaint filed in federal court said the university did "not own the word 'Duke' in all contexts for all purposes." The university's official position was not to object provided Wayne's image appeared with the name. On September 30, 2014, Orange County, California federal judge David Carter dismissed the company's suit, deciding the plaintiffs had chosen the wrong jurisdiction.
Between 1926 and 1977, Wayne appeared in over 170 films. According to Quigley Polling, John Wayne was named the top money maker (as of 2005).
In 1973, The Harvard Lampoon, a satirical paper run by Harvard University students, invited Wayne to receive The Brass Balls Award, created in his "honor", after calling him "the biggest fraud in history". Wayne accepted the invitation as a chance to promote the recently released film McQ, and a Fort Devens Army convoy offered to drive him into Harvard Square on an armored personnel carrier. The ceremony was held on January 15, 1974, at the Harvard Square Theater and the award was officially presented in honor of Wayne's "outstanding machismo and penchant for punching people". Although the convoy was met with protests by members of the American Indian Movement and others, some of whom threw snowballs, Wayne received a standing ovation from the audience when he walked onto the stage. An internal investigation was launched into the Army's involvement in the day.
Footnotes
Citations | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Marion Robert Morrison (May 26, 1907 – June 11, 1979), professionally known as John Wayne and nicknamed The Duke or Duke Wayne, was an American actor who became a popular icon through his starring roles in films which were produced during Hollywood's Golden Age, especially through his starring roles in Western and war movies. His career flourished from the silent era of the 1920s through the American New Wave, as he appeared in a total of 179 film and television productions. He was among the top box-office draws for three decades, and appeared with many other important Hollywood stars of his era. In 1999, the American Film Institute selected Wayne as one of the greatest male stars of classic American cinema.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Wayne was born in Winterset, Iowa, but grew up in Southern California. After losing his football scholarship to the University of Southern California from a bodysurfing accident, he began working for the Fox Film Corporation. He appeared mostly in small parts, but his first leading role came in Raoul Walsh's Western The Big Trail (1930), an early widescreen film epic that was a box-office failure. He played leading roles in numerous B movies during the 1930s, most of them also Westerns, without becoming a major name. John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) made Wayne a mainstream star, and he starred in 142 motion pictures altogether. According to one biographer, \"John Wayne personified for millions the nation's frontier heritage.\"",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Wayne's other roles in Westerns include a cattleman driving his herd on the Chisholm Trail in Red River (1948), a Civil War veteran whose niece is abducted by a tribe of Comanches in The Searchers (1956), a troubled rancher competing with a lawyer (James Stewart) for a woman's hand in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), and a cantankerous one-eyed marshal in True Grit (1969), for which he received the Academy Award for Best Actor. He is also remembered for his roles in The Quiet Man (1952) with Maureen O'Hara, Rio Bravo (1959) with Dean Martin, and The Longest Day (1962). In his final screen performance, he starred as an aging gunfighter battling cancer in The Shootist (1976). He made his last public appearance at the Academy Awards ceremony on April 9, 1979, and died of stomach cancer two months later. In 1980, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor of the United States.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Wayne was born Marion Robert Morrison on May 26, 1907, at 224 South Second Street in Winterset, Iowa. The local paper, Winterset Madisonian, reported on page 4 of the edition of May 30, 1907, that Wayne weighed 13 lb (around 6 kg) at birth. Wayne claimed his middle name was soon changed from Robert to Michael when his parents decided to name their next son Robert, but extensive research has found no such legal change, although it might have been changed informally or the documentation may have been lost. Wayne's legal name apparently remained Marion Robert Morrison his entire life although to this day his original name is almost always referred to as Marion Michael Morrison.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Wayne's father, Clyde Leonard Morrison (1884–1937), was the son of American Civil War veteran Marion Mitchell Morrison (1845–1915). Wayne's mother, the former Mary \"Molly\" Alberta Brown (1885–1970), was from Lancaster County, Nebraska. Wayne had Scottish, Scotch-Irish, English, and Irish ancestry. His great-great-grandfather Robert Morrison (b. 1782) left County Antrim, Ireland, with his mother, arriving in New York in 1799 and eventually settling in Adams County, Ohio. The Morrisons were originally from the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland. He was raised Presbyterian.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Wayne's family moved to Palmdale, California, and then in 1916 to Glendale at 404 Isabel Street, where his father worked as a pharmacist. He attended Glendale Union High School, where he performed well in both sports and academics. Wayne was part of his high school's football team and its debating team. He was also the president of the Latin Society and contributed to the school's newspaper sports column.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "A local fireman at the station on his route to school in Glendale started calling him \"Little Duke\" because he never went anywhere without his huge Airedale Terrier, Duke. He preferred \"Duke\" to \"Marion\", and the nickname stuck. Wayne attended Wilson Middle School in Glendale. As a teen, he worked in an ice-cream shop for a man who shod horses for Hollywood studios. He was also active as a member of the Order of DeMolay. He played football for the 1924 league champion Glendale High School team.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Wayne applied to the U.S. Naval Academy, but was not accepted due to poor grades. Instead, he attended the University of Southern California (USC), majoring in pre-law. He was a member of the Trojan Knights and Sigma Chi fraternities. Wayne, who stood 6 feet 4+1⁄2 inches (1.94 metres) tall, also played on the USC football team under coach Howard Jones. A broken collarbone injury curtailed his athletic career; Wayne later noted that he was too terrified of Jones' reaction to reveal the actual cause of his injury, a bodysurfing accident. He lost his athletic scholarship, and without funds, had to leave the university.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "As a favor to coach Jones, who had given silent Western film star Tom Mix tickets to USC games, director John Ford and Mix hired Wayne as a prop boy and extra. Wayne later credited his walk, talk, and persona to his acquaintance with Wyatt Earp, who was good friends with Tom Mix. Wayne soon moved to bit parts, establishing a longtime friendship with the director who provided most of those roles, John Ford. Early in this period, he had a minor, uncredited role as a guard in the 1926 film Bardelys the Magnificent. Wayne also appeared with his USC teammates playing football in Brown of Harvard (1926), The Dropkick (1927), and Salute (1929) and Columbia's Maker of Men (filmed in 1930, released in 1931).",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "While working for Fox Film Corporation in bit roles, Wayne was given on-screen credit as \"Duke Morrison\" only once, in Words and Music (1929). Director Raoul Walsh saw him moving studio furniture while working as a prop boy and cast him in his first starring role in The Big Trail (1930). For his screen name, Walsh suggested \"Anthony Wayne\", after Revolutionary War General \"Mad\" Anthony Wayne. Fox Studios chief Winfield Sheehan rejected it as sounding \"too Italian\". Walsh then suggested \"John Wayne\". Sheehan agreed, and the name was set. Wayne was not even present for the discussion. His pay was raised to $105 a week.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The Big Trail was to be the first big-budget outdoor spectacle of the sound era, made at a then-staggering cost over $2 million (over $32.8 million equivalent in 2021), using hundreds of extras and wide vistas of the American Southwest, still largely unpopulated at the time. To take advantage of the breathtaking scenery, it was filmed in two versions, a standard 35 mm version and another in the new 70 mm Grandeur film process, using an innovative camera and lenses. Many in the audience who saw it in Grandeur stood and cheered, but only a handful of theaters were equipped to show the film in its widescreen process, and the effort was largely wasted at the time. The film was considered a huge box-office flop at the time, but came to be highly regarded by modern critics.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "After the commercial failure of The Big Trail, Wayne was relegated to small roles in A pictures, including Columbia's The Deceiver (1931), in which he played a corpse. He appeared in the serial The Three Musketeers (1933), an updated version of the Alexandre Dumas novel in which the protagonists were soldiers in the French Foreign Legion in then-contemporary North Africa. He played the lead, with his name over the title, in many low-budget Poverty Row Westerns, mostly at Monogram Pictures and serials for Mascot Pictures Corporation. By Wayne's own estimation, he appeared in about 80 of these horse operas from 1930 to 1939. In Riders of Destiny (1933), he became one of the first singing cowboys of film, albeit via dubbing. Wayne also appeared in some of the Three Mesquiteers Westerns, whose title was a play on the Dumas classic. He was mentored by stuntmen in riding and other Western skills. Stuntman Yakima Canutt and Wayne developed and perfected stunts and onscreen fisticuffs techniques that are still in use. One of the main innovations with which Wayne is credited in these early Poverty Row Westerns is allowing the good guys to fight as convincingly as the bad guys, by not always making them fight clean. Wayne claimed, \"Before I came along, it was standard practice that the hero must always fight clean. The heavy was allowed to hit the hero in the head with a chair or throw a kerosene lamp at him or kick him in the stomach, but the hero could only knock the villain down politely and then wait until he rose. I changed all that. I threw chairs and lamps. I fought hard and I fought dirty. I fought to win.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Wayne's second breakthrough role came with John Ford's Stagecoach (1939). Because of Wayne's B-movie status and track record in low-budget Westerns throughout the 1930s, Ford had difficulty getting financing for what was to be an A-budget film. After rejection by all the major studios, Ford struck a deal with independent producer Walter Wanger in which Claire Trevor—a much bigger star at the time—received top billing. Stagecoach was a huge critical and financial success, and Wayne became a mainstream star. Cast member Louise Platt credited Ford as saying at the time that Wayne would become the biggest star ever because of his appeal as the archetypal \"everyman\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "America's entry into World War II resulted in a deluge of support for the war effort from all sectors of society, and Hollywood was no exception. Wayne was exempted from service due to his age (34 at the time of Pearl Harbor) and family status (classified as 3-A – family deferment). Wayne repeatedly wrote to John Ford saying he wanted to enlist, on one occasion inquiring whether he could get into Ford's military unit. Wayne did not attempt to prevent his reclassification as 1-A (draft eligible), but Republic Studios was emphatically resistant to losing him, since he was their only A-list actor under contract. Herbert J. Yates, president of Republic, threatened Wayne with a lawsuit if he walked away from his contract, and Republic Pictures intervened in the Selective Service process, requesting Wayne's further deferment.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "U.S. National Archives records indicate that Wayne, in fact, did make an application to serve in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), precursor to the modern CIA, but his bid was ultimately unsuccessful. Wayne toured U.S. bases and hospitals in the South Pacific for three months in 1943 and 1944, with the USO. During this trip, he carried out a request from William J. Donovan, head of the OSS, to assess whether General Douglas MacArthur, commander of the South West Pacific Area, or his staff were hindering the work of the OSS. Donovan later issued Wayne an OSS Certificate of Service to memorialize Wayne's contribution to the OSS mission.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "By many accounts, his failure to serve in the military later became the most painful part of his life. His widow later suggested that his patriotism in later decades sprang from guilt, writing: \"He would become a 'superpatriot' for the rest of his life trying to atone for staying home.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Wayne's first color film was Shepherd of the Hills (1941), in which he co-starred with his longtime friend Harry Carey. The following year, he appeared in his only film directed by Cecil B. DeMille, the Technicolor epic Reap the Wild Wind (1942), in which he co-starred with Ray Milland and Paulette Goddard; it was one of the rare times he played a character with questionable values.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Like most Hollywood stars of his era, Wayne appeared as a guest on radio programs, such as: The Hedda Hopper Show and The Louella Parsons Show. He made a number of appearances in dramatic roles, mainly recreations for radio of his own film roles, on such programs as Screen Directors Playhouse and Lux Radio Theatre. For six months in 1942, Wayne starred in his own radio adventure series, Three Sheets to the Wind, produced by film director Tay Garnett. In the series, an international spy/detective show, Wayne played Dan O'Brien, a detective who used alcoholism as a mask for his investigatory endeavors. The show was intended by Garnett to be a pilot of sorts for a film version, though the motion picture never came to fruition. No episodes of the series featuring Wayne seem to have survived, though a demonstration episode with Brian Donlevy in the leading role does exist. Wayne, not Donlevy, played the role throughout the series' run on NBC.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Director Robert Rossen offered the starring role in All the King's Men (1949) to Wayne, but he refused, believing the script to be un-American in many ways. Broderick Crawford, who was eventually cast in the role, won the 1949 Oscar for best male actor, ironically beating out Wayne, who had been nominated for Sands of Iwo Jima (1949).",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "He lost the leading role of Jimmy Ringo in The Gunfighter (1950) to Gregory Peck due to his refusal to work for Columbia Pictures because its chief, Harry Cohn, had mistreated him years before when he was a young contract player. Cohn had bought the project for Wayne, but Wayne's grudge was too deep, and Cohn sold the script to Twentieth Century Fox, which cast Peck in the role Wayne badly wanted, but for which he refused to bend.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Batjac, the production company co-founded by Wayne in 1952, was named after the fictional shipping company Batjak in Wake of the Red Witch (1948), a film based on the novel by Garland Roark. (A spelling error by Wayne's secretary was allowed to stand, accounting for the variation.) Batjac (and its predecessor, Wayne-Fellows Productions) was the arm through which Wayne produced many films for himself and other stars. Its best-known non-Wayne productions were Seven Men From Now (1956), which started the classic collaboration between director Budd Boetticher and star Randolph Scott, and Gun the Man Down (1956) with contract player James Arness as an outlaw.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "One of Wayne's most popular roles was in The High and the Mighty (1954), directed by William Wellman, and based on a novel by Ernest K. Gann. His portrayal of a heroic copilot won widespread acclaim. Wayne also portrayed aviators in Flying Tigers (1942), Flying Leathernecks (1951), Island in the Sky (1953), The Wings of Eagles (1957), and Jet Pilot (1957).",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "He appeared in nearly two dozen of John Ford's films over 20 years, including She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), The Quiet Man (1952), The Wings of Eagles (1957). The first movie in which he called someone \"Pilgrim\", Ford's The Searchers (1956), is often considered to contain Wayne's finest and most complex performance.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "On May 14, 1958, Hal Kanter's I Married a Woman starring George Gobel and Diana Dors had its Los Angeles opening. In it, Wayne had a cameo as himself. On October 2, John Huston's The Barbarian and the Geisha, in which Wayne played the lead and clashed with his director all the way, had its New York opening.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo premiered on March 18, 1959. In it, Wayne plays the lead with a supporting cast including Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, Angie Dickinson, Walter Brennan and Ward Bond. John Ford's The Horse Soldiers had its world premiere in Shreveport, Louisiana on June 18. Set during the Civil War, Wayne shares the lead with William Holden.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Wayne notoriously portrayed Genghis Khan in The Conqueror (1956), which was panned by critics.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In 1960, Wayne directed and produced The Alamo portraying Davy Crockett, with Richard Widmark as Jim Bowie. Wayne was nominated for an Oscar as the producer in the Best Picture category. That year Wayne also played the lead in Henry Hathaway's North to Alaska also starring Stewart Granger and Ernie Kovacs. In 1961, Wayne shared the lead with Stuart Whitman in Michael Curtiz's The Comancheros.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "On May 23, 1962, Wayne starred in John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance with James Stewart. May 29 marked the premiere of Howard Hawks's Hatari!, shot on location in Africa with Wayne playing the lead capturing wild animals from the beds of trucks; all the scenes with animals in the film are real. On October 4, The Longest Day started its theatrical run, with Wayne memorably acting with an ensemble cast. Although the other top-level actors in the film accepted a token payment of only $10,000 each to play their roles, making the all-star cast feasible for the budget, Wayne was paid a quarter of a million dollars due to an earlier dispute with producer Darryl F. Zanuck. During this time, the cast of the television drama, Combat!, were preparing for the inaugural season. The principal cast (including Vic Morrow) were to go through a week of basic training at the Army's Infantry Training Center at Fort Ord in northern California. Morrow noted that the instructors who worked with the cast at Fort Ord had one common request: not to act like John Wayne. \"Poor John,\" Morrow told a reporter. \"I wonder if he knows he's almost a dirty word in the Army.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "On February 20, 1963, Wayne acted in a segment of How the West Was Won directed by John Ford. On June 12, Wayne played the lead in his final John Ford film, Donovan's Reef, co-starring Lee Marvin. On November 13, another film starring Wayne premiered, Andrew V. McLaglen's McLintock!, once again opposite Maureen O'Hara.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In 1964, Wayne played the leading role in Henry Hathaway's Circus World with Claudia Cardinale and Rita Hayworth.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "On February 15, 1965, Wayne played the brief cameo role of a centurion in George Stevens's The Greatest Story Ever Told. On April 6, he shared the screen with Kirk Douglas and Patricia Neal in Otto Preminger's In Harm's Way. On June 13, he acted in Henry Hathaway's The Sons of Katie Elder with Dean Martin.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In 1966, Wayne appeared in a cameo role for Melville Shavelson's Cast a Giant Shadow starring Kirk Douglas.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "On May 24, 1967, Wayne played the lead in Burt Kennedy's The War Wagon with Kirk Douglas as the second lead. His second movie that year, Howard Hawks's El Dorado, a highly successful partial remake of Rio Bravo with Robert Mitchum playing Dean Martin's original role, premiered on June 7.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "In 1968, Wayne co-directed with Ray Kellogg The Green Berets. the only major film made during the Vietnam War in support of the war. Wayne wanted to make this movie because at that time Hollywood had little interest in making movies about the Vietnam War. During the filming of The Green Berets, the Degar or Montagnard people of Vietnam's Central Highlands, fierce fighters against communism, bestowed on Wayne a brass bracelet that he wore in the film and all subsequent films. Also that year, Wayne played the lead in Andrew V. McLaglen's Hellfighters, a film about the crews who put out oil rig fires. Katharine Ross played a supporting role.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "On June 13, 1969, Henry Hathaway's True Grit premiered. For his role as Rooster Cogburn, Wayne won the Best Actor Oscar at the Academy Awards. In November of that year another film starring Wayne was released, Andrew V. McLaglen's The Undefeated with Rock Hudson.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "On June 24, 1970, Andrew V. McLaglen's Chisum started to play in cinemas. Wayne took the role of the owner of a cattle ranch, who finds out that a businessman is trying to own neighboring land illegally. On September 16, Howard Hawks' Rio Lobo premiered. Wayne played Col. Cord McNally, who confronts Confederate soldiers who stole a shipment of gold at the end of the Civil War. This was another remake of Rio Bravo albeit without a second lead the box office calibre of Dean Martin or Robert Mitchum.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In June 1971, George Sherman's Big Jake made its debut. Wayne played the role of an estranged father who must track down a gang who kidnapped his grandson. The film was a critically acclaimed hit.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "In 1972, Wayne starred in Mark Rydell's The Cowboys. Vincent Canby of The New York Times, who did not particularly care for the film, wrote: \"Wayne is, of course, marvelously indestructible, and he has become an almost perfect father figure\". The same year, he was selected in the last round of the NFL draft by the Atlanta Falcons for his past football experience, though the pick was disallowed by league officials as he was 64 years old at the time.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "On February 7, 1973, Burt Kennedy's The Train Robbers opened; Wayne appeared alongside Ann-Margret, Rod Taylor and Ben Johnson. On June 27, Andrew V. McLaglen's Cahill U.S. Marshal premiered, with Wayne, George Kennedy and Gary Grimes. It was a box office failure.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "In 1974, Wayne took on the role of the eponymous detective in John Sturges's crime drama McQ.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "On March 25, 1975, Douglas Hickox's Brannigan premiered. In it, Wayne played a Chicago police lieutenant named Jim Brannigan on the hunt in London for an organized-crime leader. On October 17, Rooster Cogburn started its theatrical run; Wayne reprised his role as U.S. Marshal Reuben J. \"Rooster\" Cogburn with strong elements of the plot of The African Queen along with Katharine Hepburn as his leading lady.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "In 1976, Wayne starred in Don Siegel's The Shootist, also starring Lauren Bacall, Ron Howard and James Stewart. It was Wayne's final cinematic role, whose main character, J. B. Books, was dying of cancer, to which Wayne himself succumbed three years later. It contains numerous plot similarities to The Gunfighter of nearly 30 years before, a role which Wayne had wanted, but turned down. Upon its theatrical release, it grossed $13,406,138 domestically. About $6 million were earned as US theatrical rentals. The film received positive reviews. It was named one of the Ten Best Films of 1976 by the National Board of Review. Film critic Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times ranked The Shootist number 10 on his list of the 10 best films of 1976. The film was nominated for an Oscar, a Golden Globe, a BAFTA film award, and a Writers Guild of America award.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Wayne was married three times and divorced twice. His wives included one of Spanish American descent, Josephine Alicia Saenz, and two from Latin America, Esperanza Baur and Pilar Pallete. He had four children with Josephine: Michael Wayne (1934–2003), Mary Antonia \"Toni\" Wayne LaCava (1936–2000), Patrick Wayne (born 1939), and Melinda Wayne Munoz (1940–2022). He had three more children with Pilar: Aissa Wayne (born 1956), John Ethan Wayne (born 1962), and Marisa Wayne (born 1966).",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Several of Wayne's children entered the film and television industry. Son Ethan was billed as John Ethan Wayne in a few films, and played one of the leads in the 1990s update of the Adam-12 television series. Ethan has also appeared on the History Channel show Pawn Stars to help authenticate merchandise supposedly related to his father's career. Granddaughter Jennifer Wayne, daughter of Aissa, is a member of the country music group Runaway June.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "In 1973, Wayne was encouraged by Pilar, an avid tennis player, to build the John Wayne Tennis Club in Newport Beach, California. In 1995, the club was sold to Ken Stuart, former general manager, and became the Palisades Tennis Club. In The Quiet Man (1952), Wayne tells Michaeleen \"Óge\" Flynn (portrayed by Barry Fitzgerald) that he is six feet \"four and a half\" (194 cm), an assertion corroborated by Pilar's book John Wayne: My Life With the Duke.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "His divorce from Esperanza Baur, a Mexican former actress, was stormy. She believed that Wayne and co-star Gail Russell were having an affair, a claim that both Wayne and Russell denied. The night the film Angel and the Badman (1947) wrapped, the usual party was held for cast and crew, and Wayne came home very late. Esperanza was in a drunken rage by the time he arrived, and she attempted to shoot him as he walked through the front door.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Wayne had several high-profile affairs, including one with Merle Oberon that lasted from 1938 to 1947. After his separation from Pilar, in 1973, Wayne became romantically involved and lived with his former secretary Pat Stacy (1941–1995) until his death in 1979. Stacy published a book about her life with him in 1983, titled Duke: A Love Story.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Wayne's hair began to thin in the 1940s, and he had begun to wear a hairpiece by the end of the decade. He was occasionally seen in public without the hairpiece (such as, according to Life, at Gary Cooper's funeral). During an appearance at Harvard University, Wayne was asked by a student, \"Is it true that your toupée is real hair?\" He responded: \"Well sir, that's real hair. Not mine, but real hair.\"",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "A close friend, California Congressman Alphonzo E. Bell Jr., wrote of Wayne: \"Duke's personality and sense of humor were very close to what the general public saw on the big screen. It is perhaps best shown in these words he had engraved on a plaque: 'Each of us is a mixture of some good and some not so good qualities. In considering one's fellow man, it's important to remember the good things. ... We should refrain from making judgments just because a fella happens to be a dirty, rotten S.O.B.'\"",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Wayne was fond of literature, his favorite authors being Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Agatha Christie. His favorite books were David Copperfield, and Conan Doyle's historical novels The White Company and Sir Nigel.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Wayne was a chess player. Roger Ebert recalls that on the set of Chisum, \"we were playing a chess game, both of us bending over the board on an upended apple crate. Wayne, slouched in his old stitched leather director's chair, had a crowd of kibitzers: wranglers, extras, old cronies, drinking buddies, a couple of Mexican stuntmen. He studied the board, roared with laughter, and said, 'God...damn it! You've trapped my queen!' We studied the board. I made a decisive move. 'Why the hell did I just say that?' he asked. If I hadn't-a...said it, you wouldn't-a...seen it.'\" According to Michael Munn, when Wayne was asked about Rock Hudson's sexuality, he replied, \"Who the hell cares if he's a queer? The man plays great chess.\"",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "He used the same 1873 Colt Single Action Army revolver in many of the Westerns in which he appeared.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Wayne had been a chain smoker of cigarettes since young adulthood and was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1964. He underwent successful surgery to remove his entire left lung and two ribs. Despite efforts by his business associates to prevent him from going public with his illness for fear that it would cost him work, Wayne announced he had cancer and called on the public to get preventive examinations. Five years later, Wayne was declared cancer-free. Wayne has been credited with coining the term \"the Big C\" as a euphemism for cancer. Wayne biographer Michael Munn chronicled Wayne's drinking habits. According to Sam O'Steen's memoir, Cut to the Chase, studio directors knew to shoot Wayne's scenes before noon, because by afternoon, he \"was a mean drunk\". Roger Ebert quotes him as saying: \"Tequila makes your head hurt. Not from your hangover. From falling over and hitting your head.\"",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "He was a Freemason, a Master Mason in Marion McDaniel Lodge No. 56 F&AM, in Tucson, Arizona. He became a 32nd Degree Scottish Rite Mason and later joined the Al Malaikah Shrine Temple in Los Angeles. He became a member of the York Rite. During the early 1960s, Wayne traveled often to Panama, and he purchased the island of Taborcillo off that nation's Pacific coast. It was sold by his estate at his death.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Wayne's yacht, the Wild Goose, was one of his favorite possessions. He kept it docked in Newport Beach Harbor, and it was listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places in 2011.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Throughout most of his life, Wayne was a vocally prominent conservative Republican in Hollywood, supporting anti-communist positions. However, he voted for Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1936 presidential election and expressed admiration for Roosevelt's successor, fellow Democratic President Harry S. Truman, despite having supported Republican candidate Thomas E. Dewey in 1948. He took part in creating the conservative Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals in February 1944 before being elected its president in 1949. An ardent anti-communist and vocal supporter of the House Un-American Activities Committee, he made Big Jim McLain (1952) with himself as a HUAC investigator to demonstrate his support for the cause of anti-communism. His personal views found expression as a proactive inside enforcer of the \"Black List\", denying employment and undermining careers of many actors and writers who had expressed their personal political beliefs earlier in life. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin is alleged to have said that Wayne should be assassinated for his frequently espoused anti-communist politics, despite being a fan of his movies. Wayne was a supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy.",
"title": "Political views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Wayne supported Vice President Richard Nixon in the presidential election of 1960, but expressed his vision of patriotism when John F. Kennedy won the election: \"I didn't vote for him, but he's my president, and I hope he does a good job.\" He used his star power to support conservative causes, including rallying support for the Vietnam War by producing, co-directing, and starring in the financially successful film The Green Berets (1968). In 1960, he joined the anti-communist John Birch Society, but quit after the organization denounced fluoridation of water supplies as a communist plot. In 1964, Wayne was a staunch supporter of Barry Goldwater, and actively campaigned for him.",
"title": "Political views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Due to his status as the highest-profile Republican star in Hollywood, wealthy Texas Republican Party backers asked Wayne to run for national office in 1968, like his friend and fellow actor Senator George Murphy. He declined, joking that he did not believe the public would seriously consider an actor in the White House. Instead, he supported his friend Ronald Reagan's campaigns for Governor of California in 1966 and 1970. He was asked to be the running mate for Democratic Alabama Governor George Wallace, who had been nominated for president by the American Independent Party, in his 1968 campaign, but he immediately rejected the offer and actively campaigned for Richard Nixon; Wayne addressed the 1968 Republican National Convention on its opening day.",
"title": "Political views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "In 1971, Wayne wrote to President Richard Nixon, who was a friend, to oppose Nixon's planned trip to China. Wayne enclosed some hate literature on \"that Jew, Kissinger,\" who had negotiated the historic meeting with Chinese leaders.",
"title": "Political views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Wayne openly differed with many conservatives over the issue of returning the Panama Canal, as he supported the Panama Canal Treaty in the mid-1970s; while Republican leaders such as Reagan, Jesse Helms, and Strom Thurmond had wanted the U.S. to retain full control of the canal, Wayne and fellow conservative William F. Buckley believed that the Panamanians had the right to the canal and sided with President Jimmy Carter. Wayne was a close friend of Panamanian leader Omar Torrijos Herrera, and Wayne's first wife Josephine was a native of Panama. His support of the treaty brought him hate mail for the first time in his life.",
"title": "Political views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "In 1973 actor Marlon Brando refused an Oscar he had won, due to \"the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry\"; Brando did not attend the award ceremony but asked Native American civil rights activist Sacheen Littlefeather to attend and deliver a refusal speech in the event that he won. Wayne, who has been described as \"serial slaughterer of Native Americans on-screen and self-professed white supremacist off it\", was in the wings, and was so angry about her presence there that Littlefeather said \"he was coming towards me to forcibly take me off the stage, and he had to be restrained by six security men to prevent him from doing so.\" However, an investigation in 2022 found that this is unlikely to have happened, and Littlefeather had no way of witnessing this take place.",
"title": "Political views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Roger Ebert writes that Wayne had a sense of humor about his politics. He recalls Wayne giving him a tour of his house: \"He pointed out autographed photos of Eisenhower, Nixon, Goldwater, and J. Edgar Hoover. I said I had to take a pee. On the wall of the bathroom opening off the den, he had a photo of Hubert Humphrey, inscribed 'with warm appreciation for your continued Support.'\" Colorado Congresswoman Pat Schroeder recalled that \"John Wayne gave me a silver cigarette lighter during the Vietnam War that said 'Fuck Communism' on it. I didn't know how to do that. I still don't.\"",
"title": "Political views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Left-wing activist Abbie Hoffman paid tribute to Wayne's singularity, saying, \"I like Wayne's wholeness, his style. As for his politics, well—I suppose even cavemen felt a little admiration for the dinosaurs that were trying to gobble them up.\"",
"title": "Political views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "In May 1971, Playboy magazine published an interview with Wayne, in which he expressed his support for the Vietnam War, and made headlines for his opinions about social issues and race relations in the United States:",
"title": "Political views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "With a lot of blacks, there's quite a bit of resentment along with their dissent, and possibly rightfully so. But we can't all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks. I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. ... I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from the Indians. Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.",
"title": "Political views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "In the same Playboy interview, he also responded to questions about whether social programs were good for the country:",
"title": "Political views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "I know all about that. In the late '20s, when I was a sophomore at USC, I was a socialist myself—but not when I left. The average college kid idealistically wishes everybody could have ice cream and cake for every meal, but as he gets older and gives more thought to his and his fellow man's responsibilities, he finds that it can't work out that way—that some people just won't carry their load ... I believe in welfare—a welfare work program. I don't think a fella should be able to sit on his backside and receive welfare. I'd like to know why well-educated idiots keep apologizing for lazy and complaining people who think the world owes them a living. I'd like to know why they make excuses for cowards who spit in the faces of the police and then run behind the judicial sob sisters. I can't understand these people who carry placards to save the life of some criminal, yet have no thought for the innocent victim.",
"title": "Political views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "In February 2019, the Playboy interview resurfaced, which resulted in calls for John Wayne Airport to be renamed. John Wayne's son, Ethan, defended him, stating, \"It would be an injustice to judge someone based on an interview that's being used out of context.\" The calls for changing the airport's name back to Orange County Airport were renewed during the George Floyd protests in June 2020. In October 2019, USC student activists called for removing an exhibit dedicated to Wayne, citing the interview. In July 2020, it was announced that the exhibit would be removed.",
"title": "Political views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Although he enrolled in a cancer vaccine study in an attempt to ward off the disease, Wayne died of stomach cancer on June 11, 1979, at the UCLA Medical Center. He was buried in the Pacific View Memorial Park Cemetery in Corona del Mar, Newport Beach. According to his son Patrick and his grandson Matthew Muñoz, who was a priest in the California Diocese of Orange, Wayne converted to Roman Catholicism shortly before his death. He requested that his tombstone read \"Feo, Fuerte y Formal\", a Spanish epitaph Wayne described as meaning \"ugly, strong, and dignified\". His grave, which was unmarked for 20 years, has been marked since 1999 with the quotation:",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "In 1974, film critic Charles Champlin wrote of Wayne: \"Wayne is a motion picture actor, first, last and always, who defined as powerfully as anyone else what that means. From the lean and intense early days, in those low-cost dusters which still play on morning television, Wayne has had a presence which got through the lenses and shutters and onto the film undiminished.\" John Ford said of him: \"He's not something out of a book, governed by acting rules. He portrays John Wayne, a rugged American guy. He's not one of those method actors, like they send out here from drama schools in New York. He's real, perfectly natural.\" Lee Strasberg observed that Wayne was similar to fellow actors Spencer Tracy and Gary Cooper, who \"try not to act but be themselves\".",
"title": "Acting evaluation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Wayne thought of himself as a reactor rather than an actor, and felt that the difference between good and bad acting was in acting and reacting. He explained this difference: \"In a bad picture, you see them acting all over the place. In a good picture, they react in a logical way to a situation they're in, so the audience can identify with the actors.\" When asked about his approach to acting, Wayne commented: \"I read dramatic lines undramatically and react to situations normally. This is not as simple as it sounds. I've spent a major portion of my life trying to do it well and I am not past learning it yet.\" Much like many actors of his generation, Wayne disliked method acting, and once said of them: \"Let those actors who picked their noses get all the dialogue, just give me the close-up of reaction.\"",
"title": "Acting evaluation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Howard Hawks, who directed him in five films, felt that after losing one of his lungs, Wayne became a much better actor. Hawks explained: \"Because of the lung Wayne lost, he reads his lines differently. He pauses in the strangest places simply because he hasn't got the breath he used to have. This device is terribly effective, because you keep your eyes on him and wait for him to finish, because you don't know what's coming next.\" Raoul Walsh noted: \"Wayne underacts, and it's mighty effective, not because he tries to underact–it's a hard thing to do if you try–but because he can't overact.\"",
"title": "Acting evaluation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Despite his popularity at the box office, Wayne was often criticized for playing the same type of character during most of his career. In a 1969 interview with Roger Ebert, Wayne remarked: \"Of course, they give me that John Wayne stuff so much, claim I always play the same role. Seems like nobody remembers how different the fellows were in The Quiet Man or Iwo Jima, or Yellow Ribbon, where I was 35 playing a man of 65. To stay a star, you have to bring along some of your own personality. Thousands of good actors can carry a scene, but a star has to carry the scene and still, without intruding, allow some of his character into it.\"",
"title": "Acting evaluation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Gene Hackman said that Wayne \"was one of the best actors ever. You must admire how really good he was as an actor, in command of the scene and with such great charisma.\"",
"title": "Acting evaluation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Wayne's enduring status as an iconic American was formally recognized by the U.S. government in the form of the two highest civilian decorations. On his 72nd birthday on May 26, 1979, Wayne was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. Hollywood figures and American leaders from across the political spectrum, including Maureen O'Hara, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, Mike Frankovich, Katharine Hepburn, General and Mrs. Omar Bradley, Gregory Peck, Robert Stack, James Arness, and Kirk Douglas, testified to Congress in support of the award. Robert Aldrich, president of the Directors Guild of America, made a particularly notable statement:",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "It is important for you to know that I am a registered Democrat, and to my knowledge, share none of the political views espoused by Duke. However, whether he is ill disposed or healthy, John Wayne is far beyond the normal political sharpshooting in this community. Because of his courage, his dignity, his integrity, and because of his talents as an actor, his strength as a leader, his warmth as a human being throughout his illustrious career, he is entitled to a unique spot in our hearts and minds. In this industry, we often judge people, sometimes unfairly, by asking whether they have paid their dues. John Wayne has paid his dues over and over, and I'm proud to consider him a friend and am very much in favor of my government recognizing in some important fashion the contribution that Mr. Wayne has made.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Wayne was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom on June 9, 1980, by President Jimmy Carter. He had attended Carter's inaugural ball in 1977 \"as a member of the loyal opposition\", as he described it. In 1998, he was awarded the Naval Heritage Award by the US Navy Memorial Foundation for his support of the Navy and military during his film career. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Wayne 13th among the Greatest Male Screen Legends of classic Hollywood cinema.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "In the essay \"John Wayne: A Love Song\", Joan Didion recalls the first time she saw Wayne in a movie: \"it was there, that summer of 1943 while the hot wind blew outside, that I first saw John Wayne. Saw the walk, heard the voice. Heard him tell the girl in a picture called War of the Wildcats that he would build her a house, 'at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.' As it happened I did not grow up to be kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I want to hear... When John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours, he determined forever the shapes of certain of our dreams. It did not seem possible that such a man could fall ill, could carry within him that most inexplicable and ungovernable of diseases.\"",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Wayne's most enduring image is that of the displaced loner uncomfortable with the very civilization he is helping to establish and preserve...At his first appearance, we usually sense a very private person with some wound, loss or grievance from the past. At his very best he is much closer to a tragic vision of life...projecting the kind of mystery associated with great acting.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "– Film historian Andrew Sarris (1979)",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Various public locations are named in honor of Wayne, including the John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California, where a 9-foot (2.7 m) bronze equestrian statue of him stands at the entrance; the John Wayne Marina for which Wayne bequeathed the land, near Sequim, Washington; John Wayne Elementary School (P.S. 380) in Brooklyn, New York, which boasts a 38-foot (12 m) mosaic mural commission by New York artist Knox Martin entitled \"John Wayne and the American Frontier\"; and over 100 miles (160 km) named the \"John Wayne Pioneer Trail\" in Washington's Iron Horse State Park. A larger-than-life-sized bronze statue of Wayne atop a horse was erected at the corner of La Cienega Boulevard and Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, California, at the former offices of the Great Western Savings and Loan Corporation, for which Wayne had made a number of commercials. In the city of Maricopa, Arizona, part of Arizona State Route 347 is named John Wayne Parkway, which runs through the center of town.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "In 2006, friends of Wayne and his former Arizona business partner, Louis Johnson, inaugurated the \"Louie and the Duke Classics\" events benefiting the John Wayne Cancer Foundation and the American Cancer Society. The weekend-long event each fall in Casa Grande, Arizona, includes a golf tournament, an auction of John Wayne memorabilia, and a team roping competition.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Several celebrations took place on May 26, 2007, the centennial of Wayne's birth. A celebration at the John Wayne birthplace in Winterset, Iowa, included chuck-wagon suppers, concerts by Michael Martin Murphey and Riders in the Sky, a Wild West Revue in the style of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, and a Cowboy Symposium with Wayne's costars, producers, and costumers. Wayne's films ran continuously at the local theater. Ground was broken for the new John Wayne Birthplace Museum and Learning Center at a ceremony consisting of over 30 of Wayne's family members, including Melinda Wayne Muñoz, Aissa, Ethan, and Marisa Wayne. Later that year, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver inducted Wayne into the California Hall of Fame, located at the California Museum in Sacramento.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "In 2016, Republican assemblyman Matthew Harper proposed marking May 26 as \"John Wayne Day\" in California. This resolution was struck down by a vote of 35 to 20, due to Wayne's views on race and his support of controversial organizations such as the John Birch Society and the House Un-American Activities Committee.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "Wayne rose beyond the typical recognition for a famous actor to that of an enduring icon who symbolized and communicated American values and ideals. Using the power of communication through silent films and radio, Wayne was instrumental in creating a national culture from disparate areas of the US, and made the creation of a national hero possible. By the middle of his career, Wayne had developed a larger-than-life image, and as his career progressed, he selected roles that would not compromise his off-screen image. Wayne embodied the icon of strong American masculinity and rugged individualism in both his films and his life. At a party in 1957, Wayne confronted actor Kirk Douglas about the latter's decision to play the role of Vincent van Gogh in the film Lust for Life, saying: \"Christ, Kirk, how can you play a part like that? There's so goddamn few of us left. We got to play strong, tough characters. Not these weak queers.\" However, actor Marlon Brando was notably critical of Wayne's public persona and of the cultural insensitivity of Wayne's characters, arguing on The Dick Cavett Show that, \"We [Americans] like to see ourselves as perhaps John Wayne sees us. That we are a country that stands for freedom, for rightness, for justice,\" before adding that \"it just simply doesn't apply.\"",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "Wayne's rise to being the quintessential movie war hero began to take shape four years after World War II, when Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) was released. His footprints at Grauman's Chinese theater in Hollywood were laid in concrete that contained sand from Iwo Jima. His status grew so large and legendary that when Japanese Emperor Hirohito visited the United States in 1975, he asked to meet John Wayne, the symbolic representation of his country's former enemy. Likewise when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev visited the United States in 1959, he made two requests: to visit Disneyland and meet Wayne.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "In the Motion Picture Herald Top Ten Money-Making Western Stars poll, Wayne was listed in 1936 and 1939. He appeared in the similar Box Office poll in 1939 and 1940. While these two polls are really an indication only of the popularity of series stars, Wayne also appeared in the Top Ten Money Makers Poll of all films from 1949 to 1957 and 1958 to 1974, taking first place in 1950, 1951, 1954, and 1971. With a total of 25 years on the list, Wayne has more appearances than any other star, surpassing Clint Eastwood (21) who is in second place.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Wayne is the only actor to appear in every edition of the annual Harris Poll of Most Popular Film Actors, and the only actor to appear on the list after his death. Wayne was in the top 10 in this poll for 19 consecutive years, starting in 1994, 15 years after his death.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Mylène Demongeot declared in a 2015 filmed interview: \"Gary Cooper was sublime, there I have to say, now he, was part of the stars, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, John Wayne, those great Americans who I've met really were unbelievable guys, there aren't any like them anymore.\"",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "The John Wayne Cancer Foundation was founded in 1985 in honor of John Wayne, after his family granted the use of his name (and limited funding) for the continued fight against cancer. The foundation's mission is to \"bring courage, strength, and grit to the fight against cancer\". The foundation provides funds for innovative programs that improve cancer patient care, including research, education, awareness, and support.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "Newport Beach, California-based John Wayne Enterprises, a business operated by Wayne's heirs, sells products, including Kentucky straight Bourbon, bearing the \"Duke\" brand and using Wayne's picture. When the company tried to trademark the image appearing on one of the bottles, Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, filed a notice of opposition. According to court documents, Duke has tried three times since 2005 to stop the company from trademarking the name. The company sought a declaration permitting registration of their trademark. The company's complaint filed in federal court said the university did \"not own the word 'Duke' in all contexts for all purposes.\" The university's official position was not to object provided Wayne's image appeared with the name. On September 30, 2014, Orange County, California federal judge David Carter dismissed the company's suit, deciding the plaintiffs had chosen the wrong jurisdiction.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Between 1926 and 1977, Wayne appeared in over 170 films. According to Quigley Polling, John Wayne was named the top money maker (as of 2005).",
"title": "Filmography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "In 1973, The Harvard Lampoon, a satirical paper run by Harvard University students, invited Wayne to receive The Brass Balls Award, created in his \"honor\", after calling him \"the biggest fraud in history\". Wayne accepted the invitation as a chance to promote the recently released film McQ, and a Fort Devens Army convoy offered to drive him into Harvard Square on an armored personnel carrier. The ceremony was held on January 15, 1974, at the Harvard Square Theater and the award was officially presented in honor of Wayne's \"outstanding machismo and penchant for punching people\". Although the convoy was met with protests by members of the American Indian Movement and others, some of whom threw snowballs, Wayne received a standing ovation from the audience when he walked onto the stage. An internal investigation was launched into the Army's involvement in the day.",
"title": "Awards and nominations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "Footnotes",
"title": "References"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "Citations",
"title": "References"
}
]
| Marion Robert Morrison, professionally known as John Wayne and nicknamed The Duke or Duke Wayne, was an American actor who became a popular icon through his starring roles in films which were produced during Hollywood's Golden Age, especially through his starring roles in Western and war movies. His career flourished from the silent era of the 1920s through the American New Wave, as he appeared in a total of 179 film and television productions. He was among the top box-office draws for three decades, and appeared with many other important Hollywood stars of his era. In 1999, the American Film Institute selected Wayne as one of the greatest male stars of classic American cinema. Wayne was born in Winterset, Iowa, but grew up in Southern California. After losing his football scholarship to the University of Southern California from a bodysurfing accident, he began working for the Fox Film Corporation. He appeared mostly in small parts, but his first leading role came in Raoul Walsh's Western The Big Trail (1930), an early widescreen film epic that was a box-office failure. He played leading roles in numerous B movies during the 1930s, most of them also Westerns, without becoming a major name. John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) made Wayne a mainstream star, and he starred in 142 motion pictures altogether. According to one biographer, "John Wayne personified for millions the nation's frontier heritage." Wayne's other roles in Westerns include a cattleman driving his herd on the Chisholm Trail in Red River (1948), a Civil War veteran whose niece is abducted by a tribe of Comanches in The Searchers (1956), a troubled rancher competing with a lawyer for a woman's hand in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), and a cantankerous one-eyed marshal in True Grit (1969), for which he received the Academy Award for Best Actor. He is also remembered for his roles in The Quiet Man (1952) with Maureen O'Hara, Rio Bravo (1959) with Dean Martin, and The Longest Day (1962). In his final screen performance, he starred as an aging gunfighter battling cancer in The Shootist (1976). He made his last public appearance at the Academy Awards ceremony on April 9, 1979, and died of stomach cancer two months later. In 1980, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor of the United States. | 2001-09-28T02:53:35Z | 2023-12-26T02:26:09Z | [
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16,110 | Johnny Haynes | John Norman Haynes (17 October 1934 – 18 October 2005) was an English association footballer who played as an inside forward. He made 56 appearances for his country including 22 as captain. He was selected for three World Cup finals squads playing in the latter two of those. Nicknamed "the Maestro", his attacking play was noted for two-footed passing ability, vision and deftness of touch. Haynes is widely regarded as Fulham's greatest ever player, remaining loyal there for twenty years despite coming no nearer to a major trophy win than two FA Cup semi-final appearances. Immediately following the abolition of the £20 maximum wage in 1961, he became the first player to be paid £100 a week. He also had a spell on loan with Toronto City in 1961 and ended his playing days at Durban City, winning there the only trophy he won in his football career.
The son of a post office engineer, Haynes was born in Kentish Town and supported Arsenal as a boy. He signed for Fulham as a 15-year-old amateur in 1950 when Fulham were in a three-season spell in the First Division. He was loaned to then non-League Wimbledon. He made his senior debut aged 18 in the 1952 Boxing Day visit of Southampton to Fulham, then in their first season back in the Second Division.
Haynes made his debut for England in October 1954, scoring a goal in a 2–0 victory over Northern Ireland in Belfast. He first captained England in 1960 and played for them in two World Cups.
He was one of many signatories of a letter to The Times on 17 July 1958 opposing "the policy of apartheid" in international sport and defending "the principle of racial equality which is embodied in the Declaration of the Olympic Games".
Haynes played in his first of two FA Cup semi-finals in 1958. Fulham were eliminated in a replay by the remnants of Manchester United's Busby Babes team that had been devastated by the Munich air disaster the month before. United were the first top-division team Fulham played in that cup run. Fulham were promoted to the top division after finishing runners-up behind Sheffield Wednesday in 1959. In the 1959–60 season, Fulham finished 10th in the First Division, which was their highest league position until finishing 9th in the 2003–04 Premier League season. Following the abolition of the £20 maximum wage in 1961, he became Britain's first footballer to earn £100 per week. He played in a second FA Cup semi-final in 1962, losing in a replay to Burnley. In 1961, during the English off-season, he played abroad in the Eastern Canada Professional Soccer League with Toronto City.
In August 1962 on Blackpool promenade, the sports car in which he was returning late to his hotel was blown by a gust of wind into the path of another vehicle. Haynes suffered broken bones in both feet and a badly injured knee. He recounted that the police officer who attended the incident reassured him by saying "Don't worry son, you've only broken your legs". He missed almost the entire season and, when he returned to the Fulham side, was not quite the same player. Prior to the accident, he had captained England 22 times, and, being only 27, was expected to lead them in the 1966 FIFA World Cup, but he was never again selected for the national team.
Fulham were relegated in 1968. Haynes then had a single spell in football management, taking charge of Fulham for eighteen days in November that year after the dismissal of Bobby Robson as player-manager, but Haynes never had any ambition to go into coaching. That season, Fulham endured a second successive relegation. His last appearance for Fulham's first team was on 17 January 1970 in a Third Division home match against Stockport County. In total, he made 657 appearances for Fulham and scored 157 goals.
In 1970, Haynes announced his retirement, aged 35, and joined Durban City, playing one season and winning South Africa's 1970–71 National Football League. This was his only winner's medal in senior football. During the 1972–73 season, Haynes made three league appearances for non-League club Wealdstone.
On retiring from playing in 1970 he was already an active bookmaker. He sold his chain of bookmakers to The Tote in 1976. In 1985 he moved to Edinburgh, the city of his partner Avril. Haynes first met Avril in the 1960s when she travelled down to London to buy stock for boutiques she ran in Edinburgh. On moving to Edinburgh he ran a laundry business with Avril, played golf and watched local club, Heart of Midlothian. In 2004 he and Avril married in a private ceremony at Dalkeith registry office.
On 17 October 2005, his 71st birthday, Haynes was driving his car, with Avril as passenger, on Edinburgh's Dalry Road when he suffered a brain haemorrhage, instantaneously effectively rendering him brain-dead. The vehicle veered across the road and crashed into a van. After being kept on a ventilator for some 30 hours, the ventilator was turned off on the evening of 18 October 2005. The funeral at Mortonhall Crematorium was attended by ex-players Bobby Charlton, George Cohen, Sven-Göran Eriksson, Dave Mackay, Alan Mullery, Jimmy Murray and Bobby Robson, and also George Foulkes. Avril was unable to attend due to injuries from the car accident. Haynes was survived by Avril and his stepchildren Mark and Sara.
In 2002 Haynes became an inaugural inductee into the English Football Hall of Fame in recognition of his football talents and impact on the English game.
On the day of Haynes' death, Alan Mullery, another ex-Fulham and England player, made the following tribute: "He was the only reason I went to Fulham as a young boy of 15 leaving school. He was my hero, the captain of England and Fulham. The word great rolls off the tongue quite easily these days but he really was. He was the best passer of a ball I have ever seen - I don't know anyone who could pass a ball as accurately. Anyone who saw him will know what a great player he was."
Shortly after his death, the Stevenage Road Stand at Craven Cottage was renamed The Johnny Haynes Stand.
George Cohen, a World Cup winner for England in 1966 and a Fulham teammate of Johnny Haynes, stated: "I have a hundred individual memories of the beauty of John's play. One stands out for the sheer perfection of his skill. It was a charity match which, but for that one second, has faded completely from my memory. The ball came to him at speed on a wet, slippery surface but with the slightest of adjustments, one that was almost imperceptible, he played it inside a full-back and into the path of an on-running winger. I looked at our coach Dave Sexton on the bench and he caught my glance and shook his head as if to say 'fantastic'. Haynes could give you goose bumps on a wet night in a match that didn't matter."
Bobby Moore, England captain from 1964 to 1973, said of him: "Once you get used to watching that perfection you realised the rest of the secret. John was always available, always hungry for the ball, always wanting to play. I loved watching the player. Later I learnt to love the man." Pelé said he had "never seen a better passer of the ball" than Haynes.
The Fulham Supporters Trust stated: "His dedication, skill, professionalism, grace and charm - both in his playing days and in retirement - serve as a poignant reminder to many of today's footballers about what true greatness really means." On 28 July 2008, Fulham announced that fundraising had commenced, with the co-operation of a fan's group, to produce a lasting tribute to Haynes. The Johnny Haynes Statue was unveiled outside the stadium before the 0–0 draw v Sunderland on Saturday 18 October 2008.
Durban City
Individual | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "John Norman Haynes (17 October 1934 – 18 October 2005) was an English association footballer who played as an inside forward. He made 56 appearances for his country including 22 as captain. He was selected for three World Cup finals squads playing in the latter two of those. Nicknamed \"the Maestro\", his attacking play was noted for two-footed passing ability, vision and deftness of touch. Haynes is widely regarded as Fulham's greatest ever player, remaining loyal there for twenty years despite coming no nearer to a major trophy win than two FA Cup semi-final appearances. Immediately following the abolition of the £20 maximum wage in 1961, he became the first player to be paid £100 a week. He also had a spell on loan with Toronto City in 1961 and ended his playing days at Durban City, winning there the only trophy he won in his football career.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The son of a post office engineer, Haynes was born in Kentish Town and supported Arsenal as a boy. He signed for Fulham as a 15-year-old amateur in 1950 when Fulham were in a three-season spell in the First Division. He was loaned to then non-League Wimbledon. He made his senior debut aged 18 in the 1952 Boxing Day visit of Southampton to Fulham, then in their first season back in the Second Division.",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Haynes made his debut for England in October 1954, scoring a goal in a 2–0 victory over Northern Ireland in Belfast. He first captained England in 1960 and played for them in two World Cups.",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "He was one of many signatories of a letter to The Times on 17 July 1958 opposing \"the policy of apartheid\" in international sport and defending \"the principle of racial equality which is embodied in the Declaration of the Olympic Games\".",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Haynes played in his first of two FA Cup semi-finals in 1958. Fulham were eliminated in a replay by the remnants of Manchester United's Busby Babes team that had been devastated by the Munich air disaster the month before. United were the first top-division team Fulham played in that cup run. Fulham were promoted to the top division after finishing runners-up behind Sheffield Wednesday in 1959. In the 1959–60 season, Fulham finished 10th in the First Division, which was their highest league position until finishing 9th in the 2003–04 Premier League season. Following the abolition of the £20 maximum wage in 1961, he became Britain's first footballer to earn £100 per week. He played in a second FA Cup semi-final in 1962, losing in a replay to Burnley. In 1961, during the English off-season, he played abroad in the Eastern Canada Professional Soccer League with Toronto City.",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In August 1962 on Blackpool promenade, the sports car in which he was returning late to his hotel was blown by a gust of wind into the path of another vehicle. Haynes suffered broken bones in both feet and a badly injured knee. He recounted that the police officer who attended the incident reassured him by saying \"Don't worry son, you've only broken your legs\". He missed almost the entire season and, when he returned to the Fulham side, was not quite the same player. Prior to the accident, he had captained England 22 times, and, being only 27, was expected to lead them in the 1966 FIFA World Cup, but he was never again selected for the national team.",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Fulham were relegated in 1968. Haynes then had a single spell in football management, taking charge of Fulham for eighteen days in November that year after the dismissal of Bobby Robson as player-manager, but Haynes never had any ambition to go into coaching. That season, Fulham endured a second successive relegation. His last appearance for Fulham's first team was on 17 January 1970 in a Third Division home match against Stockport County. In total, he made 657 appearances for Fulham and scored 157 goals.",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In 1970, Haynes announced his retirement, aged 35, and joined Durban City, playing one season and winning South Africa's 1970–71 National Football League. This was his only winner's medal in senior football. During the 1972–73 season, Haynes made three league appearances for non-League club Wealdstone.",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "On retiring from playing in 1970 he was already an active bookmaker. He sold his chain of bookmakers to The Tote in 1976. In 1985 he moved to Edinburgh, the city of his partner Avril. Haynes first met Avril in the 1960s when she travelled down to London to buy stock for boutiques she ran in Edinburgh. On moving to Edinburgh he ran a laundry business with Avril, played golf and watched local club, Heart of Midlothian. In 2004 he and Avril married in a private ceremony at Dalkeith registry office.",
"title": "Post-playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "On 17 October 2005, his 71st birthday, Haynes was driving his car, with Avril as passenger, on Edinburgh's Dalry Road when he suffered a brain haemorrhage, instantaneously effectively rendering him brain-dead. The vehicle veered across the road and crashed into a van. After being kept on a ventilator for some 30 hours, the ventilator was turned off on the evening of 18 October 2005. The funeral at Mortonhall Crematorium was attended by ex-players Bobby Charlton, George Cohen, Sven-Göran Eriksson, Dave Mackay, Alan Mullery, Jimmy Murray and Bobby Robson, and also George Foulkes. Avril was unable to attend due to injuries from the car accident. Haynes was survived by Avril and his stepchildren Mark and Sara.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In 2002 Haynes became an inaugural inductee into the English Football Hall of Fame in recognition of his football talents and impact on the English game.",
"title": "Tributes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "On the day of Haynes' death, Alan Mullery, another ex-Fulham and England player, made the following tribute: \"He was the only reason I went to Fulham as a young boy of 15 leaving school. He was my hero, the captain of England and Fulham. The word great rolls off the tongue quite easily these days but he really was. He was the best passer of a ball I have ever seen - I don't know anyone who could pass a ball as accurately. Anyone who saw him will know what a great player he was.\"",
"title": "Tributes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Shortly after his death, the Stevenage Road Stand at Craven Cottage was renamed The Johnny Haynes Stand.",
"title": "Tributes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "George Cohen, a World Cup winner for England in 1966 and a Fulham teammate of Johnny Haynes, stated: \"I have a hundred individual memories of the beauty of John's play. One stands out for the sheer perfection of his skill. It was a charity match which, but for that one second, has faded completely from my memory. The ball came to him at speed on a wet, slippery surface but with the slightest of adjustments, one that was almost imperceptible, he played it inside a full-back and into the path of an on-running winger. I looked at our coach Dave Sexton on the bench and he caught my glance and shook his head as if to say 'fantastic'. Haynes could give you goose bumps on a wet night in a match that didn't matter.\"",
"title": "Tributes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Bobby Moore, England captain from 1964 to 1973, said of him: \"Once you get used to watching that perfection you realised the rest of the secret. John was always available, always hungry for the ball, always wanting to play. I loved watching the player. Later I learnt to love the man.\" Pelé said he had \"never seen a better passer of the ball\" than Haynes.",
"title": "Tributes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The Fulham Supporters Trust stated: \"His dedication, skill, professionalism, grace and charm - both in his playing days and in retirement - serve as a poignant reminder to many of today's footballers about what true greatness really means.\" On 28 July 2008, Fulham announced that fundraising had commenced, with the co-operation of a fan's group, to produce a lasting tribute to Haynes. The Johnny Haynes Statue was unveiled outside the stadium before the 0–0 draw v Sunderland on Saturday 18 October 2008.",
"title": "Tributes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Durban City",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Individual",
"title": "Honours"
}
]
| John Norman Haynes was an English association footballer who played as an inside forward. He made 56 appearances for his country including 22 as captain. He was selected for three World Cup finals squads playing in the latter two of those. Nicknamed "the Maestro", his attacking play was noted for two-footed passing ability, vision and deftness of touch. Haynes is widely regarded as Fulham's greatest ever player, remaining loyal there for twenty years despite coming no nearer to a major trophy win than two FA Cup semi-final appearances. Immediately following the abolition of the £20 maximum wage in 1961, he became the first player to be paid £100 a week. He also had a spell on loan with Toronto City in 1961 and ended his playing days at Durban City, winning there the only trophy he won in his football career. | 2001-09-28T14:30:27Z | 2023-12-18T15:54:49Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Haynes |
16,111 | John Sayles | John Thomas Sayles (born September 28, 1950) is an American independent film director, screenwriter, editor, actor, and novelist. He is known for writing and directing the films The Brother from Another Planet (1984), Matewan (1987), Eight Men Out (1988), Passion Fish (1992), The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), Lone Star (1996), and Men with Guns (1997).
For Eight Men Out, Sayles was nominated for the USC Scripter Award. He has twice been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, for Passion Fish and Lone Star. At the 56th Golden Globe Awards, Men with Guns was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film. His directorial debut, Return of the Secaucus 7 (1980), as well as Matewan, were added to the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 1997 and 2023, respectively.
Sayles was born on September 28, 1950, in Schenectady, New York, the son of Mary (née Rausch), a teacher, and Donald John Sayles, a school administrator. Both of Sayles's parents were Catholic and of half-Irish descent. Sayles has referred to himself as a "Catholic atheist". He attended Williams College with frequent collaborators Gordon Clapp and David Strathairn, as well as his longtime partner, Maggie Renzi. Sayles earned a B.A. in psychology in 1972.
After college, Sayles moved to Boston where he worked a variety of blue-collar jobs while writing short stories for The Atlantic. These writings culminated in his first novel, The Pride of the Bimbos, published in 1975.
Like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, Sayles began his film career working with Roger Corman. In 1979, Sayles used $30,000 he earned writing scripts for Corman to fund his first film, Return of the Secaucus 7. To make the film on a limited budget, he set the film in a large house so that he did not have to travel to or get permits for different locations, set the story over a three-day weekend to limit costume changes, and wrote about people his age so he could cast his friends in it. The film received near-unanimous critical acclaim at the time and has held its reputation. In November 1997, the National Film Preservation Board announced that Return of the Secaucus 7 would be one of the 25 films selected that year for preservation in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.
In 1983, after the films Baby It's You (starring Rosanna Arquette) and Lianna (a story in which a married woman becomes discontented with her marriage and falls in love with another woman), Sayles received a MacArthur Fellowship. He put the money into the science fiction feature The Brother from Another Planet, a film about a three-toed humanoid who escapes bondage on another world and crash-lands in New York harbour; because he is Africanoid in appearance, he finds himself at home among the people of Harlem, being pursued by European-looking alien enslavers men in black.
In 1989, Sayles created and wrote the pilot episode for the short-lived television show Shannon's Deal about a down-and-out Philadelphia lawyer played by Jamey Sheridan. Sayles received a 1990 Edgar Award for his teleplay for the pilot. The show ran for 16 episodes before being cancelled in 1991.
Sayles has funded most of his films by writing genre scripts, such as Piranha, Alligator, The Howling, and The Challenge Having collaborated with Joe Dante on Piranha and The Howling, Sayles acted in Dante's movie, Matinee. Sayles gets the rest of his funding by working as a script doctor; he did rewrites for Apollo 13 and Mimic.
A genre script, called Night Skies, inspired what would eventually become the film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. That film's director, Steven Spielberg, later commissioned Sayles to write a script (unused) for the fourth Jurassic Park film.
He has written and directed his own films, including Lone Star, Passion Fish, Eight Men Out, The Secret of Roan Inish, and Matewan. He serves on the advisory board for the Austin Film Society. Maggie Renzi has been John Sayles's long-time companion (and collaborator), but they have not married. Renzi has produced most of his films since Lianna. They met as students at Williams College.
Sayles works with a regular repertory of actors, most notably Chris Cooper, David Strathairn, and Gordon Clapp, each of whom has appeared in at least four of his films.
In early 2003, Sayles signed the Not In Our Name "Statement of Conscience" (along with Noam Chomsky, Steve Earle, Brian Eno, Jesse Jackson, Viggo Mortensen, Bonnie Raitt, Oliver Stone, Marisa Tomei, Susan Sarandon and others) which opposed the invasion of Iraq.
In February 2009, Sayles was reported to be writing an HBO series based on the early life of Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The drama, tentatively titled Scar Tissue, centers on Kiedis's early years living in West Hollywood with his father. At that time, Kiedis's father, known as Spider, sold drugs (according to legend, his clients included The Who and Led Zeppelin) and mingled with rock stars on the Sunset Strip, all while aspiring to get into show business.
In February 2010, Sayles began shooting his 17th feature film, the historical war drama Amigo, in the Philippines. The film is a fictional account of events during the Philippine–American War, with a cast that includes Joel Torre, Chris Cooper, and Garret Dillahunt.
His novel A Moment in the Sun, set during the same period as Amigo, in the Philippines, Cuba, and the U.S., was released in 2011 by McSweeney's. It includes an account of the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898 in North Carolina, the only coup d'état in United States history in which a duly elected government was overthrown.
Awards for Honeydripper:
Award for Silver City:
Awards for Sunshine State:
Awards for Limbo:
Awards for Men with Guns/Hombres armados:
Awards for Lone Star:
Awards for The Secret of Roan Inish:
Awards for Passion Fish:
Awards for City of Hope:
Awards for Matewan:
Awards for The Brother from Another Planet:
Awards for Return of the Secaucus 7:
Sayles's first published story, "I-80 Nebraska", won an O. Henry Award; his novel, Union Dues, was nominated for a National Book Award as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award.
In 1983, Sayles received the John D. MacArthur Award, given to 20 Americans in diverse fields each year for their innovative work. He has also been the recipient of the Eugene V. Debs Award, the John Steinbeck Award and the John Cassavetes Award. He was honored with the Ian McLellan Hunter Award for Lifetime Achievement by the Writers Guild of America (1999).
Actors who have regularly worked with Sayles include Maggie Renzi, David Strathairn, Joe Morton, Chris Cooper, Mary McDonnell, Vincent Spano, Kevin Tighe, Josh Mostel, Tom Wright, Gordon Clapp and Angela Bassett. | [
{
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"text": "John Thomas Sayles (born September 28, 1950) is an American independent film director, screenwriter, editor, actor, and novelist. He is known for writing and directing the films The Brother from Another Planet (1984), Matewan (1987), Eight Men Out (1988), Passion Fish (1992), The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), Lone Star (1996), and Men with Guns (1997).",
"title": ""
},
{
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"text": "For Eight Men Out, Sayles was nominated for the USC Scripter Award. He has twice been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, for Passion Fish and Lone Star. At the 56th Golden Globe Awards, Men with Guns was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film. His directorial debut, Return of the Secaucus 7 (1980), as well as Matewan, were added to the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 1997 and 2023, respectively.",
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"text": "Sayles was born on September 28, 1950, in Schenectady, New York, the son of Mary (née Rausch), a teacher, and Donald John Sayles, a school administrator. Both of Sayles's parents were Catholic and of half-Irish descent. Sayles has referred to himself as a \"Catholic atheist\". He attended Williams College with frequent collaborators Gordon Clapp and David Strathairn, as well as his longtime partner, Maggie Renzi. Sayles earned a B.A. in psychology in 1972.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
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"text": "After college, Sayles moved to Boston where he worked a variety of blue-collar jobs while writing short stories for The Atlantic. These writings culminated in his first novel, The Pride of the Bimbos, published in 1975.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
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"text": "Like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, Sayles began his film career working with Roger Corman. In 1979, Sayles used $30,000 he earned writing scripts for Corman to fund his first film, Return of the Secaucus 7. To make the film on a limited budget, he set the film in a large house so that he did not have to travel to or get permits for different locations, set the story over a three-day weekend to limit costume changes, and wrote about people his age so he could cast his friends in it. The film received near-unanimous critical acclaim at the time and has held its reputation. In November 1997, the National Film Preservation Board announced that Return of the Secaucus 7 would be one of the 25 films selected that year for preservation in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In 1983, after the films Baby It's You (starring Rosanna Arquette) and Lianna (a story in which a married woman becomes discontented with her marriage and falls in love with another woman), Sayles received a MacArthur Fellowship. He put the money into the science fiction feature The Brother from Another Planet, a film about a three-toed humanoid who escapes bondage on another world and crash-lands in New York harbour; because he is Africanoid in appearance, he finds himself at home among the people of Harlem, being pursued by European-looking alien enslavers men in black.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In 1989, Sayles created and wrote the pilot episode for the short-lived television show Shannon's Deal about a down-and-out Philadelphia lawyer played by Jamey Sheridan. Sayles received a 1990 Edgar Award for his teleplay for the pilot. The show ran for 16 episodes before being cancelled in 1991.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Sayles has funded most of his films by writing genre scripts, such as Piranha, Alligator, The Howling, and The Challenge Having collaborated with Joe Dante on Piranha and The Howling, Sayles acted in Dante's movie, Matinee. Sayles gets the rest of his funding by working as a script doctor; he did rewrites for Apollo 13 and Mimic.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "A genre script, called Night Skies, inspired what would eventually become the film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. That film's director, Steven Spielberg, later commissioned Sayles to write a script (unused) for the fourth Jurassic Park film.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "He has written and directed his own films, including Lone Star, Passion Fish, Eight Men Out, The Secret of Roan Inish, and Matewan. He serves on the advisory board for the Austin Film Society. Maggie Renzi has been John Sayles's long-time companion (and collaborator), but they have not married. Renzi has produced most of his films since Lianna. They met as students at Williams College.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Sayles works with a regular repertory of actors, most notably Chris Cooper, David Strathairn, and Gordon Clapp, each of whom has appeared in at least four of his films.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In early 2003, Sayles signed the Not In Our Name \"Statement of Conscience\" (along with Noam Chomsky, Steve Earle, Brian Eno, Jesse Jackson, Viggo Mortensen, Bonnie Raitt, Oliver Stone, Marisa Tomei, Susan Sarandon and others) which opposed the invasion of Iraq.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In February 2009, Sayles was reported to be writing an HBO series based on the early life of Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The drama, tentatively titled Scar Tissue, centers on Kiedis's early years living in West Hollywood with his father. At that time, Kiedis's father, known as Spider, sold drugs (according to legend, his clients included The Who and Led Zeppelin) and mingled with rock stars on the Sunset Strip, all while aspiring to get into show business.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In February 2010, Sayles began shooting his 17th feature film, the historical war drama Amigo, in the Philippines. The film is a fictional account of events during the Philippine–American War, with a cast that includes Joel Torre, Chris Cooper, and Garret Dillahunt.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "His novel A Moment in the Sun, set during the same period as Amigo, in the Philippines, Cuba, and the U.S., was released in 2011 by McSweeney's. It includes an account of the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898 in North Carolina, the only coup d'état in United States history in which a duly elected government was overthrown.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Awards for Honeydripper:",
"title": "Awards/nominations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Award for Silver City:",
"title": "Awards/nominations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Awards for Sunshine State:",
"title": "Awards/nominations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Awards for Limbo:",
"title": "Awards/nominations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Awards for Men with Guns/Hombres armados:",
"title": "Awards/nominations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Awards for Lone Star:",
"title": "Awards/nominations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Awards for The Secret of Roan Inish:",
"title": "Awards/nominations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Awards for Passion Fish:",
"title": "Awards/nominations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Awards for City of Hope:",
"title": "Awards/nominations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Awards for Matewan:",
"title": "Awards/nominations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Awards for The Brother from Another Planet:",
"title": "Awards/nominations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Awards for Return of the Secaucus 7:",
"title": "Awards/nominations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Sayles's first published story, \"I-80 Nebraska\", won an O. Henry Award; his novel, Union Dues, was nominated for a National Book Award as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award.",
"title": "Awards/nominations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In 1983, Sayles received the John D. MacArthur Award, given to 20 Americans in diverse fields each year for their innovative work. He has also been the recipient of the Eugene V. Debs Award, the John Steinbeck Award and the John Cassavetes Award. He was honored with the Ian McLellan Hunter Award for Lifetime Achievement by the Writers Guild of America (1999).",
"title": "Awards/nominations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Actors who have regularly worked with Sayles include Maggie Renzi, David Strathairn, Joe Morton, Chris Cooper, Mary McDonnell, Vincent Spano, Kevin Tighe, Josh Mostel, Tom Wright, Gordon Clapp and Angela Bassett.",
"title": "Recurring collaborators"
}
]
| John Thomas Sayles is an American independent film director, screenwriter, editor, actor, and novelist. He is known for writing and directing the films The Brother from Another Planet (1984), Matewan (1987), Eight Men Out (1988), Passion Fish (1992), The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), Lone Star (1996), and Men with Guns (1997). For Eight Men Out, Sayles was nominated for the USC Scripter Award. He has twice been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, for Passion Fish and Lone Star. At the 56th Golden Globe Awards, Men with Guns was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film. His directorial debut, Return of the Secaucus 7 (1980), as well as Matewan, were added to the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 1997 and 2023, respectively. | 2001-10-07T11:19:46Z | 2023-12-28T03:12:01Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sayles |
16,112 | January 12 | January 12 is the 12th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 353 days remain until the end of the year (354 in leap years). | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "January 12 is the 12th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 353 days remain until the end of the year (354 in leap years).",
"title": ""
}
]
| January 12 is the 12th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 353 days remain until the end of the year. | 2001-10-10T18:56:47Z | 2023-11-24T16:36:34Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_12 |
16,113 | John Digweed | Thomas John Digweed (born 1 January 1967) is a British DJ and record producer. DJ Magazine voted him the World No. 1 DJ in 2001. As well as achieving success as a solo act, he has collaborated with Sasha as Sasha & John Digweed, and with Nick Muir as Bedrock.
Digweed began DJing at the age of 15, and made a name for himself in his home town of Hastings, where he put on successful club nights, the most famous of which were his successful raves on Hastings Pier, where the likes of Carl Cox and The Prodigy performed. His breakthrough came in 1993, when he sent a mixtape demo to Geoff Oakes, founder of the Renaissance nightclub in Mansfield, who played it to fellow DJ Alexander Coe (aka Sasha). The two DJs struck up a long-term friendship and working relationship, despite Sasha twice failing to turn up for gigs that Digweed had booked him for in Hastings.
In partnership with Sasha, Digweed is known for promoting progressive house and notable for producing the first commercial compilation for a nightclub, when they released their 1994 compilation of mixes from Renaissance entitled Renaissance: The Mix Collection. Until then, mixtapes from clubs had only been circulated by DJs on an amateur basis. The Renaissance CD was the first time that a compilation CD had been planned strategically for marketing, from artwork to promotion. The two DJs famously followed this up with their Northern Exposure compilations and those on Global Underground.
Digweed then started the record label Bedrock Records to further promote the music that he was playing at the time. He and his friend Nick Muir went on to produce under the Bedrock alias, getting their big break when their first track "For What You Dream Of" was used in the film Trainspotting. The Bedrock duo also produced the soundtrack for the MTV adult cartoon superhero drama series, Spider-Man: The New Animated Series in 2003. In his sets, Digweed is noted for adopting tracks with new and different styles.
Between 2000 and 2005, Digweed promoted his "Bedrock" sound with monthly club nights for club members and newcomers to the electronic music scene. He played on Thursday nights at Heaven in London, and on Friday nights in a smaller club night at The Beach in Brighton. These nights featured numerous guest DJs, including Danny Howells, Phil Thompson, Hernan Cattaneo and Chris Fortier. As Digweed's international schedule increased, these events drew to a close, although occasional reunions have been held at Heaven since. He celebrated ten years of his Bedrock club night on 10 October 2008 at Matter in London, with a near on ten-hour set.
Digweed has enjoyed popularity throughout North America as well as Europe. He and Sasha established a monthly residency at the now defunct New York club Twilo, which proved a key location for the American electronic music scene. The residency began in 1997 with a lukewarm reception, but grew into one of the most popular club nights in New York City by the end of its run in 2001. Sasha and Digweed played at Twilo on the last Friday of every month, playing sets that lasted between eight and twelve hours. In early 2001, Sasha suffered an ear injury and was unable to play for their last four dates before Twilo was closed by the New York City authorities. Digweed continued to play the time-slot by himself until 6 May 2001, when Twilo was raided by the NYPD and subsequently forced to close down.
Digweed has a cameo of himself playing music in Greg Harrison's 2000 movie Groove, which tells the story of an all-night rave in San Francisco.
In early 2002, Digweed along with Sasha and Jimmy Van M undertook a six-week countrywide tour of the United States called Delta Heavy. The tour was promoted by Clear Channel and attendance reached 85,000. It took place in a variety of venues but was completely self-reliant from a technical point of view; sound, lights, and visual setups were brought along to every gig of the tour. Also in 2002, Digweed curated and compiled the soundtrack to the film Stark Raving Mad.
From September 2000 to January 2011, Digweed hosted a weekly two-hour radio show on Kiss 100 in the UK, in which he played the first hour of music and a guest DJ played the second hour. Beginning in September 2006, his show was available on all three Kiss radio stations. By that time, the show's name had become Transitions, which was also the name of a four-volume series of mix albums by Digweed that was released every six months during 2006–2008. In January 2011, Transitions aired for the last time on Kiss 100, but the show continues to be broadcast online. On December 27, 2019, Transitions aired its 800th episode.
2008 saw Digweed and Sasha reuniting for a Spring Club Tour that once again featured performances all over North America. In 2011, Digweed's music was featured in the film movie adaptation of Irvine Welsh's best-selling novel Irvine Welsh's Ecstasy.
He featured among the top ten artists from 1998 to 2008 and was voted DJ Mag's number 1 DJ in 2001. In 2010, he was voted number 29 in DJ Mag's annual Top 100 DJs vote. In 2013, Digweed was ranked the number 17 best DJ in the world in Resident Advisor's top 100 DJ charts; he currently is number 43 as of June 2016.
John is the brother of 28 times World Clay Shooting Champion George Digweed, MBE. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Thomas John Digweed (born 1 January 1967) is a British DJ and record producer. DJ Magazine voted him the World No. 1 DJ in 2001. As well as achieving success as a solo act, he has collaborated with Sasha as Sasha & John Digweed, and with Nick Muir as Bedrock.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Digweed began DJing at the age of 15, and made a name for himself in his home town of Hastings, where he put on successful club nights, the most famous of which were his successful raves on Hastings Pier, where the likes of Carl Cox and The Prodigy performed. His breakthrough came in 1993, when he sent a mixtape demo to Geoff Oakes, founder of the Renaissance nightclub in Mansfield, who played it to fellow DJ Alexander Coe (aka Sasha). The two DJs struck up a long-term friendship and working relationship, despite Sasha twice failing to turn up for gigs that Digweed had booked him for in Hastings.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In partnership with Sasha, Digweed is known for promoting progressive house and notable for producing the first commercial compilation for a nightclub, when they released their 1994 compilation of mixes from Renaissance entitled Renaissance: The Mix Collection. Until then, mixtapes from clubs had only been circulated by DJs on an amateur basis. The Renaissance CD was the first time that a compilation CD had been planned strategically for marketing, from artwork to promotion. The two DJs famously followed this up with their Northern Exposure compilations and those on Global Underground.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Digweed then started the record label Bedrock Records to further promote the music that he was playing at the time. He and his friend Nick Muir went on to produce under the Bedrock alias, getting their big break when their first track \"For What You Dream Of\" was used in the film Trainspotting. The Bedrock duo also produced the soundtrack for the MTV adult cartoon superhero drama series, Spider-Man: The New Animated Series in 2003. In his sets, Digweed is noted for adopting tracks with new and different styles.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Between 2000 and 2005, Digweed promoted his \"Bedrock\" sound with monthly club nights for club members and newcomers to the electronic music scene. He played on Thursday nights at Heaven in London, and on Friday nights in a smaller club night at The Beach in Brighton. These nights featured numerous guest DJs, including Danny Howells, Phil Thompson, Hernan Cattaneo and Chris Fortier. As Digweed's international schedule increased, these events drew to a close, although occasional reunions have been held at Heaven since. He celebrated ten years of his Bedrock club night on 10 October 2008 at Matter in London, with a near on ten-hour set.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Digweed has enjoyed popularity throughout North America as well as Europe. He and Sasha established a monthly residency at the now defunct New York club Twilo, which proved a key location for the American electronic music scene. The residency began in 1997 with a lukewarm reception, but grew into one of the most popular club nights in New York City by the end of its run in 2001. Sasha and Digweed played at Twilo on the last Friday of every month, playing sets that lasted between eight and twelve hours. In early 2001, Sasha suffered an ear injury and was unable to play for their last four dates before Twilo was closed by the New York City authorities. Digweed continued to play the time-slot by himself until 6 May 2001, when Twilo was raided by the NYPD and subsequently forced to close down.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Digweed has a cameo of himself playing music in Greg Harrison's 2000 movie Groove, which tells the story of an all-night rave in San Francisco.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In early 2002, Digweed along with Sasha and Jimmy Van M undertook a six-week countrywide tour of the United States called Delta Heavy. The tour was promoted by Clear Channel and attendance reached 85,000. It took place in a variety of venues but was completely self-reliant from a technical point of view; sound, lights, and visual setups were brought along to every gig of the tour. Also in 2002, Digweed curated and compiled the soundtrack to the film Stark Raving Mad.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "From September 2000 to January 2011, Digweed hosted a weekly two-hour radio show on Kiss 100 in the UK, in which he played the first hour of music and a guest DJ played the second hour. Beginning in September 2006, his show was available on all three Kiss radio stations. By that time, the show's name had become Transitions, which was also the name of a four-volume series of mix albums by Digweed that was released every six months during 2006–2008. In January 2011, Transitions aired for the last time on Kiss 100, but the show continues to be broadcast online. On December 27, 2019, Transitions aired its 800th episode.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "2008 saw Digweed and Sasha reuniting for a Spring Club Tour that once again featured performances all over North America. In 2011, Digweed's music was featured in the film movie adaptation of Irvine Welsh's best-selling novel Irvine Welsh's Ecstasy.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "He featured among the top ten artists from 1998 to 2008 and was voted DJ Mag's number 1 DJ in 2001. In 2010, he was voted number 29 in DJ Mag's annual Top 100 DJs vote. In 2013, Digweed was ranked the number 17 best DJ in the world in Resident Advisor's top 100 DJ charts; he currently is number 43 as of June 2016.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "John is the brother of 28 times World Clay Shooting Champion George Digweed, MBE.",
"title": "Biography"
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| Thomas John Digweed is a British DJ and record producer. DJ Magazine voted him the World No. 1 DJ in 2001. As well as achieving success as a solo act, he has collaborated with Sasha as Sasha & John Digweed, and with Nick Muir as Bedrock. | 2002-02-25T15:51:15Z | 2023-09-11T10:43:01Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Digweed |
16,115 | James Spader | James Todd Spader (born February 7, 1960) is an American actor. He is known for often portraying eccentric and morally ambiguous characters. He started his career in critically acclaimed independent films before transitioning into television for which he received numerous awards and acclaim including three Primetime Emmy Awards as well as nominations for three Golden Globe Awards, and ten Screen Actors Guild Awards.
Spader started his career acting in youth-oriented films such as Tuff Turf (1985), Pretty in Pink (1986), and Mannequin (1987). His breakthrough role came with the Steven Soderbergh drama Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) for which he received the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actor. He then starred in films such as White Palace (1990), True Colors (1991), Stargate (1994), 2 Days in the Valley (1996), and Secretary (2002). Spader took supporting roles in Bob Roberts (1992), Wolf (1994), Lincoln (2012), and The Homesman (2014). He also voiced the role of Ultron in Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015).
His television roles include those of attorney Alan Shore in the last season of The Practice (2003–2004) and its spin-off Boston Legal (2004–2008), a role which earned him three Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series. He is also known for his role as Robert California in the sitcom The Office (2011–2012). Most recently, he starred as Raymond "Red" Reddington in the NBC crime series The Blacklist (2013–2023).
Spader was born on February 7, 1960, in Boston and is the youngest of three children. His parents, Jean (née Fraser) and Stoddard ("Todd") Greenwood Spader, were both teachers. He has two older sisters, Libby Spader and Annie Spader. According to Spader, he had a very progressive and liberal upbringing. "I was always around dominant and influential women, and that left a great impression". Spader is a sixth-generation descendant of Connecticut politician Seth P. Beers; co-founder of American School for the Deaf Laurent Clerc is his 3rd great-grandfather.
During his early education, he attended many private schools, including The Pike School in Andover where his mother taught art, and the Brooks School in North Andover where his father was a teacher. He later transferred to Phillips Academy, befriended former President John F. Kennedy's son John F. Kennedy, Jr., dropped out at the age of seventeen, and moved to New York City to pursue his acting career. While studying to become a full-time actor, Spader undertook jobs including bartending, teaching yoga, driving a meat truck, loading railroad cars, and being a stable boy.
Spader's first major film role was in the film Endless Love (1981), and his first starring role was in Tuff Turf (1985). He rose to stardom in 1986, when he played the rich, arrogant playboy Steff in Pretty in Pink. He co-starred in Mannequin (1987) and the film adaptation of Less than Zero (1987), in which he played a drug dealer named Rip. Supporting roles in films such as Baby Boom (1987) and Wall Street (1987) followed until his breakthrough in Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), in which he played a sexual voyeur who complicates the lives of three Baton Rouge, Louisiana residents. For this performance he received the Best Actor Award at the Cannes Film Festival.
Spader's roles in the early 1990s included a young, affluent widower opposite Susan Sarandon in the romantic drama White Palace (1990), a yuppie who meets the mysterious Rob Lowe in the Noir drama Bad Influence (1990), John Cusack's best friend in the drama True Colors (1991), and a poker-playing drifter in The Music of Chance (1993). In 1994 he starred as Egyptologist Daniel Jackson in the sci-fi film Stargate. In 1996 he played car accident fetishist James Ballard in the controversial Canadian film Crash and assassin Lee Woods in 2 Days in the Valley. In 1997 Spader guest starred in the Seinfeld episode "The Apology", as an angry recovering alcoholic who refuses to apologize to George for making fun of him. In 2000 he played a drug-addicted detective tracking a serial killer in The Watcher. In 2002 he starred as a sadomasochistic boss in Secretary.
From 2004 to 2008 Spader starred as Alan Shore in the series Boston Legal, in which he reprised his role from the television series The Practice (2002). Longtime writer-producer David E. Kelley said there was resistance when he first tried to cast Spader in the role, "I was told that no one would ever welcome James Spader into their living room". During a TV Game Changers interview Kelley noted, "People will watch him (Spader) in the movies, but they will never let him in their own home."
He won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series in 2004 for his portrayal on The Practice and won it again in 2005 and 2007 for Boston Legal. With the 2005 win, he became one of only a few actors to win an Emmy Award while playing the same character in two series. Even rarer, he won a second consecutive Emmy while playing the same character in two series. He also won the Satellite Award for Best Actor in a Series, Comedy or Musical for Boston Legal in 2006.
In October 2006, Spader narrated "China Revealed", the first episode of Discovery Channel's documentary series Discovery Atlas. He also did voice-over in several television commercials for Acura. He starred in Race, a play written and directed by David Mamet, which opened on December 6, 2009, at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway. The show closed on August 21, 2010, after 297 performances. In March 2011, he was named to star in the film By Virtue Fall, written and to be directed by Sheldon Turner. As of June 2011, the movie was in pre-production.
Spader guest starred as Robert California in "Search Committee", the season 7 finale of The Office. On June 27, 2011, it was announced that he would join the cast on a permanent basis. He planned to stay only through the eighth season. While the original plan was just to do the guest appearance, executive producer Paul Lieberstein said: "those two scenes became a season".
Spader starred in the television series, The Blacklist, which premiered on NBC September 23, 2013 and which had its series finale on July 13, 2023, a total of ten seasons. He portrayed Raymond "Red" Reddington, one of the FBI's most wanted fugitives.
He also played villainous robot Ultron in Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015).
Spader met his first wife, decorator Victoria Kheel, while working in a yoga studio after he moved to New York City in the 1980s. They married in 1987 and had two sons. Spader filed for divorce from Kheel in 2004. He began dating his former Alien Hunter (2003) co-star, Leslie Stefanson, in 2002. They have one son together.
In an interview with Rolling Stone in 2014, Spader revealed he has obsessive–compulsive disorder. | [
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| James Todd Spader is an American actor. He is known for often portraying eccentric and morally ambiguous characters. He started his career in critically acclaimed independent films before transitioning into television for which he received numerous awards and acclaim including three Primetime Emmy Awards as well as nominations for three Golden Globe Awards, and ten Screen Actors Guild Awards. Spader started his career acting in youth-oriented films such as Tuff Turf (1985), Pretty in Pink (1986), and Mannequin (1987). His breakthrough role came with the Steven Soderbergh drama Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) for which he received the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actor. He then starred in films such as White Palace (1990), True Colors (1991), Stargate (1994), 2 Days in the Valley (1996), and Secretary (2002). Spader took supporting roles in Bob Roberts (1992), Wolf (1994), Lincoln (2012), and The Homesman (2014). He also voiced the role of Ultron in Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015). His television roles include those of attorney Alan Shore in the last season of The Practice (2003–2004) and its spin-off Boston Legal (2004–2008), a role which earned him three Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series. He is also known for his role as Robert California in the sitcom The Office (2011–2012). Most recently, he starred as Raymond "Red" Reddington in the NBC crime series The Blacklist (2013–2023). | 2002-02-25T15:51:15Z | 2023-12-25T12:08:40Z | [
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16,117 | Joseph (disambiguation) | Joseph is a masculine given name.
Joseph may also refer to: | [
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| Joseph is a masculine given name. Joseph may also refer to: | 2001-09-29T05:41:34Z | 2023-11-17T14:40:50Z | [
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16,118 | Jacob | Jacob (/ˈdʒeɪkəb/; Hebrew: יַעֲקֹב, Modern: Yaʿaqōv, Tiberian: Yaʿăqōḇ; Arabic: يَعْقُوب, romanized: Yaʿqūb; Greek: Ἰακώβ, romanized: Iakṓb), later given the name Israel, is regarded as a patriarch of the Israelites and is an important figure in Abrahamic religions, such as Judaism, Samaritanism, Christianity, and Islam. Jacob first appears in the Book of Genesis, originating from the Hebrew tradition in the Torah. Described as the son of Isaac and Rebecca, and the grandson of Abraham, Sarah, and Bethuel, Jacob is presented as the second-born among Isaac's children. His fraternal twin brother is the elder, named Esau, according to the biblical account. Jacob is said to have bought Esau's birthright and, with his mother's help, deceived his aging father to bless him instead of Esau. Later in the narrative, following a severe drought in his homeland of Canaan, Jacob and his descendants, with the help of his son Joseph (who had become a confidant of the pharaoh), moved to Egypt where Jacob died at the age of 147. He is supposed to have been buried in the Cave of Machpelah.
Jacob had twelve sons through four women, his wives (and cousins), Leah and Rachel, and his concubines, Bilhah and Zilpah, who were, in order of their birth, Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, Joseph, and Benjamin, all of whom became the heads of their own family groups, later known as the Twelve Tribes of Israel. He also had a daughter named Dinah. According to Genesis, Jacob displayed favoritism among his wives and children, preferring Rachel and her sons, Joseph and Benjamin, causing tension within the family—culminating in Joseph's older brothers selling him into slavery.
Scholars have taken a mixed view as to Jacob's historicity, with archaeology so far producing no evidence for his existence.
According to the folk etymology found in Genesis 25:26, the name Yaʿaqōv יעקב is derived from ʿaqev עָקֵב "heel", as Jacob was born grasping the heel of his twin brother Esau. The historical origin of the name is uncertain, although similar names have been recorded. Yaqub-Har is recorded as a place name in a list by Thutmose III (15th century BC), and later as the nomen of a Hyksos pharaoh. The hieroglyphs are ambiguous, and can be read as "Yaqub-Har", "Yaqubaal", or "Yaqub El". The same name is recorded earlier still, in c. 1800 BC, in cuneiform inscriptions (spelled ya-ah-qu-ub-el, ya-qu-ub-el). The suggestion that the personal name may be shortened from this compound name, which would translate to "may El protect", originates with Bright (1960). The Septuagint renders the name Iákobos (Ancient Greek: Ἰάκωβος), whence Latin Jacobus, English Jacob.
The name Israel given to Jacob following the episode of his wrestling with the angel (Genesis 32:22–32) is etymologized as composition of אֵל el "god" and the root שָׂרָה śarah "to rule, contend, have power, prevail over": שָׂרִיתָ עִם־אֱלֹהִים (KJV: "a prince hast thou power with God"); alternatively, the el can be read as the subject, for a translation of "El rules/contends/struggles".
The biblical account of the life of Jacob is found in the Book of Genesis, chapters 25–50.
Jacob and his twin brother, Esau, were born to Isaac and Rebecca after 20 years of marriage, when Isaac was 60 years of age. Rebecca was uncomfortable during her pregnancy and went to inquire of God why she was suffering. She received the prophecy that twins were fighting in her womb and would continue to fight all their lives, even after they became two separate nations. The prophecy also said that "the one people shall be stronger than the other people; and the elder shall serve the younger" (Genesis 25:25 KJV).
When the time came for Rebecca to give birth, the firstborn, Esau, came out covered with red hair, as if he were wearing a hairy garment, and his heel was grasped by the hand of Jacob, the secondborn. According to Genesis 25, Isaac and Rebecca named the first son Hebrew: עשו, Esau. The second son they named יעקב, Jacob (Ya'aqob or Ya'aqov, meaning "heel-catcher", "supplanter", "leg-puller", "he who follows upon the heels of one", from Hebrew: עקב, 'aqab or 'aqav, "seize by the heel", "circumvent", "restrain", a wordplay upon Hebrew: עקבה, 'iqqebah or 'iqqbah, "heel").
The boys displayed very different natures as they matured. "... and Esau was a cunning hunter, a man of the field; but Jacob was a simple man, dwelling in tents". Moreover, the attitudes of their parents toward them also differed: "And Isaac loved Esau, because he did eat of his venison: but Rebecca loved Jacob."
Genesis 25:29–34 tells the account of Esau selling his birthright to Jacob. This passage tells that Esau, returning famished from the fields, begged Jacob to give him some of the stew that Jacob had just made. (Esau referred to the dish as "that same red pottage", giving rise to his nickname, Hebrew: אדום ('Edom, meaning "Red").) Jacob offered to give Esau a bowl of stew in exchange for his birthright, to which Esau agreed.
As Isaac aged, he became blind and was uncertain when he would die, so he decided to bestow Esau's birthright upon him. He requested that Esau go out to the fields with his weapons (quiver and bow) to kill some venison. Isaac then requested that Esau make "savory meat" for him out of the venison, according to the way he enjoyed it the most, so that he could eat it and bless Esau.
Rebecca overheard this conversation. It is suggested that she realized prophetically that Isaac's blessings would go to Jacob, since she was told before the twins' birth that the older son would serve the younger. Rebecca blessed Jacob and she quickly ordered Jacob to bring her two kid goats from their flock so that he could take Esau's place in serving Isaac and receiving his blessing. Jacob protested that his father would recognize their deception since Esau was hairy and he himself was smooth-skinned. He feared his father would curse him as soon as he felt him, but Rebecca offered to take the curse herself, then insisted that Jacob obey her. Jacob did as his mother instructed and, when he returned with the kids, Rebecca made the savory meat that Isaac loved. Before she sent Jacob to his father, she dressed him in Esau's garments and laid goatskins on his arms and neck to simulate hairy skin.
Disguised as Esau, Jacob entered Isaac's room. Surprised that Esau was back so soon, Isaac asked how it could be that the hunt went so quickly. Jacob responded, "Because the LORD your God brought it to me." Rashi says Isaac's suspicions were aroused even more, because Esau never used the personal name of God. Isaac demanded that Jacob come close so he could feel him, but the goatskins felt just like Esau's hairy skin. Confused, Isaac exclaimed, "The voice is Jacob's voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau!" Still trying to get at the truth, Isaac asked him directly, "Art thou my very son Esau?" and Jacob answered simply, "I am." Isaac proceeded to eat the food and to drink the wine that Jacob gave him, and then told him to come close and kiss him. As Jacob kissed his father, Isaac smelled the clothes which belonged to Esau and finally accepted that the person in front of him was Esau. Isaac then blessed Jacob with the blessing that was meant for Esau. Genesis 27:28–29 states Isaac's blessing: "Therefore God give thee of the dew of heavens, and the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine: Let people serve thee: be lord over thy brethren, and let thy mother's sons bow down to thee: cursed be every one that curseth thee, and blessed be he that blesseth thee."
Jacob had scarcely left the room when Esau returned from the hunt to prepare his game and receive the blessing. The realization that he had been deceived shocked Isaac, yet he acknowledged that Jacob had received the blessings by adding, "Indeed, he will be [or remain] blessed!" (27:33).
Esau was heartbroken by the deception and begged for his own blessing. Having made Jacob a ruler over his brothers, Isaac could only promise, "By your sword you shall live, but your brother you shall serve; yet it shall be that when you are aggrieved, you may cast off his yoke from upon your neck" (27:39–40).
Although Esau sold Jacob his own birthright, which was his blessing, for "red pottage," Esau still hated Jacob for receiving his blessing that their father Isaac unknowingly had given to him. He vowed to kill Jacob as soon as Isaac died. When Rebecca heard about his murderous intentions, she ordered Jacob to travel to her brother Laban's house in Haran, until Esau's anger subsided. She convinced Isaac to send Jacob away by telling him that she despaired of his marrying a local girl from the idol-worshipping families of Canaan (as Esau had done). After Isaac sent Jacob away to find a wife, Esau realized his own Canaanite wives were evil in his father's eyes and so he took a daughter of Isaac's half-brother, Ishmael, as another wife.
Near Luz en route to Haran, Jacob experienced a vision of a ladder, or staircase, reaching into heaven with angels going up and down it, subsequently referred to in popular culture as "Jacob's ladder." He heard the voice of God, who repeated many of the blessings upon him, coming from the top of the ladder.
According to Midrash Genesis Rabbah, the ladder signified the exiles that the Jewish people would suffer before the coming of the Jewish Messiah: the angels that represented the exiles of Babylonia, Persia, and Greece each climbed up a certain number of steps, paralleling the years of the exile, before they "fell down"; but the angel representing the last exile, that of Edom, kept climbing higher and higher into the clouds. Jacob feared that his descendants would never be free of Esau's domination, but God assured him that at the End of Days, Edom too would come falling down.
In the morning, Jacob awakened and continued on his way to Haran, after naming the place where he had spent the night "Bethel", "God's house."
Arriving in Haran, Jacob saw a well where shepherds were gathering their flocks to water them and met Laban's younger daughter, Rachel, Jacob's first cousin; she was working as a shepherdess. Jacob was 77 years old, and he loved Rachel immediately. After spending a month with his relatives he asked for her hand in marriage in return for working seven years for Laban the Aramean. Laban agreed to the arrangement. These seven years seemed to Jacob "but a few days, for the love he had for her." When they were complete and he was 84 years old he asked for his wife, but Laban deceived him by switching Rachel for her older sister, Leah, as the veiled bride. In the morning, when the truth became known, Laban justified his action, saying that in his country it was unheard of to give a younger daughter before the older. However, he agreed to give Rachel in marriage as well if Jacob would work another seven years. After the week of wedding celebrations with Leah, Jacob married Rachel, and he continued to work for Laban for another seven years.
Jacob, having been celibate until the age of 84, fathered twelve children in the next seven years. He loved Rachel more than Leah, and Leah felt hated. God opened Leah's womb and she gave birth to four sons rapidly: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah. Rachel, however, remained barren. Following the example of Sarah, who gave her handmaid to Abraham after years of infertility, Rachel gave her handmaid Bilhah to Jacob so that Rachel could raise children through her. Bilhah gave birth to Dan and Naphtali. Seeing that she had left off childbearing temporarily, Leah then gave her handmaid Zilpah to Jacob so that Leah could raise more children through her. Zilpah gave birth to Gad and Asher. Afterwards, Leah became fertile again and gave birth to Issachar, Zebulun, and Dinah, Jacob's first and only daughter. God remembered Rachel, who gave birth to Joseph and Benjamin.
After Joseph was born, Jacob decided to return home to his parents. Laban the Aramean was reluctant to release him, as God had blessed his flock on account of Jacob. Laban asked what he could pay Jacob. Jacob suggested that all the spotted, speckled, and brown goats and sheep of Laban's flock, at any given moment, would be his wages. Jacob placed rods of poplar, hazel, and chestnut, all of which he peeled "white streaks upon them," within the flocks' watering holes or troughs, associating the stripes of the rods with the growth of stripes on the livestock. Despite this practicing of magic, later on Jacob says to his wives that it was God who made the livestock give birth to the convenient offspring, in order to turn the tide against the deceptive Laban. As time passed, Laban's sons noticed that Jacob was taking the better part of their flocks, and so Laban's friendly attitude towards Jacob began to change. The angel of the Lord, in a dream back during the breeding season, told Jacob "Now lift your eyes and see [that] all the he goats mounting the animals are ringed, speckled, and striped, for I have seen all that Laban is doing to you", that he is the God whom Jacob met at Bethel, and that Jacob should leave and go back to the land where he was born, which he and his wives and children did without informing Laban. Before they left, Rachel stole the teraphim, considered to be household idols, from Laban's house.
Laban pursued Jacob for seven days. The night before he caught up to him, God appeared to Laban in a dream and warned him not to say anything good or bad to Jacob. When the two met, Laban said to Jacob, "What have you done, that you have tricked me and driven away my daughters like captives of the sword?" He also asked for his stolen teraphim back. Knowing nothing about Rachel's theft, Jacob told Laban that whoever stole them should die and stood aside to let him search. When Laban reached Rachel's tent, she hid the teraphim by sitting on them and stating she could not get up because she was menstruating. Jacob and Laban then parted from each other with a pact to preserve the peace between them near Gilead. Laban returned to his home and Jacob continued on his way.
As Jacob neared the land of Canaan as he passed Mahanaim, he sent messengers ahead to his brother Esau. They returned with the news that Esau was coming to meet Jacob with an army of 400 men. With great apprehension, Jacob prepared for the worst. He engaged in earnest prayer to God, then sent on before him a tribute of flocks and herds to Esau, "A present to my lord Esau from thy servant Jacob."
Jacob then transported his family and flocks across the ford Jabbok by night, then recrossed back to send over his possessions, being left alone in communion with God. There, a mysterious being appeared ("man," Genesis 32:24, 28; or "God," Genesis 32:28, 30, Hosea 12:3, 5; or "angel," Hosea 12:4), and the two wrestled until daybreak. When the being saw that he did not overpower Jacob, he touched Jacob on the sinew of his thigh (the gid hanasheh, גיד הנשה), and, as a result, Jacob developed a limp (Genesis 32:31). Because of this, "to this day the people of Israel do not eat the sinew of the thigh that is on the hip socket" This incident is the source of the mitzvah of porging.
Jacob then demanded a blessing, and the being declared in Genesis 32:28 that, from then on, Jacob would be called יִשְׂרָאֵל, Israel (Yisra'el, meaning "one that struggled with the divine angel" (Josephus), "one who has prevailed with God" (Rashi), "a man seeing God" (Whiston), "he will rule as God" (Strong), or "a prince with God" (Morris), from Hebrew: שרה, "prevail," "have power as a prince"). While he is still called Jacob in later texts, his name Israel makes some consider him the eponymous ancestor of the Israelites.
Jacob asked the being's name, but he refused to answer. Afterwards, Jacob named the place Penuel (Penuw'el, Peniy'el, meaning "face of God"), saying: "I have seen God face to face and lived."
Because the terminology is ambiguous ("el" in Yisra'el) and inconsistent, and because this being refused to reveal his name, there are varying views as to whether he was a man, an angel, or God. Josephus uses only the terms "angel", "divine angel," and "angel of God," describing the struggle as no small victory. According to Rashi, the being was the guardian angel of Esau himself, sent to destroy Jacob before he could return to the land of Canaan. Trachtenberg theorized that the being refused to identify itself for fear that, if its secret name was known, it would be conjurable by incantations. Literal Christian interpreters like Henry M. Morris say that the stranger was "God Himself and, therefore, Christ in His preincarnate state", citing Jacob's own evaluation and the name he assumed thereafter, "one who fights victoriously with God", and adding that God had appeared in the human form of the Angel of the Lord to eat a meal with Abraham in Genesis 18. Geller wrote that, "in the context of the wrestling bout, the name implies that Jacob won this supremacy, linked to that of God's, by a kind of theomachy."
In the morning, Jacob assembled his four wives and 11 sons, placing the maidservants and their children in front, Leah and her children next, and Rachel and Joseph in the rear. Some commentators cite this placement as proof that Jacob continued to favor Joseph over Leah's children, as presumably the rear position would have been safer from a frontal assault by Esau, which Jacob feared. Jacob himself took the foremost position. Esau's spirit of revenge, however, was apparently appeased by Jacob's bounteous gifts of camels, goats and flocks. Their reunion was an emotional one.
Esau offered to accompany them on their way back to Israel, but Jacob protested that his children were still young and tender (born six to 13 years prior in the narrative); Jacob suggested eventually catching up with Esau at Mount Seir. According to the Sages, this was a prophetic reference to the End of Days, when Jacob's descendants will come to Mount Seir, the home of Edom, to deliver judgment against Esau's descendants for persecuting them throughout the millennia. Jacob actually diverted himself to Succoth and was not recorded as rejoining Esau until, at Machpelah, the two bury their father Isaac, who lived to be 180, and was 60 years older than they were.
Jacob then arrived in Shechem, where he bought a parcel of land, now identified as Joseph's Tomb. In Shechem, Jacob's daughter Dinah was kidnapped and raped by the ruler's son, who desired to marry the girl. Dinah's brothers, Simeon and Levi, agreed in Jacob's name to permit the marriage as long as all the men of Shechem first circumcised themselves, ostensibly to unite the children of Jacob in Abraham's covenant of familial harmony. On the third day after the circumcisions, when all the men of Shechem were still in pain, Simeon and Levi put them all to death by the sword and rescued their sister Dinah, and their brothers plundered the property, women, and children. Jacob condemned this act, saying: "You have brought trouble on me by making me a stench to the Canaanites and Perizzites, the people living in this land." He later rebuked his two sons for their anger in his deathbed blessing (Genesis 49:5–7).
Jacob returned to Bethel, where he had another vision of blessing. Although the death of Rebecca, Jacob's mother, is not explicitly recorded in the Bible, Deborah, Rebecca's nurse, died and was buried at Bethel, at a place that Jacob calls Allon Bachuth (אלון בכות), "Oak of Weepings" (Genesis 35:8). According to the Midrash, the plural form of the word "weeping" indicates the double sorrow that Rebecca also died at this time.
Jacob then made a further move while Rachel was pregnant; near Bethlehem, Rachel went into labor and died as she gave birth to her second son, Benjamin (Jacob's twelfth son). Jacob buried her and erected a monument over her grave. Rachel's Tomb, just outside Bethlehem, remains a popular site for pilgrimages and prayers to this day. Jacob then settled in Migdal Eder, where his firstborn, Reuben, slept with Rachel's servant Bilhah; Jacob's response was not given at the time, but he did condemn Reuben for it later, in his deathbed blessing. Jacob was finally reunited with his father Isaac in Mamre (outside Hebron).
When Isaac died at the age of 180, Jacob and Esau buried him in the Cave of the Patriarchs, which Abraham had purchased as a family burial plot. At this point in the biblical narrative, two genealogies of Esau's family appear under the headings "the generations of Esau". A conservative interpretation is that, at Isaac's burial, Jacob obtained the records of Esau, who had been married 80 years prior, and incorporated them into his own family records, and that Moses augmented and published them.
The house of Jacob dwelt in Hebron, in the land of Canaan. His flocks were often fed in the pastures of Shechem as well as Dothan. Of all the children in his household, he loved Rachel's firstborn son, Joseph, the most. Thus Joseph's half brothers were jealous of him and they ridiculed him often. Joseph even told his father about all of his half brothers' misdeeds. When Joseph was 17 years old, Jacob made a long coat or tunic of many colors for him. Seeing this, the half brothers began to hate Joseph. Then Joseph began to have dreams that implied that his family would bow down to him. When he told his brothers about such dreams, it drove them to conspire against him. When Jacob heard of these dreams, he rebuked his son for proposing the idea that the house of Jacob would even bow down to Joseph. Yet, he contemplated his son's words about these dreams.
Sometime afterward, the sons of Jacob by Leah, Bilhah and Zilpah, were feeding his flocks in Shechem. Jacob wanted to know how things were doing, so he asked Joseph to go down there and return with a report. This was the last time he would ever see his son in Hebron. Later that day, the report that Jacob ended up receiving came from Joseph's brothers who brought before him a coat laden with blood. Jacob identified the coat as the one he made for Joseph. At that moment he cried "It is my son's tunic. A wild beast has devoured him. Without doubt Joseph is torn to pieces." He rent his clothes and put sackcloth around his waist mourning for days. No one from the house of Jacob could comfort him during this time of bereavement.
The truth was that Joseph's older brothers had turned on him, apprehended him and ultimately sold him into slavery on a caravan headed for Egypt.
Twenty years later, throughout the Middle East a severe famine occurred like none other that lasted seven years. It crippled nations. The word was that the only kingdom prospering was Egypt. In the second year of this great famine, when Israel (Jacob) was about 130 years old, he told his 10 sons of Leah, Bilhah and Zilpah, to go to Egypt and buy grain. Israel's youngest son Benjamin, born from Rachel, stayed behind by his father's order to keep him safe.
Nine of the sons returned to their father Israel from Egypt, stockpiled with grain on their donkeys. They relayed to their father all that had happened in Egypt. They spoke of being accused as spies and that their brother Simeon had been taken prisoner. When Reuben, the eldest, mentioned that they needed to bring Benjamin to Egypt to prove their word as honest men, their father became furious with them. He couldn't understand how they were put in a position to tell the Egyptians all about their family. When the sons of Israel opened their sacks, they saw their money that they used to pay for the grain. It was still in their possession, and so they all became afraid. Israel then became angry with the loss of Joseph, Simeon, and now possibly Benjamin.
It turned out that Joseph, who identified his brothers in Egypt, was able to secretly return the money that they used to pay for the grain, back to them. When the house of Israel consumed all the grain that they brought from Egypt, Israel told his sons to go back and buy more. This time, Judah spoke to his father in order to persuade him about having Benjamin accompany them, so as to prevent Egyptian retribution. In hopes of retrieving Simeon and ensuring Benjamin's return, Israel told them to bring the best fruits of their land, including: balm, honey, spices, myrrh, pistachio nuts and almonds. Israel also mentioned that the money that was returned to their money sacks was probably a mistake or an oversight on their part. So, he told them to bring that money back and use double that amount to pay for the new grain. Lastly, he let Benjamin go with them and said "may God Almighty give you mercy... If I am bereaved, I am bereaved!"
When the sons of Israel (Jacob) returned to Hebron from their second trip, they came back with 20 additional donkeys carrying all kinds of goods and supplies as well as Egyptian transport wagons. When their father came out to meet them, his sons told him that Joseph was still alive, that he was the governor over all of Egypt and that he wanted the house of Israel to move to Egypt. Israel's heart "stood still" and just couldn't believe what he was hearing. Looking upon the wagons he declared "Joseph my son is still alive. I will go and see him before I die."
Israel and his entire house of 70, gathered up with all their livestock and began their journey to Egypt. En route, Israel stopped at Beersheba for the night to make a sacrificial offering to his God, Yahweh. Apparently he had some reservations about leaving the land of his forefathers, but God reassured him not to fear that he would rise again. God also assured that he would be with him, he would prosper, and he would also see his son Joseph who would lay him to rest. Continuing their journey to Egypt, when they approached in proximity, Israel sent his son Judah ahead to find out where the caravans were to stop. They were directed to disembark at Goshen. It was here, after 22 years, that Jacob saw his son Joseph once again. They embraced each other and wept together for quite a while. Israel then said, "Now let me die, since I have seen your face, because you are still alive."
The time had come for Joseph's family to personally meet the Pharaoh of Egypt. After Joseph prepared his family for the meeting, the brothers came before the Pharaoh first, formally requesting to pasture in Egyptian lands. The Pharaoh honored their stay and even made the notion that if there were any competent men in their house, then they may elect a chief herdsman to oversee Egyptian livestock. Finally, Joseph's father was brought out to meet the Pharaoh. Because the Pharaoh had such a high regard for Joseph, practically making him his equal, it was an honor to meet his father. Thus, Israel was able to bless the Pharaoh. The two chatted for a bit, the Pharaoh even inquiring of Israel's age which happened to be 130 years old at that time. After the meeting, the families were directed to pasture in the land of Ramses where they lived in the province of Goshen. The house of Israel acquired many possessions and multiplied exceedingly during the course of 17 years, even through the worst of the seven-year famine.
Israel (Jacob) was 147 years old when he called to his favorite son Joseph and pleaded that he not be buried in Egypt. Rather, he requested to be carried to the land of Canaan to be buried with his forefathers. Joseph swore to do as his father asked of him. Not too long afterward, Israel had fallen ill, losing much of his vision. When Joseph came to visit his father, he brought with him his two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh. Israel declared that they would be heirs to the inheritance of the house of Israel, as if they were his own children, just as Reuben and Simeon were. Then Israel laid his right hand on the younger Ephraim's head and his left hand on the eldest Manasseh's head and blessed Joseph. However, Joseph was displeased that his father's right hand was not on the head of his firstborn, so he switched his father's hands. But Israel refused saying, "but truly his younger brother shall be greater than he." A declaration he made, just as Israel himself was to his firstborn brother Esau. Then Israel called all of his sons in and prophesied their blessings or curses to all twelve of them in order of their ages.
Afterward, Israel died and the family, including the Egyptians, mourned him 70 days. Israel was embalmed for 40 days and a great ceremonial journey to Canaan was prepared by Joseph. He led the servants of Pharaoh, and the elders of the houses Israel and Egypt beyond the Jordan River to Atad where they observed seven days of mourning. Their lamentation was so great that it caught the attention of surrounding Canaanites who remarked "This is a deep mourning of the Egyptians." This spot was then named Abel Mizraim. Then they buried him in the cave of Machpelah, the property of Abraham when he bought it from the Hittite Ephron.
Jacob, through his two wives and his two concubines had 12 biological sons; Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, Joseph and Benjamin. The scene of Jacob mourning Joseph makes mention of him having a number of daughters, but no details are provided. Only one daughter, Dinah, is known by name. In addition, Jacob also adopted the two sons of Joseph, Manasseh and Ephraim.
The offspring of Jacob's sons became the tribes of Israel following the Exodus, when the Israelites conquered and settled in the Land of Israel.
There are two opinions in the Midrash as to how old Rebecca was at the time of her marriage and, consequently, at the twins' birth. According to the traditional counting cited by Rashi, Isaac was 37 years old at the time of the Binding of Isaac, and news of Rebecca's birth reached Abraham immediately after that event. In that case, since Isaac was 60 when Jacob and Esau were born and they had been married for 20 years, then Isaac was 40 years old when he married Rebecca (Gen. 25:20), making Rebecca three years old at the time of her marriage, and 23 years old at the birth of Jacob and Esau. According to the second opinion, Rebecca was 14 years old at the time of their marriage, and 34 years old at the birth of Jacob and Esau. In either case, Isaac and Rebecca were married for 20 years before Jacob and Esau were born. The Midrash says that during Rebecca's pregnancy whenever she would pass a house of Torah study, Jacob would struggle to come out; whenever she would pass a house of idolatry, Esau would agitate to come out.
Rashi explained that Isaac, when blessing Jacob instead of Esau, smelled the heavenly scent of Gan Eden (Paradise) when Jacob entered his room and, in contrast, perceived Gehenna opening beneath Esau when the latter entered the room, showing him that he had been deceived all along by Esau's show of piety.
According to the Talmud, Jacob did not flee directly to Haran (as would seem from the Biblical text), but rather studied for 14 years at the study house of Shem and Eber before continuing towards Haran.
When Laban planned to deceive Jacob into marrying Leah instead of Rachel, the Midrash recounts that both Jacob and Rachel suspected that Laban would pull such a trick; Laban was known as the "Aramean" (deceiver), and changed Jacob's wages ten times during his employ (Genesis 31:7). The couple therefore devised a series of signs by which Jacob could identify the veiled bride on his wedding night. But when Rachel saw her sister being taken out to the wedding canopy, her heart went out to her for the public shame Leah would suffer if she were exposed. Rachel therefore gave Leah the signs so that Jacob would not realize the switch.
Jacob had still another reason for grieving the loss of Joseph. God had promised to him: "If none of your sons dies during your lifetime, you may look upon it as a token that you will not be put in (Hell of) Gehenna after your death." Thinking Joseph to be dead, Jacob had his own destiny to lament because he considered that he was doomed to that Hell.
Jewish apocalyptic literature of the Hellenistic period includes many ancient texts with narratives about Jacob, many times with details different from Genesis. The more important are the Book of Jubilees and the Book of Biblical Antiquities. Jacob is also the protagonist of the Testament of Jacob, of the Ladder of Jacob and of the Prayer of Joseph, which interpret the experience of this Patriarch in the context of merkabah mysticism.
The Eastern Orthodox Church and those Eastern Catholic Churches which follow the Byzantine Rite see Jacob's dream as a prophecy of the incarnation of the Logos, whereby Jacob's ladder is understood as a symbol of the Theotokos (Virgin Mary), who, according to Eastern Orthodox theology, united heaven and earth in her womb. The biblical account of this vision is one of the standard Old Testament readings at Vespers on Great Feasts of the Theotokos.
The Eastern and Western Churches consider Jacob as a saint along with other biblical patriarchs. Along with other patriarchs his feast day is celebrated in the Byzantine rite on the Second Sunday before the Advent (December 11–17), under the title the Sunday of the Forefathers.
Two further references to Isra'il (Arabic: إِسْرَآئِیل [ˈisraāˈiyl]; Classical/ Quranic Arabic: إِسْرَآءِیْل [ˈisraāãˈiyl]) are believed to be mention of Jacob. The Arabic form Ya'qūb (Arabic: يَعْقُوب, romanized: Yaʿqūb may be direct from the Hebrew or indirect through Syriac.
He is recognized in Islam as a prophet who received inspiration from God. He is acknowledged as a patriarch of Islam. Muslims believe that he preached the same monotheistic faith as his forefathers ʾIbrāhīm, ʾIsḥāq and Ismā'īl. Jacob is mentioned 16 times in the Quran. In the majority of these references, Jacob is mentioned alongside fellow prophets and patriarchs as an ancient and pious prophet. According to the Quran, Jacob remained in the company of the elect throughout his life. (38:47) The Quran specifically mentions that Jacob was guided (6:84) and inspired (4:163) and was chosen to enforce the awareness of the Hereafter. (38:46) Jacob is described as a good-doer (21:72) and the Quran further makes it clear that God inspired Jacob to contribute towards purification and hold the contact prayer. (21:73) Jacob is further described as being resourceful and a possessor of great vision (38:45) and is further spoken of as being granted a "tongue [voice] of truthfulness to be heard." (19:50)
Of the life of Jacob, the Quran narrates two especially important events. The first is the role he plays in the story of his son Joseph. The Quran narrates the story of Joseph in detail, and Jacob, being Joseph's father, is mentioned thrice and is referenced another 25 times. In the narrative, Jacob does not trust some of his older sons (12: 11, 18, 23) because they do not respect him. (12: 8, 16–17) Jacob's prophetic nature is evident from his foreknowledge of Joseph's future greatness (12:6), his foreboding and response to the supposed death of Joseph (12: 13, 18) and in his response to the sons' plight in Egypt. (12: 83, 86–87, 96) Islamic literature fleshes out the narrative of Jacob, and mentions that his wives included Rachel. Jacob is later mentioned in the Quran in the context of the promise bestowed to Zechariah, regarding the birth of John the Baptist. (19:6) Jacob's second mention is in the Quran's second chapter. As Jacob lay on his deathbed, he asked his 12 sons to testify their faith to him before he departed from this world to the next. (2:132) Each son testified in front of Jacob that they would promise to remain Muslim (in submission to God) until the day of their death; that is they would surrender their wholeselves to God alone and would worship only Him.
In contrast to the Judeo-Christian view of Jacob, one main difference is that the story of Jacob's blessing, in which he deceives Isaac, is not accepted in Islam. The Quran makes it clear that Jacob was blessed by God as a prophet and, therefore, Muslims believe that his father, being a prophet as well, also knew of his son's greatness. Jacob is also cited in the Hadith as an example of one who was patient and trusting in God in the face of suffering.
According to the teachings of the Nation of Islam (NOI), the original inhabitants of the world were black (referred to as the "Asiatic Blackman"), while the white race are "devils" who were created 6,000 years ago on what is today the Greek island of Patmos by the biblical and quranic Jacob, whom the group refers to as the "bigheaded scientist" Yakub. Though rejected by the vast majority of American Muslims, several NOI breakaway sects, including the Five-Percent Nation subscribe to this narrative. In contrast to both the Bible and Qu’ran, NOI theology teaches that Yakub was born in Mecca.
Although archaeologist and biblical scholar William F. Albright maintained (c. 1961) that the narratives of Abraham and Jacob could be dated to about the 19th century BCE;, John J. Bimson wrote in 1980: "Since then ... there has been a strong reaction against the use of archaeological evidence in support of the biblical traditions, and Albright's comment could not be repeated with any truth today." Nahum M. Sarna (1978) noted that an inability to date the narratives of the patriarchs does not necessarily invalidate their historicity, a view supported by Bimson, who admitted that "Our knowledge of the centuries around 2000 BCE is very small, and our ignorance very great."
Gerhard von Rad, in his Old Testament Theology (1962) postulated that the patriarchal narratives describe actual events subsequently interpreted by the community through its own experience. Other scholars, such as Thomas L. Thompson, view the narratives as late literary compositions (6th and 5th centuries BCE) that have ideological and theological purposes but are unreliable for historical reconstruction of the pre-settlement period of the Israelites. In The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives (1974), Thompson suggested that the narratives arose in a response to some emergent situation, expressed as an imaginative picture of the past to embody hope.
In The Ascent of Man (1973), Jacob Bronowski pointed out similarities between Jacob and Bakhtyar, who lends his name to Iran's Bakhtiari people. Both were herdsmen who had two wives, and are regarded as the ancestral patriarch of their nomadic people.
Archaeologist William G. Dever wrote in 2001: "After a century of exhaustive investigation, all respectable archaeologists have given up hope of recovering any context that would make Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob 'historical figures.'" Excavations in the Timna Valley produced what may be the earliest camel bones found in Israel or even outside the Arabian Peninsula, dating to around 930 BCE. This is seen by some as evidence that the stories of Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph (said to have taken place a thousand years earlier) were written no earlier than the 10th century BCE.
Israel Finkelstein proposed the Jacob-Esau narratives could have originated from 8th century BCE Kingdom of Israel because the conflict with Edom fits well not only in a Judahite context but also in 8th century BCE Israelite context. Other scholars have suggested that the story could fit also in a 2nd millennium BCE context. Finkelstein suggests there is an archaeological evidence that 8th century Israel interacted with Edom: the graffiti of Kuntillet Ajrud that mention both a "YHWH of Samaria" (center of Israel) and a "YHWH of Teman" (center of Edom). He proposed the Jacob-Laban narrative might stem from the 8th century BCE as Haran was then the western capital of the Assyrian empire. He also proposed that the earliest layer of Jacob cycle or the oldest Jacob tradition, which is the story of him and his uncle Laban establishing the border between them, might be a pre-monarchic tradition and could be originated from Gilead.
According to researches on the historicity of the Old Testament, the descent of Abraham into Egypt as recorded in Genesis 12:10–20 should correspond to the early years of the 2nd millennium BCE, which is before the time the Hyksos ruled in Egypt, but would coincide with the Semitic parties known to have visited the Egyptians circa 1900 BCE, as documented in the painting of a West-Asiatic procession of the tomb of Khnumhotep II at Beni Hasan. It might be possible to associate Abraham to such known Semitic visitors to Egypt, as they would have been ethnically connected. The period of Joseph and Jacob/Israel in Egypt (Genesis 39:50), where they were in favour at the Egyptian court and Joseph held high administrative positions next to the ruler of the land, would correspond to the time the Hyksos ruled in Egypt, during the Fifteenth Dynasty. The time of Moses and the expulsion to Palestine related in The Exodus could also correspond to the expulsion of the Hyksos from Egypt. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Jacob (/ˈdʒeɪkəb/; Hebrew: יַעֲקֹב, Modern: Yaʿaqōv, Tiberian: Yaʿăqōḇ; Arabic: يَعْقُوب, romanized: Yaʿqūb; Greek: Ἰακώβ, romanized: Iakṓb), later given the name Israel, is regarded as a patriarch of the Israelites and is an important figure in Abrahamic religions, such as Judaism, Samaritanism, Christianity, and Islam. Jacob first appears in the Book of Genesis, originating from the Hebrew tradition in the Torah. Described as the son of Isaac and Rebecca, and the grandson of Abraham, Sarah, and Bethuel, Jacob is presented as the second-born among Isaac's children. His fraternal twin brother is the elder, named Esau, according to the biblical account. Jacob is said to have bought Esau's birthright and, with his mother's help, deceived his aging father to bless him instead of Esau. Later in the narrative, following a severe drought in his homeland of Canaan, Jacob and his descendants, with the help of his son Joseph (who had become a confidant of the pharaoh), moved to Egypt where Jacob died at the age of 147. He is supposed to have been buried in the Cave of Machpelah.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Jacob had twelve sons through four women, his wives (and cousins), Leah and Rachel, and his concubines, Bilhah and Zilpah, who were, in order of their birth, Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, Joseph, and Benjamin, all of whom became the heads of their own family groups, later known as the Twelve Tribes of Israel. He also had a daughter named Dinah. According to Genesis, Jacob displayed favoritism among his wives and children, preferring Rachel and her sons, Joseph and Benjamin, causing tension within the family—culminating in Joseph's older brothers selling him into slavery.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Scholars have taken a mixed view as to Jacob's historicity, with archaeology so far producing no evidence for his existence.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "According to the folk etymology found in Genesis 25:26, the name Yaʿaqōv יעקב is derived from ʿaqev עָקֵב \"heel\", as Jacob was born grasping the heel of his twin brother Esau. The historical origin of the name is uncertain, although similar names have been recorded. Yaqub-Har is recorded as a place name in a list by Thutmose III (15th century BC), and later as the nomen of a Hyksos pharaoh. The hieroglyphs are ambiguous, and can be read as \"Yaqub-Har\", \"Yaqubaal\", or \"Yaqub El\". The same name is recorded earlier still, in c. 1800 BC, in cuneiform inscriptions (spelled ya-ah-qu-ub-el, ya-qu-ub-el). The suggestion that the personal name may be shortened from this compound name, which would translate to \"may El protect\", originates with Bright (1960). The Septuagint renders the name Iákobos (Ancient Greek: Ἰάκωβος), whence Latin Jacobus, English Jacob.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The name Israel given to Jacob following the episode of his wrestling with the angel (Genesis 32:22–32) is etymologized as composition of אֵל el \"god\" and the root שָׂרָה śarah \"to rule, contend, have power, prevail over\": שָׂרִיתָ עִם־אֱלֹהִים (KJV: \"a prince hast thou power with God\"); alternatively, the el can be read as the subject, for a translation of \"El rules/contends/struggles\".",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The biblical account of the life of Jacob is found in the Book of Genesis, chapters 25–50.",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Jacob and his twin brother, Esau, were born to Isaac and Rebecca after 20 years of marriage, when Isaac was 60 years of age. Rebecca was uncomfortable during her pregnancy and went to inquire of God why she was suffering. She received the prophecy that twins were fighting in her womb and would continue to fight all their lives, even after they became two separate nations. The prophecy also said that \"the one people shall be stronger than the other people; and the elder shall serve the younger\" (Genesis 25:25 KJV).",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "When the time came for Rebecca to give birth, the firstborn, Esau, came out covered with red hair, as if he were wearing a hairy garment, and his heel was grasped by the hand of Jacob, the secondborn. According to Genesis 25, Isaac and Rebecca named the first son Hebrew: עשו, Esau. The second son they named יעקב, Jacob (Ya'aqob or Ya'aqov, meaning \"heel-catcher\", \"supplanter\", \"leg-puller\", \"he who follows upon the heels of one\", from Hebrew: עקב, 'aqab or 'aqav, \"seize by the heel\", \"circumvent\", \"restrain\", a wordplay upon Hebrew: עקבה, 'iqqebah or 'iqqbah, \"heel\").",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The boys displayed very different natures as they matured. \"... and Esau was a cunning hunter, a man of the field; but Jacob was a simple man, dwelling in tents\". Moreover, the attitudes of their parents toward them also differed: \"And Isaac loved Esau, because he did eat of his venison: but Rebecca loved Jacob.\"",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Genesis 25:29–34 tells the account of Esau selling his birthright to Jacob. This passage tells that Esau, returning famished from the fields, begged Jacob to give him some of the stew that Jacob had just made. (Esau referred to the dish as \"that same red pottage\", giving rise to his nickname, Hebrew: אדום ('Edom, meaning \"Red\").) Jacob offered to give Esau a bowl of stew in exchange for his birthright, to which Esau agreed.",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "As Isaac aged, he became blind and was uncertain when he would die, so he decided to bestow Esau's birthright upon him. He requested that Esau go out to the fields with his weapons (quiver and bow) to kill some venison. Isaac then requested that Esau make \"savory meat\" for him out of the venison, according to the way he enjoyed it the most, so that he could eat it and bless Esau.",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Rebecca overheard this conversation. It is suggested that she realized prophetically that Isaac's blessings would go to Jacob, since she was told before the twins' birth that the older son would serve the younger. Rebecca blessed Jacob and she quickly ordered Jacob to bring her two kid goats from their flock so that he could take Esau's place in serving Isaac and receiving his blessing. Jacob protested that his father would recognize their deception since Esau was hairy and he himself was smooth-skinned. He feared his father would curse him as soon as he felt him, but Rebecca offered to take the curse herself, then insisted that Jacob obey her. Jacob did as his mother instructed and, when he returned with the kids, Rebecca made the savory meat that Isaac loved. Before she sent Jacob to his father, she dressed him in Esau's garments and laid goatskins on his arms and neck to simulate hairy skin.",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Disguised as Esau, Jacob entered Isaac's room. Surprised that Esau was back so soon, Isaac asked how it could be that the hunt went so quickly. Jacob responded, \"Because the LORD your God brought it to me.\" Rashi says Isaac's suspicions were aroused even more, because Esau never used the personal name of God. Isaac demanded that Jacob come close so he could feel him, but the goatskins felt just like Esau's hairy skin. Confused, Isaac exclaimed, \"The voice is Jacob's voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau!\" Still trying to get at the truth, Isaac asked him directly, \"Art thou my very son Esau?\" and Jacob answered simply, \"I am.\" Isaac proceeded to eat the food and to drink the wine that Jacob gave him, and then told him to come close and kiss him. As Jacob kissed his father, Isaac smelled the clothes which belonged to Esau and finally accepted that the person in front of him was Esau. Isaac then blessed Jacob with the blessing that was meant for Esau. Genesis 27:28–29 states Isaac's blessing: \"Therefore God give thee of the dew of heavens, and the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine: Let people serve thee: be lord over thy brethren, and let thy mother's sons bow down to thee: cursed be every one that curseth thee, and blessed be he that blesseth thee.\"",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Jacob had scarcely left the room when Esau returned from the hunt to prepare his game and receive the blessing. The realization that he had been deceived shocked Isaac, yet he acknowledged that Jacob had received the blessings by adding, \"Indeed, he will be [or remain] blessed!\" (27:33).",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Esau was heartbroken by the deception and begged for his own blessing. Having made Jacob a ruler over his brothers, Isaac could only promise, \"By your sword you shall live, but your brother you shall serve; yet it shall be that when you are aggrieved, you may cast off his yoke from upon your neck\" (27:39–40).",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Although Esau sold Jacob his own birthright, which was his blessing, for \"red pottage,\" Esau still hated Jacob for receiving his blessing that their father Isaac unknowingly had given to him. He vowed to kill Jacob as soon as Isaac died. When Rebecca heard about his murderous intentions, she ordered Jacob to travel to her brother Laban's house in Haran, until Esau's anger subsided. She convinced Isaac to send Jacob away by telling him that she despaired of his marrying a local girl from the idol-worshipping families of Canaan (as Esau had done). After Isaac sent Jacob away to find a wife, Esau realized his own Canaanite wives were evil in his father's eyes and so he took a daughter of Isaac's half-brother, Ishmael, as another wife.",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Near Luz en route to Haran, Jacob experienced a vision of a ladder, or staircase, reaching into heaven with angels going up and down it, subsequently referred to in popular culture as \"Jacob's ladder.\" He heard the voice of God, who repeated many of the blessings upon him, coming from the top of the ladder.",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "According to Midrash Genesis Rabbah, the ladder signified the exiles that the Jewish people would suffer before the coming of the Jewish Messiah: the angels that represented the exiles of Babylonia, Persia, and Greece each climbed up a certain number of steps, paralleling the years of the exile, before they \"fell down\"; but the angel representing the last exile, that of Edom, kept climbing higher and higher into the clouds. Jacob feared that his descendants would never be free of Esau's domination, but God assured him that at the End of Days, Edom too would come falling down.",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In the morning, Jacob awakened and continued on his way to Haran, after naming the place where he had spent the night \"Bethel\", \"God's house.\"",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Arriving in Haran, Jacob saw a well where shepherds were gathering their flocks to water them and met Laban's younger daughter, Rachel, Jacob's first cousin; she was working as a shepherdess. Jacob was 77 years old, and he loved Rachel immediately. After spending a month with his relatives he asked for her hand in marriage in return for working seven years for Laban the Aramean. Laban agreed to the arrangement. These seven years seemed to Jacob \"but a few days, for the love he had for her.\" When they were complete and he was 84 years old he asked for his wife, but Laban deceived him by switching Rachel for her older sister, Leah, as the veiled bride. In the morning, when the truth became known, Laban justified his action, saying that in his country it was unheard of to give a younger daughter before the older. However, he agreed to give Rachel in marriage as well if Jacob would work another seven years. After the week of wedding celebrations with Leah, Jacob married Rachel, and he continued to work for Laban for another seven years.",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Jacob, having been celibate until the age of 84, fathered twelve children in the next seven years. He loved Rachel more than Leah, and Leah felt hated. God opened Leah's womb and she gave birth to four sons rapidly: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah. Rachel, however, remained barren. Following the example of Sarah, who gave her handmaid to Abraham after years of infertility, Rachel gave her handmaid Bilhah to Jacob so that Rachel could raise children through her. Bilhah gave birth to Dan and Naphtali. Seeing that she had left off childbearing temporarily, Leah then gave her handmaid Zilpah to Jacob so that Leah could raise more children through her. Zilpah gave birth to Gad and Asher. Afterwards, Leah became fertile again and gave birth to Issachar, Zebulun, and Dinah, Jacob's first and only daughter. God remembered Rachel, who gave birth to Joseph and Benjamin.",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "After Joseph was born, Jacob decided to return home to his parents. Laban the Aramean was reluctant to release him, as God had blessed his flock on account of Jacob. Laban asked what he could pay Jacob. Jacob suggested that all the spotted, speckled, and brown goats and sheep of Laban's flock, at any given moment, would be his wages. Jacob placed rods of poplar, hazel, and chestnut, all of which he peeled \"white streaks upon them,\" within the flocks' watering holes or troughs, associating the stripes of the rods with the growth of stripes on the livestock. Despite this practicing of magic, later on Jacob says to his wives that it was God who made the livestock give birth to the convenient offspring, in order to turn the tide against the deceptive Laban. As time passed, Laban's sons noticed that Jacob was taking the better part of their flocks, and so Laban's friendly attitude towards Jacob began to change. The angel of the Lord, in a dream back during the breeding season, told Jacob \"Now lift your eyes and see [that] all the he goats mounting the animals are ringed, speckled, and striped, for I have seen all that Laban is doing to you\", that he is the God whom Jacob met at Bethel, and that Jacob should leave and go back to the land where he was born, which he and his wives and children did without informing Laban. Before they left, Rachel stole the teraphim, considered to be household idols, from Laban's house.",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Laban pursued Jacob for seven days. The night before he caught up to him, God appeared to Laban in a dream and warned him not to say anything good or bad to Jacob. When the two met, Laban said to Jacob, \"What have you done, that you have tricked me and driven away my daughters like captives of the sword?\" He also asked for his stolen teraphim back. Knowing nothing about Rachel's theft, Jacob told Laban that whoever stole them should die and stood aside to let him search. When Laban reached Rachel's tent, she hid the teraphim by sitting on them and stating she could not get up because she was menstruating. Jacob and Laban then parted from each other with a pact to preserve the peace between them near Gilead. Laban returned to his home and Jacob continued on his way.",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "As Jacob neared the land of Canaan as he passed Mahanaim, he sent messengers ahead to his brother Esau. They returned with the news that Esau was coming to meet Jacob with an army of 400 men. With great apprehension, Jacob prepared for the worst. He engaged in earnest prayer to God, then sent on before him a tribute of flocks and herds to Esau, \"A present to my lord Esau from thy servant Jacob.\"",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Jacob then transported his family and flocks across the ford Jabbok by night, then recrossed back to send over his possessions, being left alone in communion with God. There, a mysterious being appeared (\"man,\" Genesis 32:24, 28; or \"God,\" Genesis 32:28, 30, Hosea 12:3, 5; or \"angel,\" Hosea 12:4), and the two wrestled until daybreak. When the being saw that he did not overpower Jacob, he touched Jacob on the sinew of his thigh (the gid hanasheh, גיד הנשה), and, as a result, Jacob developed a limp (Genesis 32:31). Because of this, \"to this day the people of Israel do not eat the sinew of the thigh that is on the hip socket\" This incident is the source of the mitzvah of porging.",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Jacob then demanded a blessing, and the being declared in Genesis 32:28 that, from then on, Jacob would be called יִשְׂרָאֵל, Israel (Yisra'el, meaning \"one that struggled with the divine angel\" (Josephus), \"one who has prevailed with God\" (Rashi), \"a man seeing God\" (Whiston), \"he will rule as God\" (Strong), or \"a prince with God\" (Morris), from Hebrew: שרה, \"prevail,\" \"have power as a prince\"). While he is still called Jacob in later texts, his name Israel makes some consider him the eponymous ancestor of the Israelites.",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Jacob asked the being's name, but he refused to answer. Afterwards, Jacob named the place Penuel (Penuw'el, Peniy'el, meaning \"face of God\"), saying: \"I have seen God face to face and lived.\"",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Because the terminology is ambiguous (\"el\" in Yisra'el) and inconsistent, and because this being refused to reveal his name, there are varying views as to whether he was a man, an angel, or God. Josephus uses only the terms \"angel\", \"divine angel,\" and \"angel of God,\" describing the struggle as no small victory. According to Rashi, the being was the guardian angel of Esau himself, sent to destroy Jacob before he could return to the land of Canaan. Trachtenberg theorized that the being refused to identify itself for fear that, if its secret name was known, it would be conjurable by incantations. Literal Christian interpreters like Henry M. Morris say that the stranger was \"God Himself and, therefore, Christ in His preincarnate state\", citing Jacob's own evaluation and the name he assumed thereafter, \"one who fights victoriously with God\", and adding that God had appeared in the human form of the Angel of the Lord to eat a meal with Abraham in Genesis 18. Geller wrote that, \"in the context of the wrestling bout, the name implies that Jacob won this supremacy, linked to that of God's, by a kind of theomachy.\"",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In the morning, Jacob assembled his four wives and 11 sons, placing the maidservants and their children in front, Leah and her children next, and Rachel and Joseph in the rear. Some commentators cite this placement as proof that Jacob continued to favor Joseph over Leah's children, as presumably the rear position would have been safer from a frontal assault by Esau, which Jacob feared. Jacob himself took the foremost position. Esau's spirit of revenge, however, was apparently appeased by Jacob's bounteous gifts of camels, goats and flocks. Their reunion was an emotional one.",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Esau offered to accompany them on their way back to Israel, but Jacob protested that his children were still young and tender (born six to 13 years prior in the narrative); Jacob suggested eventually catching up with Esau at Mount Seir. According to the Sages, this was a prophetic reference to the End of Days, when Jacob's descendants will come to Mount Seir, the home of Edom, to deliver judgment against Esau's descendants for persecuting them throughout the millennia. Jacob actually diverted himself to Succoth and was not recorded as rejoining Esau until, at Machpelah, the two bury their father Isaac, who lived to be 180, and was 60 years older than they were.",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Jacob then arrived in Shechem, where he bought a parcel of land, now identified as Joseph's Tomb. In Shechem, Jacob's daughter Dinah was kidnapped and raped by the ruler's son, who desired to marry the girl. Dinah's brothers, Simeon and Levi, agreed in Jacob's name to permit the marriage as long as all the men of Shechem first circumcised themselves, ostensibly to unite the children of Jacob in Abraham's covenant of familial harmony. On the third day after the circumcisions, when all the men of Shechem were still in pain, Simeon and Levi put them all to death by the sword and rescued their sister Dinah, and their brothers plundered the property, women, and children. Jacob condemned this act, saying: \"You have brought trouble on me by making me a stench to the Canaanites and Perizzites, the people living in this land.\" He later rebuked his two sons for their anger in his deathbed blessing (Genesis 49:5–7).",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Jacob returned to Bethel, where he had another vision of blessing. Although the death of Rebecca, Jacob's mother, is not explicitly recorded in the Bible, Deborah, Rebecca's nurse, died and was buried at Bethel, at a place that Jacob calls Allon Bachuth (אלון בכות), \"Oak of Weepings\" (Genesis 35:8). According to the Midrash, the plural form of the word \"weeping\" indicates the double sorrow that Rebecca also died at this time.",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Jacob then made a further move while Rachel was pregnant; near Bethlehem, Rachel went into labor and died as she gave birth to her second son, Benjamin (Jacob's twelfth son). Jacob buried her and erected a monument over her grave. Rachel's Tomb, just outside Bethlehem, remains a popular site for pilgrimages and prayers to this day. Jacob then settled in Migdal Eder, where his firstborn, Reuben, slept with Rachel's servant Bilhah; Jacob's response was not given at the time, but he did condemn Reuben for it later, in his deathbed blessing. Jacob was finally reunited with his father Isaac in Mamre (outside Hebron).",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "When Isaac died at the age of 180, Jacob and Esau buried him in the Cave of the Patriarchs, which Abraham had purchased as a family burial plot. At this point in the biblical narrative, two genealogies of Esau's family appear under the headings \"the generations of Esau\". A conservative interpretation is that, at Isaac's burial, Jacob obtained the records of Esau, who had been married 80 years prior, and incorporated them into his own family records, and that Moses augmented and published them.",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The house of Jacob dwelt in Hebron, in the land of Canaan. His flocks were often fed in the pastures of Shechem as well as Dothan. Of all the children in his household, he loved Rachel's firstborn son, Joseph, the most. Thus Joseph's half brothers were jealous of him and they ridiculed him often. Joseph even told his father about all of his half brothers' misdeeds. When Joseph was 17 years old, Jacob made a long coat or tunic of many colors for him. Seeing this, the half brothers began to hate Joseph. Then Joseph began to have dreams that implied that his family would bow down to him. When he told his brothers about such dreams, it drove them to conspire against him. When Jacob heard of these dreams, he rebuked his son for proposing the idea that the house of Jacob would even bow down to Joseph. Yet, he contemplated his son's words about these dreams.",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Sometime afterward, the sons of Jacob by Leah, Bilhah and Zilpah, were feeding his flocks in Shechem. Jacob wanted to know how things were doing, so he asked Joseph to go down there and return with a report. This was the last time he would ever see his son in Hebron. Later that day, the report that Jacob ended up receiving came from Joseph's brothers who brought before him a coat laden with blood. Jacob identified the coat as the one he made for Joseph. At that moment he cried \"It is my son's tunic. A wild beast has devoured him. Without doubt Joseph is torn to pieces.\" He rent his clothes and put sackcloth around his waist mourning for days. No one from the house of Jacob could comfort him during this time of bereavement.",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The truth was that Joseph's older brothers had turned on him, apprehended him and ultimately sold him into slavery on a caravan headed for Egypt.",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Twenty years later, throughout the Middle East a severe famine occurred like none other that lasted seven years. It crippled nations. The word was that the only kingdom prospering was Egypt. In the second year of this great famine, when Israel (Jacob) was about 130 years old, he told his 10 sons of Leah, Bilhah and Zilpah, to go to Egypt and buy grain. Israel's youngest son Benjamin, born from Rachel, stayed behind by his father's order to keep him safe.",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Nine of the sons returned to their father Israel from Egypt, stockpiled with grain on their donkeys. They relayed to their father all that had happened in Egypt. They spoke of being accused as spies and that their brother Simeon had been taken prisoner. When Reuben, the eldest, mentioned that they needed to bring Benjamin to Egypt to prove their word as honest men, their father became furious with them. He couldn't understand how they were put in a position to tell the Egyptians all about their family. When the sons of Israel opened their sacks, they saw their money that they used to pay for the grain. It was still in their possession, and so they all became afraid. Israel then became angry with the loss of Joseph, Simeon, and now possibly Benjamin.",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "It turned out that Joseph, who identified his brothers in Egypt, was able to secretly return the money that they used to pay for the grain, back to them. When the house of Israel consumed all the grain that they brought from Egypt, Israel told his sons to go back and buy more. This time, Judah spoke to his father in order to persuade him about having Benjamin accompany them, so as to prevent Egyptian retribution. In hopes of retrieving Simeon and ensuring Benjamin's return, Israel told them to bring the best fruits of their land, including: balm, honey, spices, myrrh, pistachio nuts and almonds. Israel also mentioned that the money that was returned to their money sacks was probably a mistake or an oversight on their part. So, he told them to bring that money back and use double that amount to pay for the new grain. Lastly, he let Benjamin go with them and said \"may God Almighty give you mercy... If I am bereaved, I am bereaved!\"",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "When the sons of Israel (Jacob) returned to Hebron from their second trip, they came back with 20 additional donkeys carrying all kinds of goods and supplies as well as Egyptian transport wagons. When their father came out to meet them, his sons told him that Joseph was still alive, that he was the governor over all of Egypt and that he wanted the house of Israel to move to Egypt. Israel's heart \"stood still\" and just couldn't believe what he was hearing. Looking upon the wagons he declared \"Joseph my son is still alive. I will go and see him before I die.\"",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Israel and his entire house of 70, gathered up with all their livestock and began their journey to Egypt. En route, Israel stopped at Beersheba for the night to make a sacrificial offering to his God, Yahweh. Apparently he had some reservations about leaving the land of his forefathers, but God reassured him not to fear that he would rise again. God also assured that he would be with him, he would prosper, and he would also see his son Joseph who would lay him to rest. Continuing their journey to Egypt, when they approached in proximity, Israel sent his son Judah ahead to find out where the caravans were to stop. They were directed to disembark at Goshen. It was here, after 22 years, that Jacob saw his son Joseph once again. They embraced each other and wept together for quite a while. Israel then said, \"Now let me die, since I have seen your face, because you are still alive.\"",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The time had come for Joseph's family to personally meet the Pharaoh of Egypt. After Joseph prepared his family for the meeting, the brothers came before the Pharaoh first, formally requesting to pasture in Egyptian lands. The Pharaoh honored their stay and even made the notion that if there were any competent men in their house, then they may elect a chief herdsman to oversee Egyptian livestock. Finally, Joseph's father was brought out to meet the Pharaoh. Because the Pharaoh had such a high regard for Joseph, practically making him his equal, it was an honor to meet his father. Thus, Israel was able to bless the Pharaoh. The two chatted for a bit, the Pharaoh even inquiring of Israel's age which happened to be 130 years old at that time. After the meeting, the families were directed to pasture in the land of Ramses where they lived in the province of Goshen. The house of Israel acquired many possessions and multiplied exceedingly during the course of 17 years, even through the worst of the seven-year famine.",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Israel (Jacob) was 147 years old when he called to his favorite son Joseph and pleaded that he not be buried in Egypt. Rather, he requested to be carried to the land of Canaan to be buried with his forefathers. Joseph swore to do as his father asked of him. Not too long afterward, Israel had fallen ill, losing much of his vision. When Joseph came to visit his father, he brought with him his two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh. Israel declared that they would be heirs to the inheritance of the house of Israel, as if they were his own children, just as Reuben and Simeon were. Then Israel laid his right hand on the younger Ephraim's head and his left hand on the eldest Manasseh's head and blessed Joseph. However, Joseph was displeased that his father's right hand was not on the head of his firstborn, so he switched his father's hands. But Israel refused saying, \"but truly his younger brother shall be greater than he.\" A declaration he made, just as Israel himself was to his firstborn brother Esau. Then Israel called all of his sons in and prophesied their blessings or curses to all twelve of them in order of their ages.",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Afterward, Israel died and the family, including the Egyptians, mourned him 70 days. Israel was embalmed for 40 days and a great ceremonial journey to Canaan was prepared by Joseph. He led the servants of Pharaoh, and the elders of the houses Israel and Egypt beyond the Jordan River to Atad where they observed seven days of mourning. Their lamentation was so great that it caught the attention of surrounding Canaanites who remarked \"This is a deep mourning of the Egyptians.\" This spot was then named Abel Mizraim. Then they buried him in the cave of Machpelah, the property of Abraham when he bought it from the Hittite Ephron.",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Jacob, through his two wives and his two concubines had 12 biological sons; Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, Joseph and Benjamin. The scene of Jacob mourning Joseph makes mention of him having a number of daughters, but no details are provided. Only one daughter, Dinah, is known by name. In addition, Jacob also adopted the two sons of Joseph, Manasseh and Ephraim.",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The offspring of Jacob's sons became the tribes of Israel following the Exodus, when the Israelites conquered and settled in the Land of Israel.",
"title": "Genesis narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "There are two opinions in the Midrash as to how old Rebecca was at the time of her marriage and, consequently, at the twins' birth. According to the traditional counting cited by Rashi, Isaac was 37 years old at the time of the Binding of Isaac, and news of Rebecca's birth reached Abraham immediately after that event. In that case, since Isaac was 60 when Jacob and Esau were born and they had been married for 20 years, then Isaac was 40 years old when he married Rebecca (Gen. 25:20), making Rebecca three years old at the time of her marriage, and 23 years old at the birth of Jacob and Esau. According to the second opinion, Rebecca was 14 years old at the time of their marriage, and 34 years old at the birth of Jacob and Esau. In either case, Isaac and Rebecca were married for 20 years before Jacob and Esau were born. The Midrash says that during Rebecca's pregnancy whenever she would pass a house of Torah study, Jacob would struggle to come out; whenever she would pass a house of idolatry, Esau would agitate to come out.",
"title": "Religious perspectives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Rashi explained that Isaac, when blessing Jacob instead of Esau, smelled the heavenly scent of Gan Eden (Paradise) when Jacob entered his room and, in contrast, perceived Gehenna opening beneath Esau when the latter entered the room, showing him that he had been deceived all along by Esau's show of piety.",
"title": "Religious perspectives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "According to the Talmud, Jacob did not flee directly to Haran (as would seem from the Biblical text), but rather studied for 14 years at the study house of Shem and Eber before continuing towards Haran.",
"title": "Religious perspectives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "When Laban planned to deceive Jacob into marrying Leah instead of Rachel, the Midrash recounts that both Jacob and Rachel suspected that Laban would pull such a trick; Laban was known as the \"Aramean\" (deceiver), and changed Jacob's wages ten times during his employ (Genesis 31:7). The couple therefore devised a series of signs by which Jacob could identify the veiled bride on his wedding night. But when Rachel saw her sister being taken out to the wedding canopy, her heart went out to her for the public shame Leah would suffer if she were exposed. Rachel therefore gave Leah the signs so that Jacob would not realize the switch.",
"title": "Religious perspectives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Jacob had still another reason for grieving the loss of Joseph. God had promised to him: \"If none of your sons dies during your lifetime, you may look upon it as a token that you will not be put in (Hell of) Gehenna after your death.\" Thinking Joseph to be dead, Jacob had his own destiny to lament because he considered that he was doomed to that Hell.",
"title": "Religious perspectives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Jewish apocalyptic literature of the Hellenistic period includes many ancient texts with narratives about Jacob, many times with details different from Genesis. The more important are the Book of Jubilees and the Book of Biblical Antiquities. Jacob is also the protagonist of the Testament of Jacob, of the Ladder of Jacob and of the Prayer of Joseph, which interpret the experience of this Patriarch in the context of merkabah mysticism.",
"title": "Religious perspectives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "The Eastern Orthodox Church and those Eastern Catholic Churches which follow the Byzantine Rite see Jacob's dream as a prophecy of the incarnation of the Logos, whereby Jacob's ladder is understood as a symbol of the Theotokos (Virgin Mary), who, according to Eastern Orthodox theology, united heaven and earth in her womb. The biblical account of this vision is one of the standard Old Testament readings at Vespers on Great Feasts of the Theotokos.",
"title": "Religious perspectives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "The Eastern and Western Churches consider Jacob as a saint along with other biblical patriarchs. Along with other patriarchs his feast day is celebrated in the Byzantine rite on the Second Sunday before the Advent (December 11–17), under the title the Sunday of the Forefathers.",
"title": "Religious perspectives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Two further references to Isra'il (Arabic: إِسْرَآئِیل [ˈisraāˈiyl]; Classical/ Quranic Arabic: إِسْرَآءِیْل [ˈisraāãˈiyl]) are believed to be mention of Jacob. The Arabic form Ya'qūb (Arabic: يَعْقُوب, romanized: Yaʿqūb may be direct from the Hebrew or indirect through Syriac.",
"title": "Religious perspectives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "He is recognized in Islam as a prophet who received inspiration from God. He is acknowledged as a patriarch of Islam. Muslims believe that he preached the same monotheistic faith as his forefathers ʾIbrāhīm, ʾIsḥāq and Ismā'īl. Jacob is mentioned 16 times in the Quran. In the majority of these references, Jacob is mentioned alongside fellow prophets and patriarchs as an ancient and pious prophet. According to the Quran, Jacob remained in the company of the elect throughout his life. (38:47) The Quran specifically mentions that Jacob was guided (6:84) and inspired (4:163) and was chosen to enforce the awareness of the Hereafter. (38:46) Jacob is described as a good-doer (21:72) and the Quran further makes it clear that God inspired Jacob to contribute towards purification and hold the contact prayer. (21:73) Jacob is further described as being resourceful and a possessor of great vision (38:45) and is further spoken of as being granted a \"tongue [voice] of truthfulness to be heard.\" (19:50)",
"title": "Religious perspectives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Of the life of Jacob, the Quran narrates two especially important events. The first is the role he plays in the story of his son Joseph. The Quran narrates the story of Joseph in detail, and Jacob, being Joseph's father, is mentioned thrice and is referenced another 25 times. In the narrative, Jacob does not trust some of his older sons (12: 11, 18, 23) because they do not respect him. (12: 8, 16–17) Jacob's prophetic nature is evident from his foreknowledge of Joseph's future greatness (12:6), his foreboding and response to the supposed death of Joseph (12: 13, 18) and in his response to the sons' plight in Egypt. (12: 83, 86–87, 96) Islamic literature fleshes out the narrative of Jacob, and mentions that his wives included Rachel. Jacob is later mentioned in the Quran in the context of the promise bestowed to Zechariah, regarding the birth of John the Baptist. (19:6) Jacob's second mention is in the Quran's second chapter. As Jacob lay on his deathbed, he asked his 12 sons to testify their faith to him before he departed from this world to the next. (2:132) Each son testified in front of Jacob that they would promise to remain Muslim (in submission to God) until the day of their death; that is they would surrender their wholeselves to God alone and would worship only Him.",
"title": "Religious perspectives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "In contrast to the Judeo-Christian view of Jacob, one main difference is that the story of Jacob's blessing, in which he deceives Isaac, is not accepted in Islam. The Quran makes it clear that Jacob was blessed by God as a prophet and, therefore, Muslims believe that his father, being a prophet as well, also knew of his son's greatness. Jacob is also cited in the Hadith as an example of one who was patient and trusting in God in the face of suffering.",
"title": "Religious perspectives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "According to the teachings of the Nation of Islam (NOI), the original inhabitants of the world were black (referred to as the \"Asiatic Blackman\"), while the white race are \"devils\" who were created 6,000 years ago on what is today the Greek island of Patmos by the biblical and quranic Jacob, whom the group refers to as the \"bigheaded scientist\" Yakub. Though rejected by the vast majority of American Muslims, several NOI breakaway sects, including the Five-Percent Nation subscribe to this narrative. In contrast to both the Bible and Qu’ran, NOI theology teaches that Yakub was born in Mecca.",
"title": "Religious perspectives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Although archaeologist and biblical scholar William F. Albright maintained (c. 1961) that the narratives of Abraham and Jacob could be dated to about the 19th century BCE;, John J. Bimson wrote in 1980: \"Since then ... there has been a strong reaction against the use of archaeological evidence in support of the biblical traditions, and Albright's comment could not be repeated with any truth today.\" Nahum M. Sarna (1978) noted that an inability to date the narratives of the patriarchs does not necessarily invalidate their historicity, a view supported by Bimson, who admitted that \"Our knowledge of the centuries around 2000 BCE is very small, and our ignorance very great.\"",
"title": "Historicity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Gerhard von Rad, in his Old Testament Theology (1962) postulated that the patriarchal narratives describe actual events subsequently interpreted by the community through its own experience. Other scholars, such as Thomas L. Thompson, view the narratives as late literary compositions (6th and 5th centuries BCE) that have ideological and theological purposes but are unreliable for historical reconstruction of the pre-settlement period of the Israelites. In The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives (1974), Thompson suggested that the narratives arose in a response to some emergent situation, expressed as an imaginative picture of the past to embody hope.",
"title": "Historicity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "In The Ascent of Man (1973), Jacob Bronowski pointed out similarities between Jacob and Bakhtyar, who lends his name to Iran's Bakhtiari people. Both were herdsmen who had two wives, and are regarded as the ancestral patriarch of their nomadic people.",
"title": "Historicity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Archaeologist William G. Dever wrote in 2001: \"After a century of exhaustive investigation, all respectable archaeologists have given up hope of recovering any context that would make Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob 'historical figures.'\" Excavations in the Timna Valley produced what may be the earliest camel bones found in Israel or even outside the Arabian Peninsula, dating to around 930 BCE. This is seen by some as evidence that the stories of Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph (said to have taken place a thousand years earlier) were written no earlier than the 10th century BCE.",
"title": "Historicity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Israel Finkelstein proposed the Jacob-Esau narratives could have originated from 8th century BCE Kingdom of Israel because the conflict with Edom fits well not only in a Judahite context but also in 8th century BCE Israelite context. Other scholars have suggested that the story could fit also in a 2nd millennium BCE context. Finkelstein suggests there is an archaeological evidence that 8th century Israel interacted with Edom: the graffiti of Kuntillet Ajrud that mention both a \"YHWH of Samaria\" (center of Israel) and a \"YHWH of Teman\" (center of Edom). He proposed the Jacob-Laban narrative might stem from the 8th century BCE as Haran was then the western capital of the Assyrian empire. He also proposed that the earliest layer of Jacob cycle or the oldest Jacob tradition, which is the story of him and his uncle Laban establishing the border between them, might be a pre-monarchic tradition and could be originated from Gilead.",
"title": "Historicity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "According to researches on the historicity of the Old Testament, the descent of Abraham into Egypt as recorded in Genesis 12:10–20 should correspond to the early years of the 2nd millennium BCE, which is before the time the Hyksos ruled in Egypt, but would coincide with the Semitic parties known to have visited the Egyptians circa 1900 BCE, as documented in the painting of a West-Asiatic procession of the tomb of Khnumhotep II at Beni Hasan. It might be possible to associate Abraham to such known Semitic visitors to Egypt, as they would have been ethnically connected. The period of Joseph and Jacob/Israel in Egypt (Genesis 39:50), where they were in favour at the Egyptian court and Joseph held high administrative positions next to the ruler of the land, would correspond to the time the Hyksos ruled in Egypt, during the Fifteenth Dynasty. The time of Moses and the expulsion to Palestine related in The Exodus could also correspond to the expulsion of the Hyksos from Egypt.",
"title": "Historicity"
}
]
| Jacob, later given the name Israel, is regarded as a patriarch of the Israelites and is an important figure in Abrahamic religions, such as Judaism, Samaritanism, Christianity, and Islam. Jacob first appears in the Book of Genesis, originating from the Hebrew tradition in the Torah. Described as the son of Isaac and Rebecca, and the grandson of Abraham, Sarah, and Bethuel, Jacob is presented as the second-born among Isaac's children. His fraternal twin brother is the elder, named Esau, according to the biblical account. Jacob is said to have bought Esau's birthright and, with his mother's help, deceived his aging father to bless him instead of Esau. Later in the narrative, following a severe drought in his homeland of Canaan, Jacob and his descendants, with the help of his son Joseph, moved to Egypt where Jacob died at the age of 147. He is supposed to have been buried in the Cave of Machpelah. Jacob had twelve sons through four women, his wives, Leah and Rachel, and his concubines, Bilhah and Zilpah, who were, in order of their birth, Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, Joseph, and Benjamin, all of whom became the heads of their own family groups, later known as the Twelve Tribes of Israel. He also had a daughter named Dinah. According to Genesis, Jacob displayed favoritism among his wives and children, preferring Rachel and her sons, Joseph and Benjamin, causing tension within the family—culminating in Joseph's older brothers selling him into slavery. Scholars have taken a mixed view as to Jacob's historicity, with archaeology so far producing no evidence for his existence. | 2001-09-29T06:26:02Z | 2023-12-26T21:34:22Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob |
16,119 | Jehoshaphat | Jehoshaphat (/dʒəˈhɒʃəfæt/; alternatively spelled Jehosaphat, Josaphat, or Yehoshafat; Hebrew: יְהוֹשָׁפָט, Modern: Yəhōšafat, Tiberian: Yŏhōšāp̄āṭ, "Yahweh has judged"; Greek: Ἰωσαφάτ, romanized: Iosafát; Latin: Josaphat), according to the Hebrew Bible, was the son of Asa, and the fourth king of the Kingdom of Judah, in succession to his father. His children included Jehoram, who succeeded him as king. His mother was Azubah. Historically, his name has sometimes been connected with the Valley of Josaphat.
2 Chronicles chapters 17 to 21 are devoted to the reign of Jehoshaphat. First Kings treats him more briefly: 1 Kings 15:24 mentions him as successor to Asa, and 1 Kings 22:1–50 summarizes the events of his life. The Jerusalem Bible states that "the Chronicler sees Asa as a type of the peaceful, Jehoshaphat of the strong king". According to these passages, Jehoshaphat ascended the throne at the age of thirty-five and reigned for twenty-five years. He "walked in the ways" of his father or ancestor, King David. He spent the first years of his reign fortifying his kingdom against the Kingdom of Israel. His zeal in suppressing the idolatrous worship of the "high places" is commended in 2 Chronicles 17:6.
In the third year of his reign, Jehoshaphat sent out priests and Levites over the land to instruct the people in the Law, an activity which was commanded for a Sabbatical year in Deuteronomy 31:10–13 (taking place in Jerusalem). Later reforms in Judah instituted by Jehoshaphat appear to have included further religious reforms, appointment of judges throughout the cities of Judah and a form of "court of appeal" in Jerusalem. Ecclesiastical and secular jurisdictions, according to 2 Chronicles 19:11, were by royal command kept distinct.
The author of the Books of Chronicles generally praises his reign, stating that the kingdom enjoyed a great measure of peace and prosperity, the blessing of God resting on the people "in their basket and their store".
Jehoshaphat also pursued alliances with the kingdom of Israel in the North. Jehoshaphat's son Jehoram married Athaliah, daughter of king Ahab of Israel. In the eighteenth year of his reign Jehosaphat visited Ahab in Samaria, and nearly lost his life accompanying his ally to the siege of Ramoth-Gilead. While Jehoshaphat safely returned from this battle, he was reproached by the prophet Jehu, son of Hanani, about this alliance. We are told that Jehoshaphat repented, and returned to his former course of opposition to all idolatry, and promoting the worship of God and in the government of his people.
Later it appears that Jehoshaphat entered into an alliance with Ahaziah of Israel, for the purpose of carrying on maritime commerce with Ophir. He subsequently joined Jehoram of Israel in a war against the Moabites, who were under tribute to Israel. The Moabites were subdued, but seeing Mesha's act of offering his own son (and singular heir) as a propitiatory human sacrifice on the walls of Kir of Moab filled Israel with horror, and they withdrew and returned to their own land.
According to Chronicles, the Moabites formed a great and powerful confederacy with the surrounding nations, and marched against Jehoshaphat. The allied forces were encamped at Ein Gedi. The king and his people were filled with alarm. The king prayed in the court of the Temple, "O our God, will you not judge them? For we have no power to face this vast army that is attacking us. We do not know what to do; but our eyes are upon you." The voice of Jahaziel the Levite was heard announcing that the next day all this great host would be overthrown. So it was, for they quarreled among themselves, and slew one another, leaving to the people of Judah only to gather the rich spoils of the slain. Soon after this victory Jehoshaphat died after a reign of twenty-five years at the age of sixty. According to some sources (such as the eleventh-century Jewish commentator Rashi), he actually died two years later, but gave up his throne earlier for unknown reasons. As with his father Asa, a bonfire was lit in his honor.
He also had the ambition to emulate Solomon's maritime ventures to Ophir, and built a large vessel for Tarshish. But when this boat was wrecked at Ezion-Geber he relinquished the project.
In I Kings xxii. 43 the piety of Jehoshaphat is briefly dwelt on. Chronicles, in keeping with its tendency, elaborates this trait of the king's character. According to its report, Jehoshaphat organized a missionary movement by sending out his officers, the priests, and the Levites to instruct the people throughout the land in the Law of YHWH, the king himself delivering sermons.
Underlying this ascription to the king of the purpose to carry out the Priestly Code, is the historical fact that Jehoshaphat took heed to organize the administration of justice on a solid foundation, and was an honest worshiper of YHWH. In connection with this the statement that Jehoshaphat expelled the "Ḳedeshim" (R. V. "Sodomites") from the land (1 Kings 22:46) is characteristic; while 2 Chron. 19:3 credits him with having cut down the Asherot. The report that he took away the "high places" (and the Asherim) conflicts with 1 Kings 22:44 (A. V. v. 43) and 2 Chron. 20:33. The account of Jehoshaphat's tremendous army (1,160,000 men) and the rich tribute received from (among others) the Philistines and the Arabs is not historical. It is in harmony with the theory worked out in Chronicles that pious monarchs have always been the mightiest and most prosperous.
The question that puzzled Heinrich Ewald and others, "Where was the brazen serpent till the time of Hezekiah?" occupied the Talmudists also. They answered it in a very simple way: Asa and Joshaphat, when clearing away the idols, purposely left the brazen serpent behind, in order that Hezekiah might also be able to do a praiseworthy deed in breaking it.
William F. Albright estimated the reign of Jehoshaphat to 873–849 BCE. Edwin R. Thiele held that he became coregent with his father Asa in Asa's 39th year, 872/871 BCE, the year Asa was infected with a severe disease in his feet, and then became sole regent when Asa died of the disease in 870/869 BCE, his own death occurring in 848/847 BCE. So Jehoshaphat's dates are taken as one year earlier: co-regency beginning in 873/871, sole reign commencing in 871/870, and death in 849/848 BCE.
The calendars for reckoning the years of kings in Judah and Israel were offset by six months, that of Judah starting in Tishri (in the fall) and that of Israel in Nisan (in the spring). Cross-synchronizations between the two kingdoms therefore often allow narrowing of the beginning and/or ending dates of a king to within a six-month range. For Jehoshaphat, the Scriptural data allow the narrowing of the beginning of his sole reign to some time between Tishri 1 of 871 BCE and the day before Nisan 1 of 870 BCE. For calculation purposes, this should be taken as the Judean year beginning in Tishri of 871/870 BCE. His death occurred at some time between Nisan 1 of 848 BCE and Tishri 1 of that same year.
The king's name in the oath jumping Jehosaphat was likely popularized by the name's utility as a euphemism for Jesus. The phrase, spelled "Jumpin' Geehosofat", is first recorded in the 1865–1866 novel The Headless Horseman by the Irish-American novelist Thomas Mayne Reid. The novel also uses "Geehosofat", standing alone, as an exclamation. The longer version "By the shaking, jumping ghost of Jehosaphat" is seen in the 1865 novel Paul Peabody by the English journalist Percy Bolingbroke St John.
Another theory is that the reference is to Joel 3:11–12, where the prophet Joel says, speaking of the judgment of the dead, "Assemble yourselves, and come, all ye heathen, and gather yourselves together round about: thither cause thy mighty ones to come down, O LORD. Let the heathen be wakened, and come up to the valley of Jehoshaphat: for there will I sit to judge all the heathen round about."
In the 1956 Warner Brothers Merrie Melodies theatrical cartoon short, Yankee Dood It, based on the fairy tale of The Elves and the Shoemaker, Jehosephat figures prominently as an invocation to turn elves into mice. On the TV series Car 54, Where Are You?, the character Francis Muldoon cited his partner's frequent use of the phrase "Jumpin' Jehosephat!" as a source of annoyance in the episode entitled "Change Your Partners". The televised Batman live-action program of the 1960s also featured Robin, played by Burt Ward, uttering the phrase as an emphatic exclamation, and it was also incorporated into the talking alarm clock alarms voiced again by Burt Ward in 1974 in the "talking Batman & Robin alarm clock" made by Janex.
'Jehoshaphat!' was the standard curse-word used by Elijah Baley, protagonist of the first three science-fiction novels of Isaac Asimov's Robot series.
Another reference comes in Keno Don Rosa's The Invader of Fort Duckburg, a Scrooge McDuck Life and Times story. Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt exclaims 'Great Jumping Jehoshaphat!!' when confronted with Scrooge McDuck's illegal occupation of the fictitious Fort Duckburg, also in Disney's 1963 animated film The Sword in the Stone, Merlin uses "Jehoshaphat" to express alarm and annoyance. Furthermore, in Disney's 1977 animated film The Rescuers, Bernard exclaims "Jehoshaphat!" during the bayou chase scene.
Rapper MF Doom used the phrase "Jumpin' Jehosephat!" in his song "I Hear Voices", featured on the 2001 re-release of his 1999 debut album Operation: Doomsday.
Attribution: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Jehoshaphat (/dʒəˈhɒʃəfæt/; alternatively spelled Jehosaphat, Josaphat, or Yehoshafat; Hebrew: יְהוֹשָׁפָט, Modern: Yəhōšafat, Tiberian: Yŏhōšāp̄āṭ, \"Yahweh has judged\"; Greek: Ἰωσαφάτ, romanized: Iosafát; Latin: Josaphat), according to the Hebrew Bible, was the son of Asa, and the fourth king of the Kingdom of Judah, in succession to his father. His children included Jehoram, who succeeded him as king. His mother was Azubah. Historically, his name has sometimes been connected with the Valley of Josaphat.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "2 Chronicles chapters 17 to 21 are devoted to the reign of Jehoshaphat. First Kings treats him more briefly: 1 Kings 15:24 mentions him as successor to Asa, and 1 Kings 22:1–50 summarizes the events of his life. The Jerusalem Bible states that \"the Chronicler sees Asa as a type of the peaceful, Jehoshaphat of the strong king\". According to these passages, Jehoshaphat ascended the throne at the age of thirty-five and reigned for twenty-five years. He \"walked in the ways\" of his father or ancestor, King David. He spent the first years of his reign fortifying his kingdom against the Kingdom of Israel. His zeal in suppressing the idolatrous worship of the \"high places\" is commended in 2 Chronicles 17:6.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In the third year of his reign, Jehoshaphat sent out priests and Levites over the land to instruct the people in the Law, an activity which was commanded for a Sabbatical year in Deuteronomy 31:10–13 (taking place in Jerusalem). Later reforms in Judah instituted by Jehoshaphat appear to have included further religious reforms, appointment of judges throughout the cities of Judah and a form of \"court of appeal\" in Jerusalem. Ecclesiastical and secular jurisdictions, according to 2 Chronicles 19:11, were by royal command kept distinct.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The author of the Books of Chronicles generally praises his reign, stating that the kingdom enjoyed a great measure of peace and prosperity, the blessing of God resting on the people \"in their basket and their store\".",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Jehoshaphat also pursued alliances with the kingdom of Israel in the North. Jehoshaphat's son Jehoram married Athaliah, daughter of king Ahab of Israel. In the eighteenth year of his reign Jehosaphat visited Ahab in Samaria, and nearly lost his life accompanying his ally to the siege of Ramoth-Gilead. While Jehoshaphat safely returned from this battle, he was reproached by the prophet Jehu, son of Hanani, about this alliance. We are told that Jehoshaphat repented, and returned to his former course of opposition to all idolatry, and promoting the worship of God and in the government of his people.",
"title": "Alliances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Later it appears that Jehoshaphat entered into an alliance with Ahaziah of Israel, for the purpose of carrying on maritime commerce with Ophir. He subsequently joined Jehoram of Israel in a war against the Moabites, who were under tribute to Israel. The Moabites were subdued, but seeing Mesha's act of offering his own son (and singular heir) as a propitiatory human sacrifice on the walls of Kir of Moab filled Israel with horror, and they withdrew and returned to their own land.",
"title": "Alliances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "According to Chronicles, the Moabites formed a great and powerful confederacy with the surrounding nations, and marched against Jehoshaphat. The allied forces were encamped at Ein Gedi. The king and his people were filled with alarm. The king prayed in the court of the Temple, \"O our God, will you not judge them? For we have no power to face this vast army that is attacking us. We do not know what to do; but our eyes are upon you.\" The voice of Jahaziel the Levite was heard announcing that the next day all this great host would be overthrown. So it was, for they quarreled among themselves, and slew one another, leaving to the people of Judah only to gather the rich spoils of the slain. Soon after this victory Jehoshaphat died after a reign of twenty-five years at the age of sixty. According to some sources (such as the eleventh-century Jewish commentator Rashi), he actually died two years later, but gave up his throne earlier for unknown reasons. As with his father Asa, a bonfire was lit in his honor.",
"title": "Victory over Moabite alliance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "He also had the ambition to emulate Solomon's maritime ventures to Ophir, and built a large vessel for Tarshish. But when this boat was wrecked at Ezion-Geber he relinquished the project.",
"title": "Victory over Moabite alliance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In I Kings xxii. 43 the piety of Jehoshaphat is briefly dwelt on. Chronicles, in keeping with its tendency, elaborates this trait of the king's character. According to its report, Jehoshaphat organized a missionary movement by sending out his officers, the priests, and the Levites to instruct the people throughout the land in the Law of YHWH, the king himself delivering sermons.",
"title": "Victory over Moabite alliance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Underlying this ascription to the king of the purpose to carry out the Priestly Code, is the historical fact that Jehoshaphat took heed to organize the administration of justice on a solid foundation, and was an honest worshiper of YHWH. In connection with this the statement that Jehoshaphat expelled the \"Ḳedeshim\" (R. V. \"Sodomites\") from the land (1 Kings 22:46) is characteristic; while 2 Chron. 19:3 credits him with having cut down the Asherot. The report that he took away the \"high places\" (and the Asherim) conflicts with 1 Kings 22:44 (A. V. v. 43) and 2 Chron. 20:33. The account of Jehoshaphat's tremendous army (1,160,000 men) and the rich tribute received from (among others) the Philistines and the Arabs is not historical. It is in harmony with the theory worked out in Chronicles that pious monarchs have always been the mightiest and most prosperous.",
"title": "Victory over Moabite alliance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The question that puzzled Heinrich Ewald and others, \"Where was the brazen serpent till the time of Hezekiah?\" occupied the Talmudists also. They answered it in a very simple way: Asa and Joshaphat, when clearing away the idols, purposely left the brazen serpent behind, in order that Hezekiah might also be able to do a praiseworthy deed in breaking it.",
"title": "Rabbinic literature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "William F. Albright estimated the reign of Jehoshaphat to 873–849 BCE. Edwin R. Thiele held that he became coregent with his father Asa in Asa's 39th year, 872/871 BCE, the year Asa was infected with a severe disease in his feet, and then became sole regent when Asa died of the disease in 870/869 BCE, his own death occurring in 848/847 BCE. So Jehoshaphat's dates are taken as one year earlier: co-regency beginning in 873/871, sole reign commencing in 871/870, and death in 849/848 BCE.",
"title": "Chronological notes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The calendars for reckoning the years of kings in Judah and Israel were offset by six months, that of Judah starting in Tishri (in the fall) and that of Israel in Nisan (in the spring). Cross-synchronizations between the two kingdoms therefore often allow narrowing of the beginning and/or ending dates of a king to within a six-month range. For Jehoshaphat, the Scriptural data allow the narrowing of the beginning of his sole reign to some time between Tishri 1 of 871 BCE and the day before Nisan 1 of 870 BCE. For calculation purposes, this should be taken as the Judean year beginning in Tishri of 871/870 BCE. His death occurred at some time between Nisan 1 of 848 BCE and Tishri 1 of that same year.",
"title": "Chronological notes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The king's name in the oath jumping Jehosaphat was likely popularized by the name's utility as a euphemism for Jesus. The phrase, spelled \"Jumpin' Geehosofat\", is first recorded in the 1865–1866 novel The Headless Horseman by the Irish-American novelist Thomas Mayne Reid. The novel also uses \"Geehosofat\", standing alone, as an exclamation. The longer version \"By the shaking, jumping ghost of Jehosaphat\" is seen in the 1865 novel Paul Peabody by the English journalist Percy Bolingbroke St John.",
"title": "In popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Another theory is that the reference is to Joel 3:11–12, where the prophet Joel says, speaking of the judgment of the dead, \"Assemble yourselves, and come, all ye heathen, and gather yourselves together round about: thither cause thy mighty ones to come down, O LORD. Let the heathen be wakened, and come up to the valley of Jehoshaphat: for there will I sit to judge all the heathen round about.\"",
"title": "In popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In the 1956 Warner Brothers Merrie Melodies theatrical cartoon short, Yankee Dood It, based on the fairy tale of The Elves and the Shoemaker, Jehosephat figures prominently as an invocation to turn elves into mice. On the TV series Car 54, Where Are You?, the character Francis Muldoon cited his partner's frequent use of the phrase \"Jumpin' Jehosephat!\" as a source of annoyance in the episode entitled \"Change Your Partners\". The televised Batman live-action program of the 1960s also featured Robin, played by Burt Ward, uttering the phrase as an emphatic exclamation, and it was also incorporated into the talking alarm clock alarms voiced again by Burt Ward in 1974 in the \"talking Batman & Robin alarm clock\" made by Janex.",
"title": "In popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "'Jehoshaphat!' was the standard curse-word used by Elijah Baley, protagonist of the first three science-fiction novels of Isaac Asimov's Robot series.",
"title": "In popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Another reference comes in Keno Don Rosa's The Invader of Fort Duckburg, a Scrooge McDuck Life and Times story. Theodore \"Teddy\" Roosevelt exclaims 'Great Jumping Jehoshaphat!!' when confronted with Scrooge McDuck's illegal occupation of the fictitious Fort Duckburg, also in Disney's 1963 animated film The Sword in the Stone, Merlin uses \"Jehoshaphat\" to express alarm and annoyance. Furthermore, in Disney's 1977 animated film The Rescuers, Bernard exclaims \"Jehoshaphat!\" during the bayou chase scene.",
"title": "In popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Rapper MF Doom used the phrase \"Jumpin' Jehosephat!\" in his song \"I Hear Voices\", featured on the 2001 re-release of his 1999 debut album Operation: Doomsday.",
"title": "In popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Attribution:",
"title": "References"
}
]
| Jehoshaphat, according to the Hebrew Bible, was the son of Asa, and the fourth king of the Kingdom of Judah, in succession to his father. His children included Jehoram, who succeeded him as king. His mother was Azubah. Historically, his name has sometimes been connected with the Valley of Josaphat. | 2001-09-29T06:54:38Z | 2023-12-22T13:33:18Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jehoshaphat |
16,120 | Jehu | Jehu (Hebrew: יֵהוּא, romanized: Yēhūʾ, meaning "Yahu is He"; Akkadian: 𒅀𒌑𒀀 Ya'úa [ia-ú-a]; Latin: Iehu) was the tenth king of the northern Kingdom of Israel since Jeroboam I, noted for exterminating the house of Ahab. He was the son of Jehoshaphat, grandson of Nimshi, and possibly great-grandson of Omri, although the latter notion is not supported by the biblical text. His reign lasted 28 years.
William F. Albright has dated Jehu's reign to 842–815 BCE, while E. R. Thiele offers the dates 841–814 BCE. The principal source for the events of his reign comes from 2 Kings.
The reign of Jehu's predecessor, Jehoram, was marked by the Battle of Ramoth-Gilead against the army of the Arameans. Jehoram was wounded and returned to Jezreel to recover. He was attended by Ahaziah, king of Judah, who was also his nephew, son of his sister Athaliah. Meanwhile, according to the writer of the Books of Kings, the prophet Elisha ordered one of his students to go to Ramoth-Gilead and separate Jehu, a military commander at the time, from his companions. There, he was to anoint Jehu as king in an inner chamber and explain to him that he was to act as an agent of divine judgment against the house of Ahab. The student followed these instructions, and upon completion he ran away. Jehu initially dismissed the student as a "madman", but nonetheless told his companions about his anointing. His companions later enthusiastically blew their trumpets and proclaimed him their king.
With a chosen band, Jehu planned his conspiracy against King Jehoram and secretly entered Jezreel. Jehoram tried to flee, but Jehu shot an arrow that pierced his heart. Jehu later threw his body on Naboth's vineyard, to avenge Naboth, whom Jehoram's father and mother had murdered. King Ahaziah fled after seeing Jehoram's death but Jehu wounded him. Ahaziah fled to Megiddo, where he died.
Jehu proceeded to enter the premises of the palace at Jezreel. Jezebel watched him with contempt from the palace window and mockingly compared him to King Zimri. Jehu later commanded Jezebel's eunuchs to throw her out of the palace window. They obeyed his commands and Jezebel was instantly killed. Jehu trampled over her body, and when he decided later to arrange a proper burial due to her royal descent, only her skull, hands and feet remained. The rest of her body had been eaten by dogs.
Now master of Jezreel, Jehu wrote to command the chief men in Samaria to hunt down and kill all the royal princes. They did so, and the next day they piled the 70 heads in two heaps outside the city gate, as Jehu commanded. Ahab's entire family was slain. Shortly afterward, Jehu encountered the 42 "brothers of Ahaziah" (since the brothers of Ahaziah had been taken away and probably killed by the Philistines, these must have been relatives of Ahaziah in a broader sense, like nephews and cousins) at "Beth-eked of the shepherds". They told Jehu they were visiting the royal family. Jehu killed them all at "the pit of Beth-eked".
After Jehu's slaughter of the Omrides, he met Jehonadab the Rechabite and convinced him that he was pro-Yahwist. Jehonadab quickly allied with him, and they entered the capital together. In control of Samaria, he invited the worshippers of Baal to a ceremony, then trapped and killed them. He then destroyed their idols and temple, and turned the temple into a latrine.
Other than Jehu's bloody seizure of power and tolerance for the golden calves at Dan and Bethel (condemned as the "corrupted" version of Yahwism by biblical writers), little else is known of his reign. He was hard pressed by Hazael, king of the Arameans, who defeated his armies "throughout all of the territories of Israel" beyond the Jordan River, in the lands of Gilead, Gad, Reuben, and Manasseh.
This suggests that Jehu offered tribute to Shalmaneser III, as depicted on his Black Obelisk, in order to gain a powerful ally against the Arameans. Bit-Khumri was used by Tiglath-Pileser III for the non-Omride kings Pekah (733) & Hoshea (732), hence House/Land/Kingdom of Omri could apply to later Israelite kings not necessarily descended from Omri. According to others, this description should be taken very literally, as in this period Assyrians were very closely following the events in this area, with control slipping in later years.
The destruction of the house of Ahab is commended by the author of 2 Kings as a form of divine punishment. Yahweh rewards Jehu for being a willing executor of divine judgment by allowing four generations of kings to sit on the throne of Israel. Jehu and his descendants Jehoahaz, Jehoash, Jeroboam II, and Zachariah ruled Israel for 102 years. Nonetheless, according to the Book of Hosea, God punished the House of Jehu through the hands of the Assyrians for Jehu's massacre at Jezreel, and some Biblical commentators reasoned that this was because Jehu's motives may not have been entirely pure in his massacre.
Aside from the Hebrew Scriptures, Jehu appears in Assyrian documents, notably in the Black Obelisk, where he is depicted as kissing the ground in front of Shalmaneser III and presenting a gift (maddattu ša Ia-ú-a...kaspu mâdu "tribute of Jehu...much silver"). In the Assyrian documents, he is simply called "son of Omri" (Akkadian: mār Ḫumri, possibly expressing his having been the ruler of "the House of Omri", a later Assyrian designation for the Kingdom of Israel). This tribute is dated 841 BCE. It is the earliest preserved depiction of an Israelite.
According to the Obelisk, Jehu severed his alliances with Phoenicia and Judah, and became subject to Assyria.
The author of the Tel Dan Stele (9th century BCE, found in 1993 and 1994) claimed to have slain both Ahaziah of Judah and Jehoram of Israel (whom Ahaziah was visiting). Some contend the author of this monument is Hazael of the Arameans, although 2 Kings 9 specifically says that Jehu killed Ahaziah and Jehoram after being anointed King of Israel by a young prophet sent by the Prophet Elisha.
David Miano suggested that the author may have been Jehu in his presentation "Who Wrote the Tel Dan Inscription?" at a 2021 conference of the Save Ancient Studies Alliance.
Jehu is portrayed by George Nader in the film Sins of Jezebel (1953).
Drive Like Jehu was an American post-hardcore band from San Diego active from 1990 to 1995. The band's name was derived from 2 Kings 9:20: "And the watchman told, saying, He came even unto them, and cometh not again: and the driving [is] like the driving of Jehu the son of Nimshi; for he driveth furiously".
"Jehu's Rebellion" is the eighth chapter in Manga Messengers (2011), the penultimate installment in the six-volume Manga Bible (2006–19). | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Jehu (Hebrew: יֵהוּא, romanized: Yēhūʾ, meaning \"Yahu is He\"; Akkadian: 𒅀𒌑𒀀 Ya'úa [ia-ú-a]; Latin: Iehu) was the tenth king of the northern Kingdom of Israel since Jeroboam I, noted for exterminating the house of Ahab. He was the son of Jehoshaphat, grandson of Nimshi, and possibly great-grandson of Omri, although the latter notion is not supported by the biblical text. His reign lasted 28 years.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "William F. Albright has dated Jehu's reign to 842–815 BCE, while E. R. Thiele offers the dates 841–814 BCE. The principal source for the events of his reign comes from 2 Kings.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The reign of Jehu's predecessor, Jehoram, was marked by the Battle of Ramoth-Gilead against the army of the Arameans. Jehoram was wounded and returned to Jezreel to recover. He was attended by Ahaziah, king of Judah, who was also his nephew, son of his sister Athaliah. Meanwhile, according to the writer of the Books of Kings, the prophet Elisha ordered one of his students to go to Ramoth-Gilead and separate Jehu, a military commander at the time, from his companions. There, he was to anoint Jehu as king in an inner chamber and explain to him that he was to act as an agent of divine judgment against the house of Ahab. The student followed these instructions, and upon completion he ran away. Jehu initially dismissed the student as a \"madman\", but nonetheless told his companions about his anointing. His companions later enthusiastically blew their trumpets and proclaimed him their king.",
"title": "Biblical narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "With a chosen band, Jehu planned his conspiracy against King Jehoram and secretly entered Jezreel. Jehoram tried to flee, but Jehu shot an arrow that pierced his heart. Jehu later threw his body on Naboth's vineyard, to avenge Naboth, whom Jehoram's father and mother had murdered. King Ahaziah fled after seeing Jehoram's death but Jehu wounded him. Ahaziah fled to Megiddo, where he died.",
"title": "Biblical narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Jehu proceeded to enter the premises of the palace at Jezreel. Jezebel watched him with contempt from the palace window and mockingly compared him to King Zimri. Jehu later commanded Jezebel's eunuchs to throw her out of the palace window. They obeyed his commands and Jezebel was instantly killed. Jehu trampled over her body, and when he decided later to arrange a proper burial due to her royal descent, only her skull, hands and feet remained. The rest of her body had been eaten by dogs.",
"title": "Biblical narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Now master of Jezreel, Jehu wrote to command the chief men in Samaria to hunt down and kill all the royal princes. They did so, and the next day they piled the 70 heads in two heaps outside the city gate, as Jehu commanded. Ahab's entire family was slain. Shortly afterward, Jehu encountered the 42 \"brothers of Ahaziah\" (since the brothers of Ahaziah had been taken away and probably killed by the Philistines, these must have been relatives of Ahaziah in a broader sense, like nephews and cousins) at \"Beth-eked of the shepherds\". They told Jehu they were visiting the royal family. Jehu killed them all at \"the pit of Beth-eked\".",
"title": "Biblical narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "After Jehu's slaughter of the Omrides, he met Jehonadab the Rechabite and convinced him that he was pro-Yahwist. Jehonadab quickly allied with him, and they entered the capital together. In control of Samaria, he invited the worshippers of Baal to a ceremony, then trapped and killed them. He then destroyed their idols and temple, and turned the temple into a latrine.",
"title": "Biblical narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Other than Jehu's bloody seizure of power and tolerance for the golden calves at Dan and Bethel (condemned as the \"corrupted\" version of Yahwism by biblical writers), little else is known of his reign. He was hard pressed by Hazael, king of the Arameans, who defeated his armies \"throughout all of the territories of Israel\" beyond the Jordan River, in the lands of Gilead, Gad, Reuben, and Manasseh.",
"title": "Biblical narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "This suggests that Jehu offered tribute to Shalmaneser III, as depicted on his Black Obelisk, in order to gain a powerful ally against the Arameans. Bit-Khumri was used by Tiglath-Pileser III for the non-Omride kings Pekah (733) & Hoshea (732), hence House/Land/Kingdom of Omri could apply to later Israelite kings not necessarily descended from Omri. According to others, this description should be taken very literally, as in this period Assyrians were very closely following the events in this area, with control slipping in later years.",
"title": "Biblical narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The destruction of the house of Ahab is commended by the author of 2 Kings as a form of divine punishment. Yahweh rewards Jehu for being a willing executor of divine judgment by allowing four generations of kings to sit on the throne of Israel. Jehu and his descendants Jehoahaz, Jehoash, Jeroboam II, and Zachariah ruled Israel for 102 years. Nonetheless, according to the Book of Hosea, God punished the House of Jehu through the hands of the Assyrians for Jehu's massacre at Jezreel, and some Biblical commentators reasoned that this was because Jehu's motives may not have been entirely pure in his massacre.",
"title": "Biblical narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Aside from the Hebrew Scriptures, Jehu appears in Assyrian documents, notably in the Black Obelisk, where he is depicted as kissing the ground in front of Shalmaneser III and presenting a gift (maddattu ša Ia-ú-a...kaspu mâdu \"tribute of Jehu...much silver\"). In the Assyrian documents, he is simply called \"son of Omri\" (Akkadian: mār Ḫumri, possibly expressing his having been the ruler of \"the House of Omri\", a later Assyrian designation for the Kingdom of Israel). This tribute is dated 841 BCE. It is the earliest preserved depiction of an Israelite.",
"title": "Archaeological evidences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "According to the Obelisk, Jehu severed his alliances with Phoenicia and Judah, and became subject to Assyria.",
"title": "Archaeological evidences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The author of the Tel Dan Stele (9th century BCE, found in 1993 and 1994) claimed to have slain both Ahaziah of Judah and Jehoram of Israel (whom Ahaziah was visiting). Some contend the author of this monument is Hazael of the Arameans, although 2 Kings 9 specifically says that Jehu killed Ahaziah and Jehoram after being anointed King of Israel by a young prophet sent by the Prophet Elisha.",
"title": "Archaeological evidences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "David Miano suggested that the author may have been Jehu in his presentation \"Who Wrote the Tel Dan Inscription?\" at a 2021 conference of the Save Ancient Studies Alliance.",
"title": "Archaeological evidences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Jehu is portrayed by George Nader in the film Sins of Jezebel (1953).",
"title": "In popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Drive Like Jehu was an American post-hardcore band from San Diego active from 1990 to 1995. The band's name was derived from 2 Kings 9:20: \"And the watchman told, saying, He came even unto them, and cometh not again: and the driving [is] like the driving of Jehu the son of Nimshi; for he driveth furiously\".",
"title": "In popular culture"
},
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"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "\"Jehu's Rebellion\" is the eighth chapter in Manga Messengers (2011), the penultimate installment in the six-volume Manga Bible (2006–19).",
"title": "In popular culture"
}
]
| Jehu was the tenth king of the northern Kingdom of Israel since Jeroboam I, noted for exterminating the house of Ahab. He was the son of Jehoshaphat, grandson of Nimshi, and possibly great-grandson of Omri, although the latter notion is not supported by the biblical text. His reign lasted 28 years. William F. Albright has dated Jehu's reign to 842–815 BCE, while E. R. Thiele offers the dates 841–814 BCE. The principal source for the events of his reign comes from 2 Kings. | 2002-02-25T15:43:11Z | 2023-12-24T04:02:28Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jehu |
16,121 | Joshua | Joshua (/ˈdʒɒʃuə/), also known as Yehoshua (Hebrew: יְהוֹשֻׁעַ Yəhōšuaʿ, Tiberian: Yŏhōšuaʿ, lit. 'Yahweh is salvation') or Josue, functioned as Moses' assistant in the books of Exodus and Numbers, and later succeeded Moses as leader of the Israelite tribes in the Book of Joshua of the Hebrew Bible. His name was Hoshea (הוֹשֵׁעַ Hōšēaʿ, lit. 'Save') the son of Nun, of the tribe of Ephraim, but Moses called him "Yehoshua" (translated as "Joshua" in English), the name by which he is commonly known in English. According to the Bible, he was born in Egypt prior to the Exodus.
The Hebrew Bible identifies Joshua as one of the twelve spies of Israel sent by Moses to explore the land of Canaan. In Numbers 13:1 and after the death of Moses, he led the Israelite tribes in the conquest of Canaan, and allocated lands to the tribes. According to biblical chronology, Joshua lived some time in the Bronze Age. According to Joshua 24:29 Joshua died at the age of 110.
Joshua holds a position of respect among Muslims, who also see him as the leader of the faithful following the death of Moses. In Islam, it is also believed that Yusha bin Nun (Joshua) was the "attendant" of Moses mentioned in the Quran before Moses meets Khidr. Joshua plays a role in Islamic literature, with significant narration in the hadith.
The English name "Joshua" is a rendering of the Hebrew Yehoshua, and is mostly interpreted as "Yahweh is salvation"; although others have also alternatively interpreted it as "Yahweh is lordly". The theophoric name appears to be constructed from a combination of the Tetragrammaton with the Hebrew noun יְשׁוּעָה (Modern: yəšūʿa, Tiberian: yăšūʿā), meaning "salvation"; derived from the Hebrew root ישׁע (y-š-ʿ), meaning "to save/help/deliver". Other theophoric names sharing a similar meaning can also be found throughout the Hebrew Bible, such as that of the son of David אֱלִישׁוּעַ (ʾĔlīšūaʿ), whose name means "My El (God) is salvation".
"Jesus" is the English derivative of the Greek transliteration of "Yehoshua" via Latin. In the Septuagint, all instances of the word "Yehoshua" are rendered as "Ἰησοῦς" (Iēsoūs), the closest Greek pronunciation of the Imperial Aramaic: יֵשׁוּעַ Yēšūaʿ. Thus, in modern Greek, Joshua is called "Jesus son of Naue" (τοῦ Ναυή, toũ Nauḗ) to differentiate him from Jesus. This is also true in some Slavic languages following the Eastern Orthodox tradition (e.g. "Иисус Навин", Iisús Navín, in Bulgarian, Serbian and Russian, but not Czech).
Joshua was a major figure in the events of the Exodus. He was charged by Moses with selecting and commanding a militia group for their first battle after exiting Egypt, against the Amalekites in Rephidim, in which they were victorious.
He later accompanied Moses when he ascended biblical Mount Sinai to commune with God, visualize God's plan for the Israelite tabernacle and receive the Ten Commandments. Joshua was with Moses when he descended from the mountain, heard the Israelites' celebrations around the Golden Calf, and broke the tablets bearing the words of the commandments. Similarly, in the narrative which refers to Moses being able to speak with God in his tent of meeting outside the camp, Joshua is seen as custodian of the tent ('tabernacle of meeting') when Moses returned to the Israelite encampment. However, when Moses returned to the mountain to re-create the tablets recording the Ten Commandments, Joshua was not present, as the biblical text states "no man shall come up with you".
Later, Joshua was identified as one of the twelve spies sent by Moses to explore and report on the land of Canaan, and only he and Caleb gave an encouraging report, a reward for which would be that only these two of their entire generation would enter the promised land.
According to Joshua 1:1, God appointed Joshua to succeed Moses as leader of the Israelites along with giving him a blessing of invincibility during his lifetime. The first part of the book of Joshua covers the period when he led the conquest of Canaan.
At the Jordan River, the waters parted, as they had for Moses at the Red Sea. The first battle after the crossing of the Jordan was the Battle of Jericho. Joshua led the destruction of Jericho, then moved on to Ai, a small neighboring city to the west. However, they were defeated with thirty-six Israelite deaths. The defeat was attributed to Achan taking an "accursed thing" from Jericho; and was followed by Achan and his family and animals being stoned to death to restore God's favor. Joshua then went to defeat Ai.
The Israelites faced an alliance of five Amorite kings from Jerusalem, Hebron, Jarmuth, Lachish, and Eglon. At Gibeon, Joshua asked the LORD to cause the sun and moon to stand still, so that he could finish the battle in daylight. According to the text, the sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day. This event is most notable because "There has been no day like it before or since, when the LORD heeded the voice of a man, for the Lord fought for Israel." The LORD also fought for the Israelites in this battle, for he hurled huge hailstones from the sky which killed more Canaanites than those which the Israelites slaughtered. From there on, Joshua was able to lead the Israelites to several victories, securing much of the land of Canaan. He presided over the Israelite gatherings at Gilgal and Shiloh which allocated land to the tribes of Israel (Joshua 14:1–5 and 18:1–10), and the Israelites rewarded him with the Ephraimite city of Timnath-heres or Timnath-serah, where he settled (Joshua 19:50).
According to the Talmud, Joshua in his book enumerated only those towns on the frontier.
When he was "old and well advanced in years", Joshua convened the elders and chiefs of the Israelites and exhorted them to have no fellowship with the native population, because it could lead them to be unfaithful to God. At a general assembly of the clans at Shechem, he took leave of the people, admonishing them to be loyal to their God, who had been so mightily manifested in the midst of them. As a witness of their promise to serve God, Joshua set up a great stone under an oak by the sanctuary of God. Soon afterward he died, at the age of 110, and was buried at Timnath-heres, in the hill country of Ephraim, north of Mount Gaash.
The prevailing scholarly view is that the Book of Joshua is not a factual account of historical events. The apparent setting of Joshua is the 13th century BCE which was a time of widespread city-destruction, but with a few exceptions (Hazor, Lachish) the destroyed cities are not the ones the Bible associates with Joshua, and the ones it does associate with him show little or no sign of even being occupied at the time. Given its lack of historicity, Carolyn Pressler in her commentary for the Westminster Bible Companion series suggests that readers of Joshua should give priority to its theological message ("what passages teach about God") and be aware of what these would have meant to audiences in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE. Richard Nelson explained that the needs of the centralised monarchy favoured a single story of origins, combining old traditions of an exodus from Egypt, belief in a national god as "divine warrior," and explanations for ruined cities, social stratification and ethnic groups, and contemporary tribes.
It has been argued that the Book of Joshua holds little historical value. The archaeological evidence shows that Jericho and Ai were not occupied in the Near Eastern Late Bronze Age, although recent excavations at Jericho have questioned this. The story of the conquest perhaps represents the nationalist propaganda of the eighth century BCE kings of Judah and their claims to the territory of the Kingdom of Israel, incorporated into an early form of Joshua written late in the reign of king Josiah (reigned 640–609 BCE). The book was probably revised and completed after the fall of Jerusalem to the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 586 BCE, and possibly after the return from the Babylonian exile in 538 BCE.
In the 1930s Martin Noth made a sweeping criticism of the usefulness of the Book of Joshua for history. Noth was a student of Albrecht Alt, who emphasized form criticism and the importance of etiology. Alt and Noth posited a peaceful movement of the Israelites into various areas of Canaan, contra the Biblical account.
William Foxwell Albright questioned the "tenacity" of etiologies, which were key to Noth's analysis of the campaigns in Joshua. Archaeological evidence in the 1930s showed that the city of Ai, an early target for conquest in the putative Joshua account, had existed and been destroyed, but in the 22nd century BCE. Some alternate sites for Ai have been proposed which would partially resolve the discrepancy in dates, but these sites have not been widely accepted.
In 1951 Kathleen Kenyon showed that City IV at Tell es-Sultan (Jericho) was destroyed at the end of the Middle Bronze Age (c. 2100–1550 BCE), not during the Late Bronze Age (c. 1550–1200 BCE). Kenyon argued that the early Israelite campaign could not be historically corroborated, but rather explained as an etiology of the location and a representation of the Israelite settlement.
In 1955, G. Ernest Wright discussed the correlation of archaeological data to the early Israelite campaigns, which he divided into three phases per the Book of Joshua. He pointed to two sets of archaeological findings that "seem to suggest that the biblical account is in general correct regarding the nature of the late thirteenth and twelfth-eleventh centuries in the country" (i.e., "a period of tremendous violence"). He gives particular weight to what were then recent digs at Hazor by Yigael Yadin.
In rabbinic literature Joshua is regarded as a faithful, humble, deserving, wise man. Biblical verses illustrative of these qualities and of their reward are applied to him. "He that waits on his master shall be honored" is construed as a reference to Joshua, as is also the first part of the same verse, "Whoso keeps the fig-tree shall eat the fruit thereof". That "honor shall uphold the humble in spirit" is proved by Joshua's victory over Amalek. Not the sons of Moses—as Moses himself had expected—but Joshua was appointed as Moses' successor. Moses was shown how Joshua reproved that Othniel.
"God would speak to Moses face to face, like someone would speak to his friend. Then he would return to the camp. But his attendant, Joshua the son of Nun, a young man, would not leave the tent. Joshua never moved from the tent". Didn't Joshua leave the tent to eat, sleep or attend to his needs? This praise shows that Joshua had complete faith in Moses, the Tzaddik. One who has this faith is cognizant of the tzaddik in everything he does; he remains steadfastly with the tzaddik whatever he does.
According to rabbinic tradition, Joshua, when dividing the Land of Canaan among the twelve tribes of Israel, planted sea squill (Hebrew: חצוב) to mark off the butts and bounds of tribal properties.
Moreover, Joshua, on dividing the land of Canaan amongst the tribes of Israel, made the tribes agree to ten conditions, the most important of which being the common use of the forests as pasture for cattle, and the common right of fishing in the Sea of Tiberias. Natural springs were to be used for drinking and laundry by all tribes, although the tribe to which the water course fell had the first rights. Prickly burnet (Sarcopoterium spinosum) and the camelthorn (Alhagi maurorum) could be freely collected as firewood by any member of any tribe, in any tribal territory.
According to Jewish religious tradition, upon making Aliyah by crossing the Jordan River to enter the Land of Israel, Joshua composed the Aleinu prayer thanking God. This idea was first cited in the Kol Bo of the late 14th Century. Several medieval commentators noticed that Joshua's shorter birth name, Hosea, appears in the first few verses of Aleinu in reverse acrostic: ע – עלינו, ש – שלא שם, ו – ואנחנו כורעים, ה – הוא אלוקינו. The Teshuvot HaGeonim, a Geonic responsum, discussed that Joshua composed the Aleinu because although the Israelites had made Aliyah to the Promised Land, they were surrounded by other peoples, and he wanted the Jews to draw a clear distinction between themselves, who knew and accepted the sovereignty of God, and those nations of the world which did not. In the modern era, religious Jews still pray the Aliyah inspired Aleinu three times daily, including on the High Holidays. The Aleinu prayer begins:
It is our duty to praise the Master of all, to exalt the Creator of the Universe, who has not made us like the nations of the world and has not placed us like the families of the earth, who has not designed our destiny to be like theirs, nor our lot like that of all their multitude.
Most modern Bibles translate Hebrews 4:8–10 to identify Jesus as a better Joshua, as Joshua led Israel into the rest of Canaan, but Jesus leads the people of God into "God's rest". Among the early Church Fathers, Joshua is considered a type of Jesus Christ.
The story of Joshua and the Canaanite kings is also alluded to in the 2 Meqabyan, a book considered canonical in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church.
Joshua (Arabic: يُوشَعُ بْنُ نُونٍ, Yūšaʿ ibn Nūn [juːʃaʕ ibn nuːn], is not mentioned by name in the Quran, but his name appears in other Islamic literature. In the Quranic account of the conquest of Canaan, Joshua and Caleb are referenced, but not named, as two "Allah-fearing men", on whom Allah "had bestowed His grace".
They said, "Moses, there is a fearsome people in this land. We will not go there until they leave. If they leave, then we will enter." Yet the two men whom God had blessed among those who were afraid said, "Go in to them through the gate and when you go in you will overcome them. If you are true believers, put your trust in God.
Joshua is also referred to in the journey Musa (Moses) took with him to find Khidr.
And ˹remember˺ when Moses said to his young assistant, “I will never give up until I reach the junction of the two seas, even if I travel for ages.” But when they ˹finally˺ reached the point where the seas met, they forgot their ˹salted˺ fish, and it made its way into the sea, slipping away ˹wondrously˺. He replied, “Do you remember when we rested by the rock? ˹That is when˺ I forgot the fish. None made me forget to mention this except Satan. And the fish made its way into the sea miraculously.” Moses responded, “That is ˹exactly˺ what we were looking for.” So they returned, retracing their footsteps. There they found a servant of Ours, to whom We had granted mercy from Us and enlightened with knowledge of Our Own.
The authentic narration collected by Bukhari reports that a man approached Moses after he gave a talk and asked him, “Who is the most knowledgeable person on earth?” Moses responded, “That would be me!” So Allah revealed to Moses that he should not have said this and there was in fact someone who was more knowledgeable than him. Moses was commanded to travel to meet this man, named Al-Khaḍir, at the junction of the two seas. Islamic scholars have argued this could be the northern part of the Sinai Peninsula between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea, the southern part of Sinai where the Rea Sea splits into the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqaba, or the Bosporus in Istanbul which is a strait between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara.
Joshua was regarded by some classical scholars as the prophetic successor to Moses (موسى) Al-Tabari relates in his History of the Prophets and Kings that Joshua was one of the twelve spies, and Muslim scholars believe that the two believing spies referred to in the Quran are Joshua and Caleb. Joshua was exceptional among the Israelites for being one of the few faithful followers of Allah.
Significant events from Joshua's Muslim narratives include the crossing of the Jordan river and the conquest of Bait al-Maqdis.
The traditional Muslim commentary al-Jalalayn says, "Ahmad [b. Hanbal] reported in his Musnad, the [following] hadīth, 'The sun was never detained for any human, except for Joshua during those days in which he marched towards the Holy House [of Jerusalem]'."
Muslim literature includes traditions of Joshua not found in the Hebrew Bible. Joshua is credited with being present at Moses's death and literature records that Moses's garments were with Joshua at the time of his departure. In Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, Joshua is mentioned as Yusha' bin Nun and is the attendant to Moses during his meeting with Khidr.
In the literary tradition of medieval Europe, Joshua is known as one of the Nine Worthies. In The Divine Comedy Joshua's spirit appears to Dante in the Heaven of Mars, where he is grouped with the other "warriors of the faith."
Baroque composer Georg Frideric Handel composed the oratorio Joshua in 1747. Composer Franz Waxman composed an oratorio Joshua in 1959. Marc-Antoine Charpentier composed Josue (H.404 and H.404 a), an oratorio for soloists, double chorus, double orchestra and continuo, in 1680.
According to legend, Mormon pioneers in the United States first referred to the yucca brevifolia agave plant as the Joshua tree because its branches reminded them of Joshua stretching his arms upward in supplication, guiding the travelers westward.
Joshua is commemorated in the scientific name of a species of snake, Joshua's blind snake (Trilepida joshuai), the holotype of which was collected at Jericó, Antioquia, Colombia.
The annual commemoration of Joshua's yahrtzeit (the anniversary of his death) is marked on the 26th of Nisan on the Hebrew calendar. Thousands make the pilgrimage to the Tomb of Joshua at Kifl Haris near Nablus, West Bank, on the preceding night.
Yom HaAliyah (Aliyah Day; Hebrew: יום העלייה) is an Israeli national holiday celebrated annually on the tenth of the Hebrew month of Nisan, as per the opening clause of the Yom HaAliyah Law, as a Zionist celebration of "Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel as the basis for the existence of the State of Israel", and secondarily "to mark the date of entry into the Land of Israel", i.e. to commemorate Joshua having led the Israelites across the Jordan River into the Land of Israel while carrying the Ark of the Covenant.
According to a Samaritan tradition, noted in 1877, the tombs of Joshua and Caleb were in Kifl Haris.
According to Joshua 24:30, the tomb of Joshua is in Timnath-heres, and Jewish tradition also places the tombs of Joshua's father, Nun, an his companion, Caleb, at that site, which is identified by Orthodox Jews with Kifl Haris. Thousands make the pilgrimage to the tombs on the annual commemoration of Joshua's death, 26th of Nisan on the Hebrew calendar.
Joshua is believed by some Muslims to be buried on Joshua's Hill in the Beykoz district of Istanbul. Alternative traditional sites for his tomb are situated in Israel (the Shia shrine at Al-Nabi Yusha'), Jordan (An-Nabi Yusha' bin Noon, a Sunni shrine near the city of Al-Salt), Iran (Historical cemetery of Takht e Foolad in Esfahan) and Iraq (the Nabi Yusha' shrine of Baghdad). A local tradition combining three versions of three different Yushas, including biblical Joshua, places the tomb inside a cave in the Tripoli Mountains, overlooking the coastal town of el-Minyieh near Tripoli, Lebanon. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Joshua (/ˈdʒɒʃuə/), also known as Yehoshua (Hebrew: יְהוֹשֻׁעַ Yəhōšuaʿ, Tiberian: Yŏhōšuaʿ, lit. 'Yahweh is salvation') or Josue, functioned as Moses' assistant in the books of Exodus and Numbers, and later succeeded Moses as leader of the Israelite tribes in the Book of Joshua of the Hebrew Bible. His name was Hoshea (הוֹשֵׁעַ Hōšēaʿ, lit. 'Save') the son of Nun, of the tribe of Ephraim, but Moses called him \"Yehoshua\" (translated as \"Joshua\" in English), the name by which he is commonly known in English. According to the Bible, he was born in Egypt prior to the Exodus.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The Hebrew Bible identifies Joshua as one of the twelve spies of Israel sent by Moses to explore the land of Canaan. In Numbers 13:1 and after the death of Moses, he led the Israelite tribes in the conquest of Canaan, and allocated lands to the tribes. According to biblical chronology, Joshua lived some time in the Bronze Age. According to Joshua 24:29 Joshua died at the age of 110.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Joshua holds a position of respect among Muslims, who also see him as the leader of the faithful following the death of Moses. In Islam, it is also believed that Yusha bin Nun (Joshua) was the \"attendant\" of Moses mentioned in the Quran before Moses meets Khidr. Joshua plays a role in Islamic literature, with significant narration in the hadith.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The English name \"Joshua\" is a rendering of the Hebrew Yehoshua, and is mostly interpreted as \"Yahweh is salvation\"; although others have also alternatively interpreted it as \"Yahweh is lordly\". The theophoric name appears to be constructed from a combination of the Tetragrammaton with the Hebrew noun יְשׁוּעָה (Modern: yəšūʿa, Tiberian: yăšūʿā), meaning \"salvation\"; derived from the Hebrew root ישׁע (y-š-ʿ), meaning \"to save/help/deliver\". Other theophoric names sharing a similar meaning can also be found throughout the Hebrew Bible, such as that of the son of David אֱלִישׁוּעַ (ʾĔlīšūaʿ), whose name means \"My El (God) is salvation\".",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "\"Jesus\" is the English derivative of the Greek transliteration of \"Yehoshua\" via Latin. In the Septuagint, all instances of the word \"Yehoshua\" are rendered as \"Ἰησοῦς\" (Iēsoūs), the closest Greek pronunciation of the Imperial Aramaic: יֵשׁוּעַ Yēšūaʿ. Thus, in modern Greek, Joshua is called \"Jesus son of Naue\" (τοῦ Ναυή, toũ Nauḗ) to differentiate him from Jesus. This is also true in some Slavic languages following the Eastern Orthodox tradition (e.g. \"Иисус Навин\", Iisús Navín, in Bulgarian, Serbian and Russian, but not Czech).",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Joshua was a major figure in the events of the Exodus. He was charged by Moses with selecting and commanding a militia group for their first battle after exiting Egypt, against the Amalekites in Rephidim, in which they were victorious.",
"title": "Biblical narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "He later accompanied Moses when he ascended biblical Mount Sinai to commune with God, visualize God's plan for the Israelite tabernacle and receive the Ten Commandments. Joshua was with Moses when he descended from the mountain, heard the Israelites' celebrations around the Golden Calf, and broke the tablets bearing the words of the commandments. Similarly, in the narrative which refers to Moses being able to speak with God in his tent of meeting outside the camp, Joshua is seen as custodian of the tent ('tabernacle of meeting') when Moses returned to the Israelite encampment. However, when Moses returned to the mountain to re-create the tablets recording the Ten Commandments, Joshua was not present, as the biblical text states \"no man shall come up with you\".",
"title": "Biblical narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Later, Joshua was identified as one of the twelve spies sent by Moses to explore and report on the land of Canaan, and only he and Caleb gave an encouraging report, a reward for which would be that only these two of their entire generation would enter the promised land.",
"title": "Biblical narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "According to Joshua 1:1, God appointed Joshua to succeed Moses as leader of the Israelites along with giving him a blessing of invincibility during his lifetime. The first part of the book of Joshua covers the period when he led the conquest of Canaan.",
"title": "Biblical narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "At the Jordan River, the waters parted, as they had for Moses at the Red Sea. The first battle after the crossing of the Jordan was the Battle of Jericho. Joshua led the destruction of Jericho, then moved on to Ai, a small neighboring city to the west. However, they were defeated with thirty-six Israelite deaths. The defeat was attributed to Achan taking an \"accursed thing\" from Jericho; and was followed by Achan and his family and animals being stoned to death to restore God's favor. Joshua then went to defeat Ai.",
"title": "Biblical narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The Israelites faced an alliance of five Amorite kings from Jerusalem, Hebron, Jarmuth, Lachish, and Eglon. At Gibeon, Joshua asked the LORD to cause the sun and moon to stand still, so that he could finish the battle in daylight. According to the text, the sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day. This event is most notable because \"There has been no day like it before or since, when the LORD heeded the voice of a man, for the Lord fought for Israel.\" The LORD also fought for the Israelites in this battle, for he hurled huge hailstones from the sky which killed more Canaanites than those which the Israelites slaughtered. From there on, Joshua was able to lead the Israelites to several victories, securing much of the land of Canaan. He presided over the Israelite gatherings at Gilgal and Shiloh which allocated land to the tribes of Israel (Joshua 14:1–5 and 18:1–10), and the Israelites rewarded him with the Ephraimite city of Timnath-heres or Timnath-serah, where he settled (Joshua 19:50).",
"title": "Biblical narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "According to the Talmud, Joshua in his book enumerated only those towns on the frontier.",
"title": "Biblical narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "When he was \"old and well advanced in years\", Joshua convened the elders and chiefs of the Israelites and exhorted them to have no fellowship with the native population, because it could lead them to be unfaithful to God. At a general assembly of the clans at Shechem, he took leave of the people, admonishing them to be loyal to their God, who had been so mightily manifested in the midst of them. As a witness of their promise to serve God, Joshua set up a great stone under an oak by the sanctuary of God. Soon afterward he died, at the age of 110, and was buried at Timnath-heres, in the hill country of Ephraim, north of Mount Gaash.",
"title": "Biblical narrative"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The prevailing scholarly view is that the Book of Joshua is not a factual account of historical events. The apparent setting of Joshua is the 13th century BCE which was a time of widespread city-destruction, but with a few exceptions (Hazor, Lachish) the destroyed cities are not the ones the Bible associates with Joshua, and the ones it does associate with him show little or no sign of even being occupied at the time. Given its lack of historicity, Carolyn Pressler in her commentary for the Westminster Bible Companion series suggests that readers of Joshua should give priority to its theological message (\"what passages teach about God\") and be aware of what these would have meant to audiences in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE. Richard Nelson explained that the needs of the centralised monarchy favoured a single story of origins, combining old traditions of an exodus from Egypt, belief in a national god as \"divine warrior,\" and explanations for ruined cities, social stratification and ethnic groups, and contemporary tribes.",
"title": "Historicity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "It has been argued that the Book of Joshua holds little historical value. The archaeological evidence shows that Jericho and Ai were not occupied in the Near Eastern Late Bronze Age, although recent excavations at Jericho have questioned this. The story of the conquest perhaps represents the nationalist propaganda of the eighth century BCE kings of Judah and their claims to the territory of the Kingdom of Israel, incorporated into an early form of Joshua written late in the reign of king Josiah (reigned 640–609 BCE). The book was probably revised and completed after the fall of Jerusalem to the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 586 BCE, and possibly after the return from the Babylonian exile in 538 BCE.",
"title": "Historicity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In the 1930s Martin Noth made a sweeping criticism of the usefulness of the Book of Joshua for history. Noth was a student of Albrecht Alt, who emphasized form criticism and the importance of etiology. Alt and Noth posited a peaceful movement of the Israelites into various areas of Canaan, contra the Biblical account.",
"title": "Historicity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "William Foxwell Albright questioned the \"tenacity\" of etiologies, which were key to Noth's analysis of the campaigns in Joshua. Archaeological evidence in the 1930s showed that the city of Ai, an early target for conquest in the putative Joshua account, had existed and been destroyed, but in the 22nd century BCE. Some alternate sites for Ai have been proposed which would partially resolve the discrepancy in dates, but these sites have not been widely accepted.",
"title": "Historicity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In 1951 Kathleen Kenyon showed that City IV at Tell es-Sultan (Jericho) was destroyed at the end of the Middle Bronze Age (c. 2100–1550 BCE), not during the Late Bronze Age (c. 1550–1200 BCE). Kenyon argued that the early Israelite campaign could not be historically corroborated, but rather explained as an etiology of the location and a representation of the Israelite settlement.",
"title": "Historicity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In 1955, G. Ernest Wright discussed the correlation of archaeological data to the early Israelite campaigns, which he divided into three phases per the Book of Joshua. He pointed to two sets of archaeological findings that \"seem to suggest that the biblical account is in general correct regarding the nature of the late thirteenth and twelfth-eleventh centuries in the country\" (i.e., \"a period of tremendous violence\"). He gives particular weight to what were then recent digs at Hazor by Yigael Yadin.",
"title": "Historicity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In rabbinic literature Joshua is regarded as a faithful, humble, deserving, wise man. Biblical verses illustrative of these qualities and of their reward are applied to him. \"He that waits on his master shall be honored\" is construed as a reference to Joshua, as is also the first part of the same verse, \"Whoso keeps the fig-tree shall eat the fruit thereof\". That \"honor shall uphold the humble in spirit\" is proved by Joshua's victory over Amalek. Not the sons of Moses—as Moses himself had expected—but Joshua was appointed as Moses' successor. Moses was shown how Joshua reproved that Othniel.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "\"God would speak to Moses face to face, like someone would speak to his friend. Then he would return to the camp. But his attendant, Joshua the son of Nun, a young man, would not leave the tent. Joshua never moved from the tent\". Didn't Joshua leave the tent to eat, sleep or attend to his needs? This praise shows that Joshua had complete faith in Moses, the Tzaddik. One who has this faith is cognizant of the tzaddik in everything he does; he remains steadfastly with the tzaddik whatever he does.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "According to rabbinic tradition, Joshua, when dividing the Land of Canaan among the twelve tribes of Israel, planted sea squill (Hebrew: חצוב) to mark off the butts and bounds of tribal properties.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Moreover, Joshua, on dividing the land of Canaan amongst the tribes of Israel, made the tribes agree to ten conditions, the most important of which being the common use of the forests as pasture for cattle, and the common right of fishing in the Sea of Tiberias. Natural springs were to be used for drinking and laundry by all tribes, although the tribe to which the water course fell had the first rights. Prickly burnet (Sarcopoterium spinosum) and the camelthorn (Alhagi maurorum) could be freely collected as firewood by any member of any tribe, in any tribal territory.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "According to Jewish religious tradition, upon making Aliyah by crossing the Jordan River to enter the Land of Israel, Joshua composed the Aleinu prayer thanking God. This idea was first cited in the Kol Bo of the late 14th Century. Several medieval commentators noticed that Joshua's shorter birth name, Hosea, appears in the first few verses of Aleinu in reverse acrostic: ע – עלינו, ש – שלא שם, ו – ואנחנו כורעים, ה – הוא אלוקינו. The Teshuvot HaGeonim, a Geonic responsum, discussed that Joshua composed the Aleinu because although the Israelites had made Aliyah to the Promised Land, they were surrounded by other peoples, and he wanted the Jews to draw a clear distinction between themselves, who knew and accepted the sovereignty of God, and those nations of the world which did not. In the modern era, religious Jews still pray the Aliyah inspired Aleinu three times daily, including on the High Holidays. The Aleinu prayer begins:",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "It is our duty to praise the Master of all, to exalt the Creator of the Universe, who has not made us like the nations of the world and has not placed us like the families of the earth, who has not designed our destiny to be like theirs, nor our lot like that of all their multitude.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Most modern Bibles translate Hebrews 4:8–10 to identify Jesus as a better Joshua, as Joshua led Israel into the rest of Canaan, but Jesus leads the people of God into \"God's rest\". Among the early Church Fathers, Joshua is considered a type of Jesus Christ.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The story of Joshua and the Canaanite kings is also alluded to in the 2 Meqabyan, a book considered canonical in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Joshua (Arabic: يُوشَعُ بْنُ نُونٍ, Yūšaʿ ibn Nūn [juːʃaʕ ibn nuːn], is not mentioned by name in the Quran, but his name appears in other Islamic literature. In the Quranic account of the conquest of Canaan, Joshua and Caleb are referenced, but not named, as two \"Allah-fearing men\", on whom Allah \"had bestowed His grace\".",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "They said, \"Moses, there is a fearsome people in this land. We will not go there until they leave. If they leave, then we will enter.\" Yet the two men whom God had blessed among those who were afraid said, \"Go in to them through the gate and when you go in you will overcome them. If you are true believers, put your trust in God.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Joshua is also referred to in the journey Musa (Moses) took with him to find Khidr.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "And ˹remember˺ when Moses said to his young assistant, “I will never give up until I reach the junction of the two seas, even if I travel for ages.” But when they ˹finally˺ reached the point where the seas met, they forgot their ˹salted˺ fish, and it made its way into the sea, slipping away ˹wondrously˺. He replied, “Do you remember when we rested by the rock? ˹That is when˺ I forgot the fish. None made me forget to mention this except Satan. And the fish made its way into the sea miraculously.” Moses responded, “That is ˹exactly˺ what we were looking for.” So they returned, retracing their footsteps. There they found a servant of Ours, to whom We had granted mercy from Us and enlightened with knowledge of Our Own.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The authentic narration collected by Bukhari reports that a man approached Moses after he gave a talk and asked him, “Who is the most knowledgeable person on earth?” Moses responded, “That would be me!” So Allah revealed to Moses that he should not have said this and there was in fact someone who was more knowledgeable than him. Moses was commanded to travel to meet this man, named Al-Khaḍir, at the junction of the two seas. Islamic scholars have argued this could be the northern part of the Sinai Peninsula between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea, the southern part of Sinai where the Rea Sea splits into the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqaba, or the Bosporus in Istanbul which is a strait between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Joshua was regarded by some classical scholars as the prophetic successor to Moses (موسى) Al-Tabari relates in his History of the Prophets and Kings that Joshua was one of the twelve spies, and Muslim scholars believe that the two believing spies referred to in the Quran are Joshua and Caleb. Joshua was exceptional among the Israelites for being one of the few faithful followers of Allah.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Significant events from Joshua's Muslim narratives include the crossing of the Jordan river and the conquest of Bait al-Maqdis.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The traditional Muslim commentary al-Jalalayn says, \"Ahmad [b. Hanbal] reported in his Musnad, the [following] hadīth, 'The sun was never detained for any human, except for Joshua during those days in which he marched towards the Holy House [of Jerusalem]'.\"",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Muslim literature includes traditions of Joshua not found in the Hebrew Bible. Joshua is credited with being present at Moses's death and literature records that Moses's garments were with Joshua at the time of his departure. In Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, Joshua is mentioned as Yusha' bin Nun and is the attendant to Moses during his meeting with Khidr.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In the literary tradition of medieval Europe, Joshua is known as one of the Nine Worthies. In The Divine Comedy Joshua's spirit appears to Dante in the Heaven of Mars, where he is grouped with the other \"warriors of the faith.\"",
"title": "In art and literature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Baroque composer Georg Frideric Handel composed the oratorio Joshua in 1747. Composer Franz Waxman composed an oratorio Joshua in 1959. Marc-Antoine Charpentier composed Josue (H.404 and H.404 a), an oratorio for soloists, double chorus, double orchestra and continuo, in 1680.",
"title": "In art and literature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "According to legend, Mormon pioneers in the United States first referred to the yucca brevifolia agave plant as the Joshua tree because its branches reminded them of Joshua stretching his arms upward in supplication, guiding the travelers westward.",
"title": "Nomenclature in biology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Joshua is commemorated in the scientific name of a species of snake, Joshua's blind snake (Trilepida joshuai), the holotype of which was collected at Jericó, Antioquia, Colombia.",
"title": "Nomenclature in biology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "The annual commemoration of Joshua's yahrtzeit (the anniversary of his death) is marked on the 26th of Nisan on the Hebrew calendar. Thousands make the pilgrimage to the Tomb of Joshua at Kifl Haris near Nablus, West Bank, on the preceding night.",
"title": "Jewish holidays"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Yom HaAliyah (Aliyah Day; Hebrew: יום העלייה) is an Israeli national holiday celebrated annually on the tenth of the Hebrew month of Nisan, as per the opening clause of the Yom HaAliyah Law, as a Zionist celebration of \"Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel as the basis for the existence of the State of Israel\", and secondarily \"to mark the date of entry into the Land of Israel\", i.e. to commemorate Joshua having led the Israelites across the Jordan River into the Land of Israel while carrying the Ark of the Covenant.",
"title": "Jewish holidays"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "According to a Samaritan tradition, noted in 1877, the tombs of Joshua and Caleb were in Kifl Haris.",
"title": "Tomb of Joshua"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "According to Joshua 24:30, the tomb of Joshua is in Timnath-heres, and Jewish tradition also places the tombs of Joshua's father, Nun, an his companion, Caleb, at that site, which is identified by Orthodox Jews with Kifl Haris. Thousands make the pilgrimage to the tombs on the annual commemoration of Joshua's death, 26th of Nisan on the Hebrew calendar.",
"title": "Tomb of Joshua"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Joshua is believed by some Muslims to be buried on Joshua's Hill in the Beykoz district of Istanbul. Alternative traditional sites for his tomb are situated in Israel (the Shia shrine at Al-Nabi Yusha'), Jordan (An-Nabi Yusha' bin Noon, a Sunni shrine near the city of Al-Salt), Iran (Historical cemetery of Takht e Foolad in Esfahan) and Iraq (the Nabi Yusha' shrine of Baghdad). A local tradition combining three versions of three different Yushas, including biblical Joshua, places the tomb inside a cave in the Tripoli Mountains, overlooking the coastal town of el-Minyieh near Tripoli, Lebanon.",
"title": "Tomb of Joshua"
}
]
| Joshua, also known as Yehoshua or Josue, functioned as Moses' assistant in the books of Exodus and Numbers, and later succeeded Moses as leader of the Israelite tribes in the Book of Joshua of the Hebrew Bible. His name was Hoshea the son of Nun, of the tribe of Ephraim, but Moses called him "Yehoshua", the name by which he is commonly known in English. According to the Bible, he was born in Egypt prior to the Exodus. The Hebrew Bible identifies Joshua as one of the twelve spies of Israel sent by Moses to explore the land of Canaan. In Numbers 13:1 and after the death of Moses, he led the Israelite tribes in the conquest of Canaan, and allocated lands to the tribes. According to biblical chronology, Joshua lived some time in the Bronze Age. According to Joshua 24:29 Joshua died at the age of 110. Joshua holds a position of respect among Muslims, who also see him as the leader of the faithful following the death of Moses. In Islam, it is also believed that Yusha bin Nun (Joshua) was the "attendant" of Moses mentioned in the Quran before Moses meets Khidr. Joshua plays a role in Islamic literature, with significant narration in the hadith. | 2001-09-29T07:03:10Z | 2023-12-19T07:18:16Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua |
16,122 | Jeremiah (disambiguation) | Jeremiah (c. 655–586 BCE) is one of the major prophets of the Hebrew Bible.
Jeremiah or Jeremias may also refer to: | [
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"text": "Jeremiah (c. 655–586 BCE) is one of the major prophets of the Hebrew Bible.",
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| Jeremiah is one of the major prophets of the Hebrew Bible. Jeremiah or Jeremias may also refer to: Book of Jeremiah, in Judeo-Christian scripture, including links to individual chapters | 2023-05-03T14:56:11Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiah_(disambiguation) |
|
16,123 | Jeroboam | Jeroboam I (/ˌdʒɛrəˈboʊ.əm/; Hebrew: יָרָבְעָם Yārŏḇʿām; Greek: Ἱεροβοάμ, romanized: Hieroboám) was, according to the Hebrew Bible, the first king of the northern Kingdom of Israel following a revolt of the ten tribes against Rehoboam that put an end to the United Monarchy.
William F. Albright has dated his reign from 922 to 901 BC, while Edwin R. Thiele offers the dates 931 to 910 BC.
The name Yārŏḇ‘ām יָרָבְעָם is commonly held to have been derived from rīḇ רִיב and ʿam עַם, signifying "the people contend" or "he pleads the people's cause". It is alternatively translated to mean "his people are many" or "he increases the people" (from רבב rbb, meaning "to increase"), or even "he that opposes the people". In the Septuagint he is called Hieroboam (Ἱεροβοάμ).
Jeroboam was the son of Nebat, a member of the Tribe of Ephraim of Zereda. His mother, named Zeruah (צרוע "leprous") was a widow. He had at least two sons, Abijah and Nadab, who succeeded him on the throne.
While still a young man, King Solomon made him superintendent over his tribesmen in the building of the fortress Millo in Jerusalem and of other public works, and he naturally became conversant with the widespread discontent caused by the extravagances which marked the reign of Solomon.
Influenced by the words of the prophet Ahijah, he began to form conspiracies with the view of becoming king of the ten northern tribes; but these were discovered, and he fled to Egypt, where he remained under the protection of Pharaoh Shishak until the death of Solomon. After this event, he returned and participated in a delegation sent to ask the new king Rehoboam to reduce taxes. After Rehoboam rejected their petition, ten of the tribes withdrew their allegiance to the house of David and proclaimed Jeroboam their king, forming the northern kingdom of Israel (Samaria). Initially, only the tribes of Judah and Benjamin remained to form the new kingdom of Judah, loyal to Rehoboam.
Jeroboam rebuilt and fortified Shechem as the capital of the northern kingdom, and fearing that pilgrimages to the temple in Jerusalem prescribed by the Law might be an occasion for his people to go back to their old allegiance, he built two state temples with golden calves, one in Bethel and the other in Dan. Although criticised for his cultic activities in 1 Kings, calf worship was not new in Israelite ritual, but a reintroduction of an earlier ritual. Bethel and Dan were already established cultic sites. According to Rabbanic Literature Gehazi possessed a magnet by which he lifted up the idol made by Jeroboam, so that it was seen between heaven and earth; he had "Yhwh" engraved on it, and in consequence the idol (a calf) pronounced the first two words of the Decalogue (ib.).
According to 1 Kings, while Jeroboam was engaged in offering incense at Bethel, a "man of God" warned him that "a son named Josiah will be born to the house of David", who would destroy the altar (referring to King Josiah of Judah who would rule approximately three hundred years later). Attempting to arrest the prophet for his bold words of defiance, Jeroboam's hand was "dried up", and the altar before which he stood was rent asunder. At the entreaty of the man of God, his hand was restored to him again, but the miracle made no abiding impression on him. Jeroboam offered hospitality to the man of God but this was declined, not out of contempt but in obedience to the command of God. The prophecy is fulfilled in 2 Kings.
This "man of God" who warned Jeroboam has been equated with a seer named Iddo.
The wife of Jeroboam is a character in the Hebrew Bible. She is unnamed in the Masoretic Text, but according to the Septuagint, she was an Egyptian princess called Ano:
In 1 Kings, Jeroboam's son Abijah gets sick, and he sends his wife to the prophet Ahijah. Ahijah's message, however, is that Abijah will die, which he does. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia the good that Abijah did for which he would be laid in the grave:"Rabbinical Literature:The passage, I Kings, xiv. 13, in which there is a reference to "some good thing [found in him] toward the Lord God of Israel," is interpreted (M. Ḳ. 28b) as an allusion to Abijah's courageous and pious act in removing the sentinels placed by his father on the frontier between Israel and Judah to prevent pilgrimages to Jerusalem. Some assert that he himself undertook a pilgrimage."
According to the Hebrew Bible, Jeroboam was in "constant war with the house of Judah". While the southern kingdom made no serious effort militarily to regain power over the north, there was a long-lasting boundary dispute, fighting over which lasted during the reigns of several kings on both sides before being finally settled.
In the eighteenth year of Jeroboam's reign, Abijah (also known as Abijam), Rehoboam's son, became king of Judah. During his short reign of three years, Abijah went to considerable lengths to bring the Kingdom of Israel back under his control. He waged a major battle against Jeroboam in the mountains of Ephraim. According to the Book of Chronicles Abijah had a force of 400,000 and Jeroboam 800,000. The Biblical sources mention that Abijah addressed the armies of Israel, urging them to submit and to let the Kingdom of Israel be whole again, but his plea fell on deaf ears. Abijah then rallied his own troops with a phrase which has since become famous: "God is with us as our leader". The biblical account states that his elite warriors fended off a pincer movement to rout Jeroboam's troops, killing 500,000 of them.
Jeroboam was crippled by this severe defeat to Abijah and posed little threat to the Kingdom of Judah for the rest of his reign. He also lost the towns of Bethel, Jeshanah, and Ephron, with their surrounding villages. Bethel was an important centre for Jeroboam's Golden Calf cult (which used non-Levites as priests), located on Israel's southern border, which had been allocated to the Tribe of Benjamin by Joshua, as was Ephron, which is believed to be the Ophrah that was allocated to the Tribe of Benjamin by Joshua.
Jeroboam died soon after Abijam.
The account of Jeroboam's life, like that of all his successors, ends with the formula "And the rest of the acts of Jeroboam, how he warred, and how he reigned, behold, they are written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel".
"The Chronicles of the Kings of Israel", likely compiled by or derived from these kings' own scribes, is likely the source for the basic facts of Jeroboam's life and reign, though the compiler(s) of the extant Book of Kings clearly made selective use of it and added hostile commentaries. His family was eventually wiped out.
The prophecies of doom concerning the fall of both the House of Jeroboam and the northern kingdom as a whole ("For the Lord shall smite Israel..., and he shall root up Israel out of this good land, which he gave to their fathers, and shall scatter them beyond the river", might have been composed retroactively, after the events described had already come to pass. Alternatively, the prophecy could have been a logical deduction. Judah had just been conquered and turned into a vassal of Egypt, while Israel stood between the Egyptian and Mesopotamian empires.
It is likely that the story of the golden calf in the wilderness was composed as a polemic against Jeroboam's cultic restoration by claiming that its origins were inconsistent with worship of YHWH.
Jeroboam is portrayed by Nickolas Grace in Solomon & Sheba (1995) and by Richard Dillane in Solomon (1997). Both of these are television films. | [
{
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"text": "Jeroboam I (/ˌdʒɛrəˈboʊ.əm/; Hebrew: יָרָבְעָם Yārŏḇʿām; Greek: Ἱεροβοάμ, romanized: Hieroboám) was, according to the Hebrew Bible, the first king of the northern Kingdom of Israel following a revolt of the ten tribes against Rehoboam that put an end to the United Monarchy.",
"title": ""
},
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"text": "William F. Albright has dated his reign from 922 to 901 BC, while Edwin R. Thiele offers the dates 931 to 910 BC.",
"title": ""
},
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"text": "The name Yārŏḇ‘ām יָרָבְעָם is commonly held to have been derived from rīḇ רִיב and ʿam עַם, signifying \"the people contend\" or \"he pleads the people's cause\". It is alternatively translated to mean \"his people are many\" or \"he increases the people\" (from רבב rbb, meaning \"to increase\"), or even \"he that opposes the people\". In the Septuagint he is called Hieroboam (Ἱεροβοάμ).",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Jeroboam was the son of Nebat, a member of the Tribe of Ephraim of Zereda. His mother, named Zeruah (צרוע \"leprous\") was a widow. He had at least two sons, Abijah and Nadab, who succeeded him on the throne.",
"title": "Biblical background"
},
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"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "While still a young man, King Solomon made him superintendent over his tribesmen in the building of the fortress Millo in Jerusalem and of other public works, and he naturally became conversant with the widespread discontent caused by the extravagances which marked the reign of Solomon.",
"title": "Biblical background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Influenced by the words of the prophet Ahijah, he began to form conspiracies with the view of becoming king of the ten northern tribes; but these were discovered, and he fled to Egypt, where he remained under the protection of Pharaoh Shishak until the death of Solomon. After this event, he returned and participated in a delegation sent to ask the new king Rehoboam to reduce taxes. After Rehoboam rejected their petition, ten of the tribes withdrew their allegiance to the house of David and proclaimed Jeroboam their king, forming the northern kingdom of Israel (Samaria). Initially, only the tribes of Judah and Benjamin remained to form the new kingdom of Judah, loyal to Rehoboam.",
"title": "Biblical background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Jeroboam rebuilt and fortified Shechem as the capital of the northern kingdom, and fearing that pilgrimages to the temple in Jerusalem prescribed by the Law might be an occasion for his people to go back to their old allegiance, he built two state temples with golden calves, one in Bethel and the other in Dan. Although criticised for his cultic activities in 1 Kings, calf worship was not new in Israelite ritual, but a reintroduction of an earlier ritual. Bethel and Dan were already established cultic sites. According to Rabbanic Literature Gehazi possessed a magnet by which he lifted up the idol made by Jeroboam, so that it was seen between heaven and earth; he had \"Yhwh\" engraved on it, and in consequence the idol (a calf) pronounced the first two words of the Decalogue (ib.).",
"title": "Biblical background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "According to 1 Kings, while Jeroboam was engaged in offering incense at Bethel, a \"man of God\" warned him that \"a son named Josiah will be born to the house of David\", who would destroy the altar (referring to King Josiah of Judah who would rule approximately three hundred years later). Attempting to arrest the prophet for his bold words of defiance, Jeroboam's hand was \"dried up\", and the altar before which he stood was rent asunder. At the entreaty of the man of God, his hand was restored to him again, but the miracle made no abiding impression on him. Jeroboam offered hospitality to the man of God but this was declined, not out of contempt but in obedience to the command of God. The prophecy is fulfilled in 2 Kings.",
"title": "Biblical background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "This \"man of God\" who warned Jeroboam has been equated with a seer named Iddo.",
"title": "Biblical background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The wife of Jeroboam is a character in the Hebrew Bible. She is unnamed in the Masoretic Text, but according to the Septuagint, she was an Egyptian princess called Ano:",
"title": "Biblical background"
},
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"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In 1 Kings, Jeroboam's son Abijah gets sick, and he sends his wife to the prophet Ahijah. Ahijah's message, however, is that Abijah will die, which he does. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia the good that Abijah did for which he would be laid in the grave:\"Rabbinical Literature:The passage, I Kings, xiv. 13, in which there is a reference to \"some good thing [found in him] toward the Lord God of Israel,\" is interpreted (M. Ḳ. 28b) as an allusion to Abijah's courageous and pious act in removing the sentinels placed by his father on the frontier between Israel and Judah to prevent pilgrimages to Jerusalem. Some assert that he himself undertook a pilgrimage.\"",
"title": "Biblical background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "According to the Hebrew Bible, Jeroboam was in \"constant war with the house of Judah\". While the southern kingdom made no serious effort militarily to regain power over the north, there was a long-lasting boundary dispute, fighting over which lasted during the reigns of several kings on both sides before being finally settled.",
"title": "War with Judah"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In the eighteenth year of Jeroboam's reign, Abijah (also known as Abijam), Rehoboam's son, became king of Judah. During his short reign of three years, Abijah went to considerable lengths to bring the Kingdom of Israel back under his control. He waged a major battle against Jeroboam in the mountains of Ephraim. According to the Book of Chronicles Abijah had a force of 400,000 and Jeroboam 800,000. The Biblical sources mention that Abijah addressed the armies of Israel, urging them to submit and to let the Kingdom of Israel be whole again, but his plea fell on deaf ears. Abijah then rallied his own troops with a phrase which has since become famous: \"God is with us as our leader\". The biblical account states that his elite warriors fended off a pincer movement to rout Jeroboam's troops, killing 500,000 of them.",
"title": "War with Judah"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Jeroboam was crippled by this severe defeat to Abijah and posed little threat to the Kingdom of Judah for the rest of his reign. He also lost the towns of Bethel, Jeshanah, and Ephron, with their surrounding villages. Bethel was an important centre for Jeroboam's Golden Calf cult (which used non-Levites as priests), located on Israel's southern border, which had been allocated to the Tribe of Benjamin by Joshua, as was Ephron, which is believed to be the Ophrah that was allocated to the Tribe of Benjamin by Joshua.",
"title": "War with Judah"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Jeroboam died soon after Abijam.",
"title": "War with Judah"
},
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"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The account of Jeroboam's life, like that of all his successors, ends with the formula \"And the rest of the acts of Jeroboam, how he warred, and how he reigned, behold, they are written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel\".",
"title": "Commentary on sources"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "\"The Chronicles of the Kings of Israel\", likely compiled by or derived from these kings' own scribes, is likely the source for the basic facts of Jeroboam's life and reign, though the compiler(s) of the extant Book of Kings clearly made selective use of it and added hostile commentaries. His family was eventually wiped out.",
"title": "Commentary on sources"
},
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"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The prophecies of doom concerning the fall of both the House of Jeroboam and the northern kingdom as a whole (\"For the Lord shall smite Israel..., and he shall root up Israel out of this good land, which he gave to their fathers, and shall scatter them beyond the river\", might have been composed retroactively, after the events described had already come to pass. Alternatively, the prophecy could have been a logical deduction. Judah had just been conquered and turned into a vassal of Egypt, while Israel stood between the Egyptian and Mesopotamian empires.",
"title": "Commentary on sources"
},
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"text": "It is likely that the story of the golden calf in the wilderness was composed as a polemic against Jeroboam's cultic restoration by claiming that its origins were inconsistent with worship of YHWH.",
"title": "Commentary on sources"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Jeroboam is portrayed by Nickolas Grace in Solomon & Sheba (1995) and by Richard Dillane in Solomon (1997). Both of these are television films.",
"title": "In popular culture"
}
]
| Jeroboam I was, according to the Hebrew Bible, the first king of the northern Kingdom of Israel following a revolt of the ten tribes against Rehoboam that put an end to the United Monarchy. William F. Albright has dated his reign from 922 to 901 BC, while Edwin R. Thiele offers the dates 931 to 910 BC. | 2001-09-29T07:05:14Z | 2023-11-26T03:19:20Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeroboam |
16,125 | John the Baptist | John the Baptist (c. 1st century BC – c. AD 30) was a Judaean preacher active in the area of the Jordan River in the early 1st century AD. He is also known as Saint John the Forerunner in Eastern Orthodoxy, John the Immerser in some Baptist Christian traditions, Saint John by certain Catholic churches, and Prophet Yahya in Islam. He is sometimes alternatively referred to as John the Baptiser.
John is mentioned by the Roman Jewish historian Josephus and he is revered as a major religious figure in Christianity, Islam, the Baháʼí faith, the Druze faith, and Mandaeism, the latter in which he is considered to be the final and most vital prophet. He is considered to be a prophet of God by all of the aforementioned faiths, and is honoured as a saint in many Christian denominations. According to the New Testament, John anticipated a messianic figure greater than himself, and the Gospels portray John as the precursor or forerunner of Jesus. Jesus himself identifies John as "Elijah who is to come", which is a direct reference to the Book of Malachi (Malachi 4:5), that has been confirmed by the angel who announced John's birth to his father, Zechariah. According to the Gospel of Luke, John and Jesus were relatives.
Some scholars maintain that John belonged to the Essenes, a semi-ascetic Jewish sect who expected a messiah and practiced ritual baptism. John used baptism as the central symbol or sacrament of his pre-messianic movement. Most biblical scholars agree that John baptized Jesus, and several New Testament accounts report that some of Jesus' early followers had previously been followers of John. According to the New Testament, John was sentenced to death and subsequently beheaded by Herod Antipas around AD 30 after John rebuked him for divorcing his wife Phasaelis and then unlawfully wedding Herodias, the wife of his brother Herod Philip I. Josephus also mentions John in the Antiquities of the Jews and states that he was executed by order of Herod Antipas in the fortress at Machaerus.
Followers of John existed well into the 2nd century AD, and some proclaimed him to be the messiah. In modern times, the followers of John the Baptist are the Mandaeans, an ancient ethnoreligious group who believe that he is their greatest and final prophet. In the Roman martyrology, apart from Jesus and the Virgin Mary, John is the only saint whose birth and death are both commemorated.
John the Baptist is mentioned in all four canonical Gospels and the non-canonical Gospel of the Nazarenes. The Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke) describe John baptising Jesus; in the Gospel of John this is inferred by many to be found in John 1:32.
The Gospel of Mark introduces John as a fulfillment of a prophecy from the Book of Isaiah (in fact, a conflation of texts from Isaiah, Malachi and Exodus) about a messenger being sent ahead, and a voice crying out in the wilderness. John is described as wearing clothes of camel's hair, and living on locusts and wild honey. John proclaims baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sin, and says another will come after him who will not baptize with water, but with the Holy Spirit.
Jesus comes to John, and is baptized by him in the river Jordan. The account describes how, as he emerges from the water, Jesus sees the heavens open and the Holy Spirit descends on him "like a dove", and he hears a voice from heaven that says, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased".
Later in the gospel there is an account of John's death. It is introduced by an incident where the Tetrarch Herod Antipas, hearing stories about Jesus, imagines that this is John the Baptist raised from the dead. It then explains that John had rebuked Herod for marrying Herodias, the ex-wife of his brother (named here as Philip). Herodias demands his execution, but Herod, who "liked to listen" to John, is reluctant to do so because he fears him, knowing he is a "righteous and holy man".
The account then describes how Herodias's unnamed daughter dances before Herod, who is pleased and offers her anything she asks for in return. When the girl asks her mother what she should request, she is told to demand the head of John the Baptist. Reluctantly, Herod orders the beheading of John, and his head is delivered to her, at her request, on a plate. John's disciples take the body away and bury it in a tomb.
The Gospel refers to Antipas as "King" and the ex-husband of Herodias is named as Philip, but he is known to have been called Herod. Although the wording clearly implies the girl was the daughter of Herodias, many texts describe her as "Herod's daughter, Herodias". Since these texts are early and significant and the reading is 'difficult', many scholars see this as the original version, altered in later versions and in Matthew and Luke. Josephus says that Herodias had a daughter by the name of Salome.
Scholars have speculated about the origins of the story. Since it shows signs of having been composed in Aramaic, which Mark apparently did not speak, he is likely to have got it from a Palestinian source. There are a variety of opinions about how much actual historical material it contains, especially given the alleged factual errors. Many scholars have seen the story of John arrested, executed, and buried in a tomb as a conscious foreshadowing of the fate of Jesus.
The Gospel of Matthew account begins with the same modified quotation from Isaiah, moving the Malachi and Exodus material to later in the text, where it is quoted by Jesus. The description of John is possibly taken directly from Mark ("clothing of camel's hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey"), along with the proclamation that one was coming who would baptize with the Holy Spirit "and fire". The book of Matthew next has Jesus coming to John to be baptized, but John objects because he is not worthy because Jesus is the one that brings the baptism in the Spirit.
Unlike Mark, Matthew describes John as critical of Pharisees and Sadducees and as preaching "the kingdom of heaven is at hand" and a "coming judgment".
Matthew shortens the account of the beheading of John, and adds two elements: that Herod Antipas wants John dead, and that the death is reported to Jesus by his disciples. Matthew's approach is to shift the focus away from Herod and onto John as a prototype of Jesus. Where Mark has Herod killing John reluctantly and at Herodias' insistence, Matthew describes him as wanting John dead.
The Gospel of Luke adds an account of John's infancy, introducing him as the miraculous son of Zechariah, an old priest, and his wife Elizabeth, who was past menopause and therefore unable to have children. According to this account, the birth of John was foretold by the angel Gabriel to Zechariah while he was performing his functions as a priest in the temple of Jerusalem. Since he is described as a priest of the course of Abijah and Elizabeth as one of the daughters of Aaron, this would make John a descendant of Aaron on both his father's and mother's side. On the basis of this account, the Catholic as well as the Anglican and Lutheran liturgical calendars placed the feast of the Nativity of John the Baptist on 24 June, six months before Christmas.
Elizabeth is described as a "relative" of Mary the mother of Jesus, in Luke 1:36. There is no mention of a family relationship between John and Jesus in the other Gospels, and Raymond E. Brown has described it as "of dubious historicity". Géza Vermes has called it "artificial and undoubtedly Luke's creation". The many similarities between the Gospel of Luke story of the birth of John and the Old Testament account of the birth of Samuel suggest that Luke's account of the annunciation and birth of Jesus are modeled on that of Samuel.
Unique to the Gospel of Luke, John the Baptist explicitly teaches charity, baptizes tax-collectors, and advises soldiers.
The text briefly mentions that John is imprisoned and later beheaded by Herod, but the Gospel of Luke lacks the story of a step-daughter dancing for Herod and requesting John's head.
The Book of Acts portrays some disciples of John becoming followers of Jesus, a development not reported by the gospels except for the early case of Andrew, Simon Peter's brother.
The fourth gospel describes John the Baptist as "a man sent from God" who "was not the light", but "came as a witness, to bear witness to the light, so that through him everyone might believe". John confirms that he is not the Christ nor Elijah nor 'the prophet' when asked by Jewish priests and Pharisees; instead, he described himself as the "voice of one crying in the wilderness".
Upon literary analysis, it is clear that John is the "testifier and confessor par excellence", particularly when compared to figures like Nicodemus.
Jesus's baptism is implied but not depicted. Unlike the other gospels, it is John himself who testifies to seeing "the Spirit come down from heaven like a dove and rest on him". John explicitly announces that Jesus is the one "who baptizes with the Holy Spirit" and John even professes a "belief that he is the Son of God" and "the Lamb of God".
The Gospel of John reports that Jesus' disciples were baptizing and that a debate broke out between some of the disciples of John and another Jew about purification. In this debate John argued that Jesus "must become greater," while he (John) "must become less."
The Gospel of John then points out that Jesus' disciples were baptizing more people than John. Later, the Gospel relates that Jesus regarded John as "a burning and shining lamp, and you were willing to rejoice for a while in his light".
All four Gospels start Jesus' ministry in association with the appearance of John the Baptist. Simon J. Joseph has argued that the Gospel demotes the historical John by depicting him only as a prophetic forerunner to Jesus whereas his ministry actually complemented Jesus'.
Although the Gospel of Mark implies that the arrival of John the Baptist is the fulfilment of a prophecy from the Book of Isaiah, the words quoted ("I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way – a voice of one calling in the wilderness, 'Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him.'") are actually a composite of texts from Isaiah, Malachi and the Book of Exodus. (Matthew and Luke drop the first part of the reference.)
The gospels differ on the details of the Baptism. In Mark and Luke, Jesus himself sees the heavens open and hears a voice address him personally, saying, "You are my dearly loved son; you bring me great joy". They do not clarify whether others saw and heard these things. Although other incidents where the "voice came out of heaven" are recorded in which, for the sake of the crowds, it was heard audibly, John did say in his witness that he did see the spirit coming down "out of heaven" (John 12:28–30, John 1:32).
In Matthew, the voice from heaven does not address Jesus personally, saying instead "This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased."
In the Gospel of John, John the Baptist himself sees the spirit descend as a dove, testifying about the experience as evidence of Jesus's status.
John's knowledge of Jesus varies across gospels. In the Gospel of Mark, John preaches of a coming leader, but shows no signs of recognizing that Jesus is this leader. In Matthew, however, John immediately recognizes Jesus and John questions his own worthiness to baptize Jesus. In both Matthew and Luke, John later dispatches disciples to question Jesus about his status, asking "Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?" In Luke, John is a familial relative of Jesus whose birth was foretold by Gabriel. In the Gospel of John, John the Baptist himself sees the spirit descend like a dove and he explicitly preaches that Jesus is the Son of God.
The Gospels vary in their depiction of John's relationship to Elijah. Matthew and Mark describe John's attire in a way reminiscent of the description of Elijah in 2 Kings 1:8, who also wore a garment of hair and a leather belt. In Matthew, Jesus explicitly teaches that John is "Elijah who was to come" (Matthew 11:14 – see also Matthew 17:11–13); many Christian theologians have taken this to mean that John was Elijah's successor. In the Gospel of John, John the Baptist explicitly denies being Elijah. In the annunciation narrative in Luke, an angel appears to Zechariah, John's father, and tells him that John "will turn many of the sons of Israel to the Lord their God," and that he will go forth "in the spirit and power of Elijah."
The following comparison table is primarily based on the New International Version (NIV) English translation of the New Testament. The account of Flavius Josephus in Antiquities of the Jews was translated by William Whiston.
An account of John the Baptist is found in all extant manuscripts of the Antiquities of the Jews (book 18, chapter 5, 2) by Flavius Josephus (37–100):
Now some of the Jews thought that the destruction of Herod's [Antipas's] army came from God, and that very justly, as a punishment of what he did against John, that was called the Baptist: for Herod slew him, who was a good man, and commanded the Jews to exercise virtue, both as to righteousness towards one another, and piety towards God, and so to come to baptism; for that the washing [with water] would be acceptable to him, if they made use of it, not in order to the putting away [or the remission] of some sins [only], but for the purification of the body; supposing still that the soul was thoroughly purified beforehand by righteousness. Now when [many] others came in crowds about him, for they were very greatly moved [or pleased] by hearing his words, Herod, who feared lest the great influence John had over the people might put it into his power and inclination to raise a rebellion, (for they seemed ready to do any thing he should advise,) thought it best, by putting him to death, to prevent any mischief he might cause, and not bring himself into difficulties, by sparing a man who might make him repent of it when it would be too late. Accordingly he was sent a prisoner, out of Herod's suspicious temper, to Macherus, the castle I before mentioned, and was there put to death. Now the Jews had an opinion that the destruction of this army was sent as a punishment upon Herod, and a mark of God's displeasure to him.
According to this passage, the execution of John was blamed for the defeat Herod suffered. Some have claimed that this passage indicates that John died near the time of the destruction of Herod's army in AD 36. However, in a different passage, Josephus states that the end of Herod's marriage with Aretas' daughter (after which John was killed) was only the beginning of hostilities between Herod and Aretas, which later escalated into the battle.
Biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan differentiates between Josephus's account of John and Jesus, saying, "John had a monopoly, but Jesus had a franchise." To get baptized, Crossan writes, a person went only to John; to stop the movement one only needed to stop John (therefore his movement ended with his death). Jesus invited all to come and see how he and his companions had already accepted the government of God, entered it and were living it. Such a communal praxis was not just for himself, but could survive without him, unlike John's movement.
Matthew 14:12 records that "his disciples came and took away [John's] body and buried it." Theologian Joseph Benson refers to a belief that they managed to do so because "it seems that the body had been thrown over the prison walls, without burial, probably by order of Herodias."
What became of the head of John the Baptist is difficult to determine. Ancient historians Josephus, Nicephorus and Symeon Metaphrastes assumed that Herodias had it buried in the fortress of Machaerus.
An Eastern Orthodox tradition holds that, after buried, the head was discovered by John's followers and was taken to the Mount of Olives, where it was twice buried and discovered, the latter events giving rise to the Orthodox feast of the First and Second Finding of the Head of St. John the Baptist. Other writers say that it was interred in Herod's palace at Jerusalem; there it was found during the reign of Constantine, and thence secretly taken to Emesa (modern Homs, in Syria), where it was concealed, the place remaining unknown for years, until it was manifested by revelation in 452, an event celebrated in the Orthodox Church as the Third Finding.
Two Catholic churches and one mosque claim to have the head of John the Baptist: the Umayyad Mosque, in Damascus (Syria); the church of San Silvestro in Capite, in Rome; and Amiens Cathedral, in France (the French king would have had it brought from the Holy Land after the Fourth Crusade). A fourth claim is made by the Residenz Museum in Munich, Germany, which keeps a reliquary containing what the Wittelsbach rulers of Bavaria believed to be the head of Saint John.
An Orthodox Christian monastery in Cetinje, Montenegro, and the Catholic Cathedral of Siena, in Italy, both claim to have John the Baptist's right arm and hand, with which he baptised Jesus. According to the Catholic account, in 1464 Pope Pius II donated what was identified as the right arm and hand of John the Baptist to the Siena Cathedral. The donation charter identifies the relic as "the arm of blessed John the Baptist. And this is the very arm that baptized the Lord." The relic is displayed on the high altar of the Siena Cathedral annually in June.
Topkapi Palace, in Istanbul, claims to have John's right hand index finger.
The saint's left hand is allegedly preserved in the Armenian Apostolic Church of St. John at Chinsurah, West Bengal, in India, where each year on "Chinsurah Day" in January it blesses the Armenian Christians of Calcutta.
The decapitation cloth of Saint John, the cloth which covered his head after his execution, is said to be kept at the Aachen Cathedral, in Germany.
According to Armenian tradition, the remains of John the Baptist would in some point have been transferred by Gregory the Illuminator to the Saint Karapet Armenian Monastery.
In 2010, bones were discovered in the ruins of a Bulgarian church in the St. John the Forerunner Monastery (4th–17th centuries) on the Black Sea island of Sveti Ivan (Saint John) and two years later, after DNA and radio carbon testing proved the bones belonged to a Middle Eastern man who lived in the 1st century AD, scientists said that the remains could conceivably have belonged to John the Baptist. The remains, found in a reliquarium, are presently kept in the Sts. Cyril and Methodius Cathedral in Sozopol.
The Coptic Orthodox Church also claim to hold the relics of Saint John the Baptist. A crypt and relics said to be John's and mentioned in 11th- and 16th-century manuscripts, were discovered in 1969 during restoration of the Church of St. Macarius at the Monastery of Saint Macarius the Great in Scetes, Egypt.
Additional relics are claimed to reside in Gandzasar Monastery's Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, in Nagorno-Karabakh.
The bone of one of John the Baptist's left fingers is said to be at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri. It is held in a Gothic-style monstrance made of gilded silver that dates back to 14th century Lower Saxony.
Another obscure claim relates to the town of Halifax in West Yorkshire, United Kingdom, where, as patron saint of the town, the Baptist's head appears on the official coat-of-arms. One legend (among others) bases the etymology of the town's place-name on "halig" (holy) and "fax" (hair), claiming that a relic of the head, or face, of John the Baptist once existed in the town.
The Gospels describe John the Baptist as having had a specific role ordained by God as forerunner or precursor of Jesus, who was the foretold Messiah. The New Testament Gospels speak of this role. In Luke 1:17 the role of John is referred to as being "to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just; to make ready a people prepared for the Lord." In Luke 1:76 as "thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways" and in Luke 1:77 as being "To give knowledge of salvation unto his people by the remission of their sins."
There are several passages within the Old Testament which are interpreted by Christians as being prophetic of John the Baptist in this role. These include a passage in the Book of Malachi that refers to a prophet who would "prepare the way of the Lord":
Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me: and the Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple, even the messenger of the covenant, whom ye delight in: behold, he shall come, saith the LORD of hosts.
Also at the end of the next chapter in Malachi 4:5–6 it says,
Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD: And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.
The Jews of Jesus' day expected Elijah to come before the Messiah; indeed, some present day Jews continue to await Elijah's coming as well, as in the Cup of Elijah the Prophet in the Passover Seder. This is why the disciples ask Jesus in Matthew 17:10, "Why then say the scribes that Elias must first come?" The disciples are then told by Jesus that Elijah came in the person of John the Baptist,
Jesus replied, "To be sure, Elijah comes and will restore all things. But I tell you, Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him, but have done to him everything they wished. In the same way the Son of Man is going to suffer at their hands." Then the disciples understood that he was talking to them about John the Baptist.
These passages are applied to John in the Synoptic Gospels. But where Matthew specifically identifies John the Baptist as Elijah's spiritual successor, the gospels of Mark and Luke are silent on the matter. The Gospel of John states that John the Baptist denied that he was Elijah.
Now this was John's testimony when the Jews of Jerusalem sent priests and Levites to ask him who he was. He did not deny, but confessed freely, "I am not the Christ." They asked him, "Then who are you? Are you Elijah?" He said, "I am not." "Are you the Prophet?" He answered, "No."
Many scholars believe there was contact between the early church in the Apostolic Age and what is called the "Qumran-Essene community". The Dead Sea Scrolls were found at Qumran, which the majority of historians and archaeologists identify as an Essene settlement. John the Baptist is thought to have been either an Essene or "associated" with the community at Khirbet Qumran. According to the Book of Acts, Paul met some "disciples of John" in Ephesus.
The Catholic Church commemorates Saint John the Baptist on two feast days:
According to Frederick Holweck, at the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary to his mother Elizabeth, as recounted in Luke 1:39–57, John, sensing the presence of his Jesus, upon the arrival of Mary, leaped in the womb of his mother; he was then cleansed from original sin and filled with the grace of God. In her Treatise of Prayer, Saint Catherine of Siena includes a brief altercation with the Devil regarding her fight due to the Devil attempting to lure her with vanity and flattery. Speaking in the first person, Catherine responds to the Devil with the following words:
[...] humiliation of yourself, and you answered the Devil with these words: "Wretch that I am! John the Baptist never sinned and was sanctified in his mother's womb. And I have committed so many sins [...]"
The Eastern Catholic Churches and Eastern Orthodox faithful believe that John was the last of the Old Testament prophets, thus serving as a bridge between that period of revelation and the New Covenant. They also teach that, following his death, John descended into Hades and there once more preached that Jesus the Messiah was coming, so he was the Forerunner of Christ in death as he had been in life. Eastern Catholic and Orthodox churches will often have an icon of Saint John the Baptist in a place of honor on the iconostasis, and he is frequently mentioned during the Divine Services. Every Tuesday throughout the year is dedicated to his memory.
The Eastern Orthodox Church remembers Saint John the Forerunner on six separate feast days, listed here in order in which they occur during the church year (which begins on 1 September):
In addition to the above, 5 September is the commemoration of Zacharias and Elizabeth, Saint John's parents.
The Russian Orthodox Church observes 12 October as the Transfer of the Right Hand of the Forerunner from Malta to Gatchina (1799).
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that modern revelation confirms the biblical account of John and also makes known additional events in his ministry. According to this belief, John was "ordained by the angel of God" when he was eight days old "to overthrow the kingdom of the Jews" and to prepare a people for the Lord. Latter-day Saints also believe that "he was baptized while yet in his childhood."
Joseph Smith said: "Let us come into New Testament times – so many are ever praising the Lord and His apostles. We will commence with John the Baptist. When Herod's edict went forth to destroy the young children, John was about six months older than Jesus, and came under this hellish edict, and Zecharias caused his mother to take him into the mountains, where he was raised on locusts and wild honey. When his father refused to disclose his hiding place, and being the officiating high priest at the Temple that year, was slain by Herod's order, between the porch and the altar, as Jesus said."
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints teaches that John the Baptist appeared on the banks of the Susquehanna River near Harmony Township, Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania, as a resurrected being to Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery on 15 May 1829, and ordained them to the Aaronic priesthood. According to the Church's dispensational view of religious history, John's ministry has operated in three dispensations: he was the last of the prophets under the law of Moses; he was the first of the New Testament prophets; and he was sent to restore the Aaronic priesthood in our day (the dispensation of the fulness of times). Latter-day Saints believe John's ministry was foretold by two prophets whose teachings are included in the Book of Mormon: Lehi and his son Nephi.
The Unification Church teaches that God intended John to help Jesus during his public ministry in Judea. In particular, John should have done everything in his power to persuade the Jewish people that Jesus was the Messiah. He was to become Jesus' main disciple and John's disciples were to become Jesus' disciples. Unfortunately, John did not follow Jesus and continued his own way of baptizing people. Moreover, John also denied that he was Elijah when queried by several Jewish leaders, contradicting Jesus who stated John is Elijah who was to come. Many Jews therefore could not accept Jesus as the Messiah because John denied being Elijah, as the prophet's appearance was a prerequisite for the Messiah's arrival as stated in Malachi 4:5. According to the Unification Church, "John the Baptist was in the position of representing Elijah's physical body, making himself identical with Elijah from the standpoint of their mission."
According to Matthew 11:11, Jesus stated "there has not risen one greater than John the Baptist." However, in referring to John's blocking the way of the Jews' understanding of him as the Messiah, Jesus said "yet he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he." John's failure to follow Jesus became the chief obstacle to the fulfillment of Jesus' mission.
Among the early Judeo-Christian Gnostics the Ebionites held that John, along with Jesus and James the Just – all of whom they revered – were vegetarians. Epiphanius of Salamis records that this group had amended their Gospel of Matthew – known today as the Gospel of the Ebionites – to change where John eats "locusts" to read "honey cakes" or "manna".
John the Baptist, or Yuhana Maṣbana (Classical Mandaic: ࡉࡅࡄࡀࡍࡀ ࡌࡀࡑࡁࡀࡍࡀ, lit. 'John the Baptizer' Iuhana Maṣbana) is considered the greatest prophet of the Mandaeans. Mandaeans also refer to him as Yuhana bar Zakria (John, son of Zechariah). He plays a large part in their religious texts such as the Ginza Rabba and the Mandaean Book of John. Mandaeans believe that they descend directly from John's original disciples but they do not believe that their religion began with John, tracing their beliefs back to their first prophet Adam. According to Mandaeism, John was a great teacher, a Nasoraean and renewer of the faith. John is a messenger of Light (nhura) and Truth (kushta) who possessed the power of healing and full Gnosis (manda). Mandaean texts make it abundantly clear that early Mandaeans were extremely loyal to John and viewed him as a prophetic reformer of the ancient Mandaean/Israelite tradition. Scholars such as Mark Lidzbarski, Rudolf Macúch, Ethel S. Drower, Jorunn J. Buckley, and Şinasi Gündüz believe that the Mandaeans likely have a historical connection with John's original disciples. Mandaeans believe that John was married, with his wife named Anhar, and had children.
Enišbai (Elizabeth) is mentioned as the mother of John the Baptist in chapters 18, 21, and 32 of the Mandaean Book of John.
John the Baptist is known as Yaḥyā ibn Zakariyā (Arabic: يحيى بن زكريا) in Islam and is honoured as a prophet. He is believed by Muslims to have been a witness to the word of God, and a prophet who would herald the coming of Jesus. His father Zechariah was also an Islamic prophet. Islamic tradition maintains that John met Muhammad on the night of the Mi'raj, along with Jesus in the second heaven. John's story was also told to the Abyssinian king during the Muslim refugees' Migration to Abyssinia. According to the Quran, John was one on whom God sent peace on the day that he was born and the day that he died.
The Quran claims that John the Baptist was the first to receive this name (Quran 19:7-10) but since the name Yoḥanan occurs many times before John the Baptist, this verse is referring either to Islamic scholar consensus that "Yaḥyā" is not the same name as "Yoḥanan" or to the Biblical account of the miraculous naming of John, which accounted that he was almost named "Zacharias" (Greek: Ζαχαρίας) after his father's name, as no one in the lineage of his father Zacharias (also known as Zechariah) had been named "John" ("Yohanan"/"Yoannes") before him.
In the Quran, God frequently mentions Zechariah's continuous praying for the birth of a son. Zechariah's wife, mentioned in the New Testament as Elizabeth, was barren and therefore the birth of a child seemed impossible. As a gift from God, Zechariah (or Zakariya) was given a son by the name of "Yaḥya" or "John", a name specially chosen for this child alone. In accordance with Zechariah's prayer, God made John and Jesus, who according to exegesis was born six months later, renew the message of God, which had been corrupted and lost by the Israelites. As the Quran says:
˹The angels announced,˺ “O Zachariah! Indeed, We give you the good news of ˹the birth of˺ a son, whose name will be John—a name We have not given to anyone before.” He wondered, “My Lord! How can I have a son when my wife is barren, and I have become extremely old?” An angel replied, “So will it be! Your Lord says, ‘It is easy for Me, just as I created you before, when you were nothing!’” Zachariah said, “My Lord! Grant me a sign.” He responded, “Your sign is that you will not ˹be able to˺ speak to people for three nights, despite being healthy.”
John was exhorted to hold fast to the Scripture and was given wisdom by God while still a child. He was pure and devout, and walked well in the presence of God. He was dutiful towards his parents and he was not arrogant or rebellious. John's reading and understanding of the scriptures, when only a child, surpassed even that of the greatest scholars of the time. Muslim exegesis narrates that Jesus sent John out with twelve disciples, who preached the message before Jesus called his own disciples. The Quran says:
˹It was later said,˺ “O John! Hold firmly to the Scriptures.” And We granted him wisdom while ˹he was still˺ a child,
John was a classical prophet, who was exalted high by God for his bold denouncing of all things sinful. Furthermore, the Quran speaks of John's gentle piety and love and his humble attitude towards life, for which he was granted the Purity of Life:
as well as purity and compassion from Us. And he was God-fearing, and kind to his parents. He was neither arrogant nor disobedient. Peace be upon him the day he was born, and the day of his death, and the day he will be raised back to life!
John is also honored highly in Sufism as well as Islamic mysticism, primarily because of the Quran's description of John's chastity and kindness. Sufis have frequently applied commentaries on the passages on John in the Quran, primarily concerning the God-given gift of "Wisdom" which he acquired in youth as well as his parallels with Jesus. Although several phrases used to describe John and Jesus are virtually identical in the Quran, the manner in which they are expressed is different.
Druze tradition honors several "mentors" and "prophets", and John the Baptist is honored as a prophet. Druze venerate John the Baptist and he is considered a central figure in Druzism. Druze, like some Christians, believe that Elijah (al-Khidr) came back as John the Baptist, since they believe in reincarnation and the transmigration of the soul.
The Baháʼí Faith considers John to have been a prophet of God who like all other prophets was sent to instill the knowledge of God, promote unity among the people of the world, and to show people the correct way to live. There are numerous quotations in the writings of Bahá'u'lláh, founder of the Baháʼí Faith, mentioning John the Baptist. He is regarded by Baháʼís as a lesser Prophet. Bahá'u'lláh claimed that his forerunner, the Báb, was the spiritual return of John the Baptist. In his letter to Pope Pius IX, Bahá'u'lláh wrote:
O followers of the Son! We have once again sent John unto you, and He, verily, hath cried out in the wilderness of the Bayán: O peoples of the world! Cleanse your eyes! The Day whereon ye can behold the Promised One and attain unto Him hath drawn nigh! O followers of the Gospel! Prepare the way! The Day of the advent of the Glorious Lord is at hand! Make ready to enter the Kingdom. Thus hath it been ordained by God, He Who causeth the dawn to break.
John is believed to have had the specific role of foretelling and preparing the way for Jesus. In condemning those who had 'turned aside' from him, Bahá'u'lláh compared them to the followers of John the Baptist, who, he said, "protested against Him Who was the Spirit (Jesus) saying: 'The dispensation of John hath not yet ended; wherefore hast thou come?'" Bahá'u'lláh believed that the Báb played the same role as John in preparing the people for his own coming. As such, Bahá'u'lláh refers to the Báb as 'My Forerunner', the Forerunner being a title that Christians reserve for John the Baptist. However, Baháʼís consider the Báb to be a greater Prophet (Manifestation of God) and thus possessed of a far greater station than John the Baptist.
Scholars studying John the Baptist's relationship with Jesus of Nazareth have commented on the differences in their respective approaches.
James F. McGrath writes "In the first half of the 20th century, the Mandaeans received significant attention from New Testament scholars who thought that their high view of John the Baptist might mean they were the descendants of his disciples. Many historians think that Jesus of Nazareth was a disciple of John the Baptist before breaking away to form his own movement, and I am inclined to agree."
L. Michael White says John the Baptist should be thought of "...primarily as one who was calling for a return to an intensely Jewish piety [...] to follow the way of the Lord [...] to make oneself pure... to be right with God [...] And it seems to be that he calls for baptism as a sign of rededication or repurification of life in a typically Jewish way before God."
John Dominic Crossan sees John the Baptist as an apocalyptic eschatologist, whose message was that "God, very soon, imminently, any moment, is going to descend to eradicate the evil of this world in a sort of an apocalyptic consummation..." When Jesus says John is the greatest person ever born on earth, but the least in the Kingdom of God is greater than John, it means Jesus is changing his vision of God and the Kingdom of God from what he has taken from John. For Crossan, Jesus is an ethical eschatologist that sees "...the demand that God is making on us, not us on God so much as God on us, to do something about the evil in the world."
Michael H. Crosby, O.F.M.Cap. states there was "no biblical evidence indicating that John the Baptist ever became a disciple of Jesus." He believes that John's concept of what a messiah should be was in contrast to how Jesus presented himself, and kept him from becoming a disciple of Jesus. Crosby states, "an unbiased reading leaves us with the figure of John the Baptist as a reformist Jew who also may have wanted desperately to become a believer but was unable to become convinced of Jesus' messiahship..." Crosby considers John's effectiveness as a "precursor" in encouraging others to follow Jesus as very minimal, since the scriptures record only two of his own followers having become Jesus' disciples.
Professor Candida Moss noted that John and Jesus become "de facto competitors in the ancient religious marketplace." Even after baptizing Jesus, John did not follow Jesus but maintained a separate ministry. After John's death, Jesus' followers had to differentiate him from the executed prophet, "countering the prevalent idea that Jesus was actually John raised from the dead." Moss also references the incident in Matthew 16 where disciples indicated some people believed Jesus was John the Baptist.
Pastor Robert L. Deffinbaugh views John's sending two of his disciples to ask Jesus if he were the Messiah or whether another should be sought as the Baptist's issuing a public challenge since the message was presented to Jesus while he was with a gathered crowd. Deffinbaugh suggests that John might have been looking for inauguration of the kingdom of God in a more dramatic way than what Jesus was presenting, as John had previously warned that the "Messiah would come with fire." Jesus answered by indicating his miracle works and teachings which themselves gave evidence of his identity: "The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor".
Harold W. Attridge agrees with Crossan that John was an apocalyptic preacher. Attridge says most contemporary scholars would see the idea of John as the "forerunner" of Jesus as a construct developed by the early church to help explain the relationship between the two. "For the early church it would have been something of an embarrassment to say that Jesus, who was in their minds superior to John the Baptist, had been baptized by him, and thereby proclaimed some sort of subordination to him, some sort of disciple relationship to him..."
Barbara Thiering questions the dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls and suggests that the Teacher of Righteousness (leader of the Essenes) preached coming fiery judgment, said "the axe is laid to the roots of the tree", called people "vipers", practiced baptism and lived in the wilderness of Judea. Due to these reasons, she believes there is a strong possibility that the Teacher of Righteousness was John the Baptist.
The earliest depictions of St John are found in the Baptism of Christ, one of the earliest scenes from the Life of Christ to be frequently depicted in Early Christian art, and John's tall, thin, even gaunt, and bearded figure is already established by the 5th century. Only he and Jesus are consistently shown with long hair from Early Christian times, when the apostles generally have trim classical cuts; in fact John is more consistently depicted in this way than Jesus.
In Byzantine and later Eastern Orthodox art, John the Baptist and the Holy Virgin Mary often flank Jesus on either side. The composition of the Deesis came to be included in every Eastern Orthodox church, as remains the case to this day. Here John and the Theotokos (Mary the "God-bearer") flank a Christ Pantocrator and intercede for humanity.
In Orthodox icons, he often has angel's wings, since Mark 1:2 describes him as a messenger.
After the earliest images showing the Baptism of the Lord follow ones with St John shown as an ascetic wearing camel hair, with a staff and scroll inscribed (in Western art) "Ecce Agnus Dei", or bearing a book or dish with a lamb on it.
The Baptist is very often shown on altarpieces designed for churches dedicated to him, where the donor was named for him or where there was some other patronage connection. John the Baptist is the patron saint of Florence and has often been depicted in the art of that city, and also frequently appears in baptistries, which are very often dedicated to him. Major works depicting St John the Baptist can be found in the Florence Baptistery, including the mosaics on the vault, the bronze doors by Andrea Pisano, and the great silver altar now in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo.
A number of narrative scenes from his life were often shown on the predella of altarpieces dedicated to John, and other settings, notably in the frescoes by Giotto for the Peruzzi Chapel in the church of Santa Croce, the large series in grisaille fresco in the Chiostro dello Scalzo, which was Andrea del Sarto's largest work, and the frescoed Life by Domenico Ghirlandaio in the Tornabuoni Chapel, all in Florence. There is another important fresco cycle by Filippo Lippi in Prato Cathedral. These include the typical scenes: the Annunciation to Zechariah; John's birth; his naming by his father; the Visitation; John's departure for the desert; his preaching in the desert; the Baptism of Christ; John before Herod; the dance of Herod's stepdaughter, Salome; his beheading; and the daughter of Herodias Salome carrying his head on a platter.
His birth, which unlike the Nativity of Jesus allowed a relatively wealthy domestic interior to be shown, became increasingly popular as a subject in the late Middle Ages, with depictions by Jan van Eyck in the Turin-Milan Hours and Ghirlandaio in the Tornabuoni Chapel being among the best known. His execution, a church feast-day, was often shown, and by the 15th century scenes such as the dance of Salome became popular; sometimes, as in an engraving by Israhel van Meckenem, the interest of the artist is clearly in showing the life of Herod's court, given contemporary dress, as much as the martyrdom of the saint. The execution was usually by a swordsman, with John kneeling in prayer, Salome often standing by with an empty platter, and Herod and Herodias at table in a cut-through view of a building in the background.
Salome bearing John's head on a platter equally became a subject for the Power of Women group: a Northern Renaissance fashion for images of glamorous but dangerous women (Delilah, Judith and others). It was often painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder and engraved by the Little Masters. When the head is brought to the table by Salome, Herod may be shown as startled, if not disgusted, but Herodias is usually not. These images remained popular into the Baroque, with Carlo Dolci painting at least three versions. John preaching, in a landscape setting, was a popular subject in Dutch art from Pieter Brueghel the Elder and his successors. The isolated motif of the severed head, often on its platter, was a frequent image, often in sculpture, from the late Middle Ages onwards, known as Ioannes in disco (Latin for "John on a plate").
As a child (of varying age), he is sometimes shown from the 15th century in family scenes from the life of Christ such as the Holy Family, the Presentation of Christ, the Marriage of the Virgin and the Holy Kinship. In the Baptism of Christ his presence was obligatory. Leonardo da Vinci's two versions of the Virgin of the Rocks were influential in establishing a Renaissance fashion for variations on the Madonna and Child which included John. Raphael in particular painted many compositions of the subject, such as the Alba Madonna, La belle jardinière, the Garvagh Madonna, the Madonna della seggiola, and the Madonna dell'Impannata, which are among his best-known works.
John was also often shown by himself as an adolescent or adult, usually already wearing his distinctive dress and carrying a long thin wooden cross – another theme influenced by Leonardo, whose equivocal composition, with the camel-skin dress, was developed by Raphael, Titian and Guido Reni among many others. Often he is accompanied by a lamb, especially in the many Early Netherlandish paintings which needed this attribute as he wore normal clothes, or a red robe over a not very clearly indicated camel skin. Caravaggio painted an especially large number of works depicting John, from at least five largely nude youths attributed to him, to three late works on his death – the great Execution in Malta, and two sombre Salomes with his head, one in Madrid, and one in London.
Amiens Cathedral, which holds one of the alleged heads of the Baptist, has a biographical sequence in polychrome relief, dating from the 16th century. This includes the execution and the disposal of the saint's remains, which according to legend were burnt in the reign of Julian the Apostate (4th century) to prevent pilgrimages.
A remarkable Pre-Raphaelite portrayal is Christ in the House of His Parents by John Everett Millais. Here the Baptist is shown as a child, wearing a loin covering of animal skins, hurrying into Joseph's carpenter shop with a bowl of water to join Mary, Joseph, and Mary's mother Anne in soothing the injured hand of Jesus. Artistic interest enjoyed a considerable revival at the end of the 19th century with Symbolist painters such as Gustave Moreau and Puvis de Chavannes (National Gallery, London). Oscar Wilde's play Salome was illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley, giving rise to some of his most memorable images.
The Italian Renaissance poet Lucrezia Tornabuoni chose John the Baptist as one of the biblical figures on which she wrote poetry.
He is also referenced in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot in stanza 12.
John the Baptist has appeared in a number of screen adaptations of the life of Jesus. Actors who have played John include James D. Ainsley in From the Manger to the Cross (1912), Nigel De Brulier in Salome (1923), Alan Badel in Salome (1953), Robert Ryan in King of Kings (1961), Mario Socrate in The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), Charlton Heston in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), David Haskell in Godspell (1973), Michael York in Jesus of Nazareth (1977), Eli Cohen in Jesus (1979), Andre Gregory in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Christopher Routh in Mary, Mother of Jesus (1999), David O'Hara in Jesus (1999), Scott Handy in The Gospel of John (2003), Aidan McArdle in Judas (2004), Daniel Percival in Son of God (2014), Abhin Galeya in Killing Jesus (2015), and David Amito in "The Chosen" (2019-2022).
Snapaka Yohannan (John the Baptist), a 1963 Indian Malayalam-language film depicts life of St. John the Baptist and his death at the hands of Salome, Herod Antipas and Herodias.
Christian festivals associated with Saint John the Baptist and Forerunner are celebrated at various days by different denominations and are dedicated to his conception, birth, and death, as well as in correlation to the baptism of Jesus. The Eastern Church has feast days for the finding of his head (first, second, and third finding), as well as for his parents, Elizabeth and Zechariah. In the Russian Orthodox Church there is a feast day of the Transfer of the Right Hand of the Forerunner from Malta to Gatchina.
The Feast of Saint John closely coincides with the June solstice, also referred to as Midsummer in the Northern Hemisphere. The Christian holy day is fixed at 24 June; but in most countries festivities are mostly held the night before, on Saint John's Eve. "In England, 'Saint John's Tide' is combined with a midsummer celebration. Instead of the date of the summer solstice, they chose June 24. This may be because of the Baptist's own words, 'He must increase, but I must decrease' (John 3:30). John was, of course, referring to Jesus. John's day comes at the time when the sun is beginning to decrease..."
Saint John the Baptist's beheading is said to have taken place in Machaerus, in central Jordan.
In Spain, Saint John was venerated during the feast of the Alhansara in Granada, and also in Gaztelugatxe
In the United Kingdom, Saint John is the patron of Penzance, Cornwall. In Scotland, he is the patron saint of Perth, which used to be known as St. John's Toun of Perth. The main church in the city is still the medieval Kirk of St. John the Baptist and the city's professional football club is called St Johnstone F.C.
Also, on the night of 23 June on to the 24th, Saint John is celebrated as the patron saint of Porto, the second largest city in Portugal. An article from June 2004 in The Guardian remarked that "Porto's Festa de São João is one of Europe's liveliest street festivals, yet it is relatively unknown outside the country".
As patron saint of the original Order of Knights of the Hospital of Saint John, he is the patron of the Knights Hospitaller of Jerusalem, Malta, Florence, Cesena, Turin and Genoa, Italy; as well as of Malta as a whole and of Xewkija and Gozo in Malta, which remember him with a great feast on the Sunday nearest to 24 June.
Saint John the Baptist is the patron saint of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and its capital city, San Juan. In 1521, the island was given its formal name, "San Juan Bautista de Puerto Rico", following the custom of christening a town with its formal name and the name which Christopher Columbus had originally given the island. The names "San Juan Bautista" and "Puerto Rico" were eventually used in reference to both city and island, leading to a reversal in terminology by most inhabitants largely due to a cartographic error. By 1746, the city's name ("Puerto Rico") had become that of the entire island, while the name for the island ("San Juan Bautista") had become that of the city. The official motto of Puerto Rico also references the saint: Joannes Est Nomen Eius.
He is also a patron saint of French Canada and Newfoundland. The Canadian cities of St. John's, Newfoundland (1497), Saint John, New Brunswick (1604), and Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec (1665), were all named in his honor. His feast day of 24 June is celebrated officially in Quebec as the Fête Nationale du Québec and was previously celebrated in Newfoundland as Discovery Day.
He is also patron of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charleston, which covers the whole of South Carolina in the United States.
Calamba, Laguna, Calumpit, Bulacan, Balayan and Lian in Batangas, Sipocot and San Fernando, Camarines Sur, Daet, Camarines Norte San Juan, Metro Manila, Tabuelan, Cebu, and Jimenez, Misamis Occidental and the oldest in Taytay Rizal are among several places in the Philippines that venerate John as the town or city patron. A common practise of many Filipino fiestas in his honour is bathing and the dousing of people in memory of John's iconic act. The custom is similar in form to Songkran and Holi, and serves as a playful respite from the intense tropical heat. While famed for the Black Nazarene it enshrines, Quiapo Church in Manila is actually dedicated to Saint John.
The Baptistines are the name given to a number of religious orders dedicated to the memory of John the Baptist.
John the Baptist is the name-giving patron of the Knights Hospitaller, or Knights of Saint John.
Along with John the Evangelist, John the Baptist is claimed as a patron saint by the fraternal society of Freemasons. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "John the Baptist (c. 1st century BC – c. AD 30) was a Judaean preacher active in the area of the Jordan River in the early 1st century AD. He is also known as Saint John the Forerunner in Eastern Orthodoxy, John the Immerser in some Baptist Christian traditions, Saint John by certain Catholic churches, and Prophet Yahya in Islam. He is sometimes alternatively referred to as John the Baptiser.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "John is mentioned by the Roman Jewish historian Josephus and he is revered as a major religious figure in Christianity, Islam, the Baháʼí faith, the Druze faith, and Mandaeism, the latter in which he is considered to be the final and most vital prophet. He is considered to be a prophet of God by all of the aforementioned faiths, and is honoured as a saint in many Christian denominations. According to the New Testament, John anticipated a messianic figure greater than himself, and the Gospels portray John as the precursor or forerunner of Jesus. Jesus himself identifies John as \"Elijah who is to come\", which is a direct reference to the Book of Malachi (Malachi 4:5), that has been confirmed by the angel who announced John's birth to his father, Zechariah. According to the Gospel of Luke, John and Jesus were relatives.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Some scholars maintain that John belonged to the Essenes, a semi-ascetic Jewish sect who expected a messiah and practiced ritual baptism. John used baptism as the central symbol or sacrament of his pre-messianic movement. Most biblical scholars agree that John baptized Jesus, and several New Testament accounts report that some of Jesus' early followers had previously been followers of John. According to the New Testament, John was sentenced to death and subsequently beheaded by Herod Antipas around AD 30 after John rebuked him for divorcing his wife Phasaelis and then unlawfully wedding Herodias, the wife of his brother Herod Philip I. Josephus also mentions John in the Antiquities of the Jews and states that he was executed by order of Herod Antipas in the fortress at Machaerus.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Followers of John existed well into the 2nd century AD, and some proclaimed him to be the messiah. In modern times, the followers of John the Baptist are the Mandaeans, an ancient ethnoreligious group who believe that he is their greatest and final prophet. In the Roman martyrology, apart from Jesus and the Virgin Mary, John is the only saint whose birth and death are both commemorated.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "John the Baptist is mentioned in all four canonical Gospels and the non-canonical Gospel of the Nazarenes. The Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke) describe John baptising Jesus; in the Gospel of John this is inferred by many to be found in John 1:32.",
"title": "Gospel narratives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The Gospel of Mark introduces John as a fulfillment of a prophecy from the Book of Isaiah (in fact, a conflation of texts from Isaiah, Malachi and Exodus) about a messenger being sent ahead, and a voice crying out in the wilderness. John is described as wearing clothes of camel's hair, and living on locusts and wild honey. John proclaims baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sin, and says another will come after him who will not baptize with water, but with the Holy Spirit.",
"title": "Gospel narratives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Jesus comes to John, and is baptized by him in the river Jordan. The account describes how, as he emerges from the water, Jesus sees the heavens open and the Holy Spirit descends on him \"like a dove\", and he hears a voice from heaven that says, \"You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased\".",
"title": "Gospel narratives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Later in the gospel there is an account of John's death. It is introduced by an incident where the Tetrarch Herod Antipas, hearing stories about Jesus, imagines that this is John the Baptist raised from the dead. It then explains that John had rebuked Herod for marrying Herodias, the ex-wife of his brother (named here as Philip). Herodias demands his execution, but Herod, who \"liked to listen\" to John, is reluctant to do so because he fears him, knowing he is a \"righteous and holy man\".",
"title": "Gospel narratives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The account then describes how Herodias's unnamed daughter dances before Herod, who is pleased and offers her anything she asks for in return. When the girl asks her mother what she should request, she is told to demand the head of John the Baptist. Reluctantly, Herod orders the beheading of John, and his head is delivered to her, at her request, on a plate. John's disciples take the body away and bury it in a tomb.",
"title": "Gospel narratives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The Gospel refers to Antipas as \"King\" and the ex-husband of Herodias is named as Philip, but he is known to have been called Herod. Although the wording clearly implies the girl was the daughter of Herodias, many texts describe her as \"Herod's daughter, Herodias\". Since these texts are early and significant and the reading is 'difficult', many scholars see this as the original version, altered in later versions and in Matthew and Luke. Josephus says that Herodias had a daughter by the name of Salome.",
"title": "Gospel narratives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Scholars have speculated about the origins of the story. Since it shows signs of having been composed in Aramaic, which Mark apparently did not speak, he is likely to have got it from a Palestinian source. There are a variety of opinions about how much actual historical material it contains, especially given the alleged factual errors. Many scholars have seen the story of John arrested, executed, and buried in a tomb as a conscious foreshadowing of the fate of Jesus.",
"title": "Gospel narratives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The Gospel of Matthew account begins with the same modified quotation from Isaiah, moving the Malachi and Exodus material to later in the text, where it is quoted by Jesus. The description of John is possibly taken directly from Mark (\"clothing of camel's hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey\"), along with the proclamation that one was coming who would baptize with the Holy Spirit \"and fire\". The book of Matthew next has Jesus coming to John to be baptized, but John objects because he is not worthy because Jesus is the one that brings the baptism in the Spirit.",
"title": "Gospel narratives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Unlike Mark, Matthew describes John as critical of Pharisees and Sadducees and as preaching \"the kingdom of heaven is at hand\" and a \"coming judgment\".",
"title": "Gospel narratives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Matthew shortens the account of the beheading of John, and adds two elements: that Herod Antipas wants John dead, and that the death is reported to Jesus by his disciples. Matthew's approach is to shift the focus away from Herod and onto John as a prototype of Jesus. Where Mark has Herod killing John reluctantly and at Herodias' insistence, Matthew describes him as wanting John dead.",
"title": "Gospel narratives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The Gospel of Luke adds an account of John's infancy, introducing him as the miraculous son of Zechariah, an old priest, and his wife Elizabeth, who was past menopause and therefore unable to have children. According to this account, the birth of John was foretold by the angel Gabriel to Zechariah while he was performing his functions as a priest in the temple of Jerusalem. Since he is described as a priest of the course of Abijah and Elizabeth as one of the daughters of Aaron, this would make John a descendant of Aaron on both his father's and mother's side. On the basis of this account, the Catholic as well as the Anglican and Lutheran liturgical calendars placed the feast of the Nativity of John the Baptist on 24 June, six months before Christmas.",
"title": "Gospel narratives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Elizabeth is described as a \"relative\" of Mary the mother of Jesus, in Luke 1:36. There is no mention of a family relationship between John and Jesus in the other Gospels, and Raymond E. Brown has described it as \"of dubious historicity\". Géza Vermes has called it \"artificial and undoubtedly Luke's creation\". The many similarities between the Gospel of Luke story of the birth of John and the Old Testament account of the birth of Samuel suggest that Luke's account of the annunciation and birth of Jesus are modeled on that of Samuel.",
"title": "Gospel narratives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Unique to the Gospel of Luke, John the Baptist explicitly teaches charity, baptizes tax-collectors, and advises soldiers.",
"title": "Gospel narratives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The text briefly mentions that John is imprisoned and later beheaded by Herod, but the Gospel of Luke lacks the story of a step-daughter dancing for Herod and requesting John's head.",
"title": "Gospel narratives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The Book of Acts portrays some disciples of John becoming followers of Jesus, a development not reported by the gospels except for the early case of Andrew, Simon Peter's brother.",
"title": "Gospel narratives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The fourth gospel describes John the Baptist as \"a man sent from God\" who \"was not the light\", but \"came as a witness, to bear witness to the light, so that through him everyone might believe\". John confirms that he is not the Christ nor Elijah nor 'the prophet' when asked by Jewish priests and Pharisees; instead, he described himself as the \"voice of one crying in the wilderness\".",
"title": "Gospel narratives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Upon literary analysis, it is clear that John is the \"testifier and confessor par excellence\", particularly when compared to figures like Nicodemus.",
"title": "Gospel narratives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Jesus's baptism is implied but not depicted. Unlike the other gospels, it is John himself who testifies to seeing \"the Spirit come down from heaven like a dove and rest on him\". John explicitly announces that Jesus is the one \"who baptizes with the Holy Spirit\" and John even professes a \"belief that he is the Son of God\" and \"the Lamb of God\".",
"title": "Gospel narratives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The Gospel of John reports that Jesus' disciples were baptizing and that a debate broke out between some of the disciples of John and another Jew about purification. In this debate John argued that Jesus \"must become greater,\" while he (John) \"must become less.\"",
"title": "Gospel narratives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The Gospel of John then points out that Jesus' disciples were baptizing more people than John. Later, the Gospel relates that Jesus regarded John as \"a burning and shining lamp, and you were willing to rejoice for a while in his light\".",
"title": "Gospel narratives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "All four Gospels start Jesus' ministry in association with the appearance of John the Baptist. Simon J. Joseph has argued that the Gospel demotes the historical John by depicting him only as a prophetic forerunner to Jesus whereas his ministry actually complemented Jesus'.",
"title": "Gospel narratives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Although the Gospel of Mark implies that the arrival of John the Baptist is the fulfilment of a prophecy from the Book of Isaiah, the words quoted (\"I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way – a voice of one calling in the wilderness, 'Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him.'\") are actually a composite of texts from Isaiah, Malachi and the Book of Exodus. (Matthew and Luke drop the first part of the reference.)",
"title": "Gospel narratives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The gospels differ on the details of the Baptism. In Mark and Luke, Jesus himself sees the heavens open and hears a voice address him personally, saying, \"You are my dearly loved son; you bring me great joy\". They do not clarify whether others saw and heard these things. Although other incidents where the \"voice came out of heaven\" are recorded in which, for the sake of the crowds, it was heard audibly, John did say in his witness that he did see the spirit coming down \"out of heaven\" (John 12:28–30, John 1:32).",
"title": "Gospel narratives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In Matthew, the voice from heaven does not address Jesus personally, saying instead \"This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.\"",
"title": "Gospel narratives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In the Gospel of John, John the Baptist himself sees the spirit descend as a dove, testifying about the experience as evidence of Jesus's status.",
"title": "Gospel narratives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "John's knowledge of Jesus varies across gospels. In the Gospel of Mark, John preaches of a coming leader, but shows no signs of recognizing that Jesus is this leader. In Matthew, however, John immediately recognizes Jesus and John questions his own worthiness to baptize Jesus. In both Matthew and Luke, John later dispatches disciples to question Jesus about his status, asking \"Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?\" In Luke, John is a familial relative of Jesus whose birth was foretold by Gabriel. In the Gospel of John, John the Baptist himself sees the spirit descend like a dove and he explicitly preaches that Jesus is the Son of God.",
"title": "Gospel narratives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The Gospels vary in their depiction of John's relationship to Elijah. Matthew and Mark describe John's attire in a way reminiscent of the description of Elijah in 2 Kings 1:8, who also wore a garment of hair and a leather belt. In Matthew, Jesus explicitly teaches that John is \"Elijah who was to come\" (Matthew 11:14 – see also Matthew 17:11–13); many Christian theologians have taken this to mean that John was Elijah's successor. In the Gospel of John, John the Baptist explicitly denies being Elijah. In the annunciation narrative in Luke, an angel appears to Zechariah, John's father, and tells him that John \"will turn many of the sons of Israel to the Lord their God,\" and that he will go forth \"in the spirit and power of Elijah.\"",
"title": "Gospel narratives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The following comparison table is primarily based on the New International Version (NIV) English translation of the New Testament. The account of Flavius Josephus in Antiquities of the Jews was translated by William Whiston.",
"title": "Gospel narratives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "An account of John the Baptist is found in all extant manuscripts of the Antiquities of the Jews (book 18, chapter 5, 2) by Flavius Josephus (37–100):",
"title": "In Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Now some of the Jews thought that the destruction of Herod's [Antipas's] army came from God, and that very justly, as a punishment of what he did against John, that was called the Baptist: for Herod slew him, who was a good man, and commanded the Jews to exercise virtue, both as to righteousness towards one another, and piety towards God, and so to come to baptism; for that the washing [with water] would be acceptable to him, if they made use of it, not in order to the putting away [or the remission] of some sins [only], but for the purification of the body; supposing still that the soul was thoroughly purified beforehand by righteousness. Now when [many] others came in crowds about him, for they were very greatly moved [or pleased] by hearing his words, Herod, who feared lest the great influence John had over the people might put it into his power and inclination to raise a rebellion, (for they seemed ready to do any thing he should advise,) thought it best, by putting him to death, to prevent any mischief he might cause, and not bring himself into difficulties, by sparing a man who might make him repent of it when it would be too late. Accordingly he was sent a prisoner, out of Herod's suspicious temper, to Macherus, the castle I before mentioned, and was there put to death. Now the Jews had an opinion that the destruction of this army was sent as a punishment upon Herod, and a mark of God's displeasure to him.",
"title": "In Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "According to this passage, the execution of John was blamed for the defeat Herod suffered. Some have claimed that this passage indicates that John died near the time of the destruction of Herod's army in AD 36. However, in a different passage, Josephus states that the end of Herod's marriage with Aretas' daughter (after which John was killed) was only the beginning of hostilities between Herod and Aretas, which later escalated into the battle.",
"title": "In Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan differentiates between Josephus's account of John and Jesus, saying, \"John had a monopoly, but Jesus had a franchise.\" To get baptized, Crossan writes, a person went only to John; to stop the movement one only needed to stop John (therefore his movement ended with his death). Jesus invited all to come and see how he and his companions had already accepted the government of God, entered it and were living it. Such a communal praxis was not just for himself, but could survive without him, unlike John's movement.",
"title": "In Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Matthew 14:12 records that \"his disciples came and took away [John's] body and buried it.\" Theologian Joseph Benson refers to a belief that they managed to do so because \"it seems that the body had been thrown over the prison walls, without burial, probably by order of Herodias.\"",
"title": "Relics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "What became of the head of John the Baptist is difficult to determine. Ancient historians Josephus, Nicephorus and Symeon Metaphrastes assumed that Herodias had it buried in the fortress of Machaerus.",
"title": "Relics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "An Eastern Orthodox tradition holds that, after buried, the head was discovered by John's followers and was taken to the Mount of Olives, where it was twice buried and discovered, the latter events giving rise to the Orthodox feast of the First and Second Finding of the Head of St. John the Baptist. Other writers say that it was interred in Herod's palace at Jerusalem; there it was found during the reign of Constantine, and thence secretly taken to Emesa (modern Homs, in Syria), where it was concealed, the place remaining unknown for years, until it was manifested by revelation in 452, an event celebrated in the Orthodox Church as the Third Finding.",
"title": "Relics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Two Catholic churches and one mosque claim to have the head of John the Baptist: the Umayyad Mosque, in Damascus (Syria); the church of San Silvestro in Capite, in Rome; and Amiens Cathedral, in France (the French king would have had it brought from the Holy Land after the Fourth Crusade). A fourth claim is made by the Residenz Museum in Munich, Germany, which keeps a reliquary containing what the Wittelsbach rulers of Bavaria believed to be the head of Saint John.",
"title": "Relics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "An Orthodox Christian monastery in Cetinje, Montenegro, and the Catholic Cathedral of Siena, in Italy, both claim to have John the Baptist's right arm and hand, with which he baptised Jesus. According to the Catholic account, in 1464 Pope Pius II donated what was identified as the right arm and hand of John the Baptist to the Siena Cathedral. The donation charter identifies the relic as \"the arm of blessed John the Baptist. And this is the very arm that baptized the Lord.\" The relic is displayed on the high altar of the Siena Cathedral annually in June.",
"title": "Relics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Topkapi Palace, in Istanbul, claims to have John's right hand index finger.",
"title": "Relics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The saint's left hand is allegedly preserved in the Armenian Apostolic Church of St. John at Chinsurah, West Bengal, in India, where each year on \"Chinsurah Day\" in January it blesses the Armenian Christians of Calcutta.",
"title": "Relics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "The decapitation cloth of Saint John, the cloth which covered his head after his execution, is said to be kept at the Aachen Cathedral, in Germany.",
"title": "Relics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "According to Armenian tradition, the remains of John the Baptist would in some point have been transferred by Gregory the Illuminator to the Saint Karapet Armenian Monastery.",
"title": "Relics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "In 2010, bones were discovered in the ruins of a Bulgarian church in the St. John the Forerunner Monastery (4th–17th centuries) on the Black Sea island of Sveti Ivan (Saint John) and two years later, after DNA and radio carbon testing proved the bones belonged to a Middle Eastern man who lived in the 1st century AD, scientists said that the remains could conceivably have belonged to John the Baptist. The remains, found in a reliquarium, are presently kept in the Sts. Cyril and Methodius Cathedral in Sozopol.",
"title": "Relics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The Coptic Orthodox Church also claim to hold the relics of Saint John the Baptist. A crypt and relics said to be John's and mentioned in 11th- and 16th-century manuscripts, were discovered in 1969 during restoration of the Church of St. Macarius at the Monastery of Saint Macarius the Great in Scetes, Egypt.",
"title": "Relics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Additional relics are claimed to reside in Gandzasar Monastery's Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, in Nagorno-Karabakh.",
"title": "Relics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The bone of one of John the Baptist's left fingers is said to be at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri. It is held in a Gothic-style monstrance made of gilded silver that dates back to 14th century Lower Saxony.",
"title": "Relics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Another obscure claim relates to the town of Halifax in West Yorkshire, United Kingdom, where, as patron saint of the town, the Baptist's head appears on the official coat-of-arms. One legend (among others) bases the etymology of the town's place-name on \"halig\" (holy) and \"fax\" (hair), claiming that a relic of the head, or face, of John the Baptist once existed in the town.",
"title": "Relics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The Gospels describe John the Baptist as having had a specific role ordained by God as forerunner or precursor of Jesus, who was the foretold Messiah. The New Testament Gospels speak of this role. In Luke 1:17 the role of John is referred to as being \"to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just; to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.\" In Luke 1:76 as \"thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways\" and in Luke 1:77 as being \"To give knowledge of salvation unto his people by the remission of their sins.\"",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "There are several passages within the Old Testament which are interpreted by Christians as being prophetic of John the Baptist in this role. These include a passage in the Book of Malachi that refers to a prophet who would \"prepare the way of the Lord\":",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me: and the Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple, even the messenger of the covenant, whom ye delight in: behold, he shall come, saith the LORD of hosts.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Also at the end of the next chapter in Malachi 4:5–6 it says,",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD: And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The Jews of Jesus' day expected Elijah to come before the Messiah; indeed, some present day Jews continue to await Elijah's coming as well, as in the Cup of Elijah the Prophet in the Passover Seder. This is why the disciples ask Jesus in Matthew 17:10, \"Why then say the scribes that Elias must first come?\" The disciples are then told by Jesus that Elijah came in the person of John the Baptist,",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Jesus replied, \"To be sure, Elijah comes and will restore all things. But I tell you, Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him, but have done to him everything they wished. In the same way the Son of Man is going to suffer at their hands.\" Then the disciples understood that he was talking to them about John the Baptist.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "These passages are applied to John in the Synoptic Gospels. But where Matthew specifically identifies John the Baptist as Elijah's spiritual successor, the gospels of Mark and Luke are silent on the matter. The Gospel of John states that John the Baptist denied that he was Elijah.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Now this was John's testimony when the Jews of Jerusalem sent priests and Levites to ask him who he was. He did not deny, but confessed freely, \"I am not the Christ.\" They asked him, \"Then who are you? Are you Elijah?\" He said, \"I am not.\" \"Are you the Prophet?\" He answered, \"No.\"",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Many scholars believe there was contact between the early church in the Apostolic Age and what is called the \"Qumran-Essene community\". The Dead Sea Scrolls were found at Qumran, which the majority of historians and archaeologists identify as an Essene settlement. John the Baptist is thought to have been either an Essene or \"associated\" with the community at Khirbet Qumran. According to the Book of Acts, Paul met some \"disciples of John\" in Ephesus.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "The Catholic Church commemorates Saint John the Baptist on two feast days:",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "According to Frederick Holweck, at the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary to his mother Elizabeth, as recounted in Luke 1:39–57, John, sensing the presence of his Jesus, upon the arrival of Mary, leaped in the womb of his mother; he was then cleansed from original sin and filled with the grace of God. In her Treatise of Prayer, Saint Catherine of Siena includes a brief altercation with the Devil regarding her fight due to the Devil attempting to lure her with vanity and flattery. Speaking in the first person, Catherine responds to the Devil with the following words:",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "[...] humiliation of yourself, and you answered the Devil with these words: \"Wretch that I am! John the Baptist never sinned and was sanctified in his mother's womb. And I have committed so many sins [...]\"",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "The Eastern Catholic Churches and Eastern Orthodox faithful believe that John was the last of the Old Testament prophets, thus serving as a bridge between that period of revelation and the New Covenant. They also teach that, following his death, John descended into Hades and there once more preached that Jesus the Messiah was coming, so he was the Forerunner of Christ in death as he had been in life. Eastern Catholic and Orthodox churches will often have an icon of Saint John the Baptist in a place of honor on the iconostasis, and he is frequently mentioned during the Divine Services. Every Tuesday throughout the year is dedicated to his memory.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "The Eastern Orthodox Church remembers Saint John the Forerunner on six separate feast days, listed here in order in which they occur during the church year (which begins on 1 September):",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "In addition to the above, 5 September is the commemoration of Zacharias and Elizabeth, Saint John's parents.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "The Russian Orthodox Church observes 12 October as the Transfer of the Right Hand of the Forerunner from Malta to Gatchina (1799).",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that modern revelation confirms the biblical account of John and also makes known additional events in his ministry. According to this belief, John was \"ordained by the angel of God\" when he was eight days old \"to overthrow the kingdom of the Jews\" and to prepare a people for the Lord. Latter-day Saints also believe that \"he was baptized while yet in his childhood.\"",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Joseph Smith said: \"Let us come into New Testament times – so many are ever praising the Lord and His apostles. We will commence with John the Baptist. When Herod's edict went forth to destroy the young children, John was about six months older than Jesus, and came under this hellish edict, and Zecharias caused his mother to take him into the mountains, where he was raised on locusts and wild honey. When his father refused to disclose his hiding place, and being the officiating high priest at the Temple that year, was slain by Herod's order, between the porch and the altar, as Jesus said.\"",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints teaches that John the Baptist appeared on the banks of the Susquehanna River near Harmony Township, Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania, as a resurrected being to Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery on 15 May 1829, and ordained them to the Aaronic priesthood. According to the Church's dispensational view of religious history, John's ministry has operated in three dispensations: he was the last of the prophets under the law of Moses; he was the first of the New Testament prophets; and he was sent to restore the Aaronic priesthood in our day (the dispensation of the fulness of times). Latter-day Saints believe John's ministry was foretold by two prophets whose teachings are included in the Book of Mormon: Lehi and his son Nephi.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "The Unification Church teaches that God intended John to help Jesus during his public ministry in Judea. In particular, John should have done everything in his power to persuade the Jewish people that Jesus was the Messiah. He was to become Jesus' main disciple and John's disciples were to become Jesus' disciples. Unfortunately, John did not follow Jesus and continued his own way of baptizing people. Moreover, John also denied that he was Elijah when queried by several Jewish leaders, contradicting Jesus who stated John is Elijah who was to come. Many Jews therefore could not accept Jesus as the Messiah because John denied being Elijah, as the prophet's appearance was a prerequisite for the Messiah's arrival as stated in Malachi 4:5. According to the Unification Church, \"John the Baptist was in the position of representing Elijah's physical body, making himself identical with Elijah from the standpoint of their mission.\"",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "According to Matthew 11:11, Jesus stated \"there has not risen one greater than John the Baptist.\" However, in referring to John's blocking the way of the Jews' understanding of him as the Messiah, Jesus said \"yet he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.\" John's failure to follow Jesus became the chief obstacle to the fulfillment of Jesus' mission.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Among the early Judeo-Christian Gnostics the Ebionites held that John, along with Jesus and James the Just – all of whom they revered – were vegetarians. Epiphanius of Salamis records that this group had amended their Gospel of Matthew – known today as the Gospel of the Ebionites – to change where John eats \"locusts\" to read \"honey cakes\" or \"manna\".",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "John the Baptist, or Yuhana Maṣbana (Classical Mandaic: ࡉࡅࡄࡀࡍࡀ ࡌࡀࡑࡁࡀࡍࡀ, lit. 'John the Baptizer' Iuhana Maṣbana) is considered the greatest prophet of the Mandaeans. Mandaeans also refer to him as Yuhana bar Zakria (John, son of Zechariah). He plays a large part in their religious texts such as the Ginza Rabba and the Mandaean Book of John. Mandaeans believe that they descend directly from John's original disciples but they do not believe that their religion began with John, tracing their beliefs back to their first prophet Adam. According to Mandaeism, John was a great teacher, a Nasoraean and renewer of the faith. John is a messenger of Light (nhura) and Truth (kushta) who possessed the power of healing and full Gnosis (manda). Mandaean texts make it abundantly clear that early Mandaeans were extremely loyal to John and viewed him as a prophetic reformer of the ancient Mandaean/Israelite tradition. Scholars such as Mark Lidzbarski, Rudolf Macúch, Ethel S. Drower, Jorunn J. Buckley, and Şinasi Gündüz believe that the Mandaeans likely have a historical connection with John's original disciples. Mandaeans believe that John was married, with his wife named Anhar, and had children.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Enišbai (Elizabeth) is mentioned as the mother of John the Baptist in chapters 18, 21, and 32 of the Mandaean Book of John.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "John the Baptist is known as Yaḥyā ibn Zakariyā (Arabic: يحيى بن زكريا) in Islam and is honoured as a prophet. He is believed by Muslims to have been a witness to the word of God, and a prophet who would herald the coming of Jesus. His father Zechariah was also an Islamic prophet. Islamic tradition maintains that John met Muhammad on the night of the Mi'raj, along with Jesus in the second heaven. John's story was also told to the Abyssinian king during the Muslim refugees' Migration to Abyssinia. According to the Quran, John was one on whom God sent peace on the day that he was born and the day that he died.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "The Quran claims that John the Baptist was the first to receive this name (Quran 19:7-10) but since the name Yoḥanan occurs many times before John the Baptist, this verse is referring either to Islamic scholar consensus that \"Yaḥyā\" is not the same name as \"Yoḥanan\" or to the Biblical account of the miraculous naming of John, which accounted that he was almost named \"Zacharias\" (Greek: Ζαχαρίας) after his father's name, as no one in the lineage of his father Zacharias (also known as Zechariah) had been named \"John\" (\"Yohanan\"/\"Yoannes\") before him.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "In the Quran, God frequently mentions Zechariah's continuous praying for the birth of a son. Zechariah's wife, mentioned in the New Testament as Elizabeth, was barren and therefore the birth of a child seemed impossible. As a gift from God, Zechariah (or Zakariya) was given a son by the name of \"Yaḥya\" or \"John\", a name specially chosen for this child alone. In accordance with Zechariah's prayer, God made John and Jesus, who according to exegesis was born six months later, renew the message of God, which had been corrupted and lost by the Israelites. As the Quran says:",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "˹The angels announced,˺ “O Zachariah! Indeed, We give you the good news of ˹the birth of˺ a son, whose name will be John—a name We have not given to anyone before.” He wondered, “My Lord! How can I have a son when my wife is barren, and I have become extremely old?” An angel replied, “So will it be! Your Lord says, ‘It is easy for Me, just as I created you before, when you were nothing!’” Zachariah said, “My Lord! Grant me a sign.” He responded, “Your sign is that you will not ˹be able to˺ speak to people for three nights, despite being healthy.”",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "John was exhorted to hold fast to the Scripture and was given wisdom by God while still a child. He was pure and devout, and walked well in the presence of God. He was dutiful towards his parents and he was not arrogant or rebellious. John's reading and understanding of the scriptures, when only a child, surpassed even that of the greatest scholars of the time. Muslim exegesis narrates that Jesus sent John out with twelve disciples, who preached the message before Jesus called his own disciples. The Quran says:",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "˹It was later said,˺ “O John! Hold firmly to the Scriptures.” And We granted him wisdom while ˹he was still˺ a child,",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "John was a classical prophet, who was exalted high by God for his bold denouncing of all things sinful. Furthermore, the Quran speaks of John's gentle piety and love and his humble attitude towards life, for which he was granted the Purity of Life:",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "as well as purity and compassion from Us. And he was God-fearing, and kind to his parents. He was neither arrogant nor disobedient. Peace be upon him the day he was born, and the day of his death, and the day he will be raised back to life!",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "John is also honored highly in Sufism as well as Islamic mysticism, primarily because of the Quran's description of John's chastity and kindness. Sufis have frequently applied commentaries on the passages on John in the Quran, primarily concerning the God-given gift of \"Wisdom\" which he acquired in youth as well as his parallels with Jesus. Although several phrases used to describe John and Jesus are virtually identical in the Quran, the manner in which they are expressed is different.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Druze tradition honors several \"mentors\" and \"prophets\", and John the Baptist is honored as a prophet. Druze venerate John the Baptist and he is considered a central figure in Druzism. Druze, like some Christians, believe that Elijah (al-Khidr) came back as John the Baptist, since they believe in reincarnation and the transmigration of the soul.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "The Baháʼí Faith considers John to have been a prophet of God who like all other prophets was sent to instill the knowledge of God, promote unity among the people of the world, and to show people the correct way to live. There are numerous quotations in the writings of Bahá'u'lláh, founder of the Baháʼí Faith, mentioning John the Baptist. He is regarded by Baháʼís as a lesser Prophet. Bahá'u'lláh claimed that his forerunner, the Báb, was the spiritual return of John the Baptist. In his letter to Pope Pius IX, Bahá'u'lláh wrote:",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "O followers of the Son! We have once again sent John unto you, and He, verily, hath cried out in the wilderness of the Bayán: O peoples of the world! Cleanse your eyes! The Day whereon ye can behold the Promised One and attain unto Him hath drawn nigh! O followers of the Gospel! Prepare the way! The Day of the advent of the Glorious Lord is at hand! Make ready to enter the Kingdom. Thus hath it been ordained by God, He Who causeth the dawn to break.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "John is believed to have had the specific role of foretelling and preparing the way for Jesus. In condemning those who had 'turned aside' from him, Bahá'u'lláh compared them to the followers of John the Baptist, who, he said, \"protested against Him Who was the Spirit (Jesus) saying: 'The dispensation of John hath not yet ended; wherefore hast thou come?'\" Bahá'u'lláh believed that the Báb played the same role as John in preparing the people for his own coming. As such, Bahá'u'lláh refers to the Báb as 'My Forerunner', the Forerunner being a title that Christians reserve for John the Baptist. However, Baháʼís consider the Báb to be a greater Prophet (Manifestation of God) and thus possessed of a far greater station than John the Baptist.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Scholars studying John the Baptist's relationship with Jesus of Nazareth have commented on the differences in their respective approaches.",
"title": "Scholarship"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "James F. McGrath writes \"In the first half of the 20th century, the Mandaeans received significant attention from New Testament scholars who thought that their high view of John the Baptist might mean they were the descendants of his disciples. Many historians think that Jesus of Nazareth was a disciple of John the Baptist before breaking away to form his own movement, and I am inclined to agree.\"",
"title": "Scholarship"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "L. Michael White says John the Baptist should be thought of \"...primarily as one who was calling for a return to an intensely Jewish piety [...] to follow the way of the Lord [...] to make oneself pure... to be right with God [...] And it seems to be that he calls for baptism as a sign of rededication or repurification of life in a typically Jewish way before God.\"",
"title": "Scholarship"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "John Dominic Crossan sees John the Baptist as an apocalyptic eschatologist, whose message was that \"God, very soon, imminently, any moment, is going to descend to eradicate the evil of this world in a sort of an apocalyptic consummation...\" When Jesus says John is the greatest person ever born on earth, but the least in the Kingdom of God is greater than John, it means Jesus is changing his vision of God and the Kingdom of God from what he has taken from John. For Crossan, Jesus is an ethical eschatologist that sees \"...the demand that God is making on us, not us on God so much as God on us, to do something about the evil in the world.\"",
"title": "Scholarship"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Michael H. Crosby, O.F.M.Cap. states there was \"no biblical evidence indicating that John the Baptist ever became a disciple of Jesus.\" He believes that John's concept of what a messiah should be was in contrast to how Jesus presented himself, and kept him from becoming a disciple of Jesus. Crosby states, \"an unbiased reading leaves us with the figure of John the Baptist as a reformist Jew who also may have wanted desperately to become a believer but was unable to become convinced of Jesus' messiahship...\" Crosby considers John's effectiveness as a \"precursor\" in encouraging others to follow Jesus as very minimal, since the scriptures record only two of his own followers having become Jesus' disciples.",
"title": "Scholarship"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "Professor Candida Moss noted that John and Jesus become \"de facto competitors in the ancient religious marketplace.\" Even after baptizing Jesus, John did not follow Jesus but maintained a separate ministry. After John's death, Jesus' followers had to differentiate him from the executed prophet, \"countering the prevalent idea that Jesus was actually John raised from the dead.\" Moss also references the incident in Matthew 16 where disciples indicated some people believed Jesus was John the Baptist.",
"title": "Scholarship"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "Pastor Robert L. Deffinbaugh views John's sending two of his disciples to ask Jesus if he were the Messiah or whether another should be sought as the Baptist's issuing a public challenge since the message was presented to Jesus while he was with a gathered crowd. Deffinbaugh suggests that John might have been looking for inauguration of the kingdom of God in a more dramatic way than what Jesus was presenting, as John had previously warned that the \"Messiah would come with fire.\" Jesus answered by indicating his miracle works and teachings which themselves gave evidence of his identity: \"The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor\".",
"title": "Scholarship"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "Harold W. Attridge agrees with Crossan that John was an apocalyptic preacher. Attridge says most contemporary scholars would see the idea of John as the \"forerunner\" of Jesus as a construct developed by the early church to help explain the relationship between the two. \"For the early church it would have been something of an embarrassment to say that Jesus, who was in their minds superior to John the Baptist, had been baptized by him, and thereby proclaimed some sort of subordination to him, some sort of disciple relationship to him...\"",
"title": "Scholarship"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "Barbara Thiering questions the dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls and suggests that the Teacher of Righteousness (leader of the Essenes) preached coming fiery judgment, said \"the axe is laid to the roots of the tree\", called people \"vipers\", practiced baptism and lived in the wilderness of Judea. Due to these reasons, she believes there is a strong possibility that the Teacher of Righteousness was John the Baptist.",
"title": "Scholarship"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "The earliest depictions of St John are found in the Baptism of Christ, one of the earliest scenes from the Life of Christ to be frequently depicted in Early Christian art, and John's tall, thin, even gaunt, and bearded figure is already established by the 5th century. Only he and Jesus are consistently shown with long hair from Early Christian times, when the apostles generally have trim classical cuts; in fact John is more consistently depicted in this way than Jesus.",
"title": "In art"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "In Byzantine and later Eastern Orthodox art, John the Baptist and the Holy Virgin Mary often flank Jesus on either side. The composition of the Deesis came to be included in every Eastern Orthodox church, as remains the case to this day. Here John and the Theotokos (Mary the \"God-bearer\") flank a Christ Pantocrator and intercede for humanity.",
"title": "In art"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "In Orthodox icons, he often has angel's wings, since Mark 1:2 describes him as a messenger.",
"title": "In art"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "After the earliest images showing the Baptism of the Lord follow ones with St John shown as an ascetic wearing camel hair, with a staff and scroll inscribed (in Western art) \"Ecce Agnus Dei\", or bearing a book or dish with a lamb on it.",
"title": "In art"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "The Baptist is very often shown on altarpieces designed for churches dedicated to him, where the donor was named for him or where there was some other patronage connection. John the Baptist is the patron saint of Florence and has often been depicted in the art of that city, and also frequently appears in baptistries, which are very often dedicated to him. Major works depicting St John the Baptist can be found in the Florence Baptistery, including the mosaics on the vault, the bronze doors by Andrea Pisano, and the great silver altar now in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo.",
"title": "In art"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "A number of narrative scenes from his life were often shown on the predella of altarpieces dedicated to John, and other settings, notably in the frescoes by Giotto for the Peruzzi Chapel in the church of Santa Croce, the large series in grisaille fresco in the Chiostro dello Scalzo, which was Andrea del Sarto's largest work, and the frescoed Life by Domenico Ghirlandaio in the Tornabuoni Chapel, all in Florence. There is another important fresco cycle by Filippo Lippi in Prato Cathedral. These include the typical scenes: the Annunciation to Zechariah; John's birth; his naming by his father; the Visitation; John's departure for the desert; his preaching in the desert; the Baptism of Christ; John before Herod; the dance of Herod's stepdaughter, Salome; his beheading; and the daughter of Herodias Salome carrying his head on a platter.",
"title": "In art"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "His birth, which unlike the Nativity of Jesus allowed a relatively wealthy domestic interior to be shown, became increasingly popular as a subject in the late Middle Ages, with depictions by Jan van Eyck in the Turin-Milan Hours and Ghirlandaio in the Tornabuoni Chapel being among the best known. His execution, a church feast-day, was often shown, and by the 15th century scenes such as the dance of Salome became popular; sometimes, as in an engraving by Israhel van Meckenem, the interest of the artist is clearly in showing the life of Herod's court, given contemporary dress, as much as the martyrdom of the saint. The execution was usually by a swordsman, with John kneeling in prayer, Salome often standing by with an empty platter, and Herod and Herodias at table in a cut-through view of a building in the background.",
"title": "In art"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "Salome bearing John's head on a platter equally became a subject for the Power of Women group: a Northern Renaissance fashion for images of glamorous but dangerous women (Delilah, Judith and others). It was often painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder and engraved by the Little Masters. When the head is brought to the table by Salome, Herod may be shown as startled, if not disgusted, but Herodias is usually not. These images remained popular into the Baroque, with Carlo Dolci painting at least three versions. John preaching, in a landscape setting, was a popular subject in Dutch art from Pieter Brueghel the Elder and his successors. The isolated motif of the severed head, often on its platter, was a frequent image, often in sculpture, from the late Middle Ages onwards, known as Ioannes in disco (Latin for \"John on a plate\").",
"title": "In art"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "As a child (of varying age), he is sometimes shown from the 15th century in family scenes from the life of Christ such as the Holy Family, the Presentation of Christ, the Marriage of the Virgin and the Holy Kinship. In the Baptism of Christ his presence was obligatory. Leonardo da Vinci's two versions of the Virgin of the Rocks were influential in establishing a Renaissance fashion for variations on the Madonna and Child which included John. Raphael in particular painted many compositions of the subject, such as the Alba Madonna, La belle jardinière, the Garvagh Madonna, the Madonna della seggiola, and the Madonna dell'Impannata, which are among his best-known works.",
"title": "In art"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "John was also often shown by himself as an adolescent or adult, usually already wearing his distinctive dress and carrying a long thin wooden cross – another theme influenced by Leonardo, whose equivocal composition, with the camel-skin dress, was developed by Raphael, Titian and Guido Reni among many others. Often he is accompanied by a lamb, especially in the many Early Netherlandish paintings which needed this attribute as he wore normal clothes, or a red robe over a not very clearly indicated camel skin. Caravaggio painted an especially large number of works depicting John, from at least five largely nude youths attributed to him, to three late works on his death – the great Execution in Malta, and two sombre Salomes with his head, one in Madrid, and one in London.",
"title": "In art"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "Amiens Cathedral, which holds one of the alleged heads of the Baptist, has a biographical sequence in polychrome relief, dating from the 16th century. This includes the execution and the disposal of the saint's remains, which according to legend were burnt in the reign of Julian the Apostate (4th century) to prevent pilgrimages.",
"title": "In art"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "A remarkable Pre-Raphaelite portrayal is Christ in the House of His Parents by John Everett Millais. Here the Baptist is shown as a child, wearing a loin covering of animal skins, hurrying into Joseph's carpenter shop with a bowl of water to join Mary, Joseph, and Mary's mother Anne in soothing the injured hand of Jesus. Artistic interest enjoyed a considerable revival at the end of the 19th century with Symbolist painters such as Gustave Moreau and Puvis de Chavannes (National Gallery, London). Oscar Wilde's play Salome was illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley, giving rise to some of his most memorable images.",
"title": "In art"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "The Italian Renaissance poet Lucrezia Tornabuoni chose John the Baptist as one of the biblical figures on which she wrote poetry.",
"title": "In art"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "He is also referenced in \"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock\" by T.S. Eliot in stanza 12.",
"title": "In art"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "John the Baptist has appeared in a number of screen adaptations of the life of Jesus. Actors who have played John include James D. Ainsley in From the Manger to the Cross (1912), Nigel De Brulier in Salome (1923), Alan Badel in Salome (1953), Robert Ryan in King of Kings (1961), Mario Socrate in The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), Charlton Heston in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), David Haskell in Godspell (1973), Michael York in Jesus of Nazareth (1977), Eli Cohen in Jesus (1979), Andre Gregory in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Christopher Routh in Mary, Mother of Jesus (1999), David O'Hara in Jesus (1999), Scott Handy in The Gospel of John (2003), Aidan McArdle in Judas (2004), Daniel Percival in Son of God (2014), Abhin Galeya in Killing Jesus (2015), and David Amito in \"The Chosen\" (2019-2022).",
"title": "In art"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "Snapaka Yohannan (John the Baptist), a 1963 Indian Malayalam-language film depicts life of St. John the Baptist and his death at the hands of Salome, Herod Antipas and Herodias.",
"title": "In art"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "Christian festivals associated with Saint John the Baptist and Forerunner are celebrated at various days by different denominations and are dedicated to his conception, birth, and death, as well as in correlation to the baptism of Jesus. The Eastern Church has feast days for the finding of his head (first, second, and third finding), as well as for his parents, Elizabeth and Zechariah. In the Russian Orthodox Church there is a feast day of the Transfer of the Right Hand of the Forerunner from Malta to Gatchina.",
"title": "Commemoration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "The Feast of Saint John closely coincides with the June solstice, also referred to as Midsummer in the Northern Hemisphere. The Christian holy day is fixed at 24 June; but in most countries festivities are mostly held the night before, on Saint John's Eve. \"In England, 'Saint John's Tide' is combined with a midsummer celebration. Instead of the date of the summer solstice, they chose June 24. This may be because of the Baptist's own words, 'He must increase, but I must decrease' (John 3:30). John was, of course, referring to Jesus. John's day comes at the time when the sun is beginning to decrease...\"",
"title": "Commemoration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 115,
"text": "Saint John the Baptist's beheading is said to have taken place in Machaerus, in central Jordan.",
"title": "Commemoration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 116,
"text": "In Spain, Saint John was venerated during the feast of the Alhansara in Granada, and also in Gaztelugatxe",
"title": "Commemoration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 117,
"text": "In the United Kingdom, Saint John is the patron of Penzance, Cornwall. In Scotland, he is the patron saint of Perth, which used to be known as St. John's Toun of Perth. The main church in the city is still the medieval Kirk of St. John the Baptist and the city's professional football club is called St Johnstone F.C.",
"title": "Commemoration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 118,
"text": "Also, on the night of 23 June on to the 24th, Saint John is celebrated as the patron saint of Porto, the second largest city in Portugal. An article from June 2004 in The Guardian remarked that \"Porto's Festa de São João is one of Europe's liveliest street festivals, yet it is relatively unknown outside the country\".",
"title": "Commemoration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 119,
"text": "As patron saint of the original Order of Knights of the Hospital of Saint John, he is the patron of the Knights Hospitaller of Jerusalem, Malta, Florence, Cesena, Turin and Genoa, Italy; as well as of Malta as a whole and of Xewkija and Gozo in Malta, which remember him with a great feast on the Sunday nearest to 24 June.",
"title": "Commemoration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 120,
"text": "Saint John the Baptist is the patron saint of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and its capital city, San Juan. In 1521, the island was given its formal name, \"San Juan Bautista de Puerto Rico\", following the custom of christening a town with its formal name and the name which Christopher Columbus had originally given the island. The names \"San Juan Bautista\" and \"Puerto Rico\" were eventually used in reference to both city and island, leading to a reversal in terminology by most inhabitants largely due to a cartographic error. By 1746, the city's name (\"Puerto Rico\") had become that of the entire island, while the name for the island (\"San Juan Bautista\") had become that of the city. The official motto of Puerto Rico also references the saint: Joannes Est Nomen Eius.",
"title": "Commemoration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 121,
"text": "He is also a patron saint of French Canada and Newfoundland. The Canadian cities of St. John's, Newfoundland (1497), Saint John, New Brunswick (1604), and Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec (1665), were all named in his honor. His feast day of 24 June is celebrated officially in Quebec as the Fête Nationale du Québec and was previously celebrated in Newfoundland as Discovery Day.",
"title": "Commemoration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 122,
"text": "He is also patron of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charleston, which covers the whole of South Carolina in the United States.",
"title": "Commemoration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 123,
"text": "Calamba, Laguna, Calumpit, Bulacan, Balayan and Lian in Batangas, Sipocot and San Fernando, Camarines Sur, Daet, Camarines Norte San Juan, Metro Manila, Tabuelan, Cebu, and Jimenez, Misamis Occidental and the oldest in Taytay Rizal are among several places in the Philippines that venerate John as the town or city patron. A common practise of many Filipino fiestas in his honour is bathing and the dousing of people in memory of John's iconic act. The custom is similar in form to Songkran and Holi, and serves as a playful respite from the intense tropical heat. While famed for the Black Nazarene it enshrines, Quiapo Church in Manila is actually dedicated to Saint John.",
"title": "Commemoration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 124,
"text": "The Baptistines are the name given to a number of religious orders dedicated to the memory of John the Baptist.",
"title": "Commemoration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 125,
"text": "John the Baptist is the name-giving patron of the Knights Hospitaller, or Knights of Saint John.",
"title": "Commemoration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 126,
"text": "Along with John the Evangelist, John the Baptist is claimed as a patron saint by the fraternal society of Freemasons.",
"title": "Commemoration"
}
]
| John the Baptist was a Judaean preacher active in the area of the Jordan River in the early 1st century AD. He is also known as Saint John the Forerunner in Eastern Orthodoxy, John the Immerser in some Baptist Christian traditions, Saint John by certain Catholic churches, and Prophet Yahya in Islam. He is sometimes alternatively referred to as John the Baptiser. John is mentioned by the Roman Jewish historian Josephus and he is revered as a major religious figure in Christianity, Islam, the Baháʼí faith, the Druze faith, and Mandaeism, the latter in which he is considered to be the final and most vital prophet. He is considered to be a prophet of God by all of the aforementioned faiths, and is honoured as a saint in many Christian denominations. According to the New Testament, John anticipated a messianic figure greater than himself, and the Gospels portray John as the precursor or forerunner of Jesus. Jesus himself identifies John as "Elijah who is to come", which is a direct reference to the Book of Malachi, that has been confirmed by the angel who announced John's birth to his father, Zechariah. According to the Gospel of Luke, John and Jesus were relatives. Some scholars maintain that John belonged to the Essenes, a semi-ascetic Jewish sect who expected a messiah and practiced ritual baptism. John used baptism as the central symbol or sacrament of his pre-messianic movement. Most biblical scholars agree that John baptized Jesus, and several New Testament accounts report that some of Jesus' early followers had previously been followers of John. According to the New Testament, John was sentenced to death and subsequently beheaded by Herod Antipas around AD 30 after John rebuked him for divorcing his wife Phasaelis and then unlawfully wedding Herodias, the wife of his brother Herod Philip I. Josephus also mentions John in the Antiquities of the Jews and states that he was executed by order of Herod Antipas in the fortress at Machaerus. Followers of John existed well into the 2nd century AD, and some proclaimed him to be the messiah. In modern times, the followers of John the Baptist are the Mandaeans, an ancient ethnoreligious group who believe that he is their greatest and final prophet. In the Roman martyrology, apart from Jesus and the Virgin Mary, John is the only saint whose birth and death are both commemorated. | 2001-09-29T08:06:49Z | 2023-12-30T02:18:09Z | [
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16,126 | Jehoram | Jehoram (meaning "Jehovah is exalted" in Biblical Hebrew) was the name of several individuals in the Tanakh. The female version of this name is Athaliah.
In modern days, it is also the name of: | [
{
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"text": "Jehoram (meaning \"Jehovah is exalted\" in Biblical Hebrew) was the name of several individuals in the Tanakh. The female version of this name is Athaliah.",
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"text": "In modern days, it is also the name of:",
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| Jehoram was the name of several individuals in the Tanakh. The female version of this name is Athaliah. The son of Toi, King of Hamath who was sent by his father to congratulate David on the occasion of his victory over Hadadezer
Jehoram of Israel or Joram, King of Israel
Jehoram of Judah or Joram, King of Judah
A Levite of the family of Gershom
A priest sent by Jehoshaphat to instruct the people in Judah In modern days, it is also the name of: Yehoram Gaon, Israeli singer and actor | 2019-12-18T12:15:47Z | [
"Template:Disambiguation"
]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jehoram |
|
16,129 | John Brunner (author) | John Kilian Houston Brunner (24 September 1934 – 25 August 1995) was a British author of science fiction novels and stories. His 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar, about an overpopulated world, won the 1969 Hugo Award for best science fiction novel and the BSFA award the same year. The Jagged Orbit won the BSFA award in 1970.
Brunner was born in 1934 in Preston Crowmarsh, near Wallingford in Oxfordshire, and went to school at St Andrew's Prep School, Pangbourne. He did his upper studies at Cheltenham College. He wrote his first novel, Galactic Storm, at 17, and published it under the pen-name Gill Hunt. He did not start writing full-time until 1958, some years after his military service.
He served as an officer in the Royal Air Force from 1953 to 1955. He married Marjorie Rosamond Sauer on 12 July 1958.
Brunner had an uneasy relationship with British new wave writers, who often considered him too American in his settings and themes. He attempted to shift to a more mainstream readership in the early 1980s, without success. Before his death, most of his books had fallen out of print. Brunner accused publishers of a conspiracy against him, although he was known to be difficult to deal with (his wife, Marjorie Brunner, had handled his publishing relations before she died).
Brunner's health began to decline in the 1980s and worsened with the death of his wife in 1986. He remarried, to Li Yi Tan, on 27 September 1991. He died of a heart attack in Glasgow on 25 August 1995, while attending the World Science Fiction Convention there.
At first writing conventional space opera, Brunner later began to experiment with the novel form. His 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar exploits the fragmented organizational style that American writer John Dos Passos created for his USA trilogy, but updates it in terms of the theory of media popularised by Canadian academic Marshall McLuhan, a major cultural figure of the period.
The Jagged Orbit (1969) is set in a United States dominated by weapons proliferation and interracial violence. Its 100 numbered chapters vary in length from a single syllable to several pages. The Sheep Look Up (1972) depicts ecological catastrophe in America.
Brunner is credited with coining the term "worm" (in computing) and predicting the emergence of computer viruses in his 1975 novel The Shockwave Rider, in which he used the term to describe software which reproduces itself across a computer network. Brunner's work has also been credited for prefiguring modern developments such as genetic engineering, same-sex marriage, online encyclopedias, the legalization of cannabis, and the development of Viagra.
These four novels Stand on Zanzibar (1968), The Jagged Orbit (1969), The Sheep Look Up (1972) and The Shockwave Rider (1975), have been called the "Club of Rome Quartet", named after the Club of Rome, whose 1972 report The Limits to Growth warned of the dire effects of overpopulation.
Brunner's pen names include K. H. Brunner (Kilian Houston Brunner), Gill Hunt, John Loxmith, Trevor Staines, Ellis Quick, Henry Crosstrees Jr., and Keith Woodcott.
In addition to his fiction, Brunner wrote poetry and published many unpaid articles in a variety of venues, particularly fanzines. He also published 13 letters to the New Scientist and an article about the educational relevance of science fiction in Physics Education. Brunner was an active member of the organisation Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and wrote the words to "The H-Bomb's Thunder", which was sung on the Aldermaston Marches. He was a linguist, translator, and Guest of Honour at the first European Science Fiction Convention Eurocon-1 in Trieste in 1972.
Brunner wrote the screenplay for the science fiction film The Terrornauts (1967) by Amicus Productions.
Two of his short stories, "Some Lapse of Time" and "The Last Lonely Man", were adapted as TV plays in the BBC science fiction series Out of the Unknown, in series 1 (1965) and series 3 (1969), respectively.
Max Curfew Series | [
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"text": "Brunner had an uneasy relationship with British new wave writers, who often considered him too American in his settings and themes. He attempted to shift to a more mainstream readership in the early 1980s, without success. Before his death, most of his books had fallen out of print. Brunner accused publishers of a conspiracy against him, although he was known to be difficult to deal with (his wife, Marjorie Brunner, had handled his publishing relations before she died).",
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"text": "Brunner's health began to decline in the 1980s and worsened with the death of his wife in 1986. He remarried, to Li Yi Tan, on 27 September 1991. He died of a heart attack in Glasgow on 25 August 1995, while attending the World Science Fiction Convention there.",
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"text": "At first writing conventional space opera, Brunner later began to experiment with the novel form. His 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar exploits the fragmented organizational style that American writer John Dos Passos created for his USA trilogy, but updates it in terms of the theory of media popularised by Canadian academic Marshall McLuhan, a major cultural figure of the period.",
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"text": "Brunner is credited with coining the term \"worm\" (in computing) and predicting the emergence of computer viruses in his 1975 novel The Shockwave Rider, in which he used the term to describe software which reproduces itself across a computer network. Brunner's work has also been credited for prefiguring modern developments such as genetic engineering, same-sex marriage, online encyclopedias, the legalization of cannabis, and the development of Viagra.",
"title": "Literary works"
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"text": "These four novels Stand on Zanzibar (1968), The Jagged Orbit (1969), The Sheep Look Up (1972) and The Shockwave Rider (1975), have been called the \"Club of Rome Quartet\", named after the Club of Rome, whose 1972 report The Limits to Growth warned of the dire effects of overpopulation.",
"title": "Literary works"
},
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"text": "Brunner's pen names include K. H. Brunner (Kilian Houston Brunner), Gill Hunt, John Loxmith, Trevor Staines, Ellis Quick, Henry Crosstrees Jr., and Keith Woodcott.",
"title": "Literary works"
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{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In addition to his fiction, Brunner wrote poetry and published many unpaid articles in a variety of venues, particularly fanzines. He also published 13 letters to the New Scientist and an article about the educational relevance of science fiction in Physics Education. Brunner was an active member of the organisation Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and wrote the words to \"The H-Bomb's Thunder\", which was sung on the Aldermaston Marches. He was a linguist, translator, and Guest of Honour at the first European Science Fiction Convention Eurocon-1 in Trieste in 1972.",
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"text": "Brunner wrote the screenplay for the science fiction film The Terrornauts (1967) by Amicus Productions.",
"title": "Film and TV"
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"text": "Two of his short stories, \"Some Lapse of Time\" and \"The Last Lonely Man\", were adapted as TV plays in the BBC science fiction series Out of the Unknown, in series 1 (1965) and series 3 (1969), respectively.",
"title": "Film and TV"
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"text": "Max Curfew Series",
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| John Kilian Houston Brunner was a British author of science fiction novels and stories. His 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar, about an overpopulated world, won the 1969 Hugo Award for best science fiction novel and the BSFA award the same year. The Jagged Orbit won the BSFA award in 1970. | 2001-09-29T18:35:45Z | 2023-10-26T04:45:32Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brunner_(author) |
16,130 | Jack Butler Yeats | Jack Butler Yeats RHA (29 August 1871 – 28 March 1957) was an Irish artist and Olympic medalist. W. B. Yeats was his brother.
Butler's early style was that of an illustrator; he only began to work regularly in oils in 1906. His early pictures are simple lyrical depictions of landscapes and figures, predominantly from the west of Ireland—especially of his boyhood home of Sligo. Yeats's work contains elements of Romanticism. He later would adopt the style of Expressionism.
Yeats was born in London, England. He was the youngest son of Irish portraitist John Butler Yeats and the brother of W. B. Yeats, who received the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature. He grew up in Sligo with his maternal grandparents, before returning to his parents' home in London in 1887.
Yeats attended the Chiswick School of Art with his sisters Elizabeth and Susan, learning "Freehand drawing in all its branches, practical Geometry and perspective, pottery and tile painting, design for decorative purposes – as in Wall-papers, Furniture, Metalwork, Stained Glass".
Early in his career, Yeats worked as an illustrator for magazines like the Boy's Own Paper and Judy, drew comic strips, including the Sherlock Holmes parody "Chubb-Lock Homes" for Comic Cuts, and wrote articles for Punch under the pseudonym "W. Bird". In 1894 he married Mary Cottenham, also a native of England and two years his senior, and resided in Wicklow according to the Census of Ireland, 1911.
From around 1920, he developed into an intensely Expressionist artist, moving from illustration to Symbolism. He was sympathetic to the Irish Republican cause, but not politically active. However, he believed that 'a painter must be part of the land and of the life he paints', and his own artistic development, as a Modernist and Expressionist, helped articulate a modern Dublin of the 20th century, partly by depicting specifically Irish subjects, but also by doing so in the light of universal themes such as the loneliness of the individual, and the universality of the plight of man. Samuel Beckett wrote that "Yeats is with the great of our time... because he brings light, as only the great dare to bring light, to the issueless predicament of existence." The Marxist art critic and author John Berger also paid tribute to Yeats from a very different perspective, praising the artist as a "great painter" with a "sense of the future, an awareness of the possibility of a world other than the one we know".
His favourite subjects included the Irish landscape, horses, circus and travelling players. His early paintings and drawings are distinguished by an energetic simplicity of line and colour, his later paintings by an extremely vigorous and experimental treatment of often thickly applied paint. He frequently abandoned the brush altogether, applying paint in a variety of different ways, and was deeply interested in the expressive power of colour. Despite his position as the most important Irish artist of the 20th century (and the first to sell for over £1m), he took no pupils and allowed no one to watch him work, so he remains a unique figure. The artist closest to him in style is his friend, the Austrian painter, Oskar Kokoschka.
In 1943 he accepted Victor Waddington as his sole dealer and business manager. Waddington played a crucial role in his career and reputation.
Besides painting, Yeats had a significant interest in theatre and in literature. He was a close friend of Samuel Beckett. He designed sets for the Abbey Theatre, and three of his own plays were also produced there. His literary works include The Careless Flower, The Amaranthers (much admired by Beckett), Ah Well, A Romance in Perpetuity, And To You Also, and The Charmed Life. Yeats's paintings usually bear poetic and evocative titles. He was elected a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1916. He died in Dublin in 1957, and was buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery.
Yeats holds the distinction of being Ireland's first medalist at the Olympic Games in the wake of creation of the Irish Free State. At the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, Yeats' painting The Liffey Swim won a silver medal in the arts and culture segment of the Games. In the competition records the painting is simply entitled Swimming.
In November 2010, one of Yeats's works, A Horseman Enters a Town at Night, painted in 1948 and previously owned by novelist Graham Greene, sold for nearly £350,000 at a Christie's auction in London. A smaller work, Man in a Room Thinking, painted in 1947, sold for £66,000 at the same auction. His painting Sleep Sound (1955) was bought by David Bowie in 1993 for £45,500 and sold at auction in 2016 for £233,000. In 1999 the painting, The Wild Ones, had sold at Sotheby's in London for over £1.2m. Whyte's Auctioneers hold the world record sale price for a Yeats painting, Reverie (1931), which sold for €1,400,000 in November 2019.
The Model, Home of The Niland Collection, in Sligo cares for one of the best and most extensive collections of Jack B. Yeats work in existence. It presents regular curated exhibitions of his work, notably, The Outside in 2011, Enter the Clowns - The Circus as Metaphor, 2013; The Music has Come, 2014; Painted Universe, 2018; Salt Water Ballads, 2021. | [
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"text": "Butler's early style was that of an illustrator; he only began to work regularly in oils in 1906. His early pictures are simple lyrical depictions of landscapes and figures, predominantly from the west of Ireland—especially of his boyhood home of Sligo. Yeats's work contains elements of Romanticism. He later would adopt the style of Expressionism.",
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"title": "Biography"
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"text": "Early in his career, Yeats worked as an illustrator for magazines like the Boy's Own Paper and Judy, drew comic strips, including the Sherlock Holmes parody \"Chubb-Lock Homes\" for Comic Cuts, and wrote articles for Punch under the pseudonym \"W. Bird\". In 1894 he married Mary Cottenham, also a native of England and two years his senior, and resided in Wicklow according to the Census of Ireland, 1911.",
"title": "Biography"
},
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"text": "From around 1920, he developed into an intensely Expressionist artist, moving from illustration to Symbolism. He was sympathetic to the Irish Republican cause, but not politically active. However, he believed that 'a painter must be part of the land and of the life he paints', and his own artistic development, as a Modernist and Expressionist, helped articulate a modern Dublin of the 20th century, partly by depicting specifically Irish subjects, but also by doing so in the light of universal themes such as the loneliness of the individual, and the universality of the plight of man. Samuel Beckett wrote that \"Yeats is with the great of our time... because he brings light, as only the great dare to bring light, to the issueless predicament of existence.\" The Marxist art critic and author John Berger also paid tribute to Yeats from a very different perspective, praising the artist as a \"great painter\" with a \"sense of the future, an awareness of the possibility of a world other than the one we know\".",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "His favourite subjects included the Irish landscape, horses, circus and travelling players. His early paintings and drawings are distinguished by an energetic simplicity of line and colour, his later paintings by an extremely vigorous and experimental treatment of often thickly applied paint. He frequently abandoned the brush altogether, applying paint in a variety of different ways, and was deeply interested in the expressive power of colour. Despite his position as the most important Irish artist of the 20th century (and the first to sell for over £1m), he took no pupils and allowed no one to watch him work, so he remains a unique figure. The artist closest to him in style is his friend, the Austrian painter, Oskar Kokoschka.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
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"text": "In 1943 he accepted Victor Waddington as his sole dealer and business manager. Waddington played a crucial role in his career and reputation.",
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"text": "Besides painting, Yeats had a significant interest in theatre and in literature. He was a close friend of Samuel Beckett. He designed sets for the Abbey Theatre, and three of his own plays were also produced there. His literary works include The Careless Flower, The Amaranthers (much admired by Beckett), Ah Well, A Romance in Perpetuity, And To You Also, and The Charmed Life. Yeats's paintings usually bear poetic and evocative titles. He was elected a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1916. He died in Dublin in 1957, and was buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Yeats holds the distinction of being Ireland's first medalist at the Olympic Games in the wake of creation of the Irish Free State. At the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, Yeats' painting The Liffey Swim won a silver medal in the arts and culture segment of the Games. In the competition records the painting is simply entitled Swimming.",
"title": "Biography"
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{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In November 2010, one of Yeats's works, A Horseman Enters a Town at Night, painted in 1948 and previously owned by novelist Graham Greene, sold for nearly £350,000 at a Christie's auction in London. A smaller work, Man in a Room Thinking, painted in 1947, sold for £66,000 at the same auction. His painting Sleep Sound (1955) was bought by David Bowie in 1993 for £45,500 and sold at auction in 2016 for £233,000. In 1999 the painting, The Wild Ones, had sold at Sotheby's in London for over £1.2m. Whyte's Auctioneers hold the world record sale price for a Yeats painting, Reverie (1931), which sold for €1,400,000 in November 2019.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The Model, Home of The Niland Collection, in Sligo cares for one of the best and most extensive collections of Jack B. Yeats work in existence. It presents regular curated exhibitions of his work, notably, The Outside in 2011, Enter the Clowns - The Circus as Metaphor, 2013; The Music has Come, 2014; Painted Universe, 2018; Salt Water Ballads, 2021.",
"title": "Works"
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]
| Jack Butler Yeats RHA was an Irish artist and Olympic medalist. W. B. Yeats was his brother. Butler's early style was that of an illustrator; he only began to work regularly in oils in 1906. His early pictures are simple lyrical depictions of landscapes and figures, predominantly from the west of Ireland—especially of his boyhood home of Sligo. Yeats's work contains elements of Romanticism. He later would adopt the style of Expressionism. | 2001-09-29T19:43:03Z | 2023-12-31T12:49:35Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Butler_Yeats |
16,132 | Joseph Yoakum | Joseph Elmer Yoakum (c. February 22, 1891 – December 25, 1972) was an American self-taught painter. He was of African-American and possibly of Native American–descent, and was known for his landscape paintings in the outsider art-style. He was age 76 when he started to record his memories in the form of imaginary landscapes and produced over 2,000 drawings during the last decade of his life.
Joseph Elmer Yoakum's biographical information is difficult to verify but he also claimed to be of African, French, and Cherokee descent. New York Times critic Will Heinrich called his biography "tricky...It’s poorly documented, and the artist himself was not a reliable narrator." His birthdates have also been given as 1886, 1888, and 1891, and his Veteran's Administration record says he was born in Springfield, Missouri. A 9 year old Joe Yoakum does show up in the 1900 U.S. census in Greene County, Missouri, listed as Black with his father's birthplace being listed as Indian Territory. His father John Yoakum is listed in the 1880 census as Black with his birthplace listed as Cherokee Nation.
Yoakum was born in Ash Grove, Missouri, but told a story of being born in Arizona, in 1888, as a Navajo Indian on the Window Rock Navajo reservation. Taking pride in his exaggerated Native heritage, Yoakum would pronounce "Navajo" as "Na-va-JOE" (as in "Joseph"). He spent his early childhood on a Missouri farm.
Yoakum left home when he was nine years old to join the Great Wallace Circus. As a bill poster, he also traveled across the U.S. with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and the Ringling Brothers, among the five different circuses. He later traveled to Europe as a stowaway.
In 1908, he returned to Missouri and started a family with his girlfriend Myrtle Julian, with whom he had his first son in 1909; the couple married in 1910. Around 1916, he worked in a coal mine, Hale Coal and Mining to support his family. Yoakum was drafted into the United States Army in 1918 and worked in the 805th Pioneer Infantry repairing roads and railroads. After the war, he traveled around the United States, working odd jobs, but never returned to his family. He later remarried and moved to Chicago. In 1946, Yoakum was committed to a psychiatric hospital there. He soon left and by the early 1950s he was drawing on a regular basis.
Yoakum was again living and painting in Chicago by 1962. Tom Brand, owner of Galaxy Press on the south side of Chicago, in 1968 had some printing to deliver to a coffee shop called "The Whole". While there he noticed the colored pencil drawings of Yoakum and was immediately taken by them. Brand had an account with the Ed Sherbyn Gallery on the north side of Chicago, and he persuaded Sherbyn to exhibit Yoakum's works and even printed his own poster for this show. Norman Mark of The Chicago Daily News wrote an article about Yoakum called "My drawings are a spiritual unfoldment"; this article was printed on the back of the poster. Brand informed his artist friends (including Whitney Halstead) about Yoakum and encouraged them to visit "The Whole" coffee shop. Halstead, an artist and instructor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, became the greatest promoter of Yoakum's work during his lifetime. He believed that his story was "more invention than reality... in part myth, Yoakum's life as he would have wished to have lived it."
In 1967, Yoakum was discovered by the mainstream art community through John Hopgood, an instructor at the Chicago State College, who saw Yoakum's work hanging in his studio window and purchased twenty-two pictures. A group of students including Roger Brown, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, and Barbara Rossi, and teachers at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, including Ray Yoshida and Whitney Halstead, took an interest in promoting his work. In 1972, just one month before his death, Yoakum was given a one-man show at the Whitney Museum in New York City.
He started drawing familiar places, such as Green Valley Ashville Kentucky, as a method to capture his memories. However, he shifted towards imaginary landscapes in places he had never visited, like Mt Cloubelle of West India or Mt Mowbullan in Dividing Range near Brisbane Australia. Drawing outlines with ballpoint pen, rarely making corrections, he colored his drawings within the lines using watercolors and pastels. He became known for his organic forms, always using two lines to designate land masses.
During the final four months of his life Yoakum's work was marked by a use of pure abstraction, as in his illustration Flooding of Sock River through Ash Grove Mo [Missouri] on July 4, 1914 in that [waters] drove many persons from Homes I were with the Groupe leiving [sic] their homes for safety. That painting was one of his autobiographical works.
In 2018–19 Yoakum's work was included in the exhibition Outliers and American Vanguard Art at the National Gallery of Art, High Museum of Art, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2021, the Museum of Modern Art presented more than 100 of his works in an exhibition called Joseph E. Yoakum: What I Saw. It was organized by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Menil Drawing Institute, which is part of the Menil Collection. His work is represented in the National Gallery of Art, among other institutions. | [
{
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"text": "Joseph Elmer Yoakum (c. February 22, 1891 – December 25, 1972) was an American self-taught painter. He was of African-American and possibly of Native American–descent, and was known for his landscape paintings in the outsider art-style. He was age 76 when he started to record his memories in the form of imaginary landscapes and produced over 2,000 drawings during the last decade of his life.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Joseph Elmer Yoakum's biographical information is difficult to verify but he also claimed to be of African, French, and Cherokee descent. New York Times critic Will Heinrich called his biography \"tricky...It’s poorly documented, and the artist himself was not a reliable narrator.\" His birthdates have also been given as 1886, 1888, and 1891, and his Veteran's Administration record says he was born in Springfield, Missouri. A 9 year old Joe Yoakum does show up in the 1900 U.S. census in Greene County, Missouri, listed as Black with his father's birthplace being listed as Indian Territory. His father John Yoakum is listed in the 1880 census as Black with his birthplace listed as Cherokee Nation.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Yoakum was born in Ash Grove, Missouri, but told a story of being born in Arizona, in 1888, as a Navajo Indian on the Window Rock Navajo reservation. Taking pride in his exaggerated Native heritage, Yoakum would pronounce \"Navajo\" as \"Na-va-JOE\" (as in \"Joseph\"). He spent his early childhood on a Missouri farm.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Yoakum left home when he was nine years old to join the Great Wallace Circus. As a bill poster, he also traveled across the U.S. with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and the Ringling Brothers, among the five different circuses. He later traveled to Europe as a stowaway.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In 1908, he returned to Missouri and started a family with his girlfriend Myrtle Julian, with whom he had his first son in 1909; the couple married in 1910. Around 1916, he worked in a coal mine, Hale Coal and Mining to support his family. Yoakum was drafted into the United States Army in 1918 and worked in the 805th Pioneer Infantry repairing roads and railroads. After the war, he traveled around the United States, working odd jobs, but never returned to his family. He later remarried and moved to Chicago. In 1946, Yoakum was committed to a psychiatric hospital there. He soon left and by the early 1950s he was drawing on a regular basis.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Yoakum was again living and painting in Chicago by 1962. Tom Brand, owner of Galaxy Press on the south side of Chicago, in 1968 had some printing to deliver to a coffee shop called \"The Whole\". While there he noticed the colored pencil drawings of Yoakum and was immediately taken by them. Brand had an account with the Ed Sherbyn Gallery on the north side of Chicago, and he persuaded Sherbyn to exhibit Yoakum's works and even printed his own poster for this show. Norman Mark of The Chicago Daily News wrote an article about Yoakum called \"My drawings are a spiritual unfoldment\"; this article was printed on the back of the poster. Brand informed his artist friends (including Whitney Halstead) about Yoakum and encouraged them to visit \"The Whole\" coffee shop. Halstead, an artist and instructor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, became the greatest promoter of Yoakum's work during his lifetime. He believed that his story was \"more invention than reality... in part myth, Yoakum's life as he would have wished to have lived it.\"",
"title": "Artistic work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In 1967, Yoakum was discovered by the mainstream art community through John Hopgood, an instructor at the Chicago State College, who saw Yoakum's work hanging in his studio window and purchased twenty-two pictures. A group of students including Roger Brown, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, and Barbara Rossi, and teachers at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, including Ray Yoshida and Whitney Halstead, took an interest in promoting his work. In 1972, just one month before his death, Yoakum was given a one-man show at the Whitney Museum in New York City.",
"title": "Artistic work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "He started drawing familiar places, such as Green Valley Ashville Kentucky, as a method to capture his memories. However, he shifted towards imaginary landscapes in places he had never visited, like Mt Cloubelle of West India or Mt Mowbullan in Dividing Range near Brisbane Australia. Drawing outlines with ballpoint pen, rarely making corrections, he colored his drawings within the lines using watercolors and pastels. He became known for his organic forms, always using two lines to designate land masses.",
"title": "Artistic work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "During the final four months of his life Yoakum's work was marked by a use of pure abstraction, as in his illustration Flooding of Sock River through Ash Grove Mo [Missouri] on July 4, 1914 in that [waters] drove many persons from Homes I were with the Groupe leiving [sic] their homes for safety. That painting was one of his autobiographical works.",
"title": "Artistic work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In 2018–19 Yoakum's work was included in the exhibition Outliers and American Vanguard Art at the National Gallery of Art, High Museum of Art, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2021, the Museum of Modern Art presented more than 100 of his works in an exhibition called Joseph E. Yoakum: What I Saw. It was organized by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Menil Drawing Institute, which is part of the Menil Collection. His work is represented in the National Gallery of Art, among other institutions.",
"title": "Artistic work"
}
]
| Joseph Elmer Yoakum was an American self-taught painter. He was of African-American and possibly of Native American–descent, and was known for his landscape paintings in the outsider art-style. He was age 76 when he started to record his memories in the form of imaginary landscapes and produced over 2,000 drawings during the last decade of his life. | 2002-02-25T15:51:15Z | 2023-11-24T18:32:48Z | [
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16,134 | Jefferson Davis | Jefferson F. Davis (June 3, 1808 – December 6, 1889) was an American politician who served as the first and only president of the Confederate States of America from 1861 to 1865. He represented Mississippi in the United States Senate and the House of Representatives as a member of the Democratic Party before the American Civil War. He was the United States Secretary of War from 1853 to 1857.
Davis, the youngest of ten children, was born in Fairview, Kentucky, but spent most of his childhood in Wilkinson County, Mississippi. His eldest brother Joseph Emory Davis secured the younger Davis's appointment to the United States Military Academy. Upon graduating, he served six years as a lieutenant in the United States Army. After leaving the army in 1835, Davis married Sarah Knox Taylor, daughter of general and future President Zachary Taylor. Sarah died from malaria three months after the wedding. Davis became a cotton planter, building Brierfield Plantation in Mississippi on his brother Joseph's land and eventually owning as many as 113 slaves.
In 1845, Davis married Varina Howell. During the same year, he was elected to the United States House of Representatives, serving for one year. From 1846 to 1847, he fought in the Mexican–American War as the colonel of a volunteer regiment. He was appointed to the United States Senate in 1847, resigning to unsuccessfully run as governor of Mississippi. In 1853, President Franklin Pierce appointed him Secretary of War. After Pierce's administration ended in 1857, Davis returned to the Senate. He resigned in 1861 when Mississippi seceded from the United States.
During the Civil War, Davis guided the Confederacy's policies and served as its commander in chief. When the Confederacy was defeated in 1865, Davis was captured, accused of treason, and imprisoned at Fort Monroe. He was released without trial after two years. Immediately after the war, Davis was often blamed for the Confederacy's defeat, but after his release from prison, he became a hero of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. In the late 19th and the 20th centuries, his legacy as Confederate leader was celebrated in the South. In the twenty-first century, he is frequently criticized as a supporter of slavery and racism, and many of the memorials dedicated to him throughout the United States have been removed.
Jefferson F. Davis was the youngest of ten children of Jane and Samuel Emory Davis. Samuel Davis's father, Evan, who had a Welsh background, came to the colony of Georgia from Philadelphia. Samuel served in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, and received a land grant for his service near present-day Washington, Georgia. He married Jane Cook, a woman of Scots-Irish descent whom he had met in South Carolina during his military service, in 1783. Around 1793, Samuel and Jane moved to Kentucky. Jefferson was born on June 3, 1808, at the family homestead in Davisburg, a village Samuel had established that later became Fairview, Kentucky. He was named after then-President Thomas Jefferson.
In 1810, the Davis family moved to Bayou Teche, Louisiana. Less than a year later, they moved to a farm near Woodville, Mississippi, where Samuel cultivated cotton, acquired twelve slaves, and built a house that Jane called Rosemont. During the War of 1812, three of Davis's brothers served in the military. When Davis was around five, he received a rudimentary education at a small schoolhouse near Woodville. When he was about eight, his father sent him with Major Thomas Hinds and his relatives to attend Saint Thomas College, a Catholic preparatory school run by Dominicans near Springfield, Kentucky. In 1818, Davis returned to Mississippi, where he briefly studied at Jefferson College in Washington. He then attended the Wilkinson County Academy near Woodville for five years. In 1823, Davis attended Transylvania University in Lexington. While he was still in college in 1824, he learned that his father Samuel had died. Before his death, Samuel had fallen into debt and sold Rosemont and most of his slaves to his eldest son Joseph Emory Davis, who already owned a large estate in Davis Bend, Mississippi, about 15 miles (24 km) south of Vicksburg, Mississippi. Joseph, who was 23 years older than Davis, informally became his surrogate father.
His older brother Joseph got Davis appointed to the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1824, where he became friends with classmates Albert Sidney Johnston and Leonidas Polk. Davis frequently challenged the academy's discipline. In his first year, he was court-martialed for drinking at a nearby tavern. He was found guilty but was pardoned. The following year, he was placed under house arrest for his role in the Eggnog Riot during Christmas 1826 but was not dismissed. He graduated 23rd in a class of 33.
Second Lieutenant Davis was assigned to the 1st Infantry Regiment. He was accompanied by his personal servant James Pemberton, an enslaved African American who he inherited from his father. In early 1829, he was stationed at Forts Crawford and Winnebago in Michigan Territory under the command of Colonel Zachary Taylor, who later became president of the United States.
Throughout his life, Davis regularly suffered from ill health. During the northern winters, he had pneumonia, colds, and bronchitis. He went to Mississippi on furlough in March 1832, missing the outbreak of the Black Hawk War, and returned to duty just before the Battle of Bad Axe, which ended the war. When Black Hawk was captured, Davis escorted him for detention in St. Louis. Black Hawk stated that Davis treated him with kindness.
After Davis's return to Fort Crawford in January 1833, he and Taylor's daughter, Sarah, became romantically involved. Davis asked Taylor if he could marry Sarah, but Taylor refused. In spring, Taylor had him assigned to the United States Regiment of Dragoons under Colonel Henry Dodge. He was promoted to first lieutenant and deployed at Fort Gibson in Arkansas Territory. In February 1835, Davis was court-martialed for insubordination. He was acquitted. He requested a furlough, and immediately after it ended, he tendered his resignation, which was effective on June 30.
Davis decided to become a cotton planter. He returned to Mississippi where his brother Joseph had developed Davis Bend into Hurricane Plantation, which eventually had 1,700 acres (690 ha) of cultivated fields with over 300 slaves. Joseph loaned him funds to buy ten slaves and provided him with 800 acres (320 ha), though Joseph retained the title to the property. Davis named his section Brierfield Plantation.
Davis continued his correspondence with Sarah, and they agreed to marry with Taylor giving his reluctant assent. They married at Beechland on June 17, 1835. In August, he and Sarah traveled to Locust Grove Plantation, his sister Anna Smith's home in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana. Within days, both became severely ill with malaria. Sarah died at the age of 21 on September 15, 1835, after only three months of marriage.
For several years after Sarah's death, Davis spent much of his time developing Brierfield. In 1836, he possessed 23 slaves; by 1840, he possessed 40; and by 1860, 113. He made his first slave, James Pemberton, Brierfield's effective overseer, a position he held until his death around 1850. Davis continued his intellectual development by reading about politics, law and economics at the large library Joseph maintained at Hurricane Plantation. As he and Joseph became concerned about national attempts to limit slavery in new territories, Davis became increasingly engaged in politics, benefiting from his brother's mentorship and political influence.
Davis became publicly involved in politics in 1840 when he attended a Democratic Party meeting in Vicksburg and served as a delegate to the party's state convention in Jackson; he served again in 1842. One week before the state election in November 1843, He was chosen to be the Democratic candidate for the Mississippi House of Representatives for Warren County when the original candidate withdrew his nomination, though Davis lost the election.
In early 1844, Davis was chosen to serve as a delegate to the state convention again. On his way to Jackson, he met Varina Banks Howell, then 18 years old, when he delivered an invitation from Joseph for her to visit the Hurricane Plantation for the Christmas season. At the convention, Davis was selected as one of Mississippi's six presidential electors for the 1844 presidential election.
Within a month of their meeting, 35-year-old Davis and Varina became engaged despite her parents' initial concerns about his age and politics. During the remainder of the year, Davis campaigned for the Democratic party, advocating for the nomination of John C. Calhoun. He preferred Calhoun because he championed Southern interests including the annexation of Texas, reduction of tariffs, and building naval defenses in southern ports. When the party chose James K. Polk for their presidential candidate, Davis campaigned for him.
Davis and Varina married on February 26, 1845. They had six children: Samuel Emory, born in 1852, who died of an undiagnosed disease two years later; Margaret Howell, born in 1855, who married, raised a family and lived to be 54; Jefferson Davis Jr., born in 1857, who died of yellow fever at age 21; Joseph Evan, born 1859, who died from an accidental fall at age five; William Howell, born 1864, who died of diphtheria at age 10; and Varina Anne, born 1872, who remained single and lived to be 34.
In July 1845, Davis became a candidate for the United States House of Representatives. He ran on a platform emphasizing a strict constructionist view of the constitution, states' rights, tariff reductions, and opposition to a national bank. He won the election and entered the 29th Congress. Davis opposed using federal monies for internal improvements, which he believed would undermine the autonomy of the states. He supported the American annexation of Oregon, but through peaceful compromise with Britain. On May 11, 1846, he voted for war with Mexico.
At the beginning of the Mexican–American War, Mississippi raised a volunteer unit, the First Mississippi Regiment, for the U.S. Army. Davis expressed his interest in joining the regiment if he was elected its colonel, and in the second round of elections in June 1846 he was chosen. He did not give up his position as a U.S. Representative, but left a letter of resignation with his brother Joseph to submit when he thought it was appropriate.
Davis was able to get his regiment armed with new percussion rifles instead of the smoothbore muskets used by other units. President Polk approved their purchase as a political favor in return for Davis marshalling enough votes to pass the Walker Tariff. Because of its association with the regiment, the weapon became known as the "Mississippi rifle", and the regiment became known as the "Mississippi Rifles".
Davis's regiment was assigned to the army of his former father-in-law, Zachary Taylor, in northeastern Mexico. Davis distinguished himself at the Battle of Monterrey in September by leading a charge that took the fort of La Teneria. He then went on a two-month leave and returned to Mississippi, where he learned that Joseph had submitted Davis's resignation from the House of Representatives in October. Davis returned to Mexico and fought in the Battle of Buena Vista on February 22, 1847. He was wounded in the heel during the fighting, but his actions stopped an attack by the Mexican forces that threatened to collapse the American line. In May, Polk offered him a federal commission as a brigadier general. Davis declined the appointment, arguing he could not directly command militia units because the U.S. Constitution gives the power of appointing militia officers to the states, not the federal government. Instead, he accepted an appointment by Mississippi governor Albert G. Brown to fill a vacancy in the U.S. Senate left when Jesse Speight died.
Davis took his seat in December 1847 and was made a regent of the Smithsonian Institution. The Mississippi legislature confirmed his appointment as senator in January 1848. He quickly established himself as an advocate of expanding slavery into the Western territories. He argued that because the territories were the common property of all the United States and lacked state sovereignty to ban slavery, slave owners had the equal right to settle them as any other citizens. Davis tried to amend the Oregon Bill to allow settlers to bring their slaves into Oregon Territory. He opposed ratifying the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican–American War, claiming that Nicholas Trist, who negotiated the treaty, had done so as a private citizen and not a government representative. Instead, he advocated negotiating a new treaty ceding additional land to the United States, and opposed the application of the Wilmot Proviso to the treaty, which would have banned slavery in any territory acquired from Mexico.
During the 1848 presidential election, Davis chose not to campaign against Zachary Taylor, who was the Whig candidate. After the Senate session following Taylor's inauguration ended in March 1849, Davis returned to Brierfield. He was reelected by the state legislature for another six-year term in the Senate. Around this time, he was approached by the Venezuelan adventurer Narciso López to lead a filibuster expedition to liberate Cuba from Spain. He turned down the offer, saying it was inconsistent with his duty as a senator.
When Calhoun died in the spring of 1850, Davis became the senatorial spokesperson for the South. The Congress debated Henry Clay's resolutions, which sought to address the sectional and territorial problems of the nation and became the basis for the Compromise of 1850. Davis was against the resolutions because he felt they would put the South at a political disadvantage. He opposed the admission of California as a free state without its first becoming a territory, asserting that a territorial government would give slaveowners the opportunity to colonize the region. He also tried to extend the Missouri Compromise Line to allow slavery to expand to the Pacific Ocean. He stated that not allowing slavery into the new territories denied the political equality of Southerners, and threatened to undermine the balance of power between Northern and Southern states in the Senate.
In the autumn of 1851, Davis was nominated to run for governor of Mississippi against Henry Stuart Foote, who had favored the Compromise of 1850. He accepted the nomination and resigned from the Senate, but Foote won the election by a slim margin. Davis turned down a reappointment to his Senate seat by outgoing Governor James Whitfield, settling in Brierfield for the next fifteen months. He remained politically active, attending the Democratic convention in January 1852 and campaigning for Democratic candidates Franklin Pierce and William R. King during the presidential election of 1852.
In March 1853, President Franklin Pierce named Davis his Secretary of War. He championed a transcontinental railroad to the Pacific, arguing it was needed for national defense, and was entrusted with overseeing the Pacific Railroad Surveys to determine which of four possible routes was the best. He promoted the Gadsden Purchase of today's southern Arizona from Mexico, partly because he preferred a southern route for the new railroad. The Pierce administration agreed and the land was purchased in December 1853. He presented the surveys' findings in 1855, but they failed to clarify the best route and sectional problems prevented any choice being made. Davis also argued for the acquisition of Cuba from Spain, seeing it as an opportunity to add the island, a strategic military location and potential slave state. He suggested that the size of the regular army was too small and that its salaries were too meagre. Congress agreed and authorized four new regiments and increased its pay scale. He ended the manufacture of smoothbore muskets and shifted production to rifles, working to develop the tactics that accompany them. He oversaw the building of public works in Washington D.C., including the initial construction of the Washington Aqueduct.
Davis assisted in the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 by allowing President Pierce to endorse it before it came up for a vote. This bill, which created Kansas and Nebraska territories, repealed the Missouri Compromise's limits on slavery and left the decision about a territory's slaveholding status to popular sovereignty, which allowed the territory's residents to decide. The passage of this bill led to the demise of the Whig party, which had tried to limit expansion of slavery in the territories. It also contributed to the rise of the Republican Party and the increase of civil violence in Kansas.
The Democratic nomination for the 1856 presidential election went to James Buchanan. Knowing his term was over when the Pierce administration ended in 1857, Davis ran for the Senate once more and re-entered it on March 4, 1857. In the same month, the United States Supreme Court decided the Dred Scott case, which ruled that slavery could not be barred from any territory.
The Senate recessed in March and did not reconvene until November 1857. The session opened with a debate on the Lecompton Constitution submitted by a convention in Kansas Territory. If approved, it would have allowed Kansas to be admitted as a slave state. Davis supported it, but it was not accepted, in part because the leading Democrat in the North, Stephen Douglas, argued it did not represent the true will of the settlers in the territory. The controversy undermined the alliance between Northern and Southern Democrats.
Davis's participation in the Senate was interrupted in early 1858 by a recurring case of iritis, which threatened the loss of his left eye. It left him bedridden for seven weeks. He spent the summer of 1858 in Portland, Maine recovering, and gave speeches in Maine, Boston, and New York, emphasizing the common heritage of all Americans and the importance of the constitution for defining the nation. His speeches angered some states' rights supporters in the South, requiring him to clarify his comments when he returned to Mississippi. Davis said that he appreciated the benefits of Union, but acknowledged that it could be dissolved if states' rights were violated or one section of the country imposed its will on another. Speaking to the Mississippi Legislature on November 16, 1858, Davis stated "if an Abolitionist be chosen President of the United States ... I should deem it your duty to provide for your safety outside of a Union with those who have already shown the will ...to deprive you of your birthright and to reduce you to worse than the colonial dependence of your fathers."
In February 1860, Davis presented a series of resolutions defining the relationship between the states under the constitution, including the assertion that Americans had a constitutional right to bring slaves into territories. These resolutions were seen as setting the agenda for the Democratic Party nomination, ensuring that Douglas's idea of popular sovereignty, known as the Freeport Doctrine, would be excluded from the party platform. The Democratic party split—Douglas was nominated by the North and Vice President John C. Breckinridge was nominated by the South—and the Republican Party nominee Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 presidential election. Davis counselled moderation after the election, but South Carolina adopted an ordinance of secession on December 20, 1860. Mississippi seceded on January 9, 1861, though Davis stayed in Washington until he received official notification on January 21. Calling it "the saddest day of my life", he delivered a farewell address, resigned from the Senate, and returned to Mississippi.
Before his resignation, Davis had sent a telegraph to Mississippi Governor John J. Pettus informing him that he was available to serve the state. On January 27, 1861, Pettus appointed him a major general of Mississippi's army. On February 10, Davis learned that he had been unanimously elected to the provisional presidency of the Confederacy by a constitutional convention in Montgomery, Alabama by delegates from the six states that had seceded: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Alabama. Davis was chosen because of his political prominence, his military reputation, and his moderate approach to secession, which Confederate leaders thought might persuade undecided Southerners to support their cause. He had been hoping for a military command, but he committed himself fully to his new role. Davis and Vice President Alexander H. Stephens were inaugurated on February 18.
Davis formed his cabinet by choosing a member from each of the states of the Confederacy, including Texas which had recently seceded: Robert Toombs of Georgia for Secretary of State, Christopher Memminger of South Carolina for Secretary of the Treasury, LeRoy Walker of Alabama for Secretary of War, John Reagan of Texas for Postmaster General, Judah P. Benjamin of Louisiana for Attorney General, and Stephen Mallory of Florida for Secretary of the Navy. Davis stood in for Mississippi. During his presidency, Davis's cabinet often changed; there were fourteen different appointees for the positions, including six secretaries of war.
As the Southern states seceded, state authorities took over most federal facilities without bloodshed. But four forts, including Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, had not surrendered. Davis preferred to avoid a crisis because the Confederacy needed time to organize its resources. To ensure that no attack on Fort Sumter was launched without his command, Davis had appointed Brigadier General P. G. T. Beauregard to command all Confederate troops in the vicinity of Charleston, South Carolina. Davis sent a commission to Washington to negotiate the evacuation of the forts, but President of the United States Lincoln refused to meet with it.
When Lincoln informed Davis that he intended to reprovision Fort Sumter, Davis convened with the Confederate Congress on April 8 and gave orders to demand the immediate surrender of the fort or to reduce it. The commander of the fort, Major Robert Anderson, refused to surrender, and Beauregard began the attack on Fort Sumter early on April 12. After over thirty hours of bombardment, the fort surrendered. When Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to suppress the rebellion, four more states–Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas—joined the Confederacy. The American Civil War had begun.
In addition to being the constitutional commander-in-chief of the Confederacy, Davis was operational military leader as the military departments reported directly to him. Many people, including Generals Joseph E. Johnston and Major General Leonidas Polk, thought he would direct the fighting, but he left that to his generals.
Major fighting in the East began when a Union army advanced into northern Virginia in July 1861. It was defeated at Manassas by two Confederate forces commanded by Beauregard and Joseph Johnston. After the battle, Davis had to manage disputes with the two generals, both of whom felt they did not get the recognition they deserved.
In the West, Davis had to address a problem caused by another general. Kentucky, which was leaning toward the Confederacy, had declared its neutrality. In September 1861, Polk violated the state's neutrality by occupying Columbus, Kentucky. Secretary of War Walker ordered him to withdraw. Davis initially agreed with Walker, but changed his mind and allowed Polk to remain. The violation led Kentucky to request aid from the Union, effectively losing the state for the Confederacy. Walker resigned as secretary of war and was replaced by Judah P. Benjamin. Davis appointed General Albert Sidney Johnston, as commander of the Western Military Department that included much of Tennessee, Kentucky, western Mississippi, and Arkansas.
In February 1862, the Confederate defenses in the West collapsed when Union forces captured Forts Henry, Donelson, and nearly half the troops in A. S. Johnston's department. Within weeks, Kentucky, Nashville and Memphis were lost, as well as control of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers. The commanders responsible for the defeat were Brigadier Generals Gideon Pillow and John B. Floyd, political generals that Davis had been required to appoint. Davis gathered troops defending the Gulf Coast and concentrated them with A. S. Johnston's remaining forces. Davis favored using this concentration in an offensive. Johnston attacked the Union forces at Shiloh in southwestern Tennessee on April 6. The attack failed, and Johnston was killed. General Beauregard took command, falling back to Corinth, Mississippi, and then to Tupelo, Mississippi. When Beauregard then put himself on leave, Davis replaced him with General Braxton Bragg.
On February 22, Davis was inaugurated as president. In his inaugural speech, he admitted that the South had suffered disasters, but called on the people of the Confederacy to renew their commitment. He replaced Secretary of War Benjamin, who had been scapegoated for the defeats, with George W. Randolph. Davis kept Benjamin in the cabinet, making him secretary of state to replace Hunter, who had stepped down. In March, Davis vetoed a bill to create a commander in chief for the army, but he selected General Robert E. Lee to be his military advisor. They formed a close relationship, and Davis relied on Lee for counsel until the end of the war.
In March, Union troops in the East began an amphibious attack on the Virginia Peninsula, 75 miles from the Confederate capitol of Richmond. Davis and Lee wanted Joseph Johnston, who commanded the Confederate army near Richmond, to make a stand at Yorktown. Instead, Johnston withdrew from the peninsula without informing Davis. Davis reminded Johnston that it was his duty to not let Richmond fall. On May 31, 1862, Johnston engaged the Union army less than ten miles from Richmond at the Battle of Seven Pines, where he was wounded. Davis put Lee in command. Lee began the Seven Days Battles less than a month later, pushing the Union forces back down the peninsula and eventually forcing them to withdraw from Virginia. Lee beat back another army moving into Virginia at the Battle of Second Manassas in August 1862. Knowing Davis desired an offensive into the North, Lee invaded Maryland, but retreated back to Virginia after a bloody stalemate at Antietam in September. In December, Lee stopped another invasion of Virginia at the Battle of Fredericksburg.
In the West, Bragg shifted most of his available forces from Tupelo to Chattanooga in July 1862 for an offensive toward Kentucky. Davis approved, suggesting that an attack could win Kentucky for the Confederacy and regain Tennessee, but he did not create a unified command. He formed a new department independent of Bragg under Major General Edmund Kirby Smith at Knoxville, Tennessee. In August, both Bragg and Smith invaded Kentucky. Frankfort was briefly captured and a Confederate governor was inaugurated, but the attack collapsed, in part due to lack of coordination between the two generals. After a stalemate at the Battle of Perryville, Bragg and Smith retreated to Tennessee. In December, Bragg was defeated at the Battle of Stones River.
In response to the defeat and the lack of coordination, Davis reorganized the command in the West in November, combining the armies in Tennessee and Vicksburg into a department under the overall command of Joseph Johnston. Davis expected Johnston to relieve Bragg of his command, but Johnston refused. During this time, Secretary of War Randolph resigned because he felt Davis refused to give him the autonomy to do his job; Davis replaced him with James Seddon.
In the winter of 1862, Davis decided to join the Episcopal Church; in May 1863, he was confirmed at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Richmond.
On January 1, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Davis saw this as attempt to destroy the South by inciting its enslaved people to revolt, declaring the proclamation "the most execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man". He requested a law that Union officers captured in Confederate states be delivered to state authorities and put on trial for inciting slave rebellion. In response, the Congress passed a law that Union officers of United States Colored Troops could be tried and executed, though none were during the war. The law also stated that captured black soldiers would be turned over to the states they were captured in to be dealt with as the state saw fit.
In May, Lee broke up another invasion of Virginia at the Battle of Chancellorsville, and countered with an invasion into Pennsylvania. Davis approved, thinking that a victory in Union territory could gain recognition of Confederate independence, but Lee's army was defeated at the Battle of Gettysburg in July. After retreating to Virginia, Lee blocked any major Union offensives into the state.
In April, Union forces resumed their attack on Vicksburg. Davis concentrated troops from across the south to counter the move, but Joseph Johnston did not stop the Union forces. Lieutenant General John C. Pemberton withdrew his army into Vicksburg, and after a siege, surrendered on July 4. The loss of Vicksburg and Port Hudson, Louisiana, led to Union control of the Mississippi. Davis relieved Johnston of his department command. During the summer, Bragg's army was maneuvered out of Chattanooga and fell back to Georgia. In September, Bragg defeated the Union army at the Battle of Chickamauga, driving it back to Chattanooga, which he put under siege. Davis visited Bragg to address leadership problems in his army. Davis acknowledged that Bragg did not have the confidence of his subordinates but kept him in command. In mid-November, the Union army counterattacked and Bragg's forces retreated to northern Georgia. Bragg resigned his command; Davis replaced him with Joseph Johnston but retained Bragg as an informal chief of staff.
Davis had to address faltering civilian morale. In early spring, there were riots in Confederate cities as people began to suffer food shortages and price inflation. During one riot in Richmond, the mayor of Richmond called the militia when a mob protesting food shortages broke into shops. Davis went to the scene and addressed the protesters, reminding them of their patriotic duty and promising them that he would get food. He then ordered them to disperse or he would command the soldiers to open fire; they dispersed. In October, Davis went on a month-long journey to rally the Confederacy, giving public speeches across the south and meeting with civic and military leaders.
In his address to the Second Confederate Congress on May 2, 1864, Davis outlined his strategy of achieving Confederate independence by exhausting the Union will to fight: If the South could show it could not be subjugated, the North would elect a president who would make peace.
In early 1864, Davis encouraged Joseph Johnston to take action in Tennessee, but Johnston refused. In May, the Union armies advanced toward Johnston's army, which repeatedly retreated toward Atlanta, Georgia. In July, Davis replaced Johnston with General John B. Hood, who immediately engaged the Union forces in a series of battles around Atlanta. The battles did not stop the Union army and Hood abandoned the city on September 2. The victory raised Northern morale and assured Lincoln's reelection. The Union forces then marched to Savannah, Georgia, capturing it. In December, they advanced into South Carolina, forcing the Confederates to evacuate Charleston. In the meantime, Hood advanced north and was repulsed in a drive toward Nashville in December 1864.
Union forces began a new advance into northern Virginia. Lee put up a strong defense and they were unable to directly advance on Richmond, but managed to cross the James River. In June 1864, Lee fought the Union armies to a standstill; both sides settled into trench warfare around Petersburg, which would continue for nine months.
Davis signed a Congressional resolution in February making Lee general-in-chief. Seddon resigned as Secretary of War and was replaced by John C. Breckinridge. Davis sent envoys to Hampton Roads for peace talks, but Lincoln refused to consider any offer that included an independent Confederacy. Davis also sent Duncan F. Kenner, the chief Confederate diplomat, on a mission to Great Britain and France, offering to gradually emancipate the enslaved people of the South for political recognition.
Major General Patrick Cleburne sent a proposal in early 1864 to Davis to enlist African Americans in the army. Davis initially suppressed it, but by the end of the year, he reconsidered and endorsed the idea. Congress passed an act supporting him. It left the principle of slavery intact by leaving it to the states and individual owners to decide which slaves could be used for military service, but Davis's administration accepted only African Americans who had been freed by their masters as a condition of their being enlisted. The act came too late to have an effect on the war.
The Union army broke through the Confederate trench lines at the end of March, forcing Lee to withdraw and abandon Richmond. Davis evacuated his family, which included Jim Limber, a free black orphan they briefly adopted, on March 29. On April 2, Davis and his cabinet escaped by rail to Danville, Virginia. He issued a proclamation on April 4, encouraging the people of the Confederacy to continue resistance, but Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9. The president and his cabinet headed to Greensboro, North Carolina. where they met with Joseph Johnston, Beauregard, and North Carolina Governor Zebulon Vance. Davis wanted to cross the Mississippi River and continue the war, but his generals stated that they did not have the forces. He gave Johnston authorization to negotiate the surrender of his army, but Davis headed south to carry on the fight.
When Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, the Union government implicated Davis, and a bounty of $100,000 (equivalent to $3,400,000 in 2022) was put on his head. On May 2, Davis met with Secretary of War Breckinridge and Bragg in Abbeville, Georgia, to see if they could pull together an army. They said they could not. On May 5, he met with his cabinet in Washington, Georgia, and officially dissolved the Confederate government. He moved on, hoping to join Kirby Smith's army across the Mississippi. On May 9, Union soldiers found Davis's encampment near Irwinville, Georgia. He tried to evade them, but was captured wearing a loose-sleeved cloak and covering his head with a black shawl, which gave rise to depictions of him in political cartoons fleeing in women's clothes.
Davis's central concern during the war was to achieve Confederate independence. When Virginia seceded, the provisional Confederate Congress moved the capital to Richmond. The government had almost no institutional structures in place: it lacked an army, treasury, diplomatic missions, and bureaucracy. Davis had to work with Congress quickly to create them.
Davis supported states' rights, but believed the constitution gave him the right to centralize authority to prosecute the war. He worked with the Congress to bring military facilities in the South, which had been controlled by the states, under Confederate authority. Though state governors wanted their troops available for local defense, he needed to deploy military forces to defend the entire South and created a centralized army that could enlist volunteers directly. When soldiers in the volunteer army seemed unwilling to re-enlist in 1862, Davis instituted the first conscription in American history. He received authorization from Congress to suspend the writ of habeas corpus when needed. In 1864, he challenged property rights by recommending a direct 5% tax on land and slaves, and implemented the impressment of supplies and slave labor for the military effort. In 1865, Davis's commitment to independence led him to even compromise slavery when he advocated for allowing African Americans to earn their freedom by serving in the military. These policies made him unpopular with states' rights advocates and state governors, who saw him as creating the same kind of government they had seceded from.
The main objective of Davis's foreign policy was to achieve foreign recognition, allowing the Confederacy to secure international loans, receive foreign aid to open trade, and provide the possibility of a military alliance. Davis was confident that most European nations' economic dependence on cotton from the South would quickly convince them to sign treaties with the Confederacy. Cotton had made up 61% of the value of all U.S. exports and the South filled most of the European cloth industry's need for cheap imported raw cotton.
There was no consensus on how to use cotton to gain European support. Davis did not want an embargo on cotton, he wanted to make cotton available to European nations, but require them to acquire it by violating the blockade declared by the Union. The majority of Congress wanted an embargo to coerce Europe to help the South. Though there was no official policy, cotton was effectively embargoed. By 1862, the price of cotton in Europe had quadrupled and European imports of cotton from the United States were down 96%, but instead of joining with the Confederacy, European cotton manufacturers found new sources, such as India, Egypt and Brazil. By the end of the war, not a single foreign nation had recognized the Confederate States of America.
Davis did not take executive action to create the needed financial structure for the Confederacy. He knew very little about public finance, largely deferring to Secretary of the Treasury Memminger. Memminger's knowledge of economics was limited, and he was ineffective at getting Congress to listen to his suggestions. Until 1863, Davis's reports on the financial state of the Confederacy to Congress tended to be unduly optimistic.
Davis's failure to argue for needed financial reform allowed Congress to avoid unpopular economic measures, such as taxing planters' property—both land and slaves—that made up two-thirds of the South's wealth. At first the government thought it could raise money with a low export tax on cotton, but the blockade prevented this. In his opening address to the fourth session of Congress in December 1863, Davis demanded the Congress pass a direct tax on property despite the constitution. Congress complied, but the tax had too many loopholes and exceptions, and failed to produce the needed revenue. Throughout the existence of the Confederacy, taxes accounted for only one-fourteenth of the government's income; consequently, the government printed money to fund the war, thus destroying the value of the Confederate currency. By 1865, the government was relying on impressments to fill the gaps caused by lack of finances.
On May 22, Davis was imprisoned in Fort Monroe, Virginia, under the watch of Major General Nelson A. Miles. Initially, he was confined to a casemate, forced to wear fetters on his ankles, required to have guards constantly in his room, forbidden contact with his family, and given only a Bible and his prayerbook to read. Over time, his treatment improved: due to public outcry, the fetters were removed after five days; within two months, the guard was removed from his room, he could walk outside for exercise, and he was allowed to read newspapers and other books. In October, he was moved to better quarters. In April 1866, Varina was permitted to regularly visit him. In September, Miles was replaced by Brevet Brigadier General Henry S. Burton, who permitted Davis to live with Varina in a four-room apartment. In December, Pope Pius IX sent a photograph of himself to Davis.
President Andrew Johnson's cabinet was unsure what to do with Davis. They considered trying him by military court for war crimes—his alleged involvement in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln or the mistreatment of Union prisoners of war at Andersonville Prison— but could not find any reliable evidence directly linking Davis to either. In late summer 1865, Attorney General James Speed determined that it was best to try Davis for treason in a civil criminal trial. In June 1866, the House of Representatives passed a resolution by a vote of 105 to 19 to put Davis on trial for treason. Davis also desired a trial to vindicate his actions. His defense lawyer, Charles O'Conor wanted to argue that Davis did not commit treason because he was no longer a citizen of the United States when Mississippi left the United States. The trial was to be held in Richmond, which might be sympathetic to Davis, and an acquittal could be interpreted as validating the constitutionality of secession.
After two years of imprisonment, Davis was released at Richmond on May 13, 1867, on bail of $100,000 (~$1.73 million in 2022), which was posted by prominent citizens including Horace Greeley, Cornelius Vanderbilt and Gerrit Smith. Davis and Varina went to Montreal, Quebec, to join their children who had been sent there while he was in prison, and they moved to Lennoxville, Quebec. Davis remained under indictment until after Johnson's proclamation on Christmas 1868 granting amnesty and pardon to all participants in the rebellion. Davis's case never went to trial. In February 1869, Attorney General William Evarts informed the court that the federal government declared it was no longer prosecuting the charges against him.
Despite his financial situation after his prison release, Davis refused work that he perceived as diminishing his status as a former senator and president. He turned down a position as head of Randolph–Macon College in Virginia because he did not want to damage the school's reputation while he was under indictment. In the summer of 1869, he traveled to Britain and France, but found no business opportunities there. When the federal government dropped its case against him, Davis left his family in England and returned to the U.S. in October 1869 to become president of the Carolina Life Insurance Company in Tennessee. On his arrival to Tennessee, the University of the South offered him their top position, but he declined because the salary was insufficient. Davis was not able to retrieve his family from England until August 1870.
Davis received numerous invitations to speak during this time, but declined most. In 1870, he delivered a eulogy to Robert E. Lee at the Lee Monument Association in Richmond in which he avoided politics and emphasized Lee's character. Davis's 1873 speech to the Virginia Historical Society was more political; he stated that the South would not have surrendered had it known what to expect from Reconstruction, particularly the enfranchisement of African Americans. He became a life-time member of the Southern Historical Society, which was devoted to presenting the Lost Cause explanation of the Civil War. Initially, the society had scapegoated political leaders like Davis for losing the war, but eventually shifted the blame for defeat to the former Confederate general James Longstreet. Davis avoided public disputes regarding blame, but consistently maintained he had done nothing wrong and had always upheld the Constitution.
The Panic of 1873 adversely affected the Carolina Life Company, and Davis resigned in August 1873 when the directors merged the company over his objections. He went to Europe again in 1874 to seek opportunities to earn money, but was still not able to find any. After returning to the United States in 1874, Davis continued to explore ways to make a living, including investments in railroads, mining, and manufacturing an ice-making machine. In 1876, the Agriculture and Mechanical College of Texas offered him the presidency, but he turned it down because Varina did not want to live in Texas. He worked for an English company, the Mississippi Valley Society, to promote trade and European immigration. When he and Varina went to Europe again in 1876, he determined the company was failing. He returned to the United States while Varina stayed in England.
Davis sought to reclaim Brierfield as well. After the war, Davis Bend had been taken over by the Freedmen's Bureau, which employed former enslaved African Americans as laborers. After Davis's elder brother, Joseph, successfully applied for a pardon, he regained ownership of Davis Bend. Unable to maintain it, Joseph gave his former slave Ben Montgomery and his sons, Isaiah and William, a mortgage loan to buy the property. When Joseph died in 1870, he had made Davis one of his executors but did not deed any land to him in the will. Davis litigated to obtain Brierfield. A judge dismissed his suit in 1876. He appealed, and the Mississippi supreme court found in his favor in 1878. He foreclosed on the Montgomerys, who were in default on their mortgage; by December 1881, Brierfield was legally his, although he did not live there and it did not produce a reliable income.
In January 1877, the author Sarah Dorsey invited him to live on her estate at Beauvoir, Mississippi, and to begin writing his memoirs. He agreed, but insisted on paying board. At the time, Davis and Varina lived separately. When Varina came back to the United States, she initially refused to come to Beauvoir because she did not like Davis's close relationship with Dorsey, who was serving as his amanuensis. In the summer of 1878, Varina relented, moving to Beauvoir and taking over the role of Davis's assistant. Dorsey died in July 1879, and left Beauvoir to Davis in her will, and he lived there for most of his remaining years.
Davis's first book, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, was published in 1881. The book was intended as a vindication of Davis's actions during the war and the righteousness of the Confederate cause, though he downplayed slavery's role as a cause of the war. James Redpath, editor of the North American Review, encouraged him to write a series of articles for the magazine and to complete his final book A Short History of the Confederate States of America. He also began dictating his memoirs, although they were never finished.
In 1886, Henry W. Grady, an advocate for the New South, convinced Davis to lay the cornerstone for a monument to the Confederate dead in Montgomery, Alabama, and to attend the unveilings of statues memorializing Davis's friend Benjamin H. Hill in Savannah and the Revolutionary War hero Nathanael Greene in Atlanta. The tour was a triumph for Davis and got extensive newspaper coverage, which emphasized national unity and the South's role as a permanent part of the United States. At each stop along the way, large crowds came out to cheer Davis, solidifying his image as an icon of the South and the Confederacy. In October 1887, Davis held his last tour, traveling to the Georgia State Fair in Macon, Georgia, for a grand reunion with Confederate veterans.
In November 1889, Davis embarked on a steamboat in New Orleans in a cold rain, intending to visit his Brierfield plantation. He fell ill during the trip, but refused to send for a doctor. An employee telegrammed Varina, who came to get him. Davis was diagnosed with acute bronchitis complicated by malaria. When he returned to New Orleans, Davis's doctor Stanford E. Chaille pronounced him too ill to travel further. He was taken to the home of Charles Erasmus Fenner, the son-in-law of his friend J. M. Payne, where he died at 12:45 a.m. on Friday, December 6, 1889, in the presence of several friends and holding Varina's hand.
Davis's body lay in state at the New Orleans City Hall from December 7 to 11. Davis's funeral was one of the largest held in the South; over 200,000 mourners were estimated to have attended. The coffin was transported on a two-mile journey to the cemetery in a modified, four-wheeled caisson to emphasize his role as a military hero. Davis was buried according to the Episcopal rites and a brief eulogy was pronounced by Bishop John Nicholas Galleher.
After Davis's funeral, various Southern states requested to be the final resting site for Davis's remains. Varina decided that Davis should be buried in Richmond, which she saw as the appropriate resting place for dead Confederate heroes. She chose Hollywood Cemetery. In May 1893, Davis's remains traveled from New Orleans to Richmond. Along the way, the train stopped at various cities, receiving military honors and visits from governors, and the coffin was allowed to lie in state in three state capitols: Montgomery, Alabama; Atlanta, Georgia; and Raleigh, North Carolina. When Davis was reburied, his children were reinterred on the site as Varina requested, and, when Varina died in 1906, she was buried beside him.
During his years as a senator, Davis was an advocate for the Southern states' right to slavery. In an 1848 speech on the Oregon Bill, he argued for a strict constructionist understanding of the Constitution. He insisted that the states are sovereign, all powers of the federal government are granted by those states, the Constitution recognized the right of states to allow citizens to have slaves as property, and the federal government was obligated to defend encroachments upon this right. In his February 13–14, 1850 speech, Davis declared that slaveholders must be allowed to bring their slaves into federal territories. He stated that slavery does not need to be justified: it was sanctioned by religion and history. He claimed that African Americans were destined for bondage, and their enslavement was a civilizing blessing to them that brought economic and social good to everyone.
Davis's speeches after secession acknowledged the relationship between the Confederacy and slavery. In his resignation speech to the U. S. Senate, delivered 12 days after his state seceded, he said Mississippi "has heard proclaimed the theory that all men are created free and equal, and this made the basis of an attack upon her social institutions and the sacred Declaration of Independence has been invoked to maintain the position of the equality of the races." In his February 1861 inaugural speech as provisional president of the Confederacy, Davis asserted that the Confederate Constitution, which explicitly prevented Congress from passing any law affecting African American slavery and mandated its protection in all Confederate territories, was a return to the intent of the original founders. When he spoke to Congress in April on the ratification of the Constitution, he stated that the war was caused by Northerners whose desire to end slavery would destroy Southern property worth millions of dollars." In his 1863 address to the Confederate Congress, Davis denounced the Emancipation Proclamation as evidence of the North's long-standing intention to abolish slavery and doom African Americans, who he called an inferior race, to extermination.
Davis came to the role of commander in chief confident in his military abilities. He had graduated from West Point Military Academy, served in the regular army, and commanded troops in combat. He actively oversaw the military policy of the Confederacy and worked long hours attending to paperwork related to the organization, finance, and logistics needed to maintain the Confederate armies.
Some historians argue that Davis's personality contributed to the defeat of the Confederacy. His constant attention to minor military details has been used to illustrate an inability to delegate, which led him to lose focus on larger issues. He has been accused of being a poor judge of generals: appointing people—such as Bragg, Pemberton, and Hood—–who failed to meet expectations, overly trusting long-time friends, and retaining generals—like Joseph Johnston—long after they should have been removed. His need to be seen as always in the right has also been described as a problem. Historians have argued that the time spent vindicating himself took time away from pressing problems and accomplished little. His reactions to criticism made unnecessary enemies and created hostile relationships with the politicians and generals he depended on. It has been argued that his focus on military victory at all costs undermined the values the South was fighting for, such as states' rights and slavery, but provided no alternatives to replace them.
Other historians have pointed out his strengths. Davis quickly mobilized the Confederacy despite the South's focus on states' rights, and he stayed focused on gaining independence. He was a skilled orator who attempted to share the vision of national unity. He shared his message through newspaper, public speeches, and trips where he would meet with the public. His policies sustained the Confederate armies through numerous campaigns, buoying Southern hopes for victory and undermining the North's will to continue the war. A few historians have argued that Davis may have been one of the best people available to serve as commander in chief. Though he was unable to win the war, he rose to the challenge of the presidency, pursuing a strategy that not only enabled the Confederacy to hold out as long as it did, but almost achieved its independence.
Although Davis served the United States as a soldier and a war hero, a politician who sat in both houses of Congress, and a cabinet officer, his legacy is mainly defined by his role as president of the Confederacy. After the Civil War, journalist Edward A. Pollard, who first popularized the Lost Cause mythology, placed much of the blame for losing the war on Davis. Into the twentieth century, many biographers and historians have also emphasized Davis's responsibility for the Confederacy's failure to achieve independence. Since the second half of the twentieth century, this assumption has been questioned. Some scholars argued that he was a capable leader, while acknowledging his skills were insufficient to overcome the challenges the Confederacy faced and exploring how his limitations may have contributed to the war's outcome.
Davis's standing among white Southerners was at a low point at the end of the Civil War, but it rebounded after his release from prison. After Reconstruction, he became a venerated figure of the white South, and he was often depicted as a martyr who suffered for his nation. His birthday was made a legal holiday in six Southern states. His popularity among white Southerners remained strong in the early twentieth century. Around 200,000 people attended the unveiling of the Jefferson Davis Memorial at Richmond, Virginia, in 1907. In 1961, a centennial celebration reenacted Davis's inauguration in Montgomery, Alabama, with fireworks and a cast of thousands in period costumes. In the early twenty-first century, there were at least 144 Confederate memorials commemorating him throughout the United States.
On October 17, 1978, Davis's U.S. citizenship was posthumously restored after the Senate passed Joint Resolution 16. President Jimmy Carter described it as an act of reconciliation reuniting the people of the United States and expressing the need to establish the nation's founding principles for all. However, Davis's legacy continued to spark controversy into the twenty-first century. Memorials such as the Jefferson Davis Highway have been argued to legitimize the white supremacist, slaveholding ideology of the Confederacy, and a number of his memorials have been removed, including his statues at the University of Texas at Austin, New Orleans, Memphis, Tennessee, and the Kentucky State Capitol in Frankfort. After the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, Davis's statue on his Richmond monument—along with the statues of other figures who were considered racists—was toppled by protesters. As part of its initiative to dismantle Confederate monuments, the Richmond City Council funded the removal of the statue's pedestal, which was completed in February 2022, and ownership of its artifacts was given to the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Jefferson F. Davis (June 3, 1808 – December 6, 1889) was an American politician who served as the first and only president of the Confederate States of America from 1861 to 1865. He represented Mississippi in the United States Senate and the House of Representatives as a member of the Democratic Party before the American Civil War. He was the United States Secretary of War from 1853 to 1857.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Davis, the youngest of ten children, was born in Fairview, Kentucky, but spent most of his childhood in Wilkinson County, Mississippi. His eldest brother Joseph Emory Davis secured the younger Davis's appointment to the United States Military Academy. Upon graduating, he served six years as a lieutenant in the United States Army. After leaving the army in 1835, Davis married Sarah Knox Taylor, daughter of general and future President Zachary Taylor. Sarah died from malaria three months after the wedding. Davis became a cotton planter, building Brierfield Plantation in Mississippi on his brother Joseph's land and eventually owning as many as 113 slaves.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In 1845, Davis married Varina Howell. During the same year, he was elected to the United States House of Representatives, serving for one year. From 1846 to 1847, he fought in the Mexican–American War as the colonel of a volunteer regiment. He was appointed to the United States Senate in 1847, resigning to unsuccessfully run as governor of Mississippi. In 1853, President Franklin Pierce appointed him Secretary of War. After Pierce's administration ended in 1857, Davis returned to the Senate. He resigned in 1861 when Mississippi seceded from the United States.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "During the Civil War, Davis guided the Confederacy's policies and served as its commander in chief. When the Confederacy was defeated in 1865, Davis was captured, accused of treason, and imprisoned at Fort Monroe. He was released without trial after two years. Immediately after the war, Davis was often blamed for the Confederacy's defeat, but after his release from prison, he became a hero of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. In the late 19th and the 20th centuries, his legacy as Confederate leader was celebrated in the South. In the twenty-first century, he is frequently criticized as a supporter of slavery and racism, and many of the memorials dedicated to him throughout the United States have been removed.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Jefferson F. Davis was the youngest of ten children of Jane and Samuel Emory Davis. Samuel Davis's father, Evan, who had a Welsh background, came to the colony of Georgia from Philadelphia. Samuel served in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, and received a land grant for his service near present-day Washington, Georgia. He married Jane Cook, a woman of Scots-Irish descent whom he had met in South Carolina during his military service, in 1783. Around 1793, Samuel and Jane moved to Kentucky. Jefferson was born on June 3, 1808, at the family homestead in Davisburg, a village Samuel had established that later became Fairview, Kentucky. He was named after then-President Thomas Jefferson.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In 1810, the Davis family moved to Bayou Teche, Louisiana. Less than a year later, they moved to a farm near Woodville, Mississippi, where Samuel cultivated cotton, acquired twelve slaves, and built a house that Jane called Rosemont. During the War of 1812, three of Davis's brothers served in the military. When Davis was around five, he received a rudimentary education at a small schoolhouse near Woodville. When he was about eight, his father sent him with Major Thomas Hinds and his relatives to attend Saint Thomas College, a Catholic preparatory school run by Dominicans near Springfield, Kentucky. In 1818, Davis returned to Mississippi, where he briefly studied at Jefferson College in Washington. He then attended the Wilkinson County Academy near Woodville for five years. In 1823, Davis attended Transylvania University in Lexington. While he was still in college in 1824, he learned that his father Samuel had died. Before his death, Samuel had fallen into debt and sold Rosemont and most of his slaves to his eldest son Joseph Emory Davis, who already owned a large estate in Davis Bend, Mississippi, about 15 miles (24 km) south of Vicksburg, Mississippi. Joseph, who was 23 years older than Davis, informally became his surrogate father.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "His older brother Joseph got Davis appointed to the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1824, where he became friends with classmates Albert Sidney Johnston and Leonidas Polk. Davis frequently challenged the academy's discipline. In his first year, he was court-martialed for drinking at a nearby tavern. He was found guilty but was pardoned. The following year, he was placed under house arrest for his role in the Eggnog Riot during Christmas 1826 but was not dismissed. He graduated 23rd in a class of 33.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Second Lieutenant Davis was assigned to the 1st Infantry Regiment. He was accompanied by his personal servant James Pemberton, an enslaved African American who he inherited from his father. In early 1829, he was stationed at Forts Crawford and Winnebago in Michigan Territory under the command of Colonel Zachary Taylor, who later became president of the United States.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Throughout his life, Davis regularly suffered from ill health. During the northern winters, he had pneumonia, colds, and bronchitis. He went to Mississippi on furlough in March 1832, missing the outbreak of the Black Hawk War, and returned to duty just before the Battle of Bad Axe, which ended the war. When Black Hawk was captured, Davis escorted him for detention in St. Louis. Black Hawk stated that Davis treated him with kindness.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "After Davis's return to Fort Crawford in January 1833, he and Taylor's daughter, Sarah, became romantically involved. Davis asked Taylor if he could marry Sarah, but Taylor refused. In spring, Taylor had him assigned to the United States Regiment of Dragoons under Colonel Henry Dodge. He was promoted to first lieutenant and deployed at Fort Gibson in Arkansas Territory. In February 1835, Davis was court-martialed for insubordination. He was acquitted. He requested a furlough, and immediately after it ended, he tendered his resignation, which was effective on June 30.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Davis decided to become a cotton planter. He returned to Mississippi where his brother Joseph had developed Davis Bend into Hurricane Plantation, which eventually had 1,700 acres (690 ha) of cultivated fields with over 300 slaves. Joseph loaned him funds to buy ten slaves and provided him with 800 acres (320 ha), though Joseph retained the title to the property. Davis named his section Brierfield Plantation.",
"title": "Planting career and first marriage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Davis continued his correspondence with Sarah, and they agreed to marry with Taylor giving his reluctant assent. They married at Beechland on June 17, 1835. In August, he and Sarah traveled to Locust Grove Plantation, his sister Anna Smith's home in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana. Within days, both became severely ill with malaria. Sarah died at the age of 21 on September 15, 1835, after only three months of marriage.",
"title": "Planting career and first marriage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "For several years after Sarah's death, Davis spent much of his time developing Brierfield. In 1836, he possessed 23 slaves; by 1840, he possessed 40; and by 1860, 113. He made his first slave, James Pemberton, Brierfield's effective overseer, a position he held until his death around 1850. Davis continued his intellectual development by reading about politics, law and economics at the large library Joseph maintained at Hurricane Plantation. As he and Joseph became concerned about national attempts to limit slavery in new territories, Davis became increasingly engaged in politics, benefiting from his brother's mentorship and political influence.",
"title": "Planting career and first marriage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Davis became publicly involved in politics in 1840 when he attended a Democratic Party meeting in Vicksburg and served as a delegate to the party's state convention in Jackson; he served again in 1842. One week before the state election in November 1843, He was chosen to be the Democratic candidate for the Mississippi House of Representatives for Warren County when the original candidate withdrew his nomination, though Davis lost the election.",
"title": "Early political career and second marriage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In early 1844, Davis was chosen to serve as a delegate to the state convention again. On his way to Jackson, he met Varina Banks Howell, then 18 years old, when he delivered an invitation from Joseph for her to visit the Hurricane Plantation for the Christmas season. At the convention, Davis was selected as one of Mississippi's six presidential electors for the 1844 presidential election.",
"title": "Early political career and second marriage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Within a month of their meeting, 35-year-old Davis and Varina became engaged despite her parents' initial concerns about his age and politics. During the remainder of the year, Davis campaigned for the Democratic party, advocating for the nomination of John C. Calhoun. He preferred Calhoun because he championed Southern interests including the annexation of Texas, reduction of tariffs, and building naval defenses in southern ports. When the party chose James K. Polk for their presidential candidate, Davis campaigned for him.",
"title": "Early political career and second marriage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Davis and Varina married on February 26, 1845. They had six children: Samuel Emory, born in 1852, who died of an undiagnosed disease two years later; Margaret Howell, born in 1855, who married, raised a family and lived to be 54; Jefferson Davis Jr., born in 1857, who died of yellow fever at age 21; Joseph Evan, born 1859, who died from an accidental fall at age five; William Howell, born 1864, who died of diphtheria at age 10; and Varina Anne, born 1872, who remained single and lived to be 34.",
"title": "Early political career and second marriage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In July 1845, Davis became a candidate for the United States House of Representatives. He ran on a platform emphasizing a strict constructionist view of the constitution, states' rights, tariff reductions, and opposition to a national bank. He won the election and entered the 29th Congress. Davis opposed using federal monies for internal improvements, which he believed would undermine the autonomy of the states. He supported the American annexation of Oregon, but through peaceful compromise with Britain. On May 11, 1846, he voted for war with Mexico.",
"title": "Early political career and second marriage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "At the beginning of the Mexican–American War, Mississippi raised a volunteer unit, the First Mississippi Regiment, for the U.S. Army. Davis expressed his interest in joining the regiment if he was elected its colonel, and in the second round of elections in June 1846 he was chosen. He did not give up his position as a U.S. Representative, but left a letter of resignation with his brother Joseph to submit when he thought it was appropriate.",
"title": "Mexican–American War"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Davis was able to get his regiment armed with new percussion rifles instead of the smoothbore muskets used by other units. President Polk approved their purchase as a political favor in return for Davis marshalling enough votes to pass the Walker Tariff. Because of its association with the regiment, the weapon became known as the \"Mississippi rifle\", and the regiment became known as the \"Mississippi Rifles\".",
"title": "Mexican–American War"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Davis's regiment was assigned to the army of his former father-in-law, Zachary Taylor, in northeastern Mexico. Davis distinguished himself at the Battle of Monterrey in September by leading a charge that took the fort of La Teneria. He then went on a two-month leave and returned to Mississippi, where he learned that Joseph had submitted Davis's resignation from the House of Representatives in October. Davis returned to Mexico and fought in the Battle of Buena Vista on February 22, 1847. He was wounded in the heel during the fighting, but his actions stopped an attack by the Mexican forces that threatened to collapse the American line. In May, Polk offered him a federal commission as a brigadier general. Davis declined the appointment, arguing he could not directly command militia units because the U.S. Constitution gives the power of appointing militia officers to the states, not the federal government. Instead, he accepted an appointment by Mississippi governor Albert G. Brown to fill a vacancy in the U.S. Senate left when Jesse Speight died.",
"title": "Mexican–American War"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Davis took his seat in December 1847 and was made a regent of the Smithsonian Institution. The Mississippi legislature confirmed his appointment as senator in January 1848. He quickly established himself as an advocate of expanding slavery into the Western territories. He argued that because the territories were the common property of all the United States and lacked state sovereignty to ban slavery, slave owners had the equal right to settle them as any other citizens. Davis tried to amend the Oregon Bill to allow settlers to bring their slaves into Oregon Territory. He opposed ratifying the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican–American War, claiming that Nicholas Trist, who negotiated the treaty, had done so as a private citizen and not a government representative. Instead, he advocated negotiating a new treaty ceding additional land to the United States, and opposed the application of the Wilmot Proviso to the treaty, which would have banned slavery in any territory acquired from Mexico.",
"title": "Senator and Secretary of War"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "During the 1848 presidential election, Davis chose not to campaign against Zachary Taylor, who was the Whig candidate. After the Senate session following Taylor's inauguration ended in March 1849, Davis returned to Brierfield. He was reelected by the state legislature for another six-year term in the Senate. Around this time, he was approached by the Venezuelan adventurer Narciso López to lead a filibuster expedition to liberate Cuba from Spain. He turned down the offer, saying it was inconsistent with his duty as a senator.",
"title": "Senator and Secretary of War"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "When Calhoun died in the spring of 1850, Davis became the senatorial spokesperson for the South. The Congress debated Henry Clay's resolutions, which sought to address the sectional and territorial problems of the nation and became the basis for the Compromise of 1850. Davis was against the resolutions because he felt they would put the South at a political disadvantage. He opposed the admission of California as a free state without its first becoming a territory, asserting that a territorial government would give slaveowners the opportunity to colonize the region. He also tried to extend the Missouri Compromise Line to allow slavery to expand to the Pacific Ocean. He stated that not allowing slavery into the new territories denied the political equality of Southerners, and threatened to undermine the balance of power between Northern and Southern states in the Senate.",
"title": "Senator and Secretary of War"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In the autumn of 1851, Davis was nominated to run for governor of Mississippi against Henry Stuart Foote, who had favored the Compromise of 1850. He accepted the nomination and resigned from the Senate, but Foote won the election by a slim margin. Davis turned down a reappointment to his Senate seat by outgoing Governor James Whitfield, settling in Brierfield for the next fifteen months. He remained politically active, attending the Democratic convention in January 1852 and campaigning for Democratic candidates Franklin Pierce and William R. King during the presidential election of 1852.",
"title": "Senator and Secretary of War"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In March 1853, President Franklin Pierce named Davis his Secretary of War. He championed a transcontinental railroad to the Pacific, arguing it was needed for national defense, and was entrusted with overseeing the Pacific Railroad Surveys to determine which of four possible routes was the best. He promoted the Gadsden Purchase of today's southern Arizona from Mexico, partly because he preferred a southern route for the new railroad. The Pierce administration agreed and the land was purchased in December 1853. He presented the surveys' findings in 1855, but they failed to clarify the best route and sectional problems prevented any choice being made. Davis also argued for the acquisition of Cuba from Spain, seeing it as an opportunity to add the island, a strategic military location and potential slave state. He suggested that the size of the regular army was too small and that its salaries were too meagre. Congress agreed and authorized four new regiments and increased its pay scale. He ended the manufacture of smoothbore muskets and shifted production to rifles, working to develop the tactics that accompany them. He oversaw the building of public works in Washington D.C., including the initial construction of the Washington Aqueduct.",
"title": "Senator and Secretary of War"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Davis assisted in the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 by allowing President Pierce to endorse it before it came up for a vote. This bill, which created Kansas and Nebraska territories, repealed the Missouri Compromise's limits on slavery and left the decision about a territory's slaveholding status to popular sovereignty, which allowed the territory's residents to decide. The passage of this bill led to the demise of the Whig party, which had tried to limit expansion of slavery in the territories. It also contributed to the rise of the Republican Party and the increase of civil violence in Kansas.",
"title": "Senator and Secretary of War"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The Democratic nomination for the 1856 presidential election went to James Buchanan. Knowing his term was over when the Pierce administration ended in 1857, Davis ran for the Senate once more and re-entered it on March 4, 1857. In the same month, the United States Supreme Court decided the Dred Scott case, which ruled that slavery could not be barred from any territory.",
"title": "Senator and Secretary of War"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The Senate recessed in March and did not reconvene until November 1857. The session opened with a debate on the Lecompton Constitution submitted by a convention in Kansas Territory. If approved, it would have allowed Kansas to be admitted as a slave state. Davis supported it, but it was not accepted, in part because the leading Democrat in the North, Stephen Douglas, argued it did not represent the true will of the settlers in the territory. The controversy undermined the alliance between Northern and Southern Democrats.",
"title": "Senator and Secretary of War"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Davis's participation in the Senate was interrupted in early 1858 by a recurring case of iritis, which threatened the loss of his left eye. It left him bedridden for seven weeks. He spent the summer of 1858 in Portland, Maine recovering, and gave speeches in Maine, Boston, and New York, emphasizing the common heritage of all Americans and the importance of the constitution for defining the nation. His speeches angered some states' rights supporters in the South, requiring him to clarify his comments when he returned to Mississippi. Davis said that he appreciated the benefits of Union, but acknowledged that it could be dissolved if states' rights were violated or one section of the country imposed its will on another. Speaking to the Mississippi Legislature on November 16, 1858, Davis stated \"if an Abolitionist be chosen President of the United States ... I should deem it your duty to provide for your safety outside of a Union with those who have already shown the will ...to deprive you of your birthright and to reduce you to worse than the colonial dependence of your fathers.\"",
"title": "Senator and Secretary of War"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "In February 1860, Davis presented a series of resolutions defining the relationship between the states under the constitution, including the assertion that Americans had a constitutional right to bring slaves into territories. These resolutions were seen as setting the agenda for the Democratic Party nomination, ensuring that Douglas's idea of popular sovereignty, known as the Freeport Doctrine, would be excluded from the party platform. The Democratic party split—Douglas was nominated by the North and Vice President John C. Breckinridge was nominated by the South—and the Republican Party nominee Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 presidential election. Davis counselled moderation after the election, but South Carolina adopted an ordinance of secession on December 20, 1860. Mississippi seceded on January 9, 1861, though Davis stayed in Washington until he received official notification on January 21. Calling it \"the saddest day of my life\", he delivered a farewell address, resigned from the Senate, and returned to Mississippi.",
"title": "Senator and Secretary of War"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Before his resignation, Davis had sent a telegraph to Mississippi Governor John J. Pettus informing him that he was available to serve the state. On January 27, 1861, Pettus appointed him a major general of Mississippi's army. On February 10, Davis learned that he had been unanimously elected to the provisional presidency of the Confederacy by a constitutional convention in Montgomery, Alabama by delegates from the six states that had seceded: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Alabama. Davis was chosen because of his political prominence, his military reputation, and his moderate approach to secession, which Confederate leaders thought might persuade undecided Southerners to support their cause. He had been hoping for a military command, but he committed himself fully to his new role. Davis and Vice President Alexander H. Stephens were inaugurated on February 18.",
"title": "President of the Confederate States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Davis formed his cabinet by choosing a member from each of the states of the Confederacy, including Texas which had recently seceded: Robert Toombs of Georgia for Secretary of State, Christopher Memminger of South Carolina for Secretary of the Treasury, LeRoy Walker of Alabama for Secretary of War, John Reagan of Texas for Postmaster General, Judah P. Benjamin of Louisiana for Attorney General, and Stephen Mallory of Florida for Secretary of the Navy. Davis stood in for Mississippi. During his presidency, Davis's cabinet often changed; there were fourteen different appointees for the positions, including six secretaries of war.",
"title": "President of the Confederate States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "As the Southern states seceded, state authorities took over most federal facilities without bloodshed. But four forts, including Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, had not surrendered. Davis preferred to avoid a crisis because the Confederacy needed time to organize its resources. To ensure that no attack on Fort Sumter was launched without his command, Davis had appointed Brigadier General P. G. T. Beauregard to command all Confederate troops in the vicinity of Charleston, South Carolina. Davis sent a commission to Washington to negotiate the evacuation of the forts, but President of the United States Lincoln refused to meet with it.",
"title": "President of the Confederate States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "When Lincoln informed Davis that he intended to reprovision Fort Sumter, Davis convened with the Confederate Congress on April 8 and gave orders to demand the immediate surrender of the fort or to reduce it. The commander of the fort, Major Robert Anderson, refused to surrender, and Beauregard began the attack on Fort Sumter early on April 12. After over thirty hours of bombardment, the fort surrendered. When Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to suppress the rebellion, four more states–Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas—joined the Confederacy. The American Civil War had begun.",
"title": "President of the Confederate States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "In addition to being the constitutional commander-in-chief of the Confederacy, Davis was operational military leader as the military departments reported directly to him. Many people, including Generals Joseph E. Johnston and Major General Leonidas Polk, thought he would direct the fighting, but he left that to his generals.",
"title": "President of the Confederate States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Major fighting in the East began when a Union army advanced into northern Virginia in July 1861. It was defeated at Manassas by two Confederate forces commanded by Beauregard and Joseph Johnston. After the battle, Davis had to manage disputes with the two generals, both of whom felt they did not get the recognition they deserved.",
"title": "President of the Confederate States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "In the West, Davis had to address a problem caused by another general. Kentucky, which was leaning toward the Confederacy, had declared its neutrality. In September 1861, Polk violated the state's neutrality by occupying Columbus, Kentucky. Secretary of War Walker ordered him to withdraw. Davis initially agreed with Walker, but changed his mind and allowed Polk to remain. The violation led Kentucky to request aid from the Union, effectively losing the state for the Confederacy. Walker resigned as secretary of war and was replaced by Judah P. Benjamin. Davis appointed General Albert Sidney Johnston, as commander of the Western Military Department that included much of Tennessee, Kentucky, western Mississippi, and Arkansas.",
"title": "President of the Confederate States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "In February 1862, the Confederate defenses in the West collapsed when Union forces captured Forts Henry, Donelson, and nearly half the troops in A. S. Johnston's department. Within weeks, Kentucky, Nashville and Memphis were lost, as well as control of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers. The commanders responsible for the defeat were Brigadier Generals Gideon Pillow and John B. Floyd, political generals that Davis had been required to appoint. Davis gathered troops defending the Gulf Coast and concentrated them with A. S. Johnston's remaining forces. Davis favored using this concentration in an offensive. Johnston attacked the Union forces at Shiloh in southwestern Tennessee on April 6. The attack failed, and Johnston was killed. General Beauregard took command, falling back to Corinth, Mississippi, and then to Tupelo, Mississippi. When Beauregard then put himself on leave, Davis replaced him with General Braxton Bragg.",
"title": "President of the Confederate States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "On February 22, Davis was inaugurated as president. In his inaugural speech, he admitted that the South had suffered disasters, but called on the people of the Confederacy to renew their commitment. He replaced Secretary of War Benjamin, who had been scapegoated for the defeats, with George W. Randolph. Davis kept Benjamin in the cabinet, making him secretary of state to replace Hunter, who had stepped down. In March, Davis vetoed a bill to create a commander in chief for the army, but he selected General Robert E. Lee to be his military advisor. They formed a close relationship, and Davis relied on Lee for counsel until the end of the war.",
"title": "President of the Confederate States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "In March, Union troops in the East began an amphibious attack on the Virginia Peninsula, 75 miles from the Confederate capitol of Richmond. Davis and Lee wanted Joseph Johnston, who commanded the Confederate army near Richmond, to make a stand at Yorktown. Instead, Johnston withdrew from the peninsula without informing Davis. Davis reminded Johnston that it was his duty to not let Richmond fall. On May 31, 1862, Johnston engaged the Union army less than ten miles from Richmond at the Battle of Seven Pines, where he was wounded. Davis put Lee in command. Lee began the Seven Days Battles less than a month later, pushing the Union forces back down the peninsula and eventually forcing them to withdraw from Virginia. Lee beat back another army moving into Virginia at the Battle of Second Manassas in August 1862. Knowing Davis desired an offensive into the North, Lee invaded Maryland, but retreated back to Virginia after a bloody stalemate at Antietam in September. In December, Lee stopped another invasion of Virginia at the Battle of Fredericksburg.",
"title": "President of the Confederate States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "In the West, Bragg shifted most of his available forces from Tupelo to Chattanooga in July 1862 for an offensive toward Kentucky. Davis approved, suggesting that an attack could win Kentucky for the Confederacy and regain Tennessee, but he did not create a unified command. He formed a new department independent of Bragg under Major General Edmund Kirby Smith at Knoxville, Tennessee. In August, both Bragg and Smith invaded Kentucky. Frankfort was briefly captured and a Confederate governor was inaugurated, but the attack collapsed, in part due to lack of coordination between the two generals. After a stalemate at the Battle of Perryville, Bragg and Smith retreated to Tennessee. In December, Bragg was defeated at the Battle of Stones River.",
"title": "President of the Confederate States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "In response to the defeat and the lack of coordination, Davis reorganized the command in the West in November, combining the armies in Tennessee and Vicksburg into a department under the overall command of Joseph Johnston. Davis expected Johnston to relieve Bragg of his command, but Johnston refused. During this time, Secretary of War Randolph resigned because he felt Davis refused to give him the autonomy to do his job; Davis replaced him with James Seddon.",
"title": "President of the Confederate States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "In the winter of 1862, Davis decided to join the Episcopal Church; in May 1863, he was confirmed at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Richmond.",
"title": "President of the Confederate States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "On January 1, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Davis saw this as attempt to destroy the South by inciting its enslaved people to revolt, declaring the proclamation \"the most execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man\". He requested a law that Union officers captured in Confederate states be delivered to state authorities and put on trial for inciting slave rebellion. In response, the Congress passed a law that Union officers of United States Colored Troops could be tried and executed, though none were during the war. The law also stated that captured black soldiers would be turned over to the states they were captured in to be dealt with as the state saw fit.",
"title": "President of the Confederate States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "In May, Lee broke up another invasion of Virginia at the Battle of Chancellorsville, and countered with an invasion into Pennsylvania. Davis approved, thinking that a victory in Union territory could gain recognition of Confederate independence, but Lee's army was defeated at the Battle of Gettysburg in July. After retreating to Virginia, Lee blocked any major Union offensives into the state.",
"title": "President of the Confederate States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "In April, Union forces resumed their attack on Vicksburg. Davis concentrated troops from across the south to counter the move, but Joseph Johnston did not stop the Union forces. Lieutenant General John C. Pemberton withdrew his army into Vicksburg, and after a siege, surrendered on July 4. The loss of Vicksburg and Port Hudson, Louisiana, led to Union control of the Mississippi. Davis relieved Johnston of his department command. During the summer, Bragg's army was maneuvered out of Chattanooga and fell back to Georgia. In September, Bragg defeated the Union army at the Battle of Chickamauga, driving it back to Chattanooga, which he put under siege. Davis visited Bragg to address leadership problems in his army. Davis acknowledged that Bragg did not have the confidence of his subordinates but kept him in command. In mid-November, the Union army counterattacked and Bragg's forces retreated to northern Georgia. Bragg resigned his command; Davis replaced him with Joseph Johnston but retained Bragg as an informal chief of staff.",
"title": "President of the Confederate States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Davis had to address faltering civilian morale. In early spring, there were riots in Confederate cities as people began to suffer food shortages and price inflation. During one riot in Richmond, the mayor of Richmond called the militia when a mob protesting food shortages broke into shops. Davis went to the scene and addressed the protesters, reminding them of their patriotic duty and promising them that he would get food. He then ordered them to disperse or he would command the soldiers to open fire; they dispersed. In October, Davis went on a month-long journey to rally the Confederacy, giving public speeches across the south and meeting with civic and military leaders.",
"title": "President of the Confederate States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "In his address to the Second Confederate Congress on May 2, 1864, Davis outlined his strategy of achieving Confederate independence by exhausting the Union will to fight: If the South could show it could not be subjugated, the North would elect a president who would make peace.",
"title": "President of the Confederate States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "In early 1864, Davis encouraged Joseph Johnston to take action in Tennessee, but Johnston refused. In May, the Union armies advanced toward Johnston's army, which repeatedly retreated toward Atlanta, Georgia. In July, Davis replaced Johnston with General John B. Hood, who immediately engaged the Union forces in a series of battles around Atlanta. The battles did not stop the Union army and Hood abandoned the city on September 2. The victory raised Northern morale and assured Lincoln's reelection. The Union forces then marched to Savannah, Georgia, capturing it. In December, they advanced into South Carolina, forcing the Confederates to evacuate Charleston. In the meantime, Hood advanced north and was repulsed in a drive toward Nashville in December 1864.",
"title": "President of the Confederate States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Union forces began a new advance into northern Virginia. Lee put up a strong defense and they were unable to directly advance on Richmond, but managed to cross the James River. In June 1864, Lee fought the Union armies to a standstill; both sides settled into trench warfare around Petersburg, which would continue for nine months.",
"title": "President of the Confederate States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Davis signed a Congressional resolution in February making Lee general-in-chief. Seddon resigned as Secretary of War and was replaced by John C. Breckinridge. Davis sent envoys to Hampton Roads for peace talks, but Lincoln refused to consider any offer that included an independent Confederacy. Davis also sent Duncan F. Kenner, the chief Confederate diplomat, on a mission to Great Britain and France, offering to gradually emancipate the enslaved people of the South for political recognition.",
"title": "President of the Confederate States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Major General Patrick Cleburne sent a proposal in early 1864 to Davis to enlist African Americans in the army. Davis initially suppressed it, but by the end of the year, he reconsidered and endorsed the idea. Congress passed an act supporting him. It left the principle of slavery intact by leaving it to the states and individual owners to decide which slaves could be used for military service, but Davis's administration accepted only African Americans who had been freed by their masters as a condition of their being enlisted. The act came too late to have an effect on the war.",
"title": "President of the Confederate States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "The Union army broke through the Confederate trench lines at the end of March, forcing Lee to withdraw and abandon Richmond. Davis evacuated his family, which included Jim Limber, a free black orphan they briefly adopted, on March 29. On April 2, Davis and his cabinet escaped by rail to Danville, Virginia. He issued a proclamation on April 4, encouraging the people of the Confederacy to continue resistance, but Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9. The president and his cabinet headed to Greensboro, North Carolina. where they met with Joseph Johnston, Beauregard, and North Carolina Governor Zebulon Vance. Davis wanted to cross the Mississippi River and continue the war, but his generals stated that they did not have the forces. He gave Johnston authorization to negotiate the surrender of his army, but Davis headed south to carry on the fight.",
"title": "President of the Confederate States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "When Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, the Union government implicated Davis, and a bounty of $100,000 (equivalent to $3,400,000 in 2022) was put on his head. On May 2, Davis met with Secretary of War Breckinridge and Bragg in Abbeville, Georgia, to see if they could pull together an army. They said they could not. On May 5, he met with his cabinet in Washington, Georgia, and officially dissolved the Confederate government. He moved on, hoping to join Kirby Smith's army across the Mississippi. On May 9, Union soldiers found Davis's encampment near Irwinville, Georgia. He tried to evade them, but was captured wearing a loose-sleeved cloak and covering his head with a black shawl, which gave rise to depictions of him in political cartoons fleeing in women's clothes.",
"title": "President of the Confederate States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Davis's central concern during the war was to achieve Confederate independence. When Virginia seceded, the provisional Confederate Congress moved the capital to Richmond. The government had almost no institutional structures in place: it lacked an army, treasury, diplomatic missions, and bureaucracy. Davis had to work with Congress quickly to create them.",
"title": "President of the Confederate States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Davis supported states' rights, but believed the constitution gave him the right to centralize authority to prosecute the war. He worked with the Congress to bring military facilities in the South, which had been controlled by the states, under Confederate authority. Though state governors wanted their troops available for local defense, he needed to deploy military forces to defend the entire South and created a centralized army that could enlist volunteers directly. When soldiers in the volunteer army seemed unwilling to re-enlist in 1862, Davis instituted the first conscription in American history. He received authorization from Congress to suspend the writ of habeas corpus when needed. In 1864, he challenged property rights by recommending a direct 5% tax on land and slaves, and implemented the impressment of supplies and slave labor for the military effort. In 1865, Davis's commitment to independence led him to even compromise slavery when he advocated for allowing African Americans to earn their freedom by serving in the military. These policies made him unpopular with states' rights advocates and state governors, who saw him as creating the same kind of government they had seceded from.",
"title": "President of the Confederate States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "The main objective of Davis's foreign policy was to achieve foreign recognition, allowing the Confederacy to secure international loans, receive foreign aid to open trade, and provide the possibility of a military alliance. Davis was confident that most European nations' economic dependence on cotton from the South would quickly convince them to sign treaties with the Confederacy. Cotton had made up 61% of the value of all U.S. exports and the South filled most of the European cloth industry's need for cheap imported raw cotton.",
"title": "President of the Confederate States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "There was no consensus on how to use cotton to gain European support. Davis did not want an embargo on cotton, he wanted to make cotton available to European nations, but require them to acquire it by violating the blockade declared by the Union. The majority of Congress wanted an embargo to coerce Europe to help the South. Though there was no official policy, cotton was effectively embargoed. By 1862, the price of cotton in Europe had quadrupled and European imports of cotton from the United States were down 96%, but instead of joining with the Confederacy, European cotton manufacturers found new sources, such as India, Egypt and Brazil. By the end of the war, not a single foreign nation had recognized the Confederate States of America.",
"title": "President of the Confederate States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Davis did not take executive action to create the needed financial structure for the Confederacy. He knew very little about public finance, largely deferring to Secretary of the Treasury Memminger. Memminger's knowledge of economics was limited, and he was ineffective at getting Congress to listen to his suggestions. Until 1863, Davis's reports on the financial state of the Confederacy to Congress tended to be unduly optimistic.",
"title": "President of the Confederate States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Davis's failure to argue for needed financial reform allowed Congress to avoid unpopular economic measures, such as taxing planters' property—both land and slaves—that made up two-thirds of the South's wealth. At first the government thought it could raise money with a low export tax on cotton, but the blockade prevented this. In his opening address to the fourth session of Congress in December 1863, Davis demanded the Congress pass a direct tax on property despite the constitution. Congress complied, but the tax had too many loopholes and exceptions, and failed to produce the needed revenue. Throughout the existence of the Confederacy, taxes accounted for only one-fourteenth of the government's income; consequently, the government printed money to fund the war, thus destroying the value of the Confederate currency. By 1865, the government was relying on impressments to fill the gaps caused by lack of finances.",
"title": "President of the Confederate States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "On May 22, Davis was imprisoned in Fort Monroe, Virginia, under the watch of Major General Nelson A. Miles. Initially, he was confined to a casemate, forced to wear fetters on his ankles, required to have guards constantly in his room, forbidden contact with his family, and given only a Bible and his prayerbook to read. Over time, his treatment improved: due to public outcry, the fetters were removed after five days; within two months, the guard was removed from his room, he could walk outside for exercise, and he was allowed to read newspapers and other books. In October, he was moved to better quarters. In April 1866, Varina was permitted to regularly visit him. In September, Miles was replaced by Brevet Brigadier General Henry S. Burton, who permitted Davis to live with Varina in a four-room apartment. In December, Pope Pius IX sent a photograph of himself to Davis.",
"title": "Imprisonment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "President Andrew Johnson's cabinet was unsure what to do with Davis. They considered trying him by military court for war crimes—his alleged involvement in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln or the mistreatment of Union prisoners of war at Andersonville Prison— but could not find any reliable evidence directly linking Davis to either. In late summer 1865, Attorney General James Speed determined that it was best to try Davis for treason in a civil criminal trial. In June 1866, the House of Representatives passed a resolution by a vote of 105 to 19 to put Davis on trial for treason. Davis also desired a trial to vindicate his actions. His defense lawyer, Charles O'Conor wanted to argue that Davis did not commit treason because he was no longer a citizen of the United States when Mississippi left the United States. The trial was to be held in Richmond, which might be sympathetic to Davis, and an acquittal could be interpreted as validating the constitutionality of secession.",
"title": "Imprisonment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "After two years of imprisonment, Davis was released at Richmond on May 13, 1867, on bail of $100,000 (~$1.73 million in 2022), which was posted by prominent citizens including Horace Greeley, Cornelius Vanderbilt and Gerrit Smith. Davis and Varina went to Montreal, Quebec, to join their children who had been sent there while he was in prison, and they moved to Lennoxville, Quebec. Davis remained under indictment until after Johnson's proclamation on Christmas 1868 granting amnesty and pardon to all participants in the rebellion. Davis's case never went to trial. In February 1869, Attorney General William Evarts informed the court that the federal government declared it was no longer prosecuting the charges against him.",
"title": "Imprisonment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Despite his financial situation after his prison release, Davis refused work that he perceived as diminishing his status as a former senator and president. He turned down a position as head of Randolph–Macon College in Virginia because he did not want to damage the school's reputation while he was under indictment. In the summer of 1869, he traveled to Britain and France, but found no business opportunities there. When the federal government dropped its case against him, Davis left his family in England and returned to the U.S. in October 1869 to become president of the Carolina Life Insurance Company in Tennessee. On his arrival to Tennessee, the University of the South offered him their top position, but he declined because the salary was insufficient. Davis was not able to retrieve his family from England until August 1870.",
"title": "Later years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Davis received numerous invitations to speak during this time, but declined most. In 1870, he delivered a eulogy to Robert E. Lee at the Lee Monument Association in Richmond in which he avoided politics and emphasized Lee's character. Davis's 1873 speech to the Virginia Historical Society was more political; he stated that the South would not have surrendered had it known what to expect from Reconstruction, particularly the enfranchisement of African Americans. He became a life-time member of the Southern Historical Society, which was devoted to presenting the Lost Cause explanation of the Civil War. Initially, the society had scapegoated political leaders like Davis for losing the war, but eventually shifted the blame for defeat to the former Confederate general James Longstreet. Davis avoided public disputes regarding blame, but consistently maintained he had done nothing wrong and had always upheld the Constitution.",
"title": "Later years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "The Panic of 1873 adversely affected the Carolina Life Company, and Davis resigned in August 1873 when the directors merged the company over his objections. He went to Europe again in 1874 to seek opportunities to earn money, but was still not able to find any. After returning to the United States in 1874, Davis continued to explore ways to make a living, including investments in railroads, mining, and manufacturing an ice-making machine. In 1876, the Agriculture and Mechanical College of Texas offered him the presidency, but he turned it down because Varina did not want to live in Texas. He worked for an English company, the Mississippi Valley Society, to promote trade and European immigration. When he and Varina went to Europe again in 1876, he determined the company was failing. He returned to the United States while Varina stayed in England.",
"title": "Later years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Davis sought to reclaim Brierfield as well. After the war, Davis Bend had been taken over by the Freedmen's Bureau, which employed former enslaved African Americans as laborers. After Davis's elder brother, Joseph, successfully applied for a pardon, he regained ownership of Davis Bend. Unable to maintain it, Joseph gave his former slave Ben Montgomery and his sons, Isaiah and William, a mortgage loan to buy the property. When Joseph died in 1870, he had made Davis one of his executors but did not deed any land to him in the will. Davis litigated to obtain Brierfield. A judge dismissed his suit in 1876. He appealed, and the Mississippi supreme court found in his favor in 1878. He foreclosed on the Montgomerys, who were in default on their mortgage; by December 1881, Brierfield was legally his, although he did not live there and it did not produce a reliable income.",
"title": "Later years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "In January 1877, the author Sarah Dorsey invited him to live on her estate at Beauvoir, Mississippi, and to begin writing his memoirs. He agreed, but insisted on paying board. At the time, Davis and Varina lived separately. When Varina came back to the United States, she initially refused to come to Beauvoir because she did not like Davis's close relationship with Dorsey, who was serving as his amanuensis. In the summer of 1878, Varina relented, moving to Beauvoir and taking over the role of Davis's assistant. Dorsey died in July 1879, and left Beauvoir to Davis in her will, and he lived there for most of his remaining years.",
"title": "Later years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Davis's first book, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, was published in 1881. The book was intended as a vindication of Davis's actions during the war and the righteousness of the Confederate cause, though he downplayed slavery's role as a cause of the war. James Redpath, editor of the North American Review, encouraged him to write a series of articles for the magazine and to complete his final book A Short History of the Confederate States of America. He also began dictating his memoirs, although they were never finished.",
"title": "Later years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "In 1886, Henry W. Grady, an advocate for the New South, convinced Davis to lay the cornerstone for a monument to the Confederate dead in Montgomery, Alabama, and to attend the unveilings of statues memorializing Davis's friend Benjamin H. Hill in Savannah and the Revolutionary War hero Nathanael Greene in Atlanta. The tour was a triumph for Davis and got extensive newspaper coverage, which emphasized national unity and the South's role as a permanent part of the United States. At each stop along the way, large crowds came out to cheer Davis, solidifying his image as an icon of the South and the Confederacy. In October 1887, Davis held his last tour, traveling to the Georgia State Fair in Macon, Georgia, for a grand reunion with Confederate veterans.",
"title": "Later years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "In November 1889, Davis embarked on a steamboat in New Orleans in a cold rain, intending to visit his Brierfield plantation. He fell ill during the trip, but refused to send for a doctor. An employee telegrammed Varina, who came to get him. Davis was diagnosed with acute bronchitis complicated by malaria. When he returned to New Orleans, Davis's doctor Stanford E. Chaille pronounced him too ill to travel further. He was taken to the home of Charles Erasmus Fenner, the son-in-law of his friend J. M. Payne, where he died at 12:45 a.m. on Friday, December 6, 1889, in the presence of several friends and holding Varina's hand.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Davis's body lay in state at the New Orleans City Hall from December 7 to 11. Davis's funeral was one of the largest held in the South; over 200,000 mourners were estimated to have attended. The coffin was transported on a two-mile journey to the cemetery in a modified, four-wheeled caisson to emphasize his role as a military hero. Davis was buried according to the Episcopal rites and a brief eulogy was pronounced by Bishop John Nicholas Galleher.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "After Davis's funeral, various Southern states requested to be the final resting site for Davis's remains. Varina decided that Davis should be buried in Richmond, which she saw as the appropriate resting place for dead Confederate heroes. She chose Hollywood Cemetery. In May 1893, Davis's remains traveled from New Orleans to Richmond. Along the way, the train stopped at various cities, receiving military honors and visits from governors, and the coffin was allowed to lie in state in three state capitols: Montgomery, Alabama; Atlanta, Georgia; and Raleigh, North Carolina. When Davis was reburied, his children were reinterred on the site as Varina requested, and, when Varina died in 1906, she was buried beside him.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "During his years as a senator, Davis was an advocate for the Southern states' right to slavery. In an 1848 speech on the Oregon Bill, he argued for a strict constructionist understanding of the Constitution. He insisted that the states are sovereign, all powers of the federal government are granted by those states, the Constitution recognized the right of states to allow citizens to have slaves as property, and the federal government was obligated to defend encroachments upon this right. In his February 13–14, 1850 speech, Davis declared that slaveholders must be allowed to bring their slaves into federal territories. He stated that slavery does not need to be justified: it was sanctioned by religion and history. He claimed that African Americans were destined for bondage, and their enslavement was a civilizing blessing to them that brought economic and social good to everyone.",
"title": "Political views on slavery"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Davis's speeches after secession acknowledged the relationship between the Confederacy and slavery. In his resignation speech to the U. S. Senate, delivered 12 days after his state seceded, he said Mississippi \"has heard proclaimed the theory that all men are created free and equal, and this made the basis of an attack upon her social institutions and the sacred Declaration of Independence has been invoked to maintain the position of the equality of the races.\" In his February 1861 inaugural speech as provisional president of the Confederacy, Davis asserted that the Confederate Constitution, which explicitly prevented Congress from passing any law affecting African American slavery and mandated its protection in all Confederate territories, was a return to the intent of the original founders. When he spoke to Congress in April on the ratification of the Constitution, he stated that the war was caused by Northerners whose desire to end slavery would destroy Southern property worth millions of dollars.\" In his 1863 address to the Confederate Congress, Davis denounced the Emancipation Proclamation as evidence of the North's long-standing intention to abolish slavery and doom African Americans, who he called an inferior race, to extermination.",
"title": "Political views on slavery"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Davis came to the role of commander in chief confident in his military abilities. He had graduated from West Point Military Academy, served in the regular army, and commanded troops in combat. He actively oversaw the military policy of the Confederacy and worked long hours attending to paperwork related to the organization, finance, and logistics needed to maintain the Confederate armies.",
"title": "Performance as commander in chief"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Some historians argue that Davis's personality contributed to the defeat of the Confederacy. His constant attention to minor military details has been used to illustrate an inability to delegate, which led him to lose focus on larger issues. He has been accused of being a poor judge of generals: appointing people—such as Bragg, Pemberton, and Hood—–who failed to meet expectations, overly trusting long-time friends, and retaining generals—like Joseph Johnston—long after they should have been removed. His need to be seen as always in the right has also been described as a problem. Historians have argued that the time spent vindicating himself took time away from pressing problems and accomplished little. His reactions to criticism made unnecessary enemies and created hostile relationships with the politicians and generals he depended on. It has been argued that his focus on military victory at all costs undermined the values the South was fighting for, such as states' rights and slavery, but provided no alternatives to replace them.",
"title": "Performance as commander in chief"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Other historians have pointed out his strengths. Davis quickly mobilized the Confederacy despite the South's focus on states' rights, and he stayed focused on gaining independence. He was a skilled orator who attempted to share the vision of national unity. He shared his message through newspaper, public speeches, and trips where he would meet with the public. His policies sustained the Confederate armies through numerous campaigns, buoying Southern hopes for victory and undermining the North's will to continue the war. A few historians have argued that Davis may have been one of the best people available to serve as commander in chief. Though he was unable to win the war, he rose to the challenge of the presidency, pursuing a strategy that not only enabled the Confederacy to hold out as long as it did, but almost achieved its independence.",
"title": "Performance as commander in chief"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Although Davis served the United States as a soldier and a war hero, a politician who sat in both houses of Congress, and a cabinet officer, his legacy is mainly defined by his role as president of the Confederacy. After the Civil War, journalist Edward A. Pollard, who first popularized the Lost Cause mythology, placed much of the blame for losing the war on Davis. Into the twentieth century, many biographers and historians have also emphasized Davis's responsibility for the Confederacy's failure to achieve independence. Since the second half of the twentieth century, this assumption has been questioned. Some scholars argued that he was a capable leader, while acknowledging his skills were insufficient to overcome the challenges the Confederacy faced and exploring how his limitations may have contributed to the war's outcome.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Davis's standing among white Southerners was at a low point at the end of the Civil War, but it rebounded after his release from prison. After Reconstruction, he became a venerated figure of the white South, and he was often depicted as a martyr who suffered for his nation. His birthday was made a legal holiday in six Southern states. His popularity among white Southerners remained strong in the early twentieth century. Around 200,000 people attended the unveiling of the Jefferson Davis Memorial at Richmond, Virginia, in 1907. In 1961, a centennial celebration reenacted Davis's inauguration in Montgomery, Alabama, with fireworks and a cast of thousands in period costumes. In the early twenty-first century, there were at least 144 Confederate memorials commemorating him throughout the United States.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "On October 17, 1978, Davis's U.S. citizenship was posthumously restored after the Senate passed Joint Resolution 16. President Jimmy Carter described it as an act of reconciliation reuniting the people of the United States and expressing the need to establish the nation's founding principles for all. However, Davis's legacy continued to spark controversy into the twenty-first century. Memorials such as the Jefferson Davis Highway have been argued to legitimize the white supremacist, slaveholding ideology of the Confederacy, and a number of his memorials have been removed, including his statues at the University of Texas at Austin, New Orleans, Memphis, Tennessee, and the Kentucky State Capitol in Frankfort. After the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, Davis's statue on his Richmond monument—along with the statues of other figures who were considered racists—was toppled by protesters. As part of its initiative to dismantle Confederate monuments, the Richmond City Council funded the removal of the statue's pedestal, which was completed in February 2022, and ownership of its artifacts was given to the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia.",
"title": "Legacy"
}
]
| Jefferson F. Davis was an American politician who served as the first and only president of the Confederate States of America from 1861 to 1865. He represented Mississippi in the United States Senate and the House of Representatives as a member of the Democratic Party before the American Civil War. He was the United States Secretary of War from 1853 to 1857. Davis, the youngest of ten children, was born in Fairview, Kentucky, but spent most of his childhood in Wilkinson County, Mississippi. His eldest brother Joseph Emory Davis secured the younger Davis's appointment to the United States Military Academy. Upon graduating, he served six years as a lieutenant in the United States Army. After leaving the army in 1835, Davis married Sarah Knox Taylor, daughter of general and future President Zachary Taylor. Sarah died from malaria three months after the wedding. Davis became a cotton planter, building Brierfield Plantation in Mississippi on his brother Joseph's land and eventually owning as many as 113 slaves. In 1845, Davis married Varina Howell. During the same year, he was elected to the United States House of Representatives, serving for one year. From 1846 to 1847, he fought in the Mexican–American War as the colonel of a volunteer regiment. He was appointed to the United States Senate in 1847, resigning to unsuccessfully run as governor of Mississippi. In 1853, President Franklin Pierce appointed him Secretary of War. After Pierce's administration ended in 1857, Davis returned to the Senate. He resigned in 1861 when Mississippi seceded from the United States. During the Civil War, Davis guided the Confederacy's policies and served as its commander in chief. When the Confederacy was defeated in 1865, Davis was captured, accused of treason, and imprisoned at Fort Monroe. He was released without trial after two years. Immediately after the war, Davis was often blamed for the Confederacy's defeat, but after his release from prison, he became a hero of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. In the late 19th and the 20th centuries, his legacy as Confederate leader was celebrated in the South. In the twenty-first century, he is frequently criticized as a supporter of slavery and racism, and many of the memorials dedicated to him throughout the United States have been removed. | 2001-09-30T07:33:42Z | 2023-12-31T06:13:10Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_Davis |
16,135 | Jonathan Meades | Jonathan Turner Meades (born 21 January 1947) is an English writer and film-maker, primarily on the subjects of place, culture, architecture and food. His work spans journalism, fiction, essays, memoir and over fifty highly idiosyncratic television films, and has been described as "brainy, scabrous, mischievous", "iconoclastic", and possessed of "a polymathic breadth of knowledge and truly caustic wit".
His latest book, an anthology of uncollected writing from 1988 to 2020 titled Pedro and Ricky Come Again, was published by Unbound in March 2021 and is the sequel to Peter Knows What Dick Likes. His most recent film, Franco Building with Jonathan Meades, aired on BBC Four in August 2019 and is the fourth instalment in a series on the architectural legacy of 20th-century European dictators.
He has described himself as a "cardinal of atheism" and is both an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society and a Patron of Humanists UK.
Jonathan Meades was born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, the only child of John William Meades, a biscuit company sales rep, and Margery Agnes Meades (née Hogg), a primary school teacher. The family lived in an "unbelievably cramped" terraced, thatched cottage in the East Harnham area of the city. Meades was educated until the age of 13 at the nearby Salisbury Cathedral School, within Salisbury Cathedral Close.
He discovered a fascination for place and the built environment whilst accompanying his father on sales trips during school holidays; he would be left unattended and free to explore while the elder Meades conducted his business with the grocer. This later developed into a full-blown passion for architecture following a visit to Edwin Lutyens' Marsh Court on a school cricket trip at the age of 13. He also developed an early love of France on the frequent trips which his family took there, made possible by his Francophile mother's father, who worked for Southern Railway, the company which ran the Saint-Malo and Le Havre ferries.
In 1960 he was sent as a boarder to King's College, Taunton, which he has described as "a dim, backward, muscular Christian boot camp". He later "walked out" of the school and was sent instead to a crammer in London, where he lodged with the painter Vivien White, daughter of Augustus John.
After a year at the University of Bordeaux and unsure of what to do next, he decided to become an actor after a chance meeting with Charles Collingwood and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) from 1966 to 1969. His contemporaries there included Robert Lindsay, David Bradley, Stephanie Beacham, Michael Kitchen and Richard Beckinsale. He later described it as a "Sandhurst for chorus boys" where students were "martially drilled", teaching them the value of discipline, craft and technique.
Although he ultimately decided against joining the acting profession, the training which he received would prove essential in his later television career, as would his extra-curricular interest in French New Wave cinema, in particular the work of Jean-Pierre Melville and Alain Robbe-Grillet. His regular Sunday pastime of exploring the capital with his Pevsner Architectural Guide would also benefit him later. On leaving RADA, he was told by the Principal, Hugh Cruttwell, that he might as well abandon acting until he reached middle age, at which point he might become an interesting character actor. When the two met again decades later, after Meades had established himself on television, Cruttwell joked that he had not realised that the character would be called "Jonathan Meades".
Following a period as a freelance copywriter, Meades began writing for the now-defunct literary magazine Books & Bookmen in 1971, setting him on a career as a journalist and critic. In 1973 he reviewed a V&A exhibition on Victorian architecture for the magazine, igniting a passion for the style and prompting him to explore even more of London than he had to date. Using the unlimited travel afforded by Red Rover bus passes, he rode on random buses for exactly 20 minutes and then got off, no matter where he was.
After leaving Books and Bookmen in 1975 he wrote for the sex education magazine Curious and joined the staff of Time Out, then became The Observer's TV critic in 1977. This led to the publication of his first book, This Is Their Life, an A to Z of TV star biographies with an introduction by Mike Yarwood. He moved to Architects' Journal in 1979 and around this time worked on another book, The Illustrated Atlas of the World's Great Buildings, with Philip Bagenal.
In 1981 he became the editor of Richard Branson's short-lived listings magazine Event, then from 1982 was the features editor of Tatler. It was here that he first had the opportunity to write about food, filling in as restaurant critic after Julian Barnes resigned, using the pseudonym "John Beaver". He was also invited to contribute to the bi-monthly restaurant magazine À la Carte at around this time. In 1986 he was offered the job of restaurant critic at The Times, replacing comedy writer Stan Hey. Meades was a great success in this position, taking the job more seriously than his predecessor. He won Best Food Journalist at the 1986, 1990, 1996 and 1999 Glenfiddich Awards.
Despite his success, he often tired of the repetitive nature of the job and threatened to leave several times. The paper responded by increasing his salary. He finally quit in around 2000, having been pronounced morbidly obese by his doctor: he had put on around five pounds per year, or one ounce per meal, during his tenure. He then managed to lose a third of his body weight over the course of the following twelve months, using a strict diet of protein and citrus. He remained with The Times as a columnist until 2005.
In the years since, he has done less journalism, but has contributed essays and reviews to numerous publications including the New Statesman, The Independent, The Guardian, The Spectator, The Daily Telegraph, The Times Literary Supplement, and many others.
In 1982, Harpers & Queen published three short stories which Meades had written about "rural lowlife". These, along with four more, were collected in 1984 as Filthy English, his first volume of fiction. Andrew Billen of the London Evening Standard later described them as "bucolic horror stories". A few more stories appeared in his first anthology of journalism and essays, 1989's Peter Knows What Dick Likes, the title of which is a reference to the supposed superiority of male-on-male fellatio.
He contributed to the screenplay of the 1992 French-Italian adventure film L'Atlantide, directed by Bob Swaim, and also wrote three unproduced screenplays in the 1980s and the 1990s: Millie's Problem (1985), The Side I Dressed On (1987) and The Brute's Price (1996).
His first novel, Pompey, was published in 1993. A dark, epic family saga centred around the titular city of Portsmouth, it was widely praised and favourably compared to Sterne, Scarfe, Steadman, Nabokov and Joyce, amongst other "great stylists". On its 2013 reissue, Matthew Adams wrote in The Independent, "Where his first collection of stories, Filthy English, achieved the distinction of covering in aggressively vivid prose the disciplines of murder, addiction, incest and bestial pornography, Pompey exhibits an even greater concentration of his aptitude for squalor ... by the end of the opening two pages, which must rank among the most startling affirmations of omniscience in 20th-century literature, the reader has met with an arresting injunction: 'After using this book please wash your hands.'"
A second novel, The Fowler Family Business, followed in 2002. A tale of suburban sexual deceit in the funeral trade, it was described by the London Evening Standard as "hilarious and very black". An anthology of his food journalism, Incest and Morris Dancing: A Gastronomic Revolution, was published in the same year.
In a 2010 interview with The Arts Desk, he revealed that he was working on a third novel.
An anthology of journalism, essays and TV scripts on the built environment, Museum Without Walls, was published by the crowdfunded imprint Unbound in 2012.
Meades' memoir of his childhood in the 1950s and early 1960s, An Encyclopaedia of Myself, was published in May 2014. It was long-listed for that year's Samuel Johnson Prize and won Best Memoir in the Spear's Book Awards 2014. Roger Lewis of the Financial Times said of the work that "If this book is thought of less as a memoir than as a symphonic poem about post-war England and Englishness – well, then it is a masterpiece."
In 2015, the publisher and record label Test Centre released a spoken word vinyl album by Meades entitled Pedigree Mongrel, consisting of readings from Pompey, Museum Without Walls, An Encyclopaedia of Myself and unpublished fiction, combined with soundscapes created by Mordant Music. The sleeve of the album featured photography by Meades, including an abstract self-portrait on the front cover. Also in 2015, Meades, along with Laura Noble, contributed essays to Robert Clayton's photographic collection Estate, which documented life on the soon-to-be-demolished Lion Farm housing estate in Oldbury, West Midlands in 1990.
A book of "borrowed" recipes, The Plagiarist in the Kitchen: A Lifetime's Culinary Thefts, was published by Unbound in 2017. According to Meades, it is "devoted to the idea that you shouldn't try and invent anything in the kitchen, just rely on what has already been done ... I hate the idea of experimental cookery, but I like the idea of experimental literature."
Isle of Rust, a collaboration with the photographer Alex Boyd featuring text based on Meades' script for his 2009 film about Lewis and Harris, was published by Luath Press in 2019.
An anthology of uncollected writing from 1988 to 2020 entitled Pedro and Ricky Come Again, described as "the best of three decades of Jonathan Meades" and the sequel to Peter Knows What Dick Likes, was published by Unbound in March 2021.
(See full bibliography)
Meades' first foray into television was in 1985: a short film on the art and architecture of Barcelona for the BBC Two arts magazine programme Saturday Review. His first major project was the 1987 six-part Channel 4 architectural documentary series The Victorian House. This contained many stylistic similarities to his other work, but the producer of the series, John Marshall, received the sole writing credit and it was not a happy experience for Meades. He would be credited as the sole author of all his subsequent work.
His next series was Abroad in Britain, broadcast on BBC Two in 1990. It featured five irreverent, "slightly bonkers" films which explored unusual and neglected aspects of the built environment: informal plotland dwellings along the Severn Valley, nautical culture around the Solent and architectural forms associated with utopianism, bohemians and the military. Each episode was introduced by Meades as being "devoted to the proposition that the exotic begins at home". The series was influenced by the work of architectural critic Ian Nairn and French New Wave film director Alain Robbe-Grillet, and it cemented Meades' uniquely incongruous on-screen persona: dark glasses, dark suits, inscrutable, didactic delivery and dense, mordant language peppered with gags and surreal interludes. Rachel Cooke of The Guardian later described his TV persona as "pugnacious, sardonic and seemingly super-confident", while noting the RADA training and that it was "not the real Jonathan Meades, who is an altogether more diffident and shy character ... except when drunk". The series spawned four sequels: Further Abroad (1994), Even Further Abroad (1997), Abroad Again in Britain (2005) and Abroad Again (2007), along with several other series and stand-alone films, the majority of which have been archived on the website MeadesShrine.
Preferring to be thought of as a performer rather than as a presenter, Meades has described his style as "heavy entertainment"; "staged essays" which seek to combine "lecture hall" and "music hall", Geoffrey Hill and Benny Hill.
The 1998 film Heart By-Pass looked affectionately at Birmingham; particularly at how its architecture, transport system and ethnic mix have changed since the 1960s. It featured the music of many of the city's best-known 1960s and 1970s rock bands such as The Moody Blues, The Move, Traffic, Black Sabbath, and ELO.
He made two films on the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner. The first, in 1998, was the Worcestershire episode of the series Travels with Pevsner, in which noted writers followed his guide books on particular counties. The second, in 2001, was a biography entitled Pevsner Revisited.
Meades made two other stand-alone films which aired earlier in 2001: Victoria Died in 1901 and is Still Alive Today examined the other-worldly legacy of Victorian architecture and culture one hundred years on, set to a soundtrack of late 1960s psychedelic rock by artists such as The Velvet Underground, The Kinks and Pink Floyd, while suRREAL FILM (or tvSSFBM EHKL, the letters of the title moved forwards then backwards) sought to expound on surrealism in a manner befitting the subject, and reflected on, inter alia, the fact that Meades had recently lost a considerable amount of weight. Both films featured the comic actor Christopher Biggins, notably as Queen Victoria herself, and were the first of Meades' films to be directed by Francis Hanly, who would go on to be his main collaborator, directing and shooting virtually all of his films from 2008 onwards.
A three-part series on food culture, Meades Eats, aired on BBC Four in 2003, again featuring Biggins and Hanly. The episodes dealt with fast food, the notion of a gastronomic revolution in the UK and with the ever-increasing influence of immigrant cuisines.
The 2008 two-part BBC Four film Jonathan Meades: Magnetic North celebrated the culture of Northern Europe, examining why the North suffers in the British popular imagination in comparison with the South. Meades travelled from the slag heaps of northern France to Belgian cities, the red-light district of Hamburg, Gdańsk, the Baltic States and finally Helsinki, musing on the architecture, food and art of the places he visited. Writing in The Daily Telegraph, James Walton praised the programme as "Sparkling, thought-provoking, constantly challenging the accepted view, Meades seemed at times inspired, at others deranged. The only thing he never was, thank heaven, was obvious."
A 9-DVD box set collecting all of his BBC work to date was planned for release in April 2008, but was reduced to a 3-disc anthology due to the expense of licensing the music used in the programmes. Much of the carefully chosen popular music used in the original edits was replaced by library music, and the more music-dependent films such as Surreal Film, Victoria Died in 1901 and Heart By-Pass were not included.
In 2009, Meades toured Scotland in a three-part BBC Four series entitled Jonathan Meades: Off Kilter. He visited Aberdeen, Lewis and Harris (the 'Isle of Rust') and the less-renowned footballing towns of south-west Fife, Clackmannanshire and Falkirk, guided by his foul-mouthed 'ScotNav'.
In 2012, BBC Four screened Jonathan Meades on France, a series in which he explored his "second country". The first episode, Fragments of an Arbitrary Encyclopaedia, focused on the Lorraine region, using a miscellany of words beginning with the letter V. The second episode, A Biased Anthology of Parisian Peripheries, focused on Frenchness and its major traits. The series concluded with Just a Few Debts France Owes to America.
The 2013 film The Joy of Essex examined that county's little-known history of utopian communities.
A two-part series on Brutalist architecture, Bunkers, Brutalism and Bloodymindedness: Concrete Poetry, aired in 2014.
In a 2017 interview with The Guardian, Meades quoted his director, Francis Hanly, on how their production budgets had declined over the years: "We used to be a convoy, now we are a Smart car". In a 2008 interview with The Independent, he indicated that the blame for this lay mostly with former BBC Two controller Jane Root.
Jonathan Meades on Jargon aired on BBC Four in May 2018. The BBC Four website described it as a "provocative television essay" which "dissects politics, the law, football commentary, business, the arts, tabloid-speak and management consultancy to show how jargon is used to cover up, confuse and generally keep us in the dark". The Guardian described it as "blisteringly brutal, clever and hilarious", while The Times also declared Meades to be "on blistering form".
Over a period of 25 years, Meades has written and presented four films on the architectural legacy of 20th-century European dictators, the latest of which, Franco Building with Jonathan Meades, looking at Franco's Spain, aired in August 2019. The previous instalments were Jerry Building (Nazi Germany, 1994), Joe Building (Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union, 2006) and Ben Building (Benito Mussolini's Italy, 2016).
(See full filmography)
Meades entered the world of photography with the 2013 collection Pidgin Snaps. Published by Unbound as a "boxette" of 100 postcards, it featured mostly abstract digital work. It was followed in April 2016 by an exhibition entitled "Ape Forgets Medication: Treyfs and Artknacks" at the Londonewcastle Project in Shoreditch, London. A second exhibition, "After Medication: Random Treyfs and Artknacks", was held in October 2017 at 108 Fine Art, Harrogate.
Meades has been married three times and has four daughters from his first two marriages. In 1980 he married Sally Brown, director of the British Theatre Association, and the couple had twins. His second wife was Frances Bentley, managing editor of Vogue, whom he married in 1988. They had two daughters and divorced in 1997. In 2003 he married his girlfriend Colette Forder, a colleague from The Times. In around 2007, the couple sold their penthouse flat on Tyers Gate, off Bermondsey Street, Southwark, where they had lived for 10 years, and moved to a converted mill near Bordeaux. Discovering that they found country life boring, they then moved to Marseille in around 2011, where they live in Le Corbusier's Unité d'habitation apartment block.
During his time at RADA, he became friends with the painter Duggie Fields, whose flatmate was the former Pink Floyd singer, songwriter and guitarist Syd Barrett. He was also friendly with Aubrey "Po" Powell, co-founder of the graphic design company Hipgnosis, most famous for its Pink Floyd album covers. He has described himself as "a hanger-on to the hangers-on" around the band and has admitted to taking LSD three times, describing it as "the only remotely interesting drug".
Meades was called "the best amateur chef in the world" by Marco Pierre White. He taught himself to cook as a young man using Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961, 1970), by Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle and Julia Child.
He is a football fan and supports Southampton F.C.
He has been a member of Soho's Groucho and Academy clubs.
He won the first ever episode of the BBC's Celebrity Mastermind, broadcast in December 2002. His specialist subject was English Architecture, 1850–2002.
In the autumn of 2016, he was rushed to hospital and underwent five hours of cardiac surgery. Earlier in the year he had suffered from pleurisy and an embolism.
All films written and presented by Jonathan Meades, except The Victorian House, written by John Marshall. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Jonathan Turner Meades (born 21 January 1947) is an English writer and film-maker, primarily on the subjects of place, culture, architecture and food. His work spans journalism, fiction, essays, memoir and over fifty highly idiosyncratic television films, and has been described as \"brainy, scabrous, mischievous\", \"iconoclastic\", and possessed of \"a polymathic breadth of knowledge and truly caustic wit\".",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "His latest book, an anthology of uncollected writing from 1988 to 2020 titled Pedro and Ricky Come Again, was published by Unbound in March 2021 and is the sequel to Peter Knows What Dick Likes. His most recent film, Franco Building with Jonathan Meades, aired on BBC Four in August 2019 and is the fourth instalment in a series on the architectural legacy of 20th-century European dictators.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "He has described himself as a \"cardinal of atheism\" and is both an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society and a Patron of Humanists UK.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Jonathan Meades was born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, the only child of John William Meades, a biscuit company sales rep, and Margery Agnes Meades (née Hogg), a primary school teacher. The family lived in an \"unbelievably cramped\" terraced, thatched cottage in the East Harnham area of the city. Meades was educated until the age of 13 at the nearby Salisbury Cathedral School, within Salisbury Cathedral Close.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "He discovered a fascination for place and the built environment whilst accompanying his father on sales trips during school holidays; he would be left unattended and free to explore while the elder Meades conducted his business with the grocer. This later developed into a full-blown passion for architecture following a visit to Edwin Lutyens' Marsh Court on a school cricket trip at the age of 13. He also developed an early love of France on the frequent trips which his family took there, made possible by his Francophile mother's father, who worked for Southern Railway, the company which ran the Saint-Malo and Le Havre ferries.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In 1960 he was sent as a boarder to King's College, Taunton, which he has described as \"a dim, backward, muscular Christian boot camp\". He later \"walked out\" of the school and was sent instead to a crammer in London, where he lodged with the painter Vivien White, daughter of Augustus John.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "After a year at the University of Bordeaux and unsure of what to do next, he decided to become an actor after a chance meeting with Charles Collingwood and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) from 1966 to 1969. His contemporaries there included Robert Lindsay, David Bradley, Stephanie Beacham, Michael Kitchen and Richard Beckinsale. He later described it as a \"Sandhurst for chorus boys\" where students were \"martially drilled\", teaching them the value of discipline, craft and technique.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Although he ultimately decided against joining the acting profession, the training which he received would prove essential in his later television career, as would his extra-curricular interest in French New Wave cinema, in particular the work of Jean-Pierre Melville and Alain Robbe-Grillet. His regular Sunday pastime of exploring the capital with his Pevsner Architectural Guide would also benefit him later. On leaving RADA, he was told by the Principal, Hugh Cruttwell, that he might as well abandon acting until he reached middle age, at which point he might become an interesting character actor. When the two met again decades later, after Meades had established himself on television, Cruttwell joked that he had not realised that the character would be called \"Jonathan Meades\".",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Following a period as a freelance copywriter, Meades began writing for the now-defunct literary magazine Books & Bookmen in 1971, setting him on a career as a journalist and critic. In 1973 he reviewed a V&A exhibition on Victorian architecture for the magazine, igniting a passion for the style and prompting him to explore even more of London than he had to date. Using the unlimited travel afforded by Red Rover bus passes, he rode on random buses for exactly 20 minutes and then got off, no matter where he was.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "After leaving Books and Bookmen in 1975 he wrote for the sex education magazine Curious and joined the staff of Time Out, then became The Observer's TV critic in 1977. This led to the publication of his first book, This Is Their Life, an A to Z of TV star biographies with an introduction by Mike Yarwood. He moved to Architects' Journal in 1979 and around this time worked on another book, The Illustrated Atlas of the World's Great Buildings, with Philip Bagenal.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In 1981 he became the editor of Richard Branson's short-lived listings magazine Event, then from 1982 was the features editor of Tatler. It was here that he first had the opportunity to write about food, filling in as restaurant critic after Julian Barnes resigned, using the pseudonym \"John Beaver\". He was also invited to contribute to the bi-monthly restaurant magazine À la Carte at around this time. In 1986 he was offered the job of restaurant critic at The Times, replacing comedy writer Stan Hey. Meades was a great success in this position, taking the job more seriously than his predecessor. He won Best Food Journalist at the 1986, 1990, 1996 and 1999 Glenfiddich Awards.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Despite his success, he often tired of the repetitive nature of the job and threatened to leave several times. The paper responded by increasing his salary. He finally quit in around 2000, having been pronounced morbidly obese by his doctor: he had put on around five pounds per year, or one ounce per meal, during his tenure. He then managed to lose a third of his body weight over the course of the following twelve months, using a strict diet of protein and citrus. He remained with The Times as a columnist until 2005.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In the years since, he has done less journalism, but has contributed essays and reviews to numerous publications including the New Statesman, The Independent, The Guardian, The Spectator, The Daily Telegraph, The Times Literary Supplement, and many others.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In 1982, Harpers & Queen published three short stories which Meades had written about \"rural lowlife\". These, along with four more, were collected in 1984 as Filthy English, his first volume of fiction. Andrew Billen of the London Evening Standard later described them as \"bucolic horror stories\". A few more stories appeared in his first anthology of journalism and essays, 1989's Peter Knows What Dick Likes, the title of which is a reference to the supposed superiority of male-on-male fellatio.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "He contributed to the screenplay of the 1992 French-Italian adventure film L'Atlantide, directed by Bob Swaim, and also wrote three unproduced screenplays in the 1980s and the 1990s: Millie's Problem (1985), The Side I Dressed On (1987) and The Brute's Price (1996).",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "His first novel, Pompey, was published in 1993. A dark, epic family saga centred around the titular city of Portsmouth, it was widely praised and favourably compared to Sterne, Scarfe, Steadman, Nabokov and Joyce, amongst other \"great stylists\". On its 2013 reissue, Matthew Adams wrote in The Independent, \"Where his first collection of stories, Filthy English, achieved the distinction of covering in aggressively vivid prose the disciplines of murder, addiction, incest and bestial pornography, Pompey exhibits an even greater concentration of his aptitude for squalor ... by the end of the opening two pages, which must rank among the most startling affirmations of omniscience in 20th-century literature, the reader has met with an arresting injunction: 'After using this book please wash your hands.'\"",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "A second novel, The Fowler Family Business, followed in 2002. A tale of suburban sexual deceit in the funeral trade, it was described by the London Evening Standard as \"hilarious and very black\". An anthology of his food journalism, Incest and Morris Dancing: A Gastronomic Revolution, was published in the same year.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In a 2010 interview with The Arts Desk, he revealed that he was working on a third novel.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "An anthology of journalism, essays and TV scripts on the built environment, Museum Without Walls, was published by the crowdfunded imprint Unbound in 2012.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Meades' memoir of his childhood in the 1950s and early 1960s, An Encyclopaedia of Myself, was published in May 2014. It was long-listed for that year's Samuel Johnson Prize and won Best Memoir in the Spear's Book Awards 2014. Roger Lewis of the Financial Times said of the work that \"If this book is thought of less as a memoir than as a symphonic poem about post-war England and Englishness – well, then it is a masterpiece.\"",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In 2015, the publisher and record label Test Centre released a spoken word vinyl album by Meades entitled Pedigree Mongrel, consisting of readings from Pompey, Museum Without Walls, An Encyclopaedia of Myself and unpublished fiction, combined with soundscapes created by Mordant Music. The sleeve of the album featured photography by Meades, including an abstract self-portrait on the front cover. Also in 2015, Meades, along with Laura Noble, contributed essays to Robert Clayton's photographic collection Estate, which documented life on the soon-to-be-demolished Lion Farm housing estate in Oldbury, West Midlands in 1990.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "A book of \"borrowed\" recipes, The Plagiarist in the Kitchen: A Lifetime's Culinary Thefts, was published by Unbound in 2017. According to Meades, it is \"devoted to the idea that you shouldn't try and invent anything in the kitchen, just rely on what has already been done ... I hate the idea of experimental cookery, but I like the idea of experimental literature.\"",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Isle of Rust, a collaboration with the photographer Alex Boyd featuring text based on Meades' script for his 2009 film about Lewis and Harris, was published by Luath Press in 2019.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "An anthology of uncollected writing from 1988 to 2020 entitled Pedro and Ricky Come Again, described as \"the best of three decades of Jonathan Meades\" and the sequel to Peter Knows What Dick Likes, was published by Unbound in March 2021.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "(See full bibliography)",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Meades' first foray into television was in 1985: a short film on the art and architecture of Barcelona for the BBC Two arts magazine programme Saturday Review. His first major project was the 1987 six-part Channel 4 architectural documentary series The Victorian House. This contained many stylistic similarities to his other work, but the producer of the series, John Marshall, received the sole writing credit and it was not a happy experience for Meades. He would be credited as the sole author of all his subsequent work.",
"title": "Television"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "His next series was Abroad in Britain, broadcast on BBC Two in 1990. It featured five irreverent, \"slightly bonkers\" films which explored unusual and neglected aspects of the built environment: informal plotland dwellings along the Severn Valley, nautical culture around the Solent and architectural forms associated with utopianism, bohemians and the military. Each episode was introduced by Meades as being \"devoted to the proposition that the exotic begins at home\". The series was influenced by the work of architectural critic Ian Nairn and French New Wave film director Alain Robbe-Grillet, and it cemented Meades' uniquely incongruous on-screen persona: dark glasses, dark suits, inscrutable, didactic delivery and dense, mordant language peppered with gags and surreal interludes. Rachel Cooke of The Guardian later described his TV persona as \"pugnacious, sardonic and seemingly super-confident\", while noting the RADA training and that it was \"not the real Jonathan Meades, who is an altogether more diffident and shy character ... except when drunk\". The series spawned four sequels: Further Abroad (1994), Even Further Abroad (1997), Abroad Again in Britain (2005) and Abroad Again (2007), along with several other series and stand-alone films, the majority of which have been archived on the website MeadesShrine.",
"title": "Television"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Preferring to be thought of as a performer rather than as a presenter, Meades has described his style as \"heavy entertainment\"; \"staged essays\" which seek to combine \"lecture hall\" and \"music hall\", Geoffrey Hill and Benny Hill.",
"title": "Television"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The 1998 film Heart By-Pass looked affectionately at Birmingham; particularly at how its architecture, transport system and ethnic mix have changed since the 1960s. It featured the music of many of the city's best-known 1960s and 1970s rock bands such as The Moody Blues, The Move, Traffic, Black Sabbath, and ELO.",
"title": "Television"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "He made two films on the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner. The first, in 1998, was the Worcestershire episode of the series Travels with Pevsner, in which noted writers followed his guide books on particular counties. The second, in 2001, was a biography entitled Pevsner Revisited.",
"title": "Television"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Meades made two other stand-alone films which aired earlier in 2001: Victoria Died in 1901 and is Still Alive Today examined the other-worldly legacy of Victorian architecture and culture one hundred years on, set to a soundtrack of late 1960s psychedelic rock by artists such as The Velvet Underground, The Kinks and Pink Floyd, while suRREAL FILM (or tvSSFBM EHKL, the letters of the title moved forwards then backwards) sought to expound on surrealism in a manner befitting the subject, and reflected on, inter alia, the fact that Meades had recently lost a considerable amount of weight. Both films featured the comic actor Christopher Biggins, notably as Queen Victoria herself, and were the first of Meades' films to be directed by Francis Hanly, who would go on to be his main collaborator, directing and shooting virtually all of his films from 2008 onwards.",
"title": "Television"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "A three-part series on food culture, Meades Eats, aired on BBC Four in 2003, again featuring Biggins and Hanly. The episodes dealt with fast food, the notion of a gastronomic revolution in the UK and with the ever-increasing influence of immigrant cuisines.",
"title": "Television"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The 2008 two-part BBC Four film Jonathan Meades: Magnetic North celebrated the culture of Northern Europe, examining why the North suffers in the British popular imagination in comparison with the South. Meades travelled from the slag heaps of northern France to Belgian cities, the red-light district of Hamburg, Gdańsk, the Baltic States and finally Helsinki, musing on the architecture, food and art of the places he visited. Writing in The Daily Telegraph, James Walton praised the programme as \"Sparkling, thought-provoking, constantly challenging the accepted view, Meades seemed at times inspired, at others deranged. The only thing he never was, thank heaven, was obvious.\"",
"title": "Television"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "A 9-DVD box set collecting all of his BBC work to date was planned for release in April 2008, but was reduced to a 3-disc anthology due to the expense of licensing the music used in the programmes. Much of the carefully chosen popular music used in the original edits was replaced by library music, and the more music-dependent films such as Surreal Film, Victoria Died in 1901 and Heart By-Pass were not included.",
"title": "Television"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In 2009, Meades toured Scotland in a three-part BBC Four series entitled Jonathan Meades: Off Kilter. He visited Aberdeen, Lewis and Harris (the 'Isle of Rust') and the less-renowned footballing towns of south-west Fife, Clackmannanshire and Falkirk, guided by his foul-mouthed 'ScotNav'.",
"title": "Television"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "In 2012, BBC Four screened Jonathan Meades on France, a series in which he explored his \"second country\". The first episode, Fragments of an Arbitrary Encyclopaedia, focused on the Lorraine region, using a miscellany of words beginning with the letter V. The second episode, A Biased Anthology of Parisian Peripheries, focused on Frenchness and its major traits. The series concluded with Just a Few Debts France Owes to America.",
"title": "Television"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The 2013 film The Joy of Essex examined that county's little-known history of utopian communities.",
"title": "Television"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "A two-part series on Brutalist architecture, Bunkers, Brutalism and Bloodymindedness: Concrete Poetry, aired in 2014.",
"title": "Television"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "In a 2017 interview with The Guardian, Meades quoted his director, Francis Hanly, on how their production budgets had declined over the years: \"We used to be a convoy, now we are a Smart car\". In a 2008 interview with The Independent, he indicated that the blame for this lay mostly with former BBC Two controller Jane Root.",
"title": "Television"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Jonathan Meades on Jargon aired on BBC Four in May 2018. The BBC Four website described it as a \"provocative television essay\" which \"dissects politics, the law, football commentary, business, the arts, tabloid-speak and management consultancy to show how jargon is used to cover up, confuse and generally keep us in the dark\". The Guardian described it as \"blisteringly brutal, clever and hilarious\", while The Times also declared Meades to be \"on blistering form\".",
"title": "Television"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Over a period of 25 years, Meades has written and presented four films on the architectural legacy of 20th-century European dictators, the latest of which, Franco Building with Jonathan Meades, looking at Franco's Spain, aired in August 2019. The previous instalments were Jerry Building (Nazi Germany, 1994), Joe Building (Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union, 2006) and Ben Building (Benito Mussolini's Italy, 2016).",
"title": "Television"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "(See full filmography)",
"title": "Television"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Meades entered the world of photography with the 2013 collection Pidgin Snaps. Published by Unbound as a \"boxette\" of 100 postcards, it featured mostly abstract digital work. It was followed in April 2016 by an exhibition entitled \"Ape Forgets Medication: Treyfs and Artknacks\" at the Londonewcastle Project in Shoreditch, London. A second exhibition, \"After Medication: Random Treyfs and Artknacks\", was held in October 2017 at 108 Fine Art, Harrogate.",
"title": "Photography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Meades has been married three times and has four daughters from his first two marriages. In 1980 he married Sally Brown, director of the British Theatre Association, and the couple had twins. His second wife was Frances Bentley, managing editor of Vogue, whom he married in 1988. They had two daughters and divorced in 1997. In 2003 he married his girlfriend Colette Forder, a colleague from The Times. In around 2007, the couple sold their penthouse flat on Tyers Gate, off Bermondsey Street, Southwark, where they had lived for 10 years, and moved to a converted mill near Bordeaux. Discovering that they found country life boring, they then moved to Marseille in around 2011, where they live in Le Corbusier's Unité d'habitation apartment block.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "During his time at RADA, he became friends with the painter Duggie Fields, whose flatmate was the former Pink Floyd singer, songwriter and guitarist Syd Barrett. He was also friendly with Aubrey \"Po\" Powell, co-founder of the graphic design company Hipgnosis, most famous for its Pink Floyd album covers. He has described himself as \"a hanger-on to the hangers-on\" around the band and has admitted to taking LSD three times, describing it as \"the only remotely interesting drug\".",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Meades was called \"the best amateur chef in the world\" by Marco Pierre White. He taught himself to cook as a young man using Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961, 1970), by Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle and Julia Child.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "He is a football fan and supports Southampton F.C.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "He has been a member of Soho's Groucho and Academy clubs.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "He won the first ever episode of the BBC's Celebrity Mastermind, broadcast in December 2002. His specialist subject was English Architecture, 1850–2002.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "In the autumn of 2016, he was rushed to hospital and underwent five hours of cardiac surgery. Earlier in the year he had suffered from pleurisy and an embolism.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "All films written and presented by Jonathan Meades, except The Victorian House, written by John Marshall.",
"title": "Filmography"
}
]
| Jonathan Turner Meades is an English writer and film-maker, primarily on the subjects of place, culture, architecture and food. His work spans journalism, fiction, essays, memoir and over fifty highly idiosyncratic television films, and has been described as "brainy, scabrous, mischievous", "iconoclastic", and possessed of "a polymathic breadth of knowledge and truly caustic wit". His latest book, an anthology of uncollected writing from 1988 to 2020 titled Pedro and Ricky Come Again, was published by Unbound in March 2021 and is the sequel to Peter Knows What Dick Likes. His most recent film, Franco Building with Jonathan Meades, aired on BBC Four in August 2019 and is the fourth instalment in a series on the architectural legacy of 20th-century European dictators. He has described himself as a "cardinal of atheism" and is both an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society and a Patron of Humanists UK. | 2001-09-30T09:32:49Z | 2023-12-07T18:53:51Z | [
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16,139 | Joe Pass | Joe Pass (born Joseph Anthony Jacobi Passalacqua; January 13, 1929 – May 23, 1994) was an American jazz guitarist. Pass is well known for his work stemming from numerous collaborations with pianist Oscar Peterson and vocalist Ella Fitzgerald, and is often esteemed as one of the most notable jazz guitarists of the 20th century.
Pass was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, on January 13, 1929. His father, Mariano Passalacqua, was a steel mill worker who was born in Sicily. The family later moved to Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Pass became interested in the guitar after he saw Gene Autry in the Western film "Ride, Tenderfoot, Ride. He got his first guitar when he was nine. He took guitar lessons every Sunday with a local teacher for 6-8 months and also practiced for many hours each day.
Pass found work as a performer as early as age 14. He played with bands led by Tony Pastor and Charlie Barnet, honing his guitar skills while learning the ropes in the music industry. He began traveling with small jazz groups and moved from Pennsylvania to New York City. Within a few years, Pass developed an addiction to heroin. He moved to New Orleans for a year and played bebop at strip clubs. Pass revealed to Robert Palmer of Rolling Stone that he had suffered a "nervous breakdown" in New Orleans "because [he] had access to every kind of drug there and was up for days [...] [he] would come to New York a lot, then get strung out and leave."
Pass spent much of the 1950s in and out of prison for drug-related convictions. In the same Rolling Stone interview, Pass said, "staying high was my first priority; playing was second; girls were third. But the first thing really took all my energy." He recovered after a two-and-a-half-year stay in the Synanon rehabilitation program. Pass largely put music on hiatus during his prison sentence.
Pass recorded a series of albums during the 1960s for Pacific Jazz Records, including Catch Me, 12-String Guitar, For Django, and Simplicity. In 1963, he received DownBeat magazine's New Star Award. He also played on Pacific Jazz recordings by Gerald Wilson, Bud Shank, and Les McCann. He toured with George Shearing in 1965. During the 1960s, he did mostly TV and recording session work in Los Angeles. Norman Granz, the producer of Jazz at the Philharmonic and the founder of Verve Records, signed Pass to Pablo Records in December 1973. In 1974, Pass released his solo album Virtuoso on Pablo. Also in 1974, Pablo released the album The Trio with Pass, Oscar Peterson, and Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen. He performed with them on many occasions throughout the 1970s and 1980s. At the Grammy Awards of 1975, The Trio won the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Performance by a Group. As part of the Pablo roster, Pass recorded with Benny Carter, Milt Jackson, Herb Ellis, Zoot Sims, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, and Count Basie.
Pass and Ella Fitzgerald recorded six albums together on Pablo toward the end of Fitzgerald's career: Take Love Easy (1973), Fitzgerald and Pass... Again (1976), Hamburg Duets - 1976 (1976), Sophisticated Lady (1975, 1983), Speak Love (1983), and Easy Living (1986).
Pass was diagnosed with liver cancer in 1992. Although he was initially responsive to treatment and continued to play into 1993, his health eventually declined, forcing him to cancel his tour with Pepe Romero, Paco Peña, and Leo Kottke. Pass performed for the final time on May 7, 1994, with fellow guitarist John Pisano at a nightclub in Los Angeles. Pisano told Guitar Player that after the performance Pass said "I can't play anymore", an exchange that Pisano described as "like a knife in my heart." Joe Pass died from liver cancer in Los Angeles sixteen days later at the age of 65. Prior to his death, he recorded an album of Hank Williams songs with country guitarist Roy Clark.
Speaking about Nuages: Live at Yoshi's, Volume 2, Jim Ferguson wrote:
The follow up to 1993's Joe Pass & Co. Live at Yoshi's, this release was colored by sad circumstances: both bassist Monty Budwig and Pass were stricken with fatal illnesses. Nevertheless, all concerned, including drummer Colin Bailey and second guitarist John Pisano, play up to their usual high levels...Issued posthumously, this material is hardly sub-standard. Bristling with energy throughout, it helps document the final stages in the career of a player who, arguably, was the greatest mainstream guitarist since Wes Montgomery.
New York magazine wrote about Pass, "Joe Pass looks like somebody's uncle and plays guitar like nobody's business. He's called 'the world's greatest' and often compared to Paganini for his virtuosity. There is a certain purity to his sound that makes him stand out easily from other first-rate jazz guitarists."
He weaves his own fast-moving chords and filigree work so nimbly that it is hard to believe fingers can physically shift so quickly. Slight moustached, fairly balding, he frowns over his fretwork like a worried head waiter with more guests than tables but the sound that comes out could only be the confident product of years of devotion to the instrument... But it is when he plays completely solo, which he does for half of each set, that he comes into his own, because without hindrance of the rhythm section he can completely orchestrate each number. Sometimes it is by contrasting out of tempo sections with fast-moving interludes, sometimes by switching mood from wistful to lightly swinging, sometimes by alternating single-note lines with chords or simultaneous bass line and melody – the possibilities seem endless. | [
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"text": "Pass found work as a performer as early as age 14. He played with bands led by Tony Pastor and Charlie Barnet, honing his guitar skills while learning the ropes in the music industry. He began traveling with small jazz groups and moved from Pennsylvania to New York City. Within a few years, Pass developed an addiction to heroin. He moved to New Orleans for a year and played bebop at strip clubs. Pass revealed to Robert Palmer of Rolling Stone that he had suffered a \"nervous breakdown\" in New Orleans \"because [he] had access to every kind of drug there and was up for days [...] [he] would come to New York a lot, then get strung out and leave.\"",
"title": "Early life"
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"text": "Pass spent much of the 1950s in and out of prison for drug-related convictions. In the same Rolling Stone interview, Pass said, \"staying high was my first priority; playing was second; girls were third. But the first thing really took all my energy.\" He recovered after a two-and-a-half-year stay in the Synanon rehabilitation program. Pass largely put music on hiatus during his prison sentence.",
"title": "Early life"
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"text": "Pass recorded a series of albums during the 1960s for Pacific Jazz Records, including Catch Me, 12-String Guitar, For Django, and Simplicity. In 1963, he received DownBeat magazine's New Star Award. He also played on Pacific Jazz recordings by Gerald Wilson, Bud Shank, and Les McCann. He toured with George Shearing in 1965. During the 1960s, he did mostly TV and recording session work in Los Angeles. Norman Granz, the producer of Jazz at the Philharmonic and the founder of Verve Records, signed Pass to Pablo Records in December 1973. In 1974, Pass released his solo album Virtuoso on Pablo. Also in 1974, Pablo released the album The Trio with Pass, Oscar Peterson, and Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen. He performed with them on many occasions throughout the 1970s and 1980s. At the Grammy Awards of 1975, The Trio won the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Performance by a Group. As part of the Pablo roster, Pass recorded with Benny Carter, Milt Jackson, Herb Ellis, Zoot Sims, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, and Count Basie.",
"title": "Discovery and career"
},
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"text": "Pass and Ella Fitzgerald recorded six albums together on Pablo toward the end of Fitzgerald's career: Take Love Easy (1973), Fitzgerald and Pass... Again (1976), Hamburg Duets - 1976 (1976), Sophisticated Lady (1975, 1983), Speak Love (1983), and Easy Living (1986).",
"title": "Discovery and career"
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"text": "Pass was diagnosed with liver cancer in 1992. Although he was initially responsive to treatment and continued to play into 1993, his health eventually declined, forcing him to cancel his tour with Pepe Romero, Paco Peña, and Leo Kottke. Pass performed for the final time on May 7, 1994, with fellow guitarist John Pisano at a nightclub in Los Angeles. Pisano told Guitar Player that after the performance Pass said \"I can't play anymore\", an exchange that Pisano described as \"like a knife in my heart.\" Joe Pass died from liver cancer in Los Angeles sixteen days later at the age of 65. Prior to his death, he recorded an album of Hank Williams songs with country guitarist Roy Clark.",
"title": "Later life and death"
},
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"text": "Speaking about Nuages: Live at Yoshi's, Volume 2, Jim Ferguson wrote:",
"title": "Later life and death"
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"text": "The follow up to 1993's Joe Pass & Co. Live at Yoshi's, this release was colored by sad circumstances: both bassist Monty Budwig and Pass were stricken with fatal illnesses. Nevertheless, all concerned, including drummer Colin Bailey and second guitarist John Pisano, play up to their usual high levels...Issued posthumously, this material is hardly sub-standard. Bristling with energy throughout, it helps document the final stages in the career of a player who, arguably, was the greatest mainstream guitarist since Wes Montgomery.",
"title": "Later life and death"
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"text": "New York magazine wrote about Pass, \"Joe Pass looks like somebody's uncle and plays guitar like nobody's business. He's called 'the world's greatest' and often compared to Paganini for his virtuosity. There is a certain purity to his sound that makes him stand out easily from other first-rate jazz guitarists.\"",
"title": "Legacy"
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"text": "He weaves his own fast-moving chords and filigree work so nimbly that it is hard to believe fingers can physically shift so quickly. Slight moustached, fairly balding, he frowns over his fretwork like a worried head waiter with more guests than tables but the sound that comes out could only be the confident product of years of devotion to the instrument... But it is when he plays completely solo, which he does for half of each set, that he comes into his own, because without hindrance of the rhythm section he can completely orchestrate each number. Sometimes it is by contrasting out of tempo sections with fast-moving interludes, sometimes by switching mood from wistful to lightly swinging, sometimes by alternating single-note lines with chords or simultaneous bass line and melody – the possibilities seem endless.",
"title": "Legacy"
}
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| Joe Pass was an American jazz guitarist. Pass is well known for his work stemming from numerous collaborations with pianist Oscar Peterson and vocalist Ella Fitzgerald, and is often esteemed as one of the most notable jazz guitarists of the 20th century. | 2001-09-30T16:51:25Z | 2023-11-24T18:51:36Z | [
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16,141 | Jazz guitar | Jazz guitar may refer to either a type of electric guitar or a guitar playing style in jazz, using electric amplification to increase the volume of acoustic guitars.
In the early 1930s, jazz musicians sought to amplify their sound to be heard over loud big bands. When guitarists in big bands switched from acoustic to semi-acoustic guitar and began using amplifiers, it enabled them to play solos. Jazz guitar had an important influence on jazz in the beginning of the twentieth century. Although the earliest guitars used in jazz were acoustic and acoustic guitars are still sometimes used in jazz, most jazz guitarists since the 1940s have performed on an electrically amplified guitar or electric guitar.
Traditionally, jazz electric guitarists use an archtop with a relatively broad hollow sound-box, violin-style f-holes, a "floating bridge", and a magnetic pickup. Solid body guitars, mass-produced since the early 1950s, are also used.
Jazz guitar playing styles include comping with jazz chord voicings (and in some cases walking bass lines) and blowing (improvising) over jazz chord progressions with jazz-style phrasing and ornaments. Comping refers to playing chords underneath a song's melody or another musician's solo improvisations.
The stringed, chord-playing rhythm can be heard in groups which included military band-style instruments such as brass, saxes, clarinets, and drums, such as early jazz groups. As the acoustic guitar became a more popular instrument in the early 20th century, guitar-makers began building louder guitars which would be useful in a wider range of settings.
The Gibson L5, an acoustic archtop guitar which was first produced in 1923, was an early “jazz”-style guitar which was used by early jazz guitarists such as Eddie Lang. By the 1930s, the guitar began to displace the banjo as the primary chordal rhythm instrument in jazz music, because the guitar could be used to voice chords of greater harmonic complexity, and it had a somewhat more muted tone that blended well with the upright bass, which, by this time, had almost completely replaced the tuba as the dominant bass instrument in jazz music.
During the late 1930s and through the 1940s—the heyday of big band jazz and swing music—the guitar was an important rhythm section instrument. Some guitarists, such as Freddie Green of Count Basie's band, developed a guitar-specific style of accompaniment. Few of the big bands, however, featured amplified guitar solos, which were done instead in the small combo context. The most important jazz guitar soloists of this period included the Manouche virtuoso Django Reinhardt, Oscar Moore who was featured with Nat “King” Cole's trio, and Charlie Christian of Benny Goodman's band and sextet, who was a major influence despite his early death at 25.
It was not until the large-scale emergence of small combo jazz in the post-WWII period that the guitar took off as a versatile instrument, which was used both in the rhythm section and as a featured melodic instrument and solo improviser. In the hands of George Barnes, Kenny Burrell, Herb Ellis, Barney Kessel, Jimmy Raney, and Tal Farlow, who had absorbed the language of bebop, the guitar began to be seen as a “serious” jazz instrument. Improved electric guitars such as Gibson's ES-175 (released in 1949), gave players a larger variety of tonal options. In the 1940s through the 1960s, players such as Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass, and Jim Hall laid the foundation of what is now known as "jazz guitar" playing.
By the early 1980s, the radical experiments of early 1970s-era fusion gave way to a more radio-friendly sounds of smooth jazz. Guitarist Pat Metheny mixed the sounds of rock, blues, country, and “world” music, while still maintaining a strong foundation in bebop and cool jazz, playing both a flat-top acoustic guitar and an electric guitar with a softer, more mellow tone which was sweetened with a shimmering effect known as “chorusing". During the 1980s, a neo-traditional school of jazz sought to reconnect with the past. In keeping with such an aesthetic, young guitarists of this era sought a clean and round tone, and they often played traditional hollow-body arch-top guitars without electronic effects, frequently through vacuum tube amplifiers.
As players such as Bobby Broom, Peter Bernstein, Howard Alden, Russell Malone, and Mark Whitfield revived the sounds of traditional jazz guitar, there was also a resurgence of archtop luthierie (guitar-making). By the early 1990s many small independent luthiers began making archtop guitars. In the 2000s, jazz guitar playing continues to change. Some guitarists incorporate a Latin jazz influence, acid jazz-style dance club music uses samples from Wes Montgomery, and guitarists such as Bill Frisell continue to defy categorization.
While jazz can be played on any type of guitar, from an acoustic instrument to a solid-bodied electric guitar such as a Fender Stratocaster, the full-depth archtop guitar has become known as the prototypical "jazz guitar." Archtop guitars are steel-string acoustic guitars with a big soundbox, arched top, violin-style f-holes, a "floating bridge" and magnetic or piezoelectric pickups. Early makers of jazz guitars included Gibson, Epiphone, D'Angelico and Stromberg. The electric guitar is plugged into a guitar amplifier to make it sound loud enough for performance. Guitar amplifiers have equalizer controls that allow the guitarist to change the tone of the instrument, by emphasizing or de-emphasizing certain frequency bands. The use of reverb effects, often included in guitar amplifiers, has long been part of the jazz guitar sound. Particularly since the 1970s jazz fusion era, some jazz guitarists have also used effects pedals such as overdrive pedals, chorus pedals and wah pedals.
The earliest guitars used in jazz were acoustic, later superseded by a typical electric configuration of two humbucking pickups. In the 1990s, there was a resurgence of interest among jazz guitarists in acoustic archtop guitars with floating pickups. The original acoustic archtop guitars were designed to enhance volume: for that reason they were constructed for use with relatively heavy guitar strings. Even after electrification became the norm, jazz guitarists continued to fit strings of 0.012" gauge or heavier for reasons of tone, and also prefer flatwound strings. The characteristic arched top can be made of a solid piece of wood that is carved into the arched shape, or a piece of laminated wood (essentially a type of plywood) that is pressed into shape. Spruce is often used for tops, and maple for backs. Archtop guitars can be mass-produced, such as the Ibanez Artcore series, or handmade by luthiers such as Robert Benedetto.
Jazz rhythm guitar often consists of very textural, odd-meter playing that includes generous use of exotic, difficult-to-fret chords. In 4/4 timing, it is common to play 2.5 beat intervals such as on the 2 and then the half beat or "and" after 4. Jazz guitarists may play chords "ahead" of the beat, by playing the chord a swung eighth note before the actual chord change. Chords are not generally played in a repetitive rhythmic fashion, like a rock rhythm guitarist would play.
Jazz guitarists use their knowledge of harmony and jazz theory to create jazz chord "voicings," which emphasize the 3rd and 7th notes of the chord. Some more sophisticated chord voicings also include the 9th, 11th, and 13th notes of the chord. In some modern jazz styles, dominant 7th chords in a tune may contain altered 9ths (either flattened by a semitone, which is called a "flat 9th", or sharpened by a semitone, which is called a "sharp 9th"); 11ths (sharpened by a semitone, which is called a "sharp 11th"); 13ths (typically flattened by a semitone, which is called a "flat 13th").
Jazz guitarists need to learn about a range of different chords, including major 7th, major 6th, minor 7th, minor/major 7th, dominant 7th, diminished, half-diminished, and augmented chords. As well, they need to learn about chord transformations (e.g., altered chords, such as "alt dominant chords" described above), chord substitutions, and re-harmonization techniques. Some jazz guitarists use their knowledge of jazz scales and chords to provide a walking bass-style accompaniment.
Jazz guitarists learn to perform these chords over the range of different chord progressions used in jazz, such as the ubiquitous ii-V-I progression, the jazz-style blues progression (which, in contrast to a blues-style 12 bar progression, may have two or more chord changes per bar) the minor jazz-style blues form, the I-vi-ii-V based "rhythm changes" progression, and the variety of modulation-rich chord progressions used in jazz ballads, and jazz standards. Guitarists may also learn to use the chord types, strumming styles, and effects pedals (e.g., chorus effect or fuzzbox) used in 1970s-era jazz-Latin, jazz-funk, and jazz-rock fusion music.
Jazz guitarists integrate the basic building blocks of scales and arpeggio patterns into balanced rhythmic and melodic phrases that make up a cohesive solo. Jazz guitarists often try to imbue their melodic phrasing with the sense of natural breathing and legato phrasing used by horn players such as saxophone players. As well, a jazz guitarists' solo improvisations have to have a rhythmic drive and "timefeel" that creates a sense of "swing" and "groove." The most experienced jazz guitarists learn to play with different "timefeels" such as playing "ahead of the beat" or "behind the beat," to create or release tension.
Another aspect of the jazz guitar style is the use of stylistically appropriate ornaments, such as grace notes, slides, and muted notes. Each subgenre or era of jazz has different ornaments that are part of the style of that subgenre or era. Jazz guitarists usually learn the appropriate ornamenting styles by listening to prominent recordings from a given style or jazz era. Some jazz guitarists also borrow ornamentation techniques from other jazz instruments, such as Wes Montgomery's borrowing of playing melodies in parallel octaves, which is a jazz piano technique. Jazz guitarists also have to learn how to add in passing tones, use "guide tones" and chord tones from the chord progression to structure their improvisations.
In the 1970s and 1980s, with jazz-rock fusion guitar playing, jazz guitarists incorporated rock guitar soloing approaches, such as riff-based soloing and usage of pentatonic and blues scale patterns. Some guitarists used Jimi Hendrix-influenced distortion and wah-wah effects to get a sustained, heavy tone, or even used rapid-fire guitar shredding techniques, such as tapping and tremolo bar bending. Guitarist Al Di Meola, who started his career with Return to Forever in 1974, was one of the first guitarists to perform in a "shred" style, a technique later used in rock and heavy metal playing. Di Meola used alternate-picking to perform very rapid sequences of notes in his solos.
When jazz guitar players improvise, they use the scales, modes, and arpeggios associated with the chords in a tune's chord progression. The approach to improvising has changed since the earliest eras of jazz guitar. During the Swing era, many soloists improvised "by ear" by embellishing the melody with ornaments and passing notes. However, during the bebop era, the rapid tempo and complicated chord progressions made it increasingly harder to play "by ear." Along with other improvisers, such as saxes and piano players, bebop-era jazz guitarists began to improvise over the chord changes using scales (whole tone scale, chromatic scale, etc.) and arpeggios. Jazz guitar players tend to improvise around chord/scale relationships, rather than reworking the melody, possibly due to their familiarity with chords resulting from their comping role. A source of melodic ideas for improvisation is transcribing improvised solos from recordings. This provides jazz guitarists with a source of "licks", melodic phrases and ideas they incorporate either intact or in variations, and is an established way of learning from the previous generations of players.
In jazz big bands, popular during the 1930s and 1940s, the guitarist is considered an integral part of the rhythm section (guitar, drums and bass). They usually played a regular four strums to the bar, although an amount of harmonic improvisation is possible. Freddie Green, guitarist in the Count Basie orchestra, was a noted exponent of this style. The harmonies are often minimal; for instance, the root note is often omitted on the assumption that it will be supplied by the bassist.
When jazz guitarists play chords underneath a song's melody or another musician's solo improvisations, it is called "comping", short for "accompanying". The accompanying style in most jazz styles differs from the way chordal instruments accompany in many popular styles of music. In many popular styles of music, such as rock and pop, the rhythm guitarist usually performs the chords in rhythmic fashion which sets out the beat or groove of a tune. In contrast, in many modern jazz styles within smaller groups, the guitarist plays much more sparsely, intermingling periodic chords and delicate voicings into pauses in the melody or solo, and using periods of silence. Jazz guitarists commonly use a wide variety of inversions when comping, rather than only using standard voicings.
In this style, the guitarist aims to render an entire song — harmony, melody and bass — in something like the way a classical guitarist or pianist can. Chord roots cannot be left to the bassist in this style. Chords themselves can be used sparsely or more densely, depending on both the individual player and his or her arrangement of a particular piece. In the sparse style, a full chord is often played only at the beginning of a melodic phrase. The denser chordal textures, in contrast, approach chord soloing (see below). A third approach is to maintain a steady, busy bass-line, like a New Orleans pianist. Here, no more than two or three notes are played at a time, and the full harmony is indicated by arpeggiation. Exponents of this style often come from a country, folk or ragtime background, such as Chet Atkins, although it is also sometimes employed by straight-ahead jazz practitioners, for instance Martin Taylor. Chord-melody is often played with a plectrum (see Tal Farlow, George Benson and others); whereas fingerstyle, as practised by Joe Pass, George van Eps, Ted Greene, Robert Conti, Lenny Breau or hybrid picking as practised by Ed Bickert, Laszlo Sirsom and others allows for a more complex, polyphonic approach to unaccompanied soloing.
Eddie Lang and Lonnie Johnson were two of the earliest practitioners of single note improvised solos. Both played with Louis Armstrong and other leading jazz and blues musicians of the 1920s and 1930s. In later years Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt, the former on electric guitar and the latter playing forcefully on an acoustic guitar, are acknowledged as the first soloists to put jazz guitar improvisation on an equal footing with that of other instruments. Over the years, jazz guitarists have been able to solo in standard jazz idioms, such as bebop, cool jazz and so on, while in also absorbing influences from rock guitarists, such as the use of electronic effects.
Jazz guitarists are not limited to single note improvisation. When working with accompaniment, chord solos are created by improvising chords (harmony) and melody simultaneously, usually in the upper register on strings 1,2,3 and 4. Wes Montgomery was noted for playing successive choruses in single notes, then octaves and finally a chord solo - this can be heard in his improvisation on the standard Lover Man (Oh, Where Can You Be?). When playing without accompaniment, jazz guitarists may create chord solos by playing bass, melody and chords, individually or simultaneously, on any or all strings - such as the work of Lenny Breau, Joe Pass, Martin Taylor and others. This technique can also be incorporated into unaccompanied soloing: for instance Django Reinhardt's "improvisations", as he called his solo pieces. | [
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"text": "In the early 1930s, jazz musicians sought to amplify their sound to be heard over loud big bands. When guitarists in big bands switched from acoustic to semi-acoustic guitar and began using amplifiers, it enabled them to play solos. Jazz guitar had an important influence on jazz in the beginning of the twentieth century. Although the earliest guitars used in jazz were acoustic and acoustic guitars are still sometimes used in jazz, most jazz guitarists since the 1940s have performed on an electrically amplified guitar or electric guitar.",
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"text": "Jazz guitar playing styles include comping with jazz chord voicings (and in some cases walking bass lines) and blowing (improvising) over jazz chord progressions with jazz-style phrasing and ornaments. Comping refers to playing chords underneath a song's melody or another musician's solo improvisations.",
"title": ""
},
{
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"text": "The stringed, chord-playing rhythm can be heard in groups which included military band-style instruments such as brass, saxes, clarinets, and drums, such as early jazz groups. As the acoustic guitar became a more popular instrument in the early 20th century, guitar-makers began building louder guitars which would be useful in a wider range of settings.",
"title": "History"
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"text": "The Gibson L5, an acoustic archtop guitar which was first produced in 1923, was an early “jazz”-style guitar which was used by early jazz guitarists such as Eddie Lang. By the 1930s, the guitar began to displace the banjo as the primary chordal rhythm instrument in jazz music, because the guitar could be used to voice chords of greater harmonic complexity, and it had a somewhat more muted tone that blended well with the upright bass, which, by this time, had almost completely replaced the tuba as the dominant bass instrument in jazz music.",
"title": "History"
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"text": "During the late 1930s and through the 1940s—the heyday of big band jazz and swing music—the guitar was an important rhythm section instrument. Some guitarists, such as Freddie Green of Count Basie's band, developed a guitar-specific style of accompaniment. Few of the big bands, however, featured amplified guitar solos, which were done instead in the small combo context. The most important jazz guitar soloists of this period included the Manouche virtuoso Django Reinhardt, Oscar Moore who was featured with Nat “King” Cole's trio, and Charlie Christian of Benny Goodman's band and sextet, who was a major influence despite his early death at 25.",
"title": "History"
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"text": "It was not until the large-scale emergence of small combo jazz in the post-WWII period that the guitar took off as a versatile instrument, which was used both in the rhythm section and as a featured melodic instrument and solo improviser. In the hands of George Barnes, Kenny Burrell, Herb Ellis, Barney Kessel, Jimmy Raney, and Tal Farlow, who had absorbed the language of bebop, the guitar began to be seen as a “serious” jazz instrument. Improved electric guitars such as Gibson's ES-175 (released in 1949), gave players a larger variety of tonal options. In the 1940s through the 1960s, players such as Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass, and Jim Hall laid the foundation of what is now known as \"jazz guitar\" playing.",
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{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "By the early 1980s, the radical experiments of early 1970s-era fusion gave way to a more radio-friendly sounds of smooth jazz. Guitarist Pat Metheny mixed the sounds of rock, blues, country, and “world” music, while still maintaining a strong foundation in bebop and cool jazz, playing both a flat-top acoustic guitar and an electric guitar with a softer, more mellow tone which was sweetened with a shimmering effect known as “chorusing\". During the 1980s, a neo-traditional school of jazz sought to reconnect with the past. In keeping with such an aesthetic, young guitarists of this era sought a clean and round tone, and they often played traditional hollow-body arch-top guitars without electronic effects, frequently through vacuum tube amplifiers.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "As players such as Bobby Broom, Peter Bernstein, Howard Alden, Russell Malone, and Mark Whitfield revived the sounds of traditional jazz guitar, there was also a resurgence of archtop luthierie (guitar-making). By the early 1990s many small independent luthiers began making archtop guitars. In the 2000s, jazz guitar playing continues to change. Some guitarists incorporate a Latin jazz influence, acid jazz-style dance club music uses samples from Wes Montgomery, and guitarists such as Bill Frisell continue to defy categorization.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "While jazz can be played on any type of guitar, from an acoustic instrument to a solid-bodied electric guitar such as a Fender Stratocaster, the full-depth archtop guitar has become known as the prototypical \"jazz guitar.\" Archtop guitars are steel-string acoustic guitars with a big soundbox, arched top, violin-style f-holes, a \"floating bridge\" and magnetic or piezoelectric pickups. Early makers of jazz guitars included Gibson, Epiphone, D'Angelico and Stromberg. The electric guitar is plugged into a guitar amplifier to make it sound loud enough for performance. Guitar amplifiers have equalizer controls that allow the guitarist to change the tone of the instrument, by emphasizing or de-emphasizing certain frequency bands. The use of reverb effects, often included in guitar amplifiers, has long been part of the jazz guitar sound. Particularly since the 1970s jazz fusion era, some jazz guitarists have also used effects pedals such as overdrive pedals, chorus pedals and wah pedals.",
"title": "Types of guitars"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The earliest guitars used in jazz were acoustic, later superseded by a typical electric configuration of two humbucking pickups. In the 1990s, there was a resurgence of interest among jazz guitarists in acoustic archtop guitars with floating pickups. The original acoustic archtop guitars were designed to enhance volume: for that reason they were constructed for use with relatively heavy guitar strings. Even after electrification became the norm, jazz guitarists continued to fit strings of 0.012\" gauge or heavier for reasons of tone, and also prefer flatwound strings. The characteristic arched top can be made of a solid piece of wood that is carved into the arched shape, or a piece of laminated wood (essentially a type of plywood) that is pressed into shape. Spruce is often used for tops, and maple for backs. Archtop guitars can be mass-produced, such as the Ibanez Artcore series, or handmade by luthiers such as Robert Benedetto.",
"title": "Types of guitars"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Jazz rhythm guitar often consists of very textural, odd-meter playing that includes generous use of exotic, difficult-to-fret chords. In 4/4 timing, it is common to play 2.5 beat intervals such as on the 2 and then the half beat or \"and\" after 4. Jazz guitarists may play chords \"ahead\" of the beat, by playing the chord a swung eighth note before the actual chord change. Chords are not generally played in a repetitive rhythmic fashion, like a rock rhythm guitarist would play.",
"title": "Musical elements"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Jazz guitarists use their knowledge of harmony and jazz theory to create jazz chord \"voicings,\" which emphasize the 3rd and 7th notes of the chord. Some more sophisticated chord voicings also include the 9th, 11th, and 13th notes of the chord. In some modern jazz styles, dominant 7th chords in a tune may contain altered 9ths (either flattened by a semitone, which is called a \"flat 9th\", or sharpened by a semitone, which is called a \"sharp 9th\"); 11ths (sharpened by a semitone, which is called a \"sharp 11th\"); 13ths (typically flattened by a semitone, which is called a \"flat 13th\").",
"title": "Musical elements"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Jazz guitarists need to learn about a range of different chords, including major 7th, major 6th, minor 7th, minor/major 7th, dominant 7th, diminished, half-diminished, and augmented chords. As well, they need to learn about chord transformations (e.g., altered chords, such as \"alt dominant chords\" described above), chord substitutions, and re-harmonization techniques. Some jazz guitarists use their knowledge of jazz scales and chords to provide a walking bass-style accompaniment.",
"title": "Musical elements"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Jazz guitarists learn to perform these chords over the range of different chord progressions used in jazz, such as the ubiquitous ii-V-I progression, the jazz-style blues progression (which, in contrast to a blues-style 12 bar progression, may have two or more chord changes per bar) the minor jazz-style blues form, the I-vi-ii-V based \"rhythm changes\" progression, and the variety of modulation-rich chord progressions used in jazz ballads, and jazz standards. Guitarists may also learn to use the chord types, strumming styles, and effects pedals (e.g., chorus effect or fuzzbox) used in 1970s-era jazz-Latin, jazz-funk, and jazz-rock fusion music.",
"title": "Musical elements"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Jazz guitarists integrate the basic building blocks of scales and arpeggio patterns into balanced rhythmic and melodic phrases that make up a cohesive solo. Jazz guitarists often try to imbue their melodic phrasing with the sense of natural breathing and legato phrasing used by horn players such as saxophone players. As well, a jazz guitarists' solo improvisations have to have a rhythmic drive and \"timefeel\" that creates a sense of \"swing\" and \"groove.\" The most experienced jazz guitarists learn to play with different \"timefeels\" such as playing \"ahead of the beat\" or \"behind the beat,\" to create or release tension.",
"title": "Musical elements"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Another aspect of the jazz guitar style is the use of stylistically appropriate ornaments, such as grace notes, slides, and muted notes. Each subgenre or era of jazz has different ornaments that are part of the style of that subgenre or era. Jazz guitarists usually learn the appropriate ornamenting styles by listening to prominent recordings from a given style or jazz era. Some jazz guitarists also borrow ornamentation techniques from other jazz instruments, such as Wes Montgomery's borrowing of playing melodies in parallel octaves, which is a jazz piano technique. Jazz guitarists also have to learn how to add in passing tones, use \"guide tones\" and chord tones from the chord progression to structure their improvisations.",
"title": "Musical elements"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In the 1970s and 1980s, with jazz-rock fusion guitar playing, jazz guitarists incorporated rock guitar soloing approaches, such as riff-based soloing and usage of pentatonic and blues scale patterns. Some guitarists used Jimi Hendrix-influenced distortion and wah-wah effects to get a sustained, heavy tone, or even used rapid-fire guitar shredding techniques, such as tapping and tremolo bar bending. Guitarist Al Di Meola, who started his career with Return to Forever in 1974, was one of the first guitarists to perform in a \"shred\" style, a technique later used in rock and heavy metal playing. Di Meola used alternate-picking to perform very rapid sequences of notes in his solos.",
"title": "Musical elements"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "When jazz guitar players improvise, they use the scales, modes, and arpeggios associated with the chords in a tune's chord progression. The approach to improvising has changed since the earliest eras of jazz guitar. During the Swing era, many soloists improvised \"by ear\" by embellishing the melody with ornaments and passing notes. However, during the bebop era, the rapid tempo and complicated chord progressions made it increasingly harder to play \"by ear.\" Along with other improvisers, such as saxes and piano players, bebop-era jazz guitarists began to improvise over the chord changes using scales (whole tone scale, chromatic scale, etc.) and arpeggios. Jazz guitar players tend to improvise around chord/scale relationships, rather than reworking the melody, possibly due to their familiarity with chords resulting from their comping role. A source of melodic ideas for improvisation is transcribing improvised solos from recordings. This provides jazz guitarists with a source of \"licks\", melodic phrases and ideas they incorporate either intact or in variations, and is an established way of learning from the previous generations of players.",
"title": "Musical elements"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In jazz big bands, popular during the 1930s and 1940s, the guitarist is considered an integral part of the rhythm section (guitar, drums and bass). They usually played a regular four strums to the bar, although an amount of harmonic improvisation is possible. Freddie Green, guitarist in the Count Basie orchestra, was a noted exponent of this style. The harmonies are often minimal; for instance, the root note is often omitted on the assumption that it will be supplied by the bassist.",
"title": "Playing styles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "When jazz guitarists play chords underneath a song's melody or another musician's solo improvisations, it is called \"comping\", short for \"accompanying\". The accompanying style in most jazz styles differs from the way chordal instruments accompany in many popular styles of music. In many popular styles of music, such as rock and pop, the rhythm guitarist usually performs the chords in rhythmic fashion which sets out the beat or groove of a tune. In contrast, in many modern jazz styles within smaller groups, the guitarist plays much more sparsely, intermingling periodic chords and delicate voicings into pauses in the melody or solo, and using periods of silence. Jazz guitarists commonly use a wide variety of inversions when comping, rather than only using standard voicings.",
"title": "Playing styles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In this style, the guitarist aims to render an entire song — harmony, melody and bass — in something like the way a classical guitarist or pianist can. Chord roots cannot be left to the bassist in this style. Chords themselves can be used sparsely or more densely, depending on both the individual player and his or her arrangement of a particular piece. In the sparse style, a full chord is often played only at the beginning of a melodic phrase. The denser chordal textures, in contrast, approach chord soloing (see below). A third approach is to maintain a steady, busy bass-line, like a New Orleans pianist. Here, no more than two or three notes are played at a time, and the full harmony is indicated by arpeggiation. Exponents of this style often come from a country, folk or ragtime background, such as Chet Atkins, although it is also sometimes employed by straight-ahead jazz practitioners, for instance Martin Taylor. Chord-melody is often played with a plectrum (see Tal Farlow, George Benson and others); whereas fingerstyle, as practised by Joe Pass, George van Eps, Ted Greene, Robert Conti, Lenny Breau or hybrid picking as practised by Ed Bickert, Laszlo Sirsom and others allows for a more complex, polyphonic approach to unaccompanied soloing.",
"title": "Playing styles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Eddie Lang and Lonnie Johnson were two of the earliest practitioners of single note improvised solos. Both played with Louis Armstrong and other leading jazz and blues musicians of the 1920s and 1930s. In later years Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt, the former on electric guitar and the latter playing forcefully on an acoustic guitar, are acknowledged as the first soloists to put jazz guitar improvisation on an equal footing with that of other instruments. Over the years, jazz guitarists have been able to solo in standard jazz idioms, such as bebop, cool jazz and so on, while in also absorbing influences from rock guitarists, such as the use of electronic effects.",
"title": "Playing styles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Jazz guitarists are not limited to single note improvisation. When working with accompaniment, chord solos are created by improvising chords (harmony) and melody simultaneously, usually in the upper register on strings 1,2,3 and 4. Wes Montgomery was noted for playing successive choruses in single notes, then octaves and finally a chord solo - this can be heard in his improvisation on the standard Lover Man (Oh, Where Can You Be?). When playing without accompaniment, jazz guitarists may create chord solos by playing bass, melody and chords, individually or simultaneously, on any or all strings - such as the work of Lenny Breau, Joe Pass, Martin Taylor and others. This technique can also be incorporated into unaccompanied soloing: for instance Django Reinhardt's \"improvisations\", as he called his solo pieces.",
"title": "Playing styles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "",
"title": "External links"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "",
"title": "External links"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "",
"title": "External links"
}
]
| Jazz guitar may refer to either a type of electric guitar or a guitar playing style in jazz, using electric amplification to increase the volume of acoustic guitars. In the early 1930s, jazz musicians sought to amplify their sound to be heard over loud big bands. When guitarists in big bands switched from acoustic to semi-acoustic guitar and began using amplifiers, it enabled them to play solos. Jazz guitar had an important influence on jazz in the beginning of the twentieth century. Although the earliest guitars used in jazz were acoustic and acoustic guitars are still sometimes used in jazz, most jazz guitarists since the 1940s have performed on an electrically amplified guitar or electric guitar. Traditionally, jazz electric guitarists use an archtop with a relatively broad hollow sound-box, violin-style f-holes, a "floating bridge", and a magnetic pickup. Solid body guitars, mass-produced since the early 1950s, are also used. Jazz guitar playing styles include comping with jazz chord voicings and blowing (improvising) over jazz chord progressions with jazz-style phrasing and ornaments. Comping refers to playing chords underneath a song's melody or another musician's solo improvisations. | 2001-09-30T16:55:45Z | 2023-12-18T16:47:26Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_guitar |
16,142 | James Watt | James Watt FRS, FRSE (/wɒt/; 30 January 1736 (19 January 1736 OS) – 25 August 1819) was a Scottish inventor, mechanical engineer, and chemist who improved on Thomas Newcomen's 1712 Newcomen steam engine with his Watt steam engine in 1776, which was fundamental to the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution in both his native Great Britain and the rest of the world.
While working as an instrument maker at the University of Glasgow, Watt became interested in the technology of steam engines. He realised that contemporary engine designs wasted a great deal of energy by repeatedly cooling and reheating the cylinder. Watt introduced a design enhancement, the separate condenser, which avoided this waste of energy and radically improved the power, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of steam engines. Eventually, he adapted his engine to produce rotary motion, greatly broadening its use beyond pumping water.
Watt attempted to commercialise his invention, but experienced great financial difficulties until he entered a partnership with Matthew Boulton in 1775. The new firm of Boulton and Watt was eventually highly successful and Watt became a wealthy man. In his retirement, Watt continued to develop new inventions though none was as significant as his steam engine work.
As Watt developed the concept of horsepower, the SI unit of power, the watt, was named after him.
James Watt was born on 19 January 1736 in Greenock, Renfrewshire, the eldest of the five surviving children of Agnes Muirhead (1703–1755) and James Watt (1698–1782). His mother came from a distinguished family, was well educated and said to be of forceful character, while his father was a shipwright, ship owner and contractor, and served as the Greenock's chief baillie in 1751. The Watt family's wealth came in part from Watt's father's trading in slaves and slave-produced goods. Watt's parents were Presbyterians and strong Covenanters, but despite his religious upbringing he later became a deist. Watt's grandfather, Thomas Watt (1642–1734), was a teacher of mathematics, surveying and navigation and baillie to the Baron of Cartsburn.
Initially, Watt was educated at home by his mother, later going on to attend Greenock Grammar School. There he exhibited an aptitude for mathematics, while Latin and Greek failed to interest him.
Watt is said to have suffered prolonged bouts of ill-health as a child and from frequent headaches all his life.
After leaving school, Watt worked in the workshops of his father's businesses, demonstrating considerable dexterity and skill in creating engineering models. After his father suffered unsuccessful business ventures, Watt left Greenock to seek employment in Glasgow as a mathematical instrument maker.
When he was 18, Watt's mother died and his father's health began to fail. Watt travelled to London and was able to obtain a period of training as an instrument maker for a year (1755–56), then returned to Scotland, settling in the major commercial city of Glasgow, intent on setting up his own instrument-making business. He was still very young and, having not had a full apprenticeship, did not have the usual connections via a former master to establish himself as a journeyman instrument maker.
Watt was saved from this impasse by the arrival from Jamaica of astronomical instruments bequeathed by Alexander MacFarlane to the University of Glasgow – instruments that required expert attention. Watt restored them to working order and was remunerated. These instruments were eventually installed in the Macfarlane Observatory. Subsequently, three professors offered him the opportunity to set up a small workshop within the university. It was initiated in 1757 and two of the professors, the physicist and chemist Joseph Black as well as the famed economist Adam Smith, became Watt's friends.
At first, he worked on maintaining and repairing scientific instruments used in the university, helping with demonstrations, and expanding the production of quadrants. He made and repaired brass reflecting quadrants, parallel rulers, scales, parts for telescopes, and barometers, among other things.
It is sometimes falsely stated that he struggled to establish himself in Glasgow due to opposition from the Trades House, but this myth has been thoroughly debunked by the historian Harry Lumsden. The records from this period are lost, but it is known that he was able to work and trade completely normally as a skilled metal worker so the Incorporation of Hammermen must have been satisfied that he met their requirements for membership. It is also known that other people in the metal trades were pursued for working without being members of the Incorporation well into the 19th century, so the rules were definitely being enforced when Watt was trading freely throughout the city.
In 1759, he formed a partnership with John Craig, an architect and businessman, to manufacture and sell a line of products including musical instruments and toys. This partnership lasted for the next six years, and employed up to 16 workers. Craig died in 1765. One employee, Alex Gardner, eventually took over the business, which lasted into the 20th century.
In 1764, Watt married his cousin Margaret (Peggy) Miller, with whom he had 5 children, 2 of whom lived to adulthood: James Jr. (1769–1848) and Margaret (1767–1796). His wife died in childbirth in 1773. In 1777, he married again, to Ann MacGregor, daughter of a Glasgow dye-maker, with whom he had 2 children: Gregory (1777–1804), who became a geologist and mineralogist, and Janet (1779–1794). Ann died in 1832. Between 1777 and 1790 he lived in Regent Place, Birmingham.
There is a popular story that Watt was inspired to invent the steam engine by seeing a kettle boiling, the steam forcing the lid to rise and thus showing Watt the power of steam. This story is told in many forms; in some Watt is a young lad, in others he is older, sometimes it's his mother's kettle, sometimes his aunt's. Watt did not actually invent the steam engine, as the story implies, but dramatically improved the efficiency of the existing Newcomen engine by adding a separate condenser. This is difficult to explain to someone not familiar with concepts of heat and thermal efficiency. It appears that the story was created, possibly by Watt's son James Watt Jr., and persists because it is easy for children to understand and remember. In this light, it can be seen as akin to the story of Isaac Newton and the falling apple and his discovery of gravity.
Although it is often dismissed as a myth, the story of Watt and the kettle has a basis in fact. In trying to understand the thermodynamics of heat and steam, James Watt carried out many laboratory experiments and his diaries record that in conducting these, he used a kettle as a boiler to generate steam.
In 1759, Watt's friend, John Robison, called his attention to the use of steam as a source of motive power. The design of the Newcomen engine, in use for almost 50 years for pumping water from mines, had hardly changed from its first implementation. Watt began to experiment with steam, though he had never seen an operating steam engine. He tried constructing a model; it failed to work satisfactorily, but he continued his experiments and began to read everything he could about the subject. He came to realise the importance of latent heat—the thermal energy released or absorbed during a constant-temperature process—in understanding the engine, which, unknown to Watt, his friend Joseph Black had previously discovered years before. Understanding of the steam engine was in a very primitive state, for the science of thermodynamics would not be formalised for nearly another 100 years.
In 1763, Watt was asked to repair a model Newcomen engine belonging to the university. Even after repair, the engine barely worked. After much experimentation, Watt demonstrated that about three-quarters of the thermal energy of the steam was being consumed in heating the engine cylinder on every cycle. This energy was wasted because, later in the cycle, cold water was injected into the cylinder to condense the steam to reduce its pressure. Thus, by repeatedly heating and cooling the cylinder, the engine wasted most of its thermal energy rather than converting it into mechanical energy.
Watt's critical insight, arrived at in May 1765 as he crossed Glasgow Green park, was to cause the steam to condense in a separate chamber apart from the piston, and to maintain the temperature of the cylinder at the same temperature as the injected steam by surrounding it with a "steam jacket". Thus, very little energy was absorbed by the cylinder on each cycle, making more available to perform useful work. Watt had a working model later that same year.
Despite a potentially workable design, there were still substantial difficulties in constructing a full-scale engine. This required more capital, some of which came from Black. More substantial backing came from John Roebuck, the founder of the celebrated Carron Iron Works near Falkirk, with whom he now formed a partnership. Roebuck lived at Kinneil House in Bo'ness, during which time Watt worked at perfecting his steam engine in a cottage adjacent to the house. The shell of the cottage, and a very large part of one of his projects, still exist to the rear.
The principal difficulty was in machining the piston and cylinder. Iron workers of the day were more like blacksmiths than modern machinists, and were unable to produce the components with sufficient precision. Much capital was spent in pursuing a patent on Watt's invention. Strapped for resources, Watt was forced to take up employment—first as a surveyor, then as a civil engineer—for 8 years.
Roebuck went bankrupt, and Matthew Boulton, who owned the Soho Manufactory works near Birmingham, acquired his patent rights. An extension of the patent to 1800 was successfully obtained in 1775.
Through Boulton, Watt finally had access to some of the best iron workers in the world. The difficulty of the manufacture of a large cylinder with a tightly fitting piston was solved by John Wilkinson, who had developed precision boring techniques for cannon making at Bersham, near Wrexham, North Wales. Watt and Boulton formed a hugely successful partnership, Boulton and Watt, which lasted for the next 25 years.
In 1776, the first engines were installed and working in commercial enterprises. These first engines were used to power pumps and produced only reciprocating motion to move the pump rods at the bottom of the shaft. The design was commercially successful, and for the next five years, Watt was very busy installing more engines, mostly in Cornwall, for pumping water out of mines.
These early engines were not manufactured by Boulton and Watt, but were made by others according to drawings made by Watt, who served in the role of consulting engineer. The erection of the engine and its shakedown was supervised by Watt, at first, and then by men in the firm's employ. These were large machines. The first, for example, had a cylinder with a diameter of 50 inches and an overall height of about 24 feet, and required the construction of a dedicated building to house it. Boulton and Watt charged an annual payment, equal to one-third of the value of the coal saved in comparison to a Newcomen engine performing the same work.
The field of application for the invention was greatly widened when Boulton urged Watt to convert the reciprocating motion of the piston to produce rotational power for grinding, weaving and milling. Although a crank seemed the obvious solution to the conversion, Watt and Boulton were stymied by a patent for this, whose holder, James Pickard and his associates proposed to cross-license the external condenser. Watt adamantly opposed this and they circumvented the patent by their sun and planet gear in 1781.
Over the next six years, he made other improvements and modifications to the steam engine. A double-acting engine, in which the steam acted alternately on both sides of the piston, was one. He described methods for working the steam "expansively" (i.e., using steam at pressures well above atmospheric). A compound engine, which connected two or more engines, was described. Two more patents were granted for these in 1781 and 1782. Numerous other improvements that made for easier manufacture and installation were continually implemented. One of these included the use of the steam indicator which produced an informative plot of the pressure in the cylinder against its volume, which he kept as a trade secret. Another important invention, one which Watt was most proud of, was the parallel motion linkage, which was essential in double-acting engines as it produced the straight line motion required for the cylinder rod and pump, from the connected rocking beam, whose end moves in a circular arc. This was patented in 1784. A throttle valve to control the power of the engine, and a centrifugal governor, patented in 1788, to keep it from "running away" were very important. These improvements taken together produced an engine which was up to five times as fuel efficient as the Newcomen engine.
Because of the danger of exploding boilers, which were in a very primitive stage of development, and the ongoing issues with leaks, Watt restricted his use of high pressure steam – all of his engines used steam at near atmospheric pressure.
Edward Bull started constructing engines for Boulton and Watt in Cornwall in 1781. By 1792, he had started making engines of his own design, but which contained a separate condenser, and so infringed Watt's patents. Two brothers, Jabez Carter Hornblower and Jonathan Hornblower Jnr also started to build engines about the same time. Others began to modify Newcomen engines by adding a condenser, and the mine owners in Cornwall became convinced that Watt's patent could not be enforced. They started to withhold payments to Boulton and Watt, which by 1795 had fallen on hard times. Of the total £21,000 (equivalent to £2,310,000 as of 2021) owed, only £2,500 had been received. Watt was forced to go to court to enforce his claims.
He first sued Bull in 1793. The jury found for Watt, but the question of whether or not the original specification of the patent was valid was left to another trial. In the meantime, injunctions were issued against the infringers, forcing their payments of the royalties to be placed in escrow. The trial on determining the validity of the specifications which was held in the following year was inconclusive, but the injunctions remained in force and the infringers, except for Jonathan Hornblower, all began to settle their cases. Hornblower was soon brought to trial in 1799, and the verdict of the four was decisively in favour of Watt. Their friend John Wilkinson, who had solved the problem of boring an accurate cylinder, was a particularly grievous case. He had erected about 20 engines without Boulton's and Watts' knowledge. They finally agreed to settle the infringement in 1796. Boulton and Watt never collected all that was owed them, but the disputes were all settled directly between the parties or through arbitration. These trials were extremely costly in both money and time, but ultimately were successful for the firm.
Before 1780, there was no good method for making copies of letters or drawings. The only method sometimes used was a mechanical one using multiple linked pens. Watt at first experimented with improving this method, but soon gave up on this approach because it was so cumbersome. He instead decided to try to physically transfer ink from the front of the original to the back of another sheet, moistened with a solvent, and pressed to the original. The second sheet had to be thin, so that the ink could be seen through it when the copy was held up to the light, thus reproducing the original exactly.
Watt started to develop the process in 1779, and made many experiments to formulate the ink, select the thin paper, to devise a method for wetting the special thin paper, and to make a press suitable for applying the correct pressure to effect the transfer. All of these required much experimentation, but he soon had enough success to patent the process a year later. Watt formed another partnership with Boulton (who provided financing) and James Keir (to manage the business) in a firm called James Watt and Co. The perfection of the invention required much more development work before it could be routinely used by others, but this was carried out over the next few years. Boulton and Watt gave up their shares to their sons in 1794. It became a commercial success and was widely used in offices even into the 20th century.
From an early age, Watt was very interested in chemistry. In late 1786, while in Paris, he witnessed an experiment by Claude Louis Berthollet in which he reacted hydrochloric acid with manganese dioxide to produce chlorine. He had already found that an aqueous solution of chlorine could bleach textiles, and had published his findings, which aroused great interest among many potential rivals. When Watt returned to Britain, he began experiments along these lines with hopes of finding a commercially viable process. He discovered that a mixture of salt, manganese dioxide and sulphuric acid could produce chlorine, which Watt believed might be a cheaper method. He passed the chlorine into a weak solution of alkali, and obtained a turbid solution that appeared to have good bleaching properties. He soon communicated these results to James McGrigor, his father-in-law, who was a bleacher in Glasgow. Otherwise, he tried to keep his method a secret.
With McGrigor and his wife Annie, he started to scale up the process, and in March 1788, McGrigor was able to bleach 1,500 yards (4,500 feet) of cloth to his satisfaction. About this time, Berthollet discovered the salt and sulphuric acid process, and published it, so it became public knowledge. Many others began to experiment with improving the process, which still had many shortcomings, not the least of which was the problem of transporting the liquid product. Watt's rivals soon overtook him in developing the process, and he dropped out of the race. It was not until 1799, when Charles Tennant patented a process for producing solid bleaching powder (calcium hypochlorite) that it became a commercial success.
By 1794, Watt had been chosen by Thomas Beddoes to manufacture apparatuses to produce, clean and store gases for use in the new Pneumatic Institution at Hotwells in Bristol. Watt continued to experiment with various gases, but by 1797, the medical uses for the "factitious airs" (artificial gases) had come to a dead end.
Watt combined theoretical knowledge of science with the ability to apply it practically. Chemist Humphry Davy said of him, "Those who consider James Watt only as a great practical mechanic form a very erroneous idea of his character; he was equally distinguished as a natural philosopher and a chemist, and his inventions demonstrate his profound knowledge of those sciences, and that peculiar characteristic of genius, the union of them for practical application".
He was greatly respected by other prominent men of the Industrial Revolution. He was an important member of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, and was a much sought-after conversationalist and companion, always interested in expanding his horizons. His personal relationships with his friends and business partners were always congenial and long-lasting.
According to Lord Liverpool (Prime Minister of the UK),
A more excllent and amikable man in all the relations of life I believe never existed.
Watt was a prolific correspondent. During his years in Cornwall, he wrote long letters to Boulton several times per week. He was averse to publishing his results in, for example, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society however, and instead preferred to communicate his ideas in patents. He was an excellent draughtsman.
He was a rather poor businessman, and especially hated bargaining and negotiating terms with those who sought to use the steam engine. In a letter to William Small in 1772, Watt confessed that "he would rather face a loaded cannon than settle an account or make a bargain." Until he retired, he was always very concerned about his financial affairs, and was something of a worrier. His health was often poor and he suffered frequent nervous headaches and depression. When he retired in 1800, he became a rich enough man to pass the business on to his sons.
At first, the partnership made the drawings and specifications for the engines, and supervised the work to erect them on the customers' property. They produced almost none of the parts themselves. Watt did most of his work at his home in Harper's Hill in Birmingham, while Boulton worked at the Soho Manufactory. Gradually, the partners began to actually manufacture more and more of the parts, and by 1795, they purchased a property about a mile away from the Soho Manufactory, on the banks of the Birmingham Canal, to establish a new foundry for the manufacture of the engines. The Soho Foundry formally opened in 1796 at a time when Watt's sons, Gregory and James Jr. were heavily involved in the management of the enterprise. In 1800, the year of Watt's retirement, the firm made a total of 41 engines.
Watt retired in 1800, the same year that his fundamental patent and partnership with Boulton expired. The famous partnership was transferred to the men's sons, Matthew Robinson Boulton and James Watt Jr.. Longtime firm engineer William Murdoch was soon made a partner and the firm prospered.
Watt continued to invent other things before and during his semi-retirement. Within his home in Handsworth, Staffordshire, Watt made use of a garret room as a workshop, and it was here that he worked on many of his inventions. Among other things, he invented and constructed machines for copying sculptures and medallions which worked very well, but which he never patented. One of the first sculptures he produced with the machine was a small head of his old professor friend Adam Smith. He maintained his interest in civil engineering and was a consultant on several significant projects. He proposed, for example, a method for constructing a flexible pipe to be used for pumping water under the River Clyde at Glasgow.
He and his second wife travelled to France and Germany, and he purchased an estate in mid-Wales at Doldowlod House, one mile south of Llanwrthwl, which he much improved.
In 1816, he took a trip on the paddle-steamer Comet, a product of his inventions, to revisit his home town of Greenock.
He died on 25 August 1819 at his home "Heathfield Hall" near Handsworth in Staffordshire (now part of Birmingham) at the age of 83. He was buried on 2 September in the graveyard of St Mary's Church, Handsworth. The church has since been extended and his grave is now inside the church.
On 16 July 1764, Watt married his cousin Margaret Miller (d. 1773). They had two children, Margaret (1767–1796) and James (1769–1848). In 1791, their daughter married James Miller. In September 1773, while Watt was working in the Scottish Highlands, he learned that his wife, who was pregnant with their third child, was seriously ill. He immediately returned home but found that she had died and their child was stillborn.
In 1775, he married Ann MacGregor (d. 1832).
He was Initiated into Scottish Freemasonry in The Glasgow Royal Arch Lodge, No. 77, in 1763. The Lodge ceased to exist in 1810. A Masonic Lodge was named after him in his home town of Glasgow – Lodge James Watt, No. 1215.
William Murdoch joined Boulton and Watt in 1777. At first, he worked in the pattern shop in Soho, but soon he was erecting engines in Cornwall. He became an important part of the firm and made many contributions to its success including important inventions of his own.
John Griffiths, who wrote a biography of him in 1992, has argued that Watt's discouragement of Murdoch's work with high-pressure steam on his steam road locomotive experiments delayed its development: Watt rightly believed that boilers of the time would be unsafe at higher pressures.
Watt patented the application of the sun and planet gear to steam in 1781 and a steam locomotive in 1784, both of which have strong claims to have been invented by Murdoch. The patent was never contested by Murdoch, however, and Boulton and Watt's firm continued to use the sun and planet gear in their rotative engines, even long after the patent for the crank expired in 1794. Murdoch was made a partner of the firm in 1810, where he remained until his retirement 20 years later at the age of 76.
As one author states, James Watt's improvements to the steam engine "converted it from a prime mover of marginal efficiency into the mechanical workhorse of the Industrial Revolution".
Watt was much honoured in his own time. In 1784, he was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and was elected as a member of the Batavian Society for Experimental Philosophy, of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in 1787. In 1789, he was elected to the elite group, the Smeatonian Society of Civil Engineers. In 1806, he was conferred the honorary Doctor of Laws by the University of Glasgow. The French Academy elected him a Corresponding Member and he was made a Foreign Associate in 1814.
The watt is named after James Watt for his contributions to the development of the steam engine, and was adopted by the Second Congress of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1889 and by the 11th General Conference on Weights and Measures in 1960 as the unit of power incorporated in the International System of Units (or "SI").
On 29 May 2009, the Bank of England announced that Boulton and Watt would appear on a new £50 note. The design is the first to feature a dual portrait on a Bank of England note, and presents the two industrialists side by side with images of Watt's steam engine and Boulton's Soho Manufactory. Quotes attributed to each of the men are inscribed on the note: "I sell here, sir, what all the world desires to have—POWER" (Boulton) and "I can think of nothing else but this machine" (Watt). The inclusion of Watt is the second time that a Scot has featured on a Bank of England note (the first was Adam Smith on the 2007 issue £20 note). In September 2011, it was announced that the notes would enter circulation on 2 November.
In 2011, he was one of seven inaugural inductees to the Scottish Engineering Hall of Fame.
Watt was buried in the grounds of St. Mary's Church, Handsworth, in Birmingham. Later expansion of the church, over his grave, means that his tomb is now buried inside the church.
The garret room workshop that Watt used in his retirement was left, locked and untouched, until 1853, when it was first viewed by his biographer J. P. Muirhead. Thereafter, it was occasionally visited, but left untouched, as a kind of shrine. A proposal to have it transferred to the Patent Office came to nothing. When the house was due to be demolished in 1924, the room and all its contents were presented to the Science Museum, where it was recreated in its entirety. It remained on display for visitors for many years, but was walled-off when the gallery it was housed in closed. The workshop remained intact, and preserved, and in March 2011 was put on public display as part of a new permanent Science Museum exhibition, "James Watt and our world".
The approximate location of James Watt's birth in Greenock is commemorated by a statue. Other memorials in Greenock include street names and the Watt Memorial Library, which was begun in 1816 with Watt's donation of scientific books, and developed as part of the Watt Institution by his son (which ultimately became the James Watt College). Taken over by the local authority in 1974, the library now also houses the local history collection and archives of Inverclyde, and is dominated by a large seated statue in the vestibule. Watt is additionally commemorated by statuary in George Square, Glasgow and Princes Street, Edinburgh, as well as others in Birmingham, where he is also remembered by the Moonstones and a school is named in his honour.
The James Watt College has expanded from its original location to include campuses in Kilwinning (North Ayrshire), Finnart Street and The Waterfront in Greenock, and the Sports campus in Largs. Heriot-Watt University near Edinburgh was at one time the School of Arts of Edinburgh, founded in 1821 as the world's first Mechanics Institute, but to commemorate George Heriot, the 16th-century financier to King James VI and I, and James Watt, after Royal Charter the name was changed to Heriot-Watt University. Dozens of university and college buildings (chiefly of science and technology) are named after him. Matthew Boulton's home, Soho House, is now a museum, commemorating the work of both men. The University of Glasgow's Faculty of Engineering has its headquarters in the James Watt Building, which also houses the department of Mechanical Engineering and the department of Aerospace Engineering. The huge painting James Watt contemplating the steam engine by James Eckford Lauder is now owned by the National Gallery of Scotland.
There is a statue of James Watt in Piccadilly Gardens, Manchester and City Square, Leeds.
A colossal statue of Watt by Francis Legatt Chantrey was placed in Westminster Abbey, and later was moved to St. Paul's Cathedral. On the cenotaph, the inscription reads, in part, "JAMES WATT ... ENLARGED THE RESOURCES OF HIS COUNTRY, INCREASED THE POWER OF MAN, AND ROSE TO AN EMINENT PLACE AMONG THE MOST ILLUSTRIOUS FOLLOWERS OF SCIENCE AND THE REAL BENEFACTORS OF THE WORLD".
A bust of Watt is in the Hall of Heroes of the National Wallace Monument in Stirling, Scotland.
The French Navy submarine Watt was named for Watt.
Watt was the sole inventor listed on his six patents: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "James Watt FRS, FRSE (/wɒt/; 30 January 1736 (19 January 1736 OS) – 25 August 1819) was a Scottish inventor, mechanical engineer, and chemist who improved on Thomas Newcomen's 1712 Newcomen steam engine with his Watt steam engine in 1776, which was fundamental to the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution in both his native Great Britain and the rest of the world.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "While working as an instrument maker at the University of Glasgow, Watt became interested in the technology of steam engines. He realised that contemporary engine designs wasted a great deal of energy by repeatedly cooling and reheating the cylinder. Watt introduced a design enhancement, the separate condenser, which avoided this waste of energy and radically improved the power, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of steam engines. Eventually, he adapted his engine to produce rotary motion, greatly broadening its use beyond pumping water.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Watt attempted to commercialise his invention, but experienced great financial difficulties until he entered a partnership with Matthew Boulton in 1775. The new firm of Boulton and Watt was eventually highly successful and Watt became a wealthy man. In his retirement, Watt continued to develop new inventions though none was as significant as his steam engine work.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "As Watt developed the concept of horsepower, the SI unit of power, the watt, was named after him.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "James Watt was born on 19 January 1736 in Greenock, Renfrewshire, the eldest of the five surviving children of Agnes Muirhead (1703–1755) and James Watt (1698–1782). His mother came from a distinguished family, was well educated and said to be of forceful character, while his father was a shipwright, ship owner and contractor, and served as the Greenock's chief baillie in 1751. The Watt family's wealth came in part from Watt's father's trading in slaves and slave-produced goods. Watt's parents were Presbyterians and strong Covenanters, but despite his religious upbringing he later became a deist. Watt's grandfather, Thomas Watt (1642–1734), was a teacher of mathematics, surveying and navigation and baillie to the Baron of Cartsburn.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Initially, Watt was educated at home by his mother, later going on to attend Greenock Grammar School. There he exhibited an aptitude for mathematics, while Latin and Greek failed to interest him.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Watt is said to have suffered prolonged bouts of ill-health as a child and from frequent headaches all his life.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "After leaving school, Watt worked in the workshops of his father's businesses, demonstrating considerable dexterity and skill in creating engineering models. After his father suffered unsuccessful business ventures, Watt left Greenock to seek employment in Glasgow as a mathematical instrument maker.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "When he was 18, Watt's mother died and his father's health began to fail. Watt travelled to London and was able to obtain a period of training as an instrument maker for a year (1755–56), then returned to Scotland, settling in the major commercial city of Glasgow, intent on setting up his own instrument-making business. He was still very young and, having not had a full apprenticeship, did not have the usual connections via a former master to establish himself as a journeyman instrument maker.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Watt was saved from this impasse by the arrival from Jamaica of astronomical instruments bequeathed by Alexander MacFarlane to the University of Glasgow – instruments that required expert attention. Watt restored them to working order and was remunerated. These instruments were eventually installed in the Macfarlane Observatory. Subsequently, three professors offered him the opportunity to set up a small workshop within the university. It was initiated in 1757 and two of the professors, the physicist and chemist Joseph Black as well as the famed economist Adam Smith, became Watt's friends.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "At first, he worked on maintaining and repairing scientific instruments used in the university, helping with demonstrations, and expanding the production of quadrants. He made and repaired brass reflecting quadrants, parallel rulers, scales, parts for telescopes, and barometers, among other things.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "It is sometimes falsely stated that he struggled to establish himself in Glasgow due to opposition from the Trades House, but this myth has been thoroughly debunked by the historian Harry Lumsden. The records from this period are lost, but it is known that he was able to work and trade completely normally as a skilled metal worker so the Incorporation of Hammermen must have been satisfied that he met their requirements for membership. It is also known that other people in the metal trades were pursued for working without being members of the Incorporation well into the 19th century, so the rules were definitely being enforced when Watt was trading freely throughout the city.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In 1759, he formed a partnership with John Craig, an architect and businessman, to manufacture and sell a line of products including musical instruments and toys. This partnership lasted for the next six years, and employed up to 16 workers. Craig died in 1765. One employee, Alex Gardner, eventually took over the business, which lasted into the 20th century.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In 1764, Watt married his cousin Margaret (Peggy) Miller, with whom he had 5 children, 2 of whom lived to adulthood: James Jr. (1769–1848) and Margaret (1767–1796). His wife died in childbirth in 1773. In 1777, he married again, to Ann MacGregor, daughter of a Glasgow dye-maker, with whom he had 2 children: Gregory (1777–1804), who became a geologist and mineralogist, and Janet (1779–1794). Ann died in 1832. Between 1777 and 1790 he lived in Regent Place, Birmingham.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "There is a popular story that Watt was inspired to invent the steam engine by seeing a kettle boiling, the steam forcing the lid to rise and thus showing Watt the power of steam. This story is told in many forms; in some Watt is a young lad, in others he is older, sometimes it's his mother's kettle, sometimes his aunt's. Watt did not actually invent the steam engine, as the story implies, but dramatically improved the efficiency of the existing Newcomen engine by adding a separate condenser. This is difficult to explain to someone not familiar with concepts of heat and thermal efficiency. It appears that the story was created, possibly by Watt's son James Watt Jr., and persists because it is easy for children to understand and remember. In this light, it can be seen as akin to the story of Isaac Newton and the falling apple and his discovery of gravity.",
"title": "Scientific Studies and Inventions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Although it is often dismissed as a myth, the story of Watt and the kettle has a basis in fact. In trying to understand the thermodynamics of heat and steam, James Watt carried out many laboratory experiments and his diaries record that in conducting these, he used a kettle as a boiler to generate steam.",
"title": "Scientific Studies and Inventions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In 1759, Watt's friend, John Robison, called his attention to the use of steam as a source of motive power. The design of the Newcomen engine, in use for almost 50 years for pumping water from mines, had hardly changed from its first implementation. Watt began to experiment with steam, though he had never seen an operating steam engine. He tried constructing a model; it failed to work satisfactorily, but he continued his experiments and began to read everything he could about the subject. He came to realise the importance of latent heat—the thermal energy released or absorbed during a constant-temperature process—in understanding the engine, which, unknown to Watt, his friend Joseph Black had previously discovered years before. Understanding of the steam engine was in a very primitive state, for the science of thermodynamics would not be formalised for nearly another 100 years.",
"title": "Scientific Studies and Inventions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In 1763, Watt was asked to repair a model Newcomen engine belonging to the university. Even after repair, the engine barely worked. After much experimentation, Watt demonstrated that about three-quarters of the thermal energy of the steam was being consumed in heating the engine cylinder on every cycle. This energy was wasted because, later in the cycle, cold water was injected into the cylinder to condense the steam to reduce its pressure. Thus, by repeatedly heating and cooling the cylinder, the engine wasted most of its thermal energy rather than converting it into mechanical energy.",
"title": "Scientific Studies and Inventions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Watt's critical insight, arrived at in May 1765 as he crossed Glasgow Green park, was to cause the steam to condense in a separate chamber apart from the piston, and to maintain the temperature of the cylinder at the same temperature as the injected steam by surrounding it with a \"steam jacket\". Thus, very little energy was absorbed by the cylinder on each cycle, making more available to perform useful work. Watt had a working model later that same year.",
"title": "Scientific Studies and Inventions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Despite a potentially workable design, there were still substantial difficulties in constructing a full-scale engine. This required more capital, some of which came from Black. More substantial backing came from John Roebuck, the founder of the celebrated Carron Iron Works near Falkirk, with whom he now formed a partnership. Roebuck lived at Kinneil House in Bo'ness, during which time Watt worked at perfecting his steam engine in a cottage adjacent to the house. The shell of the cottage, and a very large part of one of his projects, still exist to the rear.",
"title": "Scientific Studies and Inventions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The principal difficulty was in machining the piston and cylinder. Iron workers of the day were more like blacksmiths than modern machinists, and were unable to produce the components with sufficient precision. Much capital was spent in pursuing a patent on Watt's invention. Strapped for resources, Watt was forced to take up employment—first as a surveyor, then as a civil engineer—for 8 years.",
"title": "Scientific Studies and Inventions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Roebuck went bankrupt, and Matthew Boulton, who owned the Soho Manufactory works near Birmingham, acquired his patent rights. An extension of the patent to 1800 was successfully obtained in 1775.",
"title": "Scientific Studies and Inventions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Through Boulton, Watt finally had access to some of the best iron workers in the world. The difficulty of the manufacture of a large cylinder with a tightly fitting piston was solved by John Wilkinson, who had developed precision boring techniques for cannon making at Bersham, near Wrexham, North Wales. Watt and Boulton formed a hugely successful partnership, Boulton and Watt, which lasted for the next 25 years.",
"title": "Scientific Studies and Inventions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "In 1776, the first engines were installed and working in commercial enterprises. These first engines were used to power pumps and produced only reciprocating motion to move the pump rods at the bottom of the shaft. The design was commercially successful, and for the next five years, Watt was very busy installing more engines, mostly in Cornwall, for pumping water out of mines.",
"title": "Scientific Studies and Inventions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "These early engines were not manufactured by Boulton and Watt, but were made by others according to drawings made by Watt, who served in the role of consulting engineer. The erection of the engine and its shakedown was supervised by Watt, at first, and then by men in the firm's employ. These were large machines. The first, for example, had a cylinder with a diameter of 50 inches and an overall height of about 24 feet, and required the construction of a dedicated building to house it. Boulton and Watt charged an annual payment, equal to one-third of the value of the coal saved in comparison to a Newcomen engine performing the same work.",
"title": "Scientific Studies and Inventions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The field of application for the invention was greatly widened when Boulton urged Watt to convert the reciprocating motion of the piston to produce rotational power for grinding, weaving and milling. Although a crank seemed the obvious solution to the conversion, Watt and Boulton were stymied by a patent for this, whose holder, James Pickard and his associates proposed to cross-license the external condenser. Watt adamantly opposed this and they circumvented the patent by their sun and planet gear in 1781.",
"title": "Scientific Studies and Inventions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Over the next six years, he made other improvements and modifications to the steam engine. A double-acting engine, in which the steam acted alternately on both sides of the piston, was one. He described methods for working the steam \"expansively\" (i.e., using steam at pressures well above atmospheric). A compound engine, which connected two or more engines, was described. Two more patents were granted for these in 1781 and 1782. Numerous other improvements that made for easier manufacture and installation were continually implemented. One of these included the use of the steam indicator which produced an informative plot of the pressure in the cylinder against its volume, which he kept as a trade secret. Another important invention, one which Watt was most proud of, was the parallel motion linkage, which was essential in double-acting engines as it produced the straight line motion required for the cylinder rod and pump, from the connected rocking beam, whose end moves in a circular arc. This was patented in 1784. A throttle valve to control the power of the engine, and a centrifugal governor, patented in 1788, to keep it from \"running away\" were very important. These improvements taken together produced an engine which was up to five times as fuel efficient as the Newcomen engine.",
"title": "Scientific Studies and Inventions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Because of the danger of exploding boilers, which were in a very primitive stage of development, and the ongoing issues with leaks, Watt restricted his use of high pressure steam – all of his engines used steam at near atmospheric pressure.",
"title": "Scientific Studies and Inventions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Edward Bull started constructing engines for Boulton and Watt in Cornwall in 1781. By 1792, he had started making engines of his own design, but which contained a separate condenser, and so infringed Watt's patents. Two brothers, Jabez Carter Hornblower and Jonathan Hornblower Jnr also started to build engines about the same time. Others began to modify Newcomen engines by adding a condenser, and the mine owners in Cornwall became convinced that Watt's patent could not be enforced. They started to withhold payments to Boulton and Watt, which by 1795 had fallen on hard times. Of the total £21,000 (equivalent to £2,310,000 as of 2021) owed, only £2,500 had been received. Watt was forced to go to court to enforce his claims.",
"title": "Scientific Studies and Inventions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "He first sued Bull in 1793. The jury found for Watt, but the question of whether or not the original specification of the patent was valid was left to another trial. In the meantime, injunctions were issued against the infringers, forcing their payments of the royalties to be placed in escrow. The trial on determining the validity of the specifications which was held in the following year was inconclusive, but the injunctions remained in force and the infringers, except for Jonathan Hornblower, all began to settle their cases. Hornblower was soon brought to trial in 1799, and the verdict of the four was decisively in favour of Watt. Their friend John Wilkinson, who had solved the problem of boring an accurate cylinder, was a particularly grievous case. He had erected about 20 engines without Boulton's and Watts' knowledge. They finally agreed to settle the infringement in 1796. Boulton and Watt never collected all that was owed them, but the disputes were all settled directly between the parties or through arbitration. These trials were extremely costly in both money and time, but ultimately were successful for the firm.",
"title": "Scientific Studies and Inventions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Before 1780, there was no good method for making copies of letters or drawings. The only method sometimes used was a mechanical one using multiple linked pens. Watt at first experimented with improving this method, but soon gave up on this approach because it was so cumbersome. He instead decided to try to physically transfer ink from the front of the original to the back of another sheet, moistened with a solvent, and pressed to the original. The second sheet had to be thin, so that the ink could be seen through it when the copy was held up to the light, thus reproducing the original exactly.",
"title": "Scientific Studies and Inventions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Watt started to develop the process in 1779, and made many experiments to formulate the ink, select the thin paper, to devise a method for wetting the special thin paper, and to make a press suitable for applying the correct pressure to effect the transfer. All of these required much experimentation, but he soon had enough success to patent the process a year later. Watt formed another partnership with Boulton (who provided financing) and James Keir (to manage the business) in a firm called James Watt and Co. The perfection of the invention required much more development work before it could be routinely used by others, but this was carried out over the next few years. Boulton and Watt gave up their shares to their sons in 1794. It became a commercial success and was widely used in offices even into the 20th century.",
"title": "Scientific Studies and Inventions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "From an early age, Watt was very interested in chemistry. In late 1786, while in Paris, he witnessed an experiment by Claude Louis Berthollet in which he reacted hydrochloric acid with manganese dioxide to produce chlorine. He had already found that an aqueous solution of chlorine could bleach textiles, and had published his findings, which aroused great interest among many potential rivals. When Watt returned to Britain, he began experiments along these lines with hopes of finding a commercially viable process. He discovered that a mixture of salt, manganese dioxide and sulphuric acid could produce chlorine, which Watt believed might be a cheaper method. He passed the chlorine into a weak solution of alkali, and obtained a turbid solution that appeared to have good bleaching properties. He soon communicated these results to James McGrigor, his father-in-law, who was a bleacher in Glasgow. Otherwise, he tried to keep his method a secret.",
"title": "Scientific Studies and Inventions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "With McGrigor and his wife Annie, he started to scale up the process, and in March 1788, McGrigor was able to bleach 1,500 yards (4,500 feet) of cloth to his satisfaction. About this time, Berthollet discovered the salt and sulphuric acid process, and published it, so it became public knowledge. Many others began to experiment with improving the process, which still had many shortcomings, not the least of which was the problem of transporting the liquid product. Watt's rivals soon overtook him in developing the process, and he dropped out of the race. It was not until 1799, when Charles Tennant patented a process for producing solid bleaching powder (calcium hypochlorite) that it became a commercial success.",
"title": "Scientific Studies and Inventions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "By 1794, Watt had been chosen by Thomas Beddoes to manufacture apparatuses to produce, clean and store gases for use in the new Pneumatic Institution at Hotwells in Bristol. Watt continued to experiment with various gases, but by 1797, the medical uses for the \"factitious airs\" (artificial gases) had come to a dead end.",
"title": "Scientific Studies and Inventions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Watt combined theoretical knowledge of science with the ability to apply it practically. Chemist Humphry Davy said of him, \"Those who consider James Watt only as a great practical mechanic form a very erroneous idea of his character; he was equally distinguished as a natural philosopher and a chemist, and his inventions demonstrate his profound knowledge of those sciences, and that peculiar characteristic of genius, the union of them for practical application\".",
"title": "Scientific Studies and Inventions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "He was greatly respected by other prominent men of the Industrial Revolution. He was an important member of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, and was a much sought-after conversationalist and companion, always interested in expanding his horizons. His personal relationships with his friends and business partners were always congenial and long-lasting.",
"title": "Scientific Studies and Inventions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "According to Lord Liverpool (Prime Minister of the UK),",
"title": "Scientific Studies and Inventions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "A more excllent and amikable man in all the relations of life I believe never existed.",
"title": "Scientific Studies and Inventions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Watt was a prolific correspondent. During his years in Cornwall, he wrote long letters to Boulton several times per week. He was averse to publishing his results in, for example, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society however, and instead preferred to communicate his ideas in patents. He was an excellent draughtsman.",
"title": "Scientific Studies and Inventions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "He was a rather poor businessman, and especially hated bargaining and negotiating terms with those who sought to use the steam engine. In a letter to William Small in 1772, Watt confessed that \"he would rather face a loaded cannon than settle an account or make a bargain.\" Until he retired, he was always very concerned about his financial affairs, and was something of a worrier. His health was often poor and he suffered frequent nervous headaches and depression. When he retired in 1800, he became a rich enough man to pass the business on to his sons.",
"title": "Scientific Studies and Inventions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "At first, the partnership made the drawings and specifications for the engines, and supervised the work to erect them on the customers' property. They produced almost none of the parts themselves. Watt did most of his work at his home in Harper's Hill in Birmingham, while Boulton worked at the Soho Manufactory. Gradually, the partners began to actually manufacture more and more of the parts, and by 1795, they purchased a property about a mile away from the Soho Manufactory, on the banks of the Birmingham Canal, to establish a new foundry for the manufacture of the engines. The Soho Foundry formally opened in 1796 at a time when Watt's sons, Gregory and James Jr. were heavily involved in the management of the enterprise. In 1800, the year of Watt's retirement, the firm made a total of 41 engines.",
"title": "Scientific Studies and Inventions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Watt retired in 1800, the same year that his fundamental patent and partnership with Boulton expired. The famous partnership was transferred to the men's sons, Matthew Robinson Boulton and James Watt Jr.. Longtime firm engineer William Murdoch was soon made a partner and the firm prospered.",
"title": "Scientific Studies and Inventions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Watt continued to invent other things before and during his semi-retirement. Within his home in Handsworth, Staffordshire, Watt made use of a garret room as a workshop, and it was here that he worked on many of his inventions. Among other things, he invented and constructed machines for copying sculptures and medallions which worked very well, but which he never patented. One of the first sculptures he produced with the machine was a small head of his old professor friend Adam Smith. He maintained his interest in civil engineering and was a consultant on several significant projects. He proposed, for example, a method for constructing a flexible pipe to be used for pumping water under the River Clyde at Glasgow.",
"title": "Scientific Studies and Inventions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "He and his second wife travelled to France and Germany, and he purchased an estate in mid-Wales at Doldowlod House, one mile south of Llanwrthwl, which he much improved.",
"title": "Scientific Studies and Inventions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "In 1816, he took a trip on the paddle-steamer Comet, a product of his inventions, to revisit his home town of Greenock.",
"title": "Scientific Studies and Inventions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "He died on 25 August 1819 at his home \"Heathfield Hall\" near Handsworth in Staffordshire (now part of Birmingham) at the age of 83. He was buried on 2 September in the graveyard of St Mary's Church, Handsworth. The church has since been extended and his grave is now inside the church.",
"title": "Scientific Studies and Inventions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "On 16 July 1764, Watt married his cousin Margaret Miller (d. 1773). They had two children, Margaret (1767–1796) and James (1769–1848). In 1791, their daughter married James Miller. In September 1773, while Watt was working in the Scottish Highlands, he learned that his wife, who was pregnant with their third child, was seriously ill. He immediately returned home but found that she had died and their child was stillborn.",
"title": "Family"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "In 1775, he married Ann MacGregor (d. 1832).",
"title": "Family"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "He was Initiated into Scottish Freemasonry in The Glasgow Royal Arch Lodge, No. 77, in 1763. The Lodge ceased to exist in 1810. A Masonic Lodge was named after him in his home town of Glasgow – Lodge James Watt, No. 1215.",
"title": "Freemasonry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "William Murdoch joined Boulton and Watt in 1777. At first, he worked in the pattern shop in Soho, but soon he was erecting engines in Cornwall. He became an important part of the firm and made many contributions to its success including important inventions of his own.",
"title": "Murdoch's contributions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "John Griffiths, who wrote a biography of him in 1992, has argued that Watt's discouragement of Murdoch's work with high-pressure steam on his steam road locomotive experiments delayed its development: Watt rightly believed that boilers of the time would be unsafe at higher pressures.",
"title": "Murdoch's contributions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Watt patented the application of the sun and planet gear to steam in 1781 and a steam locomotive in 1784, both of which have strong claims to have been invented by Murdoch. The patent was never contested by Murdoch, however, and Boulton and Watt's firm continued to use the sun and planet gear in their rotative engines, even long after the patent for the crank expired in 1794. Murdoch was made a partner of the firm in 1810, where he remained until his retirement 20 years later at the age of 76.",
"title": "Murdoch's contributions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "As one author states, James Watt's improvements to the steam engine \"converted it from a prime mover of marginal efficiency into the mechanical workhorse of the Industrial Revolution\".",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Watt was much honoured in his own time. In 1784, he was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and was elected as a member of the Batavian Society for Experimental Philosophy, of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in 1787. In 1789, he was elected to the elite group, the Smeatonian Society of Civil Engineers. In 1806, he was conferred the honorary Doctor of Laws by the University of Glasgow. The French Academy elected him a Corresponding Member and he was made a Foreign Associate in 1814.",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The watt is named after James Watt for his contributions to the development of the steam engine, and was adopted by the Second Congress of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1889 and by the 11th General Conference on Weights and Measures in 1960 as the unit of power incorporated in the International System of Units (or \"SI\").",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "On 29 May 2009, the Bank of England announced that Boulton and Watt would appear on a new £50 note. The design is the first to feature a dual portrait on a Bank of England note, and presents the two industrialists side by side with images of Watt's steam engine and Boulton's Soho Manufactory. Quotes attributed to each of the men are inscribed on the note: \"I sell here, sir, what all the world desires to have—POWER\" (Boulton) and \"I can think of nothing else but this machine\" (Watt). The inclusion of Watt is the second time that a Scot has featured on a Bank of England note (the first was Adam Smith on the 2007 issue £20 note). In September 2011, it was announced that the notes would enter circulation on 2 November.",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "In 2011, he was one of seven inaugural inductees to the Scottish Engineering Hall of Fame.",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Watt was buried in the grounds of St. Mary's Church, Handsworth, in Birmingham. Later expansion of the church, over his grave, means that his tomb is now buried inside the church.",
"title": "Memorials"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "The garret room workshop that Watt used in his retirement was left, locked and untouched, until 1853, when it was first viewed by his biographer J. P. Muirhead. Thereafter, it was occasionally visited, but left untouched, as a kind of shrine. A proposal to have it transferred to the Patent Office came to nothing. When the house was due to be demolished in 1924, the room and all its contents were presented to the Science Museum, where it was recreated in its entirety. It remained on display for visitors for many years, but was walled-off when the gallery it was housed in closed. The workshop remained intact, and preserved, and in March 2011 was put on public display as part of a new permanent Science Museum exhibition, \"James Watt and our world\".",
"title": "Memorials"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "The approximate location of James Watt's birth in Greenock is commemorated by a statue. Other memorials in Greenock include street names and the Watt Memorial Library, which was begun in 1816 with Watt's donation of scientific books, and developed as part of the Watt Institution by his son (which ultimately became the James Watt College). Taken over by the local authority in 1974, the library now also houses the local history collection and archives of Inverclyde, and is dominated by a large seated statue in the vestibule. Watt is additionally commemorated by statuary in George Square, Glasgow and Princes Street, Edinburgh, as well as others in Birmingham, where he is also remembered by the Moonstones and a school is named in his honour.",
"title": "Memorials"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "The James Watt College has expanded from its original location to include campuses in Kilwinning (North Ayrshire), Finnart Street and The Waterfront in Greenock, and the Sports campus in Largs. Heriot-Watt University near Edinburgh was at one time the School of Arts of Edinburgh, founded in 1821 as the world's first Mechanics Institute, but to commemorate George Heriot, the 16th-century financier to King James VI and I, and James Watt, after Royal Charter the name was changed to Heriot-Watt University. Dozens of university and college buildings (chiefly of science and technology) are named after him. Matthew Boulton's home, Soho House, is now a museum, commemorating the work of both men. The University of Glasgow's Faculty of Engineering has its headquarters in the James Watt Building, which also houses the department of Mechanical Engineering and the department of Aerospace Engineering. The huge painting James Watt contemplating the steam engine by James Eckford Lauder is now owned by the National Gallery of Scotland.",
"title": "Memorials"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "There is a statue of James Watt in Piccadilly Gardens, Manchester and City Square, Leeds.",
"title": "Memorials"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "A colossal statue of Watt by Francis Legatt Chantrey was placed in Westminster Abbey, and later was moved to St. Paul's Cathedral. On the cenotaph, the inscription reads, in part, \"JAMES WATT ... ENLARGED THE RESOURCES OF HIS COUNTRY, INCREASED THE POWER OF MAN, AND ROSE TO AN EMINENT PLACE AMONG THE MOST ILLUSTRIOUS FOLLOWERS OF SCIENCE AND THE REAL BENEFACTORS OF THE WORLD\".",
"title": "Memorials"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "A bust of Watt is in the Hall of Heroes of the National Wallace Monument in Stirling, Scotland.",
"title": "Memorials"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "The French Navy submarine Watt was named for Watt.",
"title": "Memorials"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Watt was the sole inventor listed on his six patents:",
"title": "Patents"
}
]
| James Watt was a Scottish inventor, mechanical engineer, and chemist who improved on Thomas Newcomen's 1712 Newcomen steam engine with his Watt steam engine in 1776, which was fundamental to the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution in both his native Great Britain and the rest of the world. While working as an instrument maker at the University of Glasgow, Watt became interested in the technology of steam engines. He realised that contemporary engine designs wasted a great deal of energy by repeatedly cooling and reheating the cylinder. Watt introduced a design enhancement, the separate condenser, which avoided this waste of energy and radically improved the power, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of steam engines. Eventually, he adapted his engine to produce rotary motion, greatly broadening its use beyond pumping water. Watt attempted to commercialise his invention, but experienced great financial difficulties until he entered a partnership with Matthew Boulton in 1775. The new firm of Boulton and Watt was eventually highly successful and Watt became a wealthy man. In his retirement, Watt continued to develop new inventions though none was as significant as his steam engine work. As Watt developed the concept of horsepower, the SI unit of power, the watt, was named after him. | 2001-09-30T18:12:36Z | 2023-12-15T00:56:02Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Watt |
16,143 | John Locke | John Locke (/lɒk/; 29 August 1632 – 28 October 1704) was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the "father of liberalism". Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, Locke is equally important to social contract theory. His work greatly affected the development of epistemology and political philosophy. His writings influenced Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American Revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence. Internationally, Locke's political-legal principles continue to have a profound influence on the theory and practice of limited representative government and the protection of basic rights and freedoms under the rule of law.
Locke's theory of mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of identity and the self, figuring prominently in the work of later philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant.
He postulated that, at birth, the mind was a blank slate, or tabula rasa. Contrary to Cartesian philosophy based on pre-existing concepts, he maintained that we are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience derived from sense perception, a concept now known as empiricism.
Locke was born on 29 August 1632, in a small thatched cottage by the church in Wrington, Somerset, about 12 miles from Bristol. He was baptised the same day, as both of his parents were Puritans. Locke's father, also named John, was an attorney who served as clerk to the Justices of the Peace in Chew Magna and as a captain of cavalry for the Parliamentarian forces during the early part of the English Civil War. His mother was Agnes Keene. Soon after Locke's birth, the family moved to the market town of Pensford, about seven miles south of Bristol, where Locke grew up in a rural Tudor house in Belluton.
In 1647, Locke was sent to the prestigious Westminster School in London under the sponsorship of Alexander Popham, a member of Parliament and John Sr.'s former commander. At the age of 16 he was at school just half a mile away from the execution of Charles I; however, the boys were not allowed to go and watch. After completing studies at Westminster, he was admitted to Christ Church, Oxford, in the autumn of 1652 at the age of 20. The dean of the college at the time was John Owen, vice-chancellor of the university. Although a capable student, Locke was irritated by the undergraduate curriculum of the time. He found the works of modern philosophers, such as René Descartes, more interesting than the classical material taught at the university. Through his friend Richard Lower, whom he knew from the Westminster School, Locke was introduced to medicine and the experimental philosophy being pursued at other universities and in the Royal Society, of which he eventually became a member.
Locke was awarded a bachelor's degree in February 1656 and a master's degree in June 1658. He obtained a bachelor of medicine in February 1675, having studied the subject extensively during his time at Oxford and, in addition to Lower, worked with such noted scientists and thinkers as Robert Boyle, Thomas Willis and Robert Hooke. In 1666, he met Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Ashley, who had come to Oxford seeking treatment for a liver infection. Ashley was impressed with Locke and persuaded him to become part of his retinue.
Locke had been looking for a career and in 1667 moved into Ashley's home at Exeter House in London, to serve as his personal physician. In London, Locke resumed his medical studies under the tutelage of Thomas Sydenham. Sydenham had a major effect on Locke's natural philosophical thinking—an effect that would become evident in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
Locke's medical knowledge was put to the test when Ashley's liver infection became life-threatening. Locke coordinated the advice of several physicians and was probably instrumental in persuading Ashley to undergo surgery (then life-threatening in itself) to remove the cyst. Ashley survived and prospered, crediting Locke with saving his life.
During this time, Locke served as Secretary of the Board of Trade and Plantations and Secretary to the Lords Proprietors of Carolina, which helped to shape his ideas on international trade and economics.
Ashley, as a founder of the Whig movement, exerted great influence on Locke's political ideas. Locke became involved in politics when Ashley became Lord Chancellor in 1672 (Ashley being created 1st Earl of Shaftesbury in 1673). Following Shaftesbury's fall from favour in 1675, Locke spent some time travelling across France as a tutor and medical attendant to Caleb Banks. He returned to England in 1679 when Shaftesbury's political fortunes took a brief positive turn. Around this time, most likely at Shaftesbury's prompting, Locke composed the bulk of the Two Treatises of Government. While it was once thought that Locke wrote the Treatises to defend the Glorious Revolution of 1688, recent scholarship has shown that the work was composed well before this date. The work is now viewed as a more general argument against absolute monarchy (particularly as espoused by Robert Filmer and Thomas Hobbes) and for individual consent as the basis of political legitimacy. Although Locke was associated with the influential Whigs, his ideas about natural rights and government are today considered quite revolutionary for that period in English history.
Locke fled to the Netherlands in 1683, under strong suspicion of involvement in the Rye House Plot, although there is little evidence to suggest that he was directly involved in the scheme. The philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein argues that during his five years in Holland, Locke chose his friends "from among the same freethinking members of dissenting Protestant groups as Spinoza's small group of loyal confidants. [Baruch Spinoza had died in 1677.] Locke almost certainly met men in Amsterdam who spoke of the ideas of that renegade Jew who... insisted on identifying himself through his religion of reason alone." While she says that "Locke's strong empiricist tendencies" would have "disinclined him to read a grandly metaphysical work such as Spinoza's Ethics, in other ways he was deeply receptive to Spinoza's ideas, most particularly to the rationalist's well thought out argument for political and religious tolerance and the necessity of the separation of church and state." In the Netherlands, Locke had time to return to his writing, spending a great deal of time working on the Essay Concerning Human Understanding and composing the Letter on Toleration.
Locke did not return home until after the Glorious Revolution. Locke accompanied Mary II back to England in 1689. The bulk of Locke's publishing took place upon his return from exile—his aforementioned Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration all appearing in quick succession.
Locke's close friend Lady Masham invited him to join her at Otes, the Mashams' country house in Essex. Although his time there was marked by variable health from asthma attacks, he nevertheless became an intellectual hero of the Whigs. During this period he discussed matters with such figures as John Dryden and Isaac Newton.
He died on 28 October 1704, and is buried in the churchyard of the village of High Laver, east of Harlow in Essex, where he had lived in the household of Sir Francis Masham since 1691. Locke never married nor had children.
Events that happened during Locke's lifetime include the English Restoration, the Great Plague of London, the Great Fire of London, and the Glorious Revolution. He did not see the Act of Union of 1707, but the thrones of England and Scotland were held in personal union throughout his lifetime. Constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy were in their infancy during Locke's time.
In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, Locke's Two Treatises were rarely cited. Historian Julian Hoppit said of the book "except among some Whigs, even as a contribution to the intense debate of the 1690s it made little impression and was generally ignored until 1703 (though in Oxford in 1695 it was reported to have made 'a great noise')." John Kenyon, in his study of British political debate from 1689 to 1720, has remarked that Locke's theories were "mentioned so rarely in the early stages of the [Glorious] Revolution, up to 1692, and even less thereafter, unless it was to heap abuse on them" and that "no one, including most Whigs, [was] ready for the idea of a notional or abstract contract of the kind adumbrated by Locke". In contrast, Kenyon adds that Algernon Sidney's Discourses Concerning Government were "certainly much more influential than Locke's Two Treatises."
In the 50 years after Queen Anne's death in 1714, the Two Treatises were reprinted only once (except in the collected works of Locke). However, with the rise of American resistance to British taxation, the Second Treatise of Government gained a new readership; it was frequently cited in the debates in both America and Britain. The first American printing occurred in 1773 in Boston.
Locke exercised a profound influence on political philosophy, in particular on modern liberalism. Michael Zuckert has argued that Locke launched liberalism by tempering Hobbesian absolutism and clearly separating the realms of Church and State. He had a strong influence on Voltaire, who called him "le sage Locke". His arguments concerning liberty and the social contract later influenced the written works of Thomas Jefferson. One passage from the Second Treatise is reproduced verbatim in the Declaration of Independence, the reference to a "long train of abuses". Concerning Locke, Thomas Jefferson wrote:
Bacon, Locke and Newton… I consider them as the three greatest men that have ever lived, without any exception, and as having laid the foundation of those superstructures which have been raised in the Physical and Moral sciences.
However, Locke's influence may have been even more profound in the realm of epistemology. Locke redefined subjectivity, or self, leading intellectual historians such as Charles Taylor and Jerrold Seigel to argue that Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689/90) marks the beginning of the modern Western conception of the self.
Locke's theory of association heavily influenced the subject matter of modern psychology. At the time, Locke's recognition of two types of ideas, simple and complex—and, more importantly, their interaction through association—inspired other philosophers, such as David Hume and George Berkeley, to revise and expand this theory and apply it to explain how humans gain knowledge in the physical world.
Locke thought the state's borders and the functioning and enforcement of the existence of the state and its constitution were metaphysically tied to "the natural rights of the individual", and this inspired future liberal politicians and philosophers.
Writing his Letters Concerning Toleration (1689–1692) in the aftermath of the European wars of religion, Locke formulated a classic reasoning for religious tolerance, in which three arguments are central:
With regard to his position on religious tolerance, Locke was influenced by Baptist theologians like John Smyth and Thomas Helwys, who had published tracts demanding freedom of conscience in the early 17th century. Baptist theologian Roger Williams founded the colony of Rhode Island in 1636, where he combined a democratic constitution with unlimited religious freedom. His tract, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience (1644), which was widely read in the mother country, was a passionate plea for absolute religious freedom and the total separation of church and state. Freedom of conscience had had high priority on the theological, philosophical, and political agenda, as Martin Luther refused to recant his beliefs before the Diet of the Holy Roman Empire at Worms in 1521, unless he would be proved false by the Bible.
Locke's views on slavery were multifaceted and complex. Although he wrote against slavery in general, Locke was an investor and beneficiary of the slave-trading Royal Africa Company. In addition, while secretary to the Earl of Shaftesbury, Locke participated in drafting the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which established a quasi-feudal aristocracy and gave Carolinian planters absolute power over their enslaved chattel property; the constitutions pledged that "every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves". Philosopher Martin Cohen notes that Locke, as secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations and a member of the Board of Trade, was "one of just half a dozen men who created and supervised both the colonies and their iniquitous systems of servitude". According to American historian James Farr, Locke never expressed any thoughts concerning his contradictory opinions regarding slavery, which Farr ascribes to his personal involvement in the slave trade. Locke's positions on slavery have been described as hypocritical, and laying the foundation for the Founding Fathers to hold similarly contradictory thoughts regarding freedom and slavery.
Historian Holly Brewer has argued, however, that Locke's role in the Constitution of Carolina has been exaggerated and that he was merely paid to revise and make copies of a document that had already been partially written before he became involved; she compares Locke's role to a lawyer writing a will. She further says that Locke was paid in Royal African Company stock in lieu of money for his work as a secretary for a governmental sub-committee, and that he sold the stock after a few years. Brewer likewise argues that Locke actively worked to undermine slavery in Virginia while heading a Board of Trade created by William of Orange following the Glorious Revolution. He specifically attacked colonial policy granting land to slave owners and encouraged the baptism and Christian education of the children of enslaved Africans to undercut a major justification of slavery—that they were heathens who possessed no rights. In his Two Treatises of Government, Locke provided a justification for slavery that could never actually be met, thus rendering all forms of slavery as it actually existed invalid. Moreover, as one may not submit to slavery, in Locke's view there is a moral injunction to attempt to throw off and escape it whenever it looms.
Locke also supported child labour, which was an intrinsic part of all pre-industrial societies. In his "Essay on the Poor Law", he turns to the education of the poor; he laments that "the children of labouring people are an ordinary burden to the parish, and are usually maintained in idleness, so that their labour also is generally lost to the public till they are 12 or 14 years old". He suggests, therefore, that "working schools" be set up in each parish in England for poor children so that they will be "from infancy [three years old] inured to work". He goes on to outline the economics of these schools, arguing not only that they will be profitable for the parish, but also that they will instil a good work ethic in the children.
Locke's political theory was founded upon that of social contract. Unlike Thomas Hobbes, Locke believed that human nature is characterised by reason and tolerance. Like Hobbes, however, Locke believed that human nature allows people to be selfish. This is apparent with the introduction of currency. In a natural state, all people were equal and independent, and everyone had a natural right to defend his "life, health, liberty, or possessions". Most scholars trace the phrase "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" in the American Declaration of Independence to Locke's theory of rights, although other origins have been suggested.
Like Hobbes, Locke assumed that the sole right to defend in the state of nature was not enough, so people established a civil society to resolve conflicts in a civil way with help from government in a state of society. However, Locke never refers to Hobbes by name and may instead have been responding to other writers of the day. Locke also advocated governmental separation of powers and believed that revolution is not only a right but an obligation in some circumstances. These ideas would come to have profound influence on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.
According to Locke, unused property is wasteful and an offence against nature, but, with the introduction of "durable" goods, men could exchange their excessive perishable goods for those which would last longer and thus not offend the natural law. In his view, the introduction of money marked the culmination of this process, making possible the unlimited accumulation of property without causing waste through spoilage. He also includes gold or silver as money because they may be "hoarded up without injury to anyone", as they do not spoil or decay in the hands of the possessor. In his view, the introduction of money eliminates limits to accumulation. Locke stresses that inequality has come about by tacit agreement on the use of money, not by the social contract establishing civil society or the law of land regulating property. Locke is aware of a problem posed by unlimited accumulation, but does not consider it his task. He just implies that government would function to moderate the conflict between the unlimited accumulation of property and a more nearly equal distribution of wealth; he does not identify which principles that government should apply to solve this problem. However, not all elements of his thought form a consistent whole. For example, the labour theory of value in the Two Treatises of Government stands side by side with the demand-and-supply theory of value developed in a letter he wrote titled Some Considerations on the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest and the Raising of the Value of Money. Moreover, Locke anchors property in labour but, in the end, upholds unlimited accumulation of wealth.
Locke's general theory of value and price is a supply-and-demand theory, set out in a letter to a member of parliament in 1691, titled Some Considerations on the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest and the Raising of the Value of Money. In it, he refers to supply as quantity and demand as rent: "The price of any commodity rises or falls by the proportion of the number of buyers and sellers" and "that which regulates the price…[of goods] is nothing else but their quantity in proportion to their rent."
The quantity theory of money forms a special case of this general theory. His idea is based on "money answers all things" (Ecclesiastes) or "rent of money is always sufficient, or more than enough" and "varies very little". Locke concludes that, as far as money is concerned, the demand for it is exclusively regulated by its quantity, regardless of whether the demand is unlimited or constant. He also investigates the determinants of demand and supply. For supply, he explains the value of goods as based on their scarcity and ability to be exchanged and consumed. He explains demand for goods as based on their ability to yield a flow of income. Locke develops an early theory of capitalisation, such as of land, which has value because "by its constant production of saleable commodities it brings in a certain yearly income". He considers the demand for money as almost the same as demand for goods or land: it depends on whether money is wanted as medium of exchange. As a medium of exchange, he states, "money is capable by exchange to procure us the necessaries or conveniences of life" and, for loanable funds, "it comes to be of the same nature with land by yielding a certain yearly income…or interest".
Locke distinguishes two functions of money: as a counter to measure value, and as a pledge to lay claim to goods. He believes that silver and gold, as opposed to paper money, are the appropriate currency for international transactions. Silver and gold, he says, are treated to have equal value by all of humanity and can thus be treated as a pledge by anyone, while the value of paper money is only valid under the government which issues it.
Locke argues that a country should seek a favourable balance of trade, lest it fall behind other countries and suffer a loss in its trade. Since the world money stock grows constantly, a country must constantly seek to enlarge its own stock. Locke develops his theory of foreign exchanges, in addition to commodity movements, there are also movements in country stock of money, and movements of capital determine exchange rates. He considers the latter less significant and less volatile than commodity movements. As for a country's money stock, if it is large relative to that of other countries, he says it will cause the country's exchange to rise above par, as an export balance would do.
He also prepares estimates of the cash requirements for different economic groups (landholders, labourers, and brokers). In each group he posits that the cash requirements are closely related to the length of the pay period. He argues the brokers—the middlemen—whose activities enlarge the monetary circuit and whose profits eat into the earnings of labourers and landholders, have a negative influence on both personal and the public economy to which they supposedly contribute.
Locke uses the concept of property in both broad and narrow terms: broadly, it covers a wide range of human interests and aspirations; more particularly, it refers to material goods. He argues that property is a natural right that is derived from labour. In Chapter V of his Second Treatise, Locke argues that the individual ownership of goods and property is justified by the labour exerted to produce such goods—"at least where there is enough [land], and as good, left in common for others" (para. 27)—or to use property to produce goods beneficial to human society.
Locke states in his Second Treatise that nature on its own provides little of value to society, implying that the labour expended in the creation of goods gives them their value. From this premise, understood as a labour theory of value, Locke developed a labour theory of property, whereby ownership of property is created by the application of labour. In addition, he believed that property precedes government and government cannot "dispose of the estates of the subjects arbitrarily". Karl Marx later critiqued Locke's theory of property in his own social theory.
Locke defines the self as "that conscious thinking thing, (whatever substance, made up of whether spiritual, or material, simple, or compounded, it matters not) which is sensible, or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is concerned for itself, as far as that consciousness extends". He does not, however, wholly ignore "substance", writing that "the body too goes to the making the man".
In his Essay, Locke explains the gradual unfolding of this conscious mind. Arguing against both the Augustinian view of man as originally sinful and the Cartesian position, which holds that man innately knows basic logical propositions, Locke posits an 'empty mind', a tabula rasa, which is shaped by experience; sensations and reflections being the two sources of all of our ideas. He states in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding:
This source of ideas every man has wholly within himself; and though it be not sense, as having nothing to do with external objects, yet it is very like it, and might properly enough be called 'internal sense.'
Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education is an outline on how to educate this mind. Drawing on thoughts expressed in letters written to Mary Clarke and her husband about their son, he expresses the belief that education makes the man—or, more fundamentally, that the mind is an "empty cabinet":
I think I may say that of all the men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education.
Locke also wrote that "the little and almost insensible impressions on our tender infancies have very important and lasting consequences". He argues that the "associations of ideas" that one makes when young are more important than those made later because they are the foundation of the self; they are, put differently, what first mark the tabula rasa. In his Essay, in which both these concepts are introduced, Locke warns, for example, against letting "a foolish maid" convince a child that "goblins and sprites" are associated with the night, for "darkness shall ever afterwards bring with it those frightful ideas, and they shall be so joined, that he can no more bear the one than the other".
This theory came to be called associationism, going on to strongly influence 18th-century thought, particularly educational theory, as nearly every educational writer warned parents not to allow their children to develop negative associations. It also led to the development of psychology and other new disciplines with David Hartley's attempt to discover a biological mechanism for associationism in his Observations on Man (1749).
Locke was critical of Descartes's version of the dream argument, with Locke making the counter-argument that people cannot have physical pain in dreams as they do in waking life.
Some scholars have seen Locke's political convictions as being based from his religious beliefs. Locke's religious trajectory began in Calvinist trinitarianism, but by the time of the Reflections (1695) Locke was advocating not just Socinian views on tolerance but also Socinian Christology. However Wainwright (1987) notes that in the posthumously published Paraphrase (1707) Locke's interpretation of one verse, Ephesians 1:10, is markedly different from that of Socinians like Biddle, and may indicate that near the end of his life Locke returned nearer to an Arian position, thereby accepting Christ's pre-existence. Locke was at times not sure about the subject of original sin, so he was accused of Socinianism, Arianism, or Deism. Locke argued that the idea that "all Adam's Posterity [are] doomed to Eternal Infinite Punishment, for the Transgression of Adam" was "little consistent with the Justice or Goodness of the Great and Infinite God", leading Eric Nelson to associate him with Pelagian ideas. However, he did not deny the reality of evil. Man was capable of waging unjust wars and committing crimes. Criminals had to be punished, even with the death penalty.
With regard to the Bible, Locke was very conservative. He retained the doctrine of the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures. The miracles were proof of the divine nature of the biblical message. Locke was convinced that the entire content of the Bible was in agreement with human reason (The Reasonableness of Christianity, 1695). Although Locke was an advocate of tolerance, he urged the authorities not to tolerate atheism, because he thought the denial of God's existence would undermine the social order and lead to chaos. That excluded all atheistic varieties of philosophy and all attempts to deduce ethics and natural law from purely secular premises. In Locke's opinion the cosmological argument was valid and proved God's existence. His political thought was based on Protestant Christian views. Additionally, Locke advocated a sense of piety out of gratitude to God for giving reason to men.
Locke's concept of man started with the belief in creation. Like philosophers Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf, Locke equated natural law with the biblical revelation. Locke derived the fundamental concepts of his political theory from biblical texts, in particular from Genesis 1 and 2 (creation), the Decalogue, the Golden Rule, the teachings of Jesus, and the letters of Paul the Apostle. The Decalogue puts a person's life, reputation and property under God's protection.
Locke's philosophy on freedom is also derived from the Bible. Locke derived from the Bible basic human equality (including equality of the sexes), the starting point of the theological doctrine of Imago Dei. To Locke, one of the consequences of the principle of equality was that all humans were created equally free and therefore governments needed the consent of the governed. Locke compared the English monarchy's rule over the British people to Adam's rule over Eve in Genesis, which was appointed by God.
Following Locke's philosophy, the American Declaration of Independence founded human rights partially on the biblical belief in creation. Locke's doctrine that governments need the consent of the governed is also central to the Declaration of Independence.
Locke was an assiduous book collector and notetaker throughout his life. By his death in 1704, Locke had amassed a library of more than 3,000 books, a significant number in the seventeenth century. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Locke took care to catalogue and preserve his library, and his will made specific provisions for how his library was to be distributed after his death. Locke's will offered Lady Masham the choice of "any four folios, eight quartos and twenty books of less volume, which she shall choose out of the books in my Library." Locke also gave six titles to his "good friend" Anthony Collins, but Locke bequeathed the majority of his collection to his cousin Peter King (later Lord King) and to Lady Masham's son, Francis Cudworth Masham.
Francis Masham was promised one "moiety" (half) of Locke's library when he reached "the age of one and twenty years." The other "moiety" of Locke's books, along with his manuscripts, passed to his cousin King. Over the next two centuries, the Masham portion of Locke's library was dispersed. The manuscripts and books left to King, however, remained with King's descendants (later the Earls of Lovelace), until most of the collection was bought by the Bodleian Library, Oxford in 1947. Another portion of the books Locke left to King was discovered by the collector and philanthropist Paul Mellon in 1951. Mellon supplemented this discovery with books from Locke's library which he bought privately, and in 1978, he transferred his collection to the Bodleian. The holdings in the Locke Room at the Bodleian have been a valuable resource for scholars interested in Locke, his philosophy, practices for information management, and the history of the book.
Many of the books still contain Locke's signature, which he often made on the pastedowns of his books. Many also include Locke's marginalia.
The printed books in Locke's library reflected his various intellectual interests as well as his movements at different stages of his life. Locke travelled extensively in France and the Netherlands during the 1670s and 1680s, and during this time he acquired many books from the continent. Only half of the books in Locke's library were printed in England, while close to 40% came from France and the Netherlands. These books cover a wide range of subjects. According to John Harrison and Peter Laslett, the largest genres in Locke's library were theology (23.8% of books), medicine (11.1%), politics and law (10.7%), and classical literature (10.1%). The Bodleian library currently holds more than 800 of the books from Locke's library. These include Locke's copies of works by several of the most influential figures of the seventeenth century, including
In addition to books owned by Locke, the Bodleian also possesses more than 100 manuscripts related to Locke or written in his hand. Like the books in Locke's library, these manuscripts display a range of interests and provide different windows into Locke's activity and relationships. Several of the manuscripts include letters to and from acquaintances like Peter King (MS Locke b. 6) and Nicolas Toinard (MS Locke c. 45). MS Locke f. 1–10 contain Locke's journals for most years between 1675 and 1704. Some of the most significant manuscripts include early drafts of Locke's writings, such as his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (MS Locke f. 26). The Bodleian also holds a copy of Robert Boyle's General History of the Air with corrections and notes Locke made while preparing Boyle's work for posthumous publication (MS Locke c. 37 ). Other manuscripts contain unpublished works. Among others, MS. Locke e. 18 includes some of Locke's thoughts on the Glorious Revolution, which Locke sent to his friend Edward Clarke but never published.
One of the largest categories of manuscript at the Bodleian comprises Locke's notebooks and commonplace books. The scholar Richard Yeo calls Locke a "Master Note-taker" and explains that "Locke's methodical note-taking pervaded most areas of his life." In an unpublished essay "Of Study," Locke argued that a notebook should work like a "chest-of-drawers" for organizing information, which would be a "great help to the memory and means to avoid confusion in our thoughts." Locke kept several notebooks and commonplace books, which he organized according to topic. MS Locke c. 43 includes Locke's notes on theology, while MS Locke f. 18–24 contain medical notes. Other notebooks, such as MS c. 43, incorporate several topics in the same notebook, but separated into sections.
These commonplace books were highly personal and were designed to be used by Locke himself rather than accessible to a wide audience. Locke's notes are often abbreviated and are full of codes which he used to reference material across notebooks. Another way Locke personalized his notebooks was by devising his own method of creating indexes using a grid system and Latin keywords. Instead of recording entire words, his indexes shortened words to their first letter and vowel. Thus, the word "Epistle" would be classified as "Ei". Locke published his method in French in 1686, and it was republished posthumously in English in 1706.
Some of the books in Locke's library at the Bodleian are a combination of manuscript and print. Locke had some of his books interleaved, meaning that they were bound with blank sheets in-between the printed pages to enable annotations. Locke interleaved and annotated his five volumes of the New Testament in French, Greek, and Latin (Bodleian Locke 9.103-107). Locke did the same with his copy of Thomas Hyde's Bodleian Library catalogue (Bodleian Locke 16.17), which Locke used to create a catalogue of his own library. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "John Locke (/lɒk/; 29 August 1632 – 28 October 1704) was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the \"father of liberalism\". Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, Locke is equally important to social contract theory. His work greatly affected the development of epistemology and political philosophy. His writings influenced Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American Revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence. Internationally, Locke's political-legal principles continue to have a profound influence on the theory and practice of limited representative government and the protection of basic rights and freedoms under the rule of law.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Locke's theory of mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of identity and the self, figuring prominently in the work of later philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "He postulated that, at birth, the mind was a blank slate, or tabula rasa. Contrary to Cartesian philosophy based on pre-existing concepts, he maintained that we are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience derived from sense perception, a concept now known as empiricism.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Locke was born on 29 August 1632, in a small thatched cottage by the church in Wrington, Somerset, about 12 miles from Bristol. He was baptised the same day, as both of his parents were Puritans. Locke's father, also named John, was an attorney who served as clerk to the Justices of the Peace in Chew Magna and as a captain of cavalry for the Parliamentarian forces during the early part of the English Civil War. His mother was Agnes Keene. Soon after Locke's birth, the family moved to the market town of Pensford, about seven miles south of Bristol, where Locke grew up in a rural Tudor house in Belluton.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In 1647, Locke was sent to the prestigious Westminster School in London under the sponsorship of Alexander Popham, a member of Parliament and John Sr.'s former commander. At the age of 16 he was at school just half a mile away from the execution of Charles I; however, the boys were not allowed to go and watch. After completing studies at Westminster, he was admitted to Christ Church, Oxford, in the autumn of 1652 at the age of 20. The dean of the college at the time was John Owen, vice-chancellor of the university. Although a capable student, Locke was irritated by the undergraduate curriculum of the time. He found the works of modern philosophers, such as René Descartes, more interesting than the classical material taught at the university. Through his friend Richard Lower, whom he knew from the Westminster School, Locke was introduced to medicine and the experimental philosophy being pursued at other universities and in the Royal Society, of which he eventually became a member.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Locke was awarded a bachelor's degree in February 1656 and a master's degree in June 1658. He obtained a bachelor of medicine in February 1675, having studied the subject extensively during his time at Oxford and, in addition to Lower, worked with such noted scientists and thinkers as Robert Boyle, Thomas Willis and Robert Hooke. In 1666, he met Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Ashley, who had come to Oxford seeking treatment for a liver infection. Ashley was impressed with Locke and persuaded him to become part of his retinue.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Locke had been looking for a career and in 1667 moved into Ashley's home at Exeter House in London, to serve as his personal physician. In London, Locke resumed his medical studies under the tutelage of Thomas Sydenham. Sydenham had a major effect on Locke's natural philosophical thinking—an effect that would become evident in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Locke's medical knowledge was put to the test when Ashley's liver infection became life-threatening. Locke coordinated the advice of several physicians and was probably instrumental in persuading Ashley to undergo surgery (then life-threatening in itself) to remove the cyst. Ashley survived and prospered, crediting Locke with saving his life.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "During this time, Locke served as Secretary of the Board of Trade and Plantations and Secretary to the Lords Proprietors of Carolina, which helped to shape his ideas on international trade and economics.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Ashley, as a founder of the Whig movement, exerted great influence on Locke's political ideas. Locke became involved in politics when Ashley became Lord Chancellor in 1672 (Ashley being created 1st Earl of Shaftesbury in 1673). Following Shaftesbury's fall from favour in 1675, Locke spent some time travelling across France as a tutor and medical attendant to Caleb Banks. He returned to England in 1679 when Shaftesbury's political fortunes took a brief positive turn. Around this time, most likely at Shaftesbury's prompting, Locke composed the bulk of the Two Treatises of Government. While it was once thought that Locke wrote the Treatises to defend the Glorious Revolution of 1688, recent scholarship has shown that the work was composed well before this date. The work is now viewed as a more general argument against absolute monarchy (particularly as espoused by Robert Filmer and Thomas Hobbes) and for individual consent as the basis of political legitimacy. Although Locke was associated with the influential Whigs, his ideas about natural rights and government are today considered quite revolutionary for that period in English history.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Locke fled to the Netherlands in 1683, under strong suspicion of involvement in the Rye House Plot, although there is little evidence to suggest that he was directly involved in the scheme. The philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein argues that during his five years in Holland, Locke chose his friends \"from among the same freethinking members of dissenting Protestant groups as Spinoza's small group of loyal confidants. [Baruch Spinoza had died in 1677.] Locke almost certainly met men in Amsterdam who spoke of the ideas of that renegade Jew who... insisted on identifying himself through his religion of reason alone.\" While she says that \"Locke's strong empiricist tendencies\" would have \"disinclined him to read a grandly metaphysical work such as Spinoza's Ethics, in other ways he was deeply receptive to Spinoza's ideas, most particularly to the rationalist's well thought out argument for political and religious tolerance and the necessity of the separation of church and state.\" In the Netherlands, Locke had time to return to his writing, spending a great deal of time working on the Essay Concerning Human Understanding and composing the Letter on Toleration.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Locke did not return home until after the Glorious Revolution. Locke accompanied Mary II back to England in 1689. The bulk of Locke's publishing took place upon his return from exile—his aforementioned Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration all appearing in quick succession.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Locke's close friend Lady Masham invited him to join her at Otes, the Mashams' country house in Essex. Although his time there was marked by variable health from asthma attacks, he nevertheless became an intellectual hero of the Whigs. During this period he discussed matters with such figures as John Dryden and Isaac Newton.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "He died on 28 October 1704, and is buried in the churchyard of the village of High Laver, east of Harlow in Essex, where he had lived in the household of Sir Francis Masham since 1691. Locke never married nor had children.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Events that happened during Locke's lifetime include the English Restoration, the Great Plague of London, the Great Fire of London, and the Glorious Revolution. He did not see the Act of Union of 1707, but the thrones of England and Scotland were held in personal union throughout his lifetime. Constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy were in their infancy during Locke's time.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, Locke's Two Treatises were rarely cited. Historian Julian Hoppit said of the book \"except among some Whigs, even as a contribution to the intense debate of the 1690s it made little impression and was generally ignored until 1703 (though in Oxford in 1695 it was reported to have made 'a great noise').\" John Kenyon, in his study of British political debate from 1689 to 1720, has remarked that Locke's theories were \"mentioned so rarely in the early stages of the [Glorious] Revolution, up to 1692, and even less thereafter, unless it was to heap abuse on them\" and that \"no one, including most Whigs, [was] ready for the idea of a notional or abstract contract of the kind adumbrated by Locke\". In contrast, Kenyon adds that Algernon Sidney's Discourses Concerning Government were \"certainly much more influential than Locke's Two Treatises.\"",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In the 50 years after Queen Anne's death in 1714, the Two Treatises were reprinted only once (except in the collected works of Locke). However, with the rise of American resistance to British taxation, the Second Treatise of Government gained a new readership; it was frequently cited in the debates in both America and Britain. The first American printing occurred in 1773 in Boston.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Locke exercised a profound influence on political philosophy, in particular on modern liberalism. Michael Zuckert has argued that Locke launched liberalism by tempering Hobbesian absolutism and clearly separating the realms of Church and State. He had a strong influence on Voltaire, who called him \"le sage Locke\". His arguments concerning liberty and the social contract later influenced the written works of Thomas Jefferson. One passage from the Second Treatise is reproduced verbatim in the Declaration of Independence, the reference to a \"long train of abuses\". Concerning Locke, Thomas Jefferson wrote:",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Bacon, Locke and Newton… I consider them as the three greatest men that have ever lived, without any exception, and as having laid the foundation of those superstructures which have been raised in the Physical and Moral sciences.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "However, Locke's influence may have been even more profound in the realm of epistemology. Locke redefined subjectivity, or self, leading intellectual historians such as Charles Taylor and Jerrold Seigel to argue that Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689/90) marks the beginning of the modern Western conception of the self.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Locke's theory of association heavily influenced the subject matter of modern psychology. At the time, Locke's recognition of two types of ideas, simple and complex—and, more importantly, their interaction through association—inspired other philosophers, such as David Hume and George Berkeley, to revise and expand this theory and apply it to explain how humans gain knowledge in the physical world.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Locke thought the state's borders and the functioning and enforcement of the existence of the state and its constitution were metaphysically tied to \"the natural rights of the individual\", and this inspired future liberal politicians and philosophers.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Writing his Letters Concerning Toleration (1689–1692) in the aftermath of the European wars of religion, Locke formulated a classic reasoning for religious tolerance, in which three arguments are central:",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "With regard to his position on religious tolerance, Locke was influenced by Baptist theologians like John Smyth and Thomas Helwys, who had published tracts demanding freedom of conscience in the early 17th century. Baptist theologian Roger Williams founded the colony of Rhode Island in 1636, where he combined a democratic constitution with unlimited religious freedom. His tract, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience (1644), which was widely read in the mother country, was a passionate plea for absolute religious freedom and the total separation of church and state. Freedom of conscience had had high priority on the theological, philosophical, and political agenda, as Martin Luther refused to recant his beliefs before the Diet of the Holy Roman Empire at Worms in 1521, unless he would be proved false by the Bible.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Locke's views on slavery were multifaceted and complex. Although he wrote against slavery in general, Locke was an investor and beneficiary of the slave-trading Royal Africa Company. In addition, while secretary to the Earl of Shaftesbury, Locke participated in drafting the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which established a quasi-feudal aristocracy and gave Carolinian planters absolute power over their enslaved chattel property; the constitutions pledged that \"every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves\". Philosopher Martin Cohen notes that Locke, as secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations and a member of the Board of Trade, was \"one of just half a dozen men who created and supervised both the colonies and their iniquitous systems of servitude\". According to American historian James Farr, Locke never expressed any thoughts concerning his contradictory opinions regarding slavery, which Farr ascribes to his personal involvement in the slave trade. Locke's positions on slavery have been described as hypocritical, and laying the foundation for the Founding Fathers to hold similarly contradictory thoughts regarding freedom and slavery.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Historian Holly Brewer has argued, however, that Locke's role in the Constitution of Carolina has been exaggerated and that he was merely paid to revise and make copies of a document that had already been partially written before he became involved; she compares Locke's role to a lawyer writing a will. She further says that Locke was paid in Royal African Company stock in lieu of money for his work as a secretary for a governmental sub-committee, and that he sold the stock after a few years. Brewer likewise argues that Locke actively worked to undermine slavery in Virginia while heading a Board of Trade created by William of Orange following the Glorious Revolution. He specifically attacked colonial policy granting land to slave owners and encouraged the baptism and Christian education of the children of enslaved Africans to undercut a major justification of slavery—that they were heathens who possessed no rights. In his Two Treatises of Government, Locke provided a justification for slavery that could never actually be met, thus rendering all forms of slavery as it actually existed invalid. Moreover, as one may not submit to slavery, in Locke's view there is a moral injunction to attempt to throw off and escape it whenever it looms.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Locke also supported child labour, which was an intrinsic part of all pre-industrial societies. In his \"Essay on the Poor Law\", he turns to the education of the poor; he laments that \"the children of labouring people are an ordinary burden to the parish, and are usually maintained in idleness, so that their labour also is generally lost to the public till they are 12 or 14 years old\". He suggests, therefore, that \"working schools\" be set up in each parish in England for poor children so that they will be \"from infancy [three years old] inured to work\". He goes on to outline the economics of these schools, arguing not only that they will be profitable for the parish, but also that they will instil a good work ethic in the children.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Locke's political theory was founded upon that of social contract. Unlike Thomas Hobbes, Locke believed that human nature is characterised by reason and tolerance. Like Hobbes, however, Locke believed that human nature allows people to be selfish. This is apparent with the introduction of currency. In a natural state, all people were equal and independent, and everyone had a natural right to defend his \"life, health, liberty, or possessions\". Most scholars trace the phrase \"Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness\" in the American Declaration of Independence to Locke's theory of rights, although other origins have been suggested.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Like Hobbes, Locke assumed that the sole right to defend in the state of nature was not enough, so people established a civil society to resolve conflicts in a civil way with help from government in a state of society. However, Locke never refers to Hobbes by name and may instead have been responding to other writers of the day. Locke also advocated governmental separation of powers and believed that revolution is not only a right but an obligation in some circumstances. These ideas would come to have profound influence on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "According to Locke, unused property is wasteful and an offence against nature, but, with the introduction of \"durable\" goods, men could exchange their excessive perishable goods for those which would last longer and thus not offend the natural law. In his view, the introduction of money marked the culmination of this process, making possible the unlimited accumulation of property without causing waste through spoilage. He also includes gold or silver as money because they may be \"hoarded up without injury to anyone\", as they do not spoil or decay in the hands of the possessor. In his view, the introduction of money eliminates limits to accumulation. Locke stresses that inequality has come about by tacit agreement on the use of money, not by the social contract establishing civil society or the law of land regulating property. Locke is aware of a problem posed by unlimited accumulation, but does not consider it his task. He just implies that government would function to moderate the conflict between the unlimited accumulation of property and a more nearly equal distribution of wealth; he does not identify which principles that government should apply to solve this problem. However, not all elements of his thought form a consistent whole. For example, the labour theory of value in the Two Treatises of Government stands side by side with the demand-and-supply theory of value developed in a letter he wrote titled Some Considerations on the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest and the Raising of the Value of Money. Moreover, Locke anchors property in labour but, in the end, upholds unlimited accumulation of wealth.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Locke's general theory of value and price is a supply-and-demand theory, set out in a letter to a member of parliament in 1691, titled Some Considerations on the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest and the Raising of the Value of Money. In it, he refers to supply as quantity and demand as rent: \"The price of any commodity rises or falls by the proportion of the number of buyers and sellers\" and \"that which regulates the price…[of goods] is nothing else but their quantity in proportion to their rent.\"",
"title": "Ideas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The quantity theory of money forms a special case of this general theory. His idea is based on \"money answers all things\" (Ecclesiastes) or \"rent of money is always sufficient, or more than enough\" and \"varies very little\". Locke concludes that, as far as money is concerned, the demand for it is exclusively regulated by its quantity, regardless of whether the demand is unlimited or constant. He also investigates the determinants of demand and supply. For supply, he explains the value of goods as based on their scarcity and ability to be exchanged and consumed. He explains demand for goods as based on their ability to yield a flow of income. Locke develops an early theory of capitalisation, such as of land, which has value because \"by its constant production of saleable commodities it brings in a certain yearly income\". He considers the demand for money as almost the same as demand for goods or land: it depends on whether money is wanted as medium of exchange. As a medium of exchange, he states, \"money is capable by exchange to procure us the necessaries or conveniences of life\" and, for loanable funds, \"it comes to be of the same nature with land by yielding a certain yearly income…or interest\".",
"title": "Ideas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Locke distinguishes two functions of money: as a counter to measure value, and as a pledge to lay claim to goods. He believes that silver and gold, as opposed to paper money, are the appropriate currency for international transactions. Silver and gold, he says, are treated to have equal value by all of humanity and can thus be treated as a pledge by anyone, while the value of paper money is only valid under the government which issues it.",
"title": "Ideas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Locke argues that a country should seek a favourable balance of trade, lest it fall behind other countries and suffer a loss in its trade. Since the world money stock grows constantly, a country must constantly seek to enlarge its own stock. Locke develops his theory of foreign exchanges, in addition to commodity movements, there are also movements in country stock of money, and movements of capital determine exchange rates. He considers the latter less significant and less volatile than commodity movements. As for a country's money stock, if it is large relative to that of other countries, he says it will cause the country's exchange to rise above par, as an export balance would do.",
"title": "Ideas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "He also prepares estimates of the cash requirements for different economic groups (landholders, labourers, and brokers). In each group he posits that the cash requirements are closely related to the length of the pay period. He argues the brokers—the middlemen—whose activities enlarge the monetary circuit and whose profits eat into the earnings of labourers and landholders, have a negative influence on both personal and the public economy to which they supposedly contribute.",
"title": "Ideas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Locke uses the concept of property in both broad and narrow terms: broadly, it covers a wide range of human interests and aspirations; more particularly, it refers to material goods. He argues that property is a natural right that is derived from labour. In Chapter V of his Second Treatise, Locke argues that the individual ownership of goods and property is justified by the labour exerted to produce such goods—\"at least where there is enough [land], and as good, left in common for others\" (para. 27)—or to use property to produce goods beneficial to human society.",
"title": "Ideas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Locke states in his Second Treatise that nature on its own provides little of value to society, implying that the labour expended in the creation of goods gives them their value. From this premise, understood as a labour theory of value, Locke developed a labour theory of property, whereby ownership of property is created by the application of labour. In addition, he believed that property precedes government and government cannot \"dispose of the estates of the subjects arbitrarily\". Karl Marx later critiqued Locke's theory of property in his own social theory.",
"title": "Ideas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Locke defines the self as \"that conscious thinking thing, (whatever substance, made up of whether spiritual, or material, simple, or compounded, it matters not) which is sensible, or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is concerned for itself, as far as that consciousness extends\". He does not, however, wholly ignore \"substance\", writing that \"the body too goes to the making the man\".",
"title": "Ideas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "In his Essay, Locke explains the gradual unfolding of this conscious mind. Arguing against both the Augustinian view of man as originally sinful and the Cartesian position, which holds that man innately knows basic logical propositions, Locke posits an 'empty mind', a tabula rasa, which is shaped by experience; sensations and reflections being the two sources of all of our ideas. He states in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding:",
"title": "Ideas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "This source of ideas every man has wholly within himself; and though it be not sense, as having nothing to do with external objects, yet it is very like it, and might properly enough be called 'internal sense.'",
"title": "Ideas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education is an outline on how to educate this mind. Drawing on thoughts expressed in letters written to Mary Clarke and her husband about their son, he expresses the belief that education makes the man—or, more fundamentally, that the mind is an \"empty cabinet\":",
"title": "Ideas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "I think I may say that of all the men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education.",
"title": "Ideas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Locke also wrote that \"the little and almost insensible impressions on our tender infancies have very important and lasting consequences\". He argues that the \"associations of ideas\" that one makes when young are more important than those made later because they are the foundation of the self; they are, put differently, what first mark the tabula rasa. In his Essay, in which both these concepts are introduced, Locke warns, for example, against letting \"a foolish maid\" convince a child that \"goblins and sprites\" are associated with the night, for \"darkness shall ever afterwards bring with it those frightful ideas, and they shall be so joined, that he can no more bear the one than the other\".",
"title": "Ideas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "This theory came to be called associationism, going on to strongly influence 18th-century thought, particularly educational theory, as nearly every educational writer warned parents not to allow their children to develop negative associations. It also led to the development of psychology and other new disciplines with David Hartley's attempt to discover a biological mechanism for associationism in his Observations on Man (1749).",
"title": "Ideas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Locke was critical of Descartes's version of the dream argument, with Locke making the counter-argument that people cannot have physical pain in dreams as they do in waking life.",
"title": "Ideas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Some scholars have seen Locke's political convictions as being based from his religious beliefs. Locke's religious trajectory began in Calvinist trinitarianism, but by the time of the Reflections (1695) Locke was advocating not just Socinian views on tolerance but also Socinian Christology. However Wainwright (1987) notes that in the posthumously published Paraphrase (1707) Locke's interpretation of one verse, Ephesians 1:10, is markedly different from that of Socinians like Biddle, and may indicate that near the end of his life Locke returned nearer to an Arian position, thereby accepting Christ's pre-existence. Locke was at times not sure about the subject of original sin, so he was accused of Socinianism, Arianism, or Deism. Locke argued that the idea that \"all Adam's Posterity [are] doomed to Eternal Infinite Punishment, for the Transgression of Adam\" was \"little consistent with the Justice or Goodness of the Great and Infinite God\", leading Eric Nelson to associate him with Pelagian ideas. However, he did not deny the reality of evil. Man was capable of waging unjust wars and committing crimes. Criminals had to be punished, even with the death penalty.",
"title": "Ideas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "With regard to the Bible, Locke was very conservative. He retained the doctrine of the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures. The miracles were proof of the divine nature of the biblical message. Locke was convinced that the entire content of the Bible was in agreement with human reason (The Reasonableness of Christianity, 1695). Although Locke was an advocate of tolerance, he urged the authorities not to tolerate atheism, because he thought the denial of God's existence would undermine the social order and lead to chaos. That excluded all atheistic varieties of philosophy and all attempts to deduce ethics and natural law from purely secular premises. In Locke's opinion the cosmological argument was valid and proved God's existence. His political thought was based on Protestant Christian views. Additionally, Locke advocated a sense of piety out of gratitude to God for giving reason to men.",
"title": "Ideas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Locke's concept of man started with the belief in creation. Like philosophers Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf, Locke equated natural law with the biblical revelation. Locke derived the fundamental concepts of his political theory from biblical texts, in particular from Genesis 1 and 2 (creation), the Decalogue, the Golden Rule, the teachings of Jesus, and the letters of Paul the Apostle. The Decalogue puts a person's life, reputation and property under God's protection.",
"title": "Ideas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Locke's philosophy on freedom is also derived from the Bible. Locke derived from the Bible basic human equality (including equality of the sexes), the starting point of the theological doctrine of Imago Dei. To Locke, one of the consequences of the principle of equality was that all humans were created equally free and therefore governments needed the consent of the governed. Locke compared the English monarchy's rule over the British people to Adam's rule over Eve in Genesis, which was appointed by God.",
"title": "Ideas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Following Locke's philosophy, the American Declaration of Independence founded human rights partially on the biblical belief in creation. Locke's doctrine that governments need the consent of the governed is also central to the Declaration of Independence.",
"title": "Ideas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Locke was an assiduous book collector and notetaker throughout his life. By his death in 1704, Locke had amassed a library of more than 3,000 books, a significant number in the seventeenth century. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Locke took care to catalogue and preserve his library, and his will made specific provisions for how his library was to be distributed after his death. Locke's will offered Lady Masham the choice of \"any four folios, eight quartos and twenty books of less volume, which she shall choose out of the books in my Library.\" Locke also gave six titles to his \"good friend\" Anthony Collins, but Locke bequeathed the majority of his collection to his cousin Peter King (later Lord King) and to Lady Masham's son, Francis Cudworth Masham.",
"title": "Library"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Francis Masham was promised one \"moiety\" (half) of Locke's library when he reached \"the age of one and twenty years.\" The other \"moiety\" of Locke's books, along with his manuscripts, passed to his cousin King. Over the next two centuries, the Masham portion of Locke's library was dispersed. The manuscripts and books left to King, however, remained with King's descendants (later the Earls of Lovelace), until most of the collection was bought by the Bodleian Library, Oxford in 1947. Another portion of the books Locke left to King was discovered by the collector and philanthropist Paul Mellon in 1951. Mellon supplemented this discovery with books from Locke's library which he bought privately, and in 1978, he transferred his collection to the Bodleian. The holdings in the Locke Room at the Bodleian have been a valuable resource for scholars interested in Locke, his philosophy, practices for information management, and the history of the book.",
"title": "Library"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Many of the books still contain Locke's signature, which he often made on the pastedowns of his books. Many also include Locke's marginalia.",
"title": "Library"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "The printed books in Locke's library reflected his various intellectual interests as well as his movements at different stages of his life. Locke travelled extensively in France and the Netherlands during the 1670s and 1680s, and during this time he acquired many books from the continent. Only half of the books in Locke's library were printed in England, while close to 40% came from France and the Netherlands. These books cover a wide range of subjects. According to John Harrison and Peter Laslett, the largest genres in Locke's library were theology (23.8% of books), medicine (11.1%), politics and law (10.7%), and classical literature (10.1%). The Bodleian library currently holds more than 800 of the books from Locke's library. These include Locke's copies of works by several of the most influential figures of the seventeenth century, including",
"title": "Library"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "In addition to books owned by Locke, the Bodleian also possesses more than 100 manuscripts related to Locke or written in his hand. Like the books in Locke's library, these manuscripts display a range of interests and provide different windows into Locke's activity and relationships. Several of the manuscripts include letters to and from acquaintances like Peter King (MS Locke b. 6) and Nicolas Toinard (MS Locke c. 45). MS Locke f. 1–10 contain Locke's journals for most years between 1675 and 1704. Some of the most significant manuscripts include early drafts of Locke's writings, such as his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (MS Locke f. 26). The Bodleian also holds a copy of Robert Boyle's General History of the Air with corrections and notes Locke made while preparing Boyle's work for posthumous publication (MS Locke c. 37 ). Other manuscripts contain unpublished works. Among others, MS. Locke e. 18 includes some of Locke's thoughts on the Glorious Revolution, which Locke sent to his friend Edward Clarke but never published.",
"title": "Library"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "One of the largest categories of manuscript at the Bodleian comprises Locke's notebooks and commonplace books. The scholar Richard Yeo calls Locke a \"Master Note-taker\" and explains that \"Locke's methodical note-taking pervaded most areas of his life.\" In an unpublished essay \"Of Study,\" Locke argued that a notebook should work like a \"chest-of-drawers\" for organizing information, which would be a \"great help to the memory and means to avoid confusion in our thoughts.\" Locke kept several notebooks and commonplace books, which he organized according to topic. MS Locke c. 43 includes Locke's notes on theology, while MS Locke f. 18–24 contain medical notes. Other notebooks, such as MS c. 43, incorporate several topics in the same notebook, but separated into sections.",
"title": "Library"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "These commonplace books were highly personal and were designed to be used by Locke himself rather than accessible to a wide audience. Locke's notes are often abbreviated and are full of codes which he used to reference material across notebooks. Another way Locke personalized his notebooks was by devising his own method of creating indexes using a grid system and Latin keywords. Instead of recording entire words, his indexes shortened words to their first letter and vowel. Thus, the word \"Epistle\" would be classified as \"Ei\". Locke published his method in French in 1686, and it was republished posthumously in English in 1706.",
"title": "Library"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Some of the books in Locke's library at the Bodleian are a combination of manuscript and print. Locke had some of his books interleaved, meaning that they were bound with blank sheets in-between the printed pages to enable annotations. Locke interleaved and annotated his five volumes of the New Testament in French, Greek, and Latin (Bodleian Locke 9.103-107). Locke did the same with his copy of Thomas Hyde's Bodleian Library catalogue (Bodleian Locke 16.17), which Locke used to create a catalogue of his own library.",
"title": "Library"
}
]
| John Locke was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the "father of liberalism". Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, Locke is equally important to social contract theory. His work greatly affected the development of epistemology and political philosophy. His writings influenced Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American Revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence. Internationally, Locke's political-legal principles continue to have a profound influence on the theory and practice of limited representative government and the protection of basic rights and freedoms under the rule of law. Locke's theory of mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of identity and the self, figuring prominently in the work of later philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. He postulated that, at birth, the mind was a blank slate, or tabula rasa. Contrary to Cartesian philosophy based on pre-existing concepts, he maintained that we are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience derived from sense perception, a concept now known as empiricism. | 2001-09-30T18:28:39Z | 2023-12-06T20:43:35Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Locke |
16,147 | Jewish holidays | Jewish holidays, also known as Jewish festivals or Yamim Tovim (Hebrew: Hebrew: ימים טובים, romanized: yāmim ṭovim, lit. 'Good Days', or singular Hebrew: יום טוב Yom Tov, in transliterated Hebrew [English: /ˈjɔːm ˈtɔːv, joʊm ˈtoʊv/]), are holidays observed by Jews throughout the Hebrew calendar. They include religious, cultural and national elements, derived from three sources: biblical mitzvot ("commandments"), rabbinic mandates, and the history of Judaism and the State of Israel.
Jewish holidays occur on the same dates every year in the Hebrew calendar, but the dates vary in the Gregorian. This is because the Hebrew calendar is a lunisolar calendar (based on the cycles of both the sun and moon), whereas the Gregorian is a solar calendar. Each holiday can only occur on certain days of the week, four for most, but five for holidays in Tevet and Shevat and six for Hanukkah (see Days of week on Hebrew calendar).
Certain terms are used very commonly for groups of holidays.
Certain terminology is used in referring to different categories of holidays, depending on their source and their nature:
Shabbat (Hebrew: שבת) (Ashkenazi pron. from Yiddish shabbos), or Sabbath, is referred to by that name exclusively. Similarly, Rosh Chodesh (Hebrew: ראש חודש) is referred to by that name exclusively.
The most notable common feature of Shabbat and the biblical festivals is the requirement to refrain from melacha on these days. Melacha is most commonly translated as "work"; perhaps a better translation is "creative-constructive work". Strictly speaking, Melacha is defined in Jewish law (halacha) by 39 categories of labor that were used in constructing the Tabernacle while the Jews wandered in the desert. As understood traditionally and in Orthodox Judaism:
In principle, Conservative Judaism understands the requirement to refrain from melacha in the same way as Orthodox Judaism. In practice, Conservative rabbis frequently rule on prohibitions around melacha differently from Orthodox authorities. Still, there are a number of Conservative/Masorti communities around the world where Sabbath and Festival observance fairly closely resembles Orthodox observance.
However, many, if not most, lay members of Conservative congregations in North America do not consider themselves Sabbath-observant, even by Conservative standards. At the same time, adherents of Reform Judaism and Reconstructionist Judaism do not accept halacha, and therefore restrictions on melacha, as binding at all. Jews fitting any of these descriptions refrain from melacha in practice only as they personally see fit.
Shabbat and holiday work restrictions are always put aside in cases of pikuach nefesh, which is saving a human life. At the most fundamental level, if there is any possibility whatsoever that action must be taken to save a life, Shabbat restrictions are set aside immediately, and without reservation. Where the danger to life is present but less immediate, there is some preference to minimize violation of Shabbat work restrictions where possible. The laws in this area are complex.
The Torah specifies a single date on the Jewish calendar for observance of holidays. Nevertheless, festivals of biblical origin other than Shabbat and Yom Kippur are observed for two days outside the land of Israel, and Rosh Hashanah is observed for two days even inside the land of Israel.
Dates for holidays on the Jewish calendar are expressed in the Torah as "day x of month y". Accordingly, the beginning of month y needs to be determined before the proper date of the holiday on day x can be fixed. Months in the Jewish calendar are lunar, and originally were thought to have been proclaimed by the blowing of a shofar. Later, the Sanhedrin received testimony of witnesses saying they saw the new crescent moon. Then the Sanhedrin would inform Jewish communities away from its meeting place that it had proclaimed a new moon. The practice of observing a second festival day stemmed from delays in disseminating that information.
Yom Kippur is not observed for two days anywhere because of the difficulty of maintaining a fast over two days.
Adherents of Reform Judaism and Reconstructionist Judaism generally do not observe the second day of festivals, although some do observe two days of Rosh Hashanah.
Jewish law (halacha) accords Shabbat (Hebrew: שבת) the status of a holiday, a day of rest celebrated on the seventh day of each week. Jewish law defines a day as ending at either sundown or nightfall, when the next day then begins. Thus,
The fundamental rituals and observances of Shabbat include:
In many ways, halakha (Jewish law) sees Shabbat as the most important holy day in the Jewish calendar.
Rosh Chodesh (Hebrew: ראש חודש) (lit., "head of the month") is a minor holiday or observance occurring on the first day of each month of the Jewish calendar, as well as the last day of the preceding month if it has thirty days.
Beyond the preceding, current observance is limited to changes in liturgy.
Related observances:
The month of Elul that precedes Rosh Hashanah is considered to be a propitious time for repentance. For this reason, additional penitential prayers called Selichot are added to the daily prayers, except on Shabbat. Sephardi Jews add these prayers each weekday during Elul. Ashkenazi Jews recite them from the last Sunday (or Saturday night) preceding Rosh Hashanah that allows at least four days of recitations.
According to oral tradition, Rosh Hashanah (Hebrew: ראש השנה) (lit., "Head of the Year") is the Day of Memorial or Remembrance (Hebrew: יום הזכרון, Yom HaZikaron), and the day of judgment (Hebrew: יום הדין, Yom HaDin). God appears in the role of King, remembering and judging each person individually according to his/her deeds, and making a decree for each person for the following year.
The holiday is characterized by one specific mitzvah: blowing the shofar. According to the Torah, this is the first day of the seventh month of the calendar year, and marks the beginning of a ten-day period leading up to Yom Kippur. According to one of two Talmudic opinions, the creation of the world was completed on Rosh Hashanah.
Morning prayer services are lengthy on Rosh Hashanah, and focus on the themes described above: majesty and judgment, remembrance, the birth of the world, and the blowing of the shofar. Ashkenazi Jews recite the brief Tashlikh prayer, a symbolic casting off of the previous year's sins, during the afternoon of Rosh Hashanah.
The Bible specifies Rosh Hashanah as a one-day holiday, but it is traditionally celebrated for two days, even within the Land of Israel. (See Second day of biblical festivals, above.)
The Torah itself does not use any term like "New Year" in reference to Rosh Hashanah. The Mishnah in Rosh Hashanah specifies four different "New Year's Days" for different purposes:
The first ten days of Tishrei (from the beginning of Rosh Hashana until the end of Yom Kippur) are known as the Ten Days of Repentance (עשרת ימי תשובה, Aseret Yemei Teshuva). During this time, in anticipation of Yom Kippur, it is "exceedingly appropriate" for Jews to practice teshuvah (literally "return"), an examination of one's deeds and repentance for sins one has committed against other people and God. This repentance can take the form of additional supplications, confessing one's deeds before God, fasting, self-reflection, and an increase of involvement with, or donations to, charity.
The Fast of Gedalia (Hebrew: צום גדליה) is a minor Jewish fast day. It commemorates the assassination of the governor of Judah, Gedalia, which ended any level of Jewish rule following the destruction of the First Temple.
As on all minor fast days, fasting from dawn to dusk is required, but other laws of mourning are not normally observed. A Torah reading is included in both the Shacharit and Mincha prayers, and a Haftarah is also included at Mincha. There are also a number of additions to the liturgy of both services.
Yom Kippur (Hebrew: יום כיפור) is the holiest day of the year for Jews. Its central theme is atonement and reconciliation. This is accomplished through prayer and complete fasting—including abstinence from all food and drink (including water)—by all healthy adults. Bathing, wearing of perfume or cologne, wearing of leather shoes, and sexual relations are some of the other prohibitions on Yom Kippur—all them designed to ensure one's attention is completely and absolutely focused on the quest for atonement with God. Yom Kippur is also unique among holidays as having work-related restrictions identical to those of Shabbat. The fast and other prohibitions commence on 10 Tishrei at sunset—sunset being the beginning of the day in Jewish tradition.
A traditional prayer in Aramaic called Kol Nidre ("All Vows") is traditionally recited just before sunset. Although often regarded as the start of the Yom Kippur evening service—to such a degree that Erev Yom Kippur ("Yom Kippur Evening") is often called "Kol Nidre" (also spelled "Kol Nidrei")—it is technically a separate tradition. This is especially so because, being recited before sunset, it is actually recited on 9 Tishrei, which is the day before Yom Kippur; it is not recited on Yom Kippur itself (on 10 Tishrei, which begins after the sun sets).
A Tallit (four-cornered prayer shawl) is donned for evening and afternoon prayers–the only day of the year in which this is done. In traditional Ashkenazi communities, men wear the kittel throughout the day's prayers. The prayers on Yom Kippur evening are lengthier than on any other night of the year. Once services reconvene in the morning, the services (in all traditions) are the longest of the year. In some traditional synagogues prayers run continuously from morning until nightfall, or nearly so. Two highlights of the morning prayers in traditional synagogues are the recitation of Yizkor, the prayer of remembrance, and of liturgical poems (piyyutim) describing the temple service of Yom Kippur.
Two other highlights happen late in the day. During the Minchah prayer, the haftarah reading features the entire Book of Jonah. Finally, the day concludes with Ne'ilah, a special service recited only on the day of Yom Kippur. Ne'ilah deals with the closing of the holiday, and contains a fervent final plea to God for forgiveness just before the conclusion of the fast. Yom Kippur comes to an end with the blowing of the shofar, which marks the conclusion of the fast. It is always observed as a one-day holiday, both inside and outside the boundaries of the Land of Israel.
Yom Kippur is considered, along with 15th of Av, as the happiest days of the year (Talmud Bavli—Tractate Ta'anit).
Sukkot (Hebrew: סוכות or Hebrew: סֻכּוֹת, sukkōt) or Succoth is a seven-day festival, also known as the Feast of Booths, the Feast of Tabernacles, or just Tabernacles. It is one of the Three Pilgrimage Festivals (shalosh regalim) mentioned in the Bible. Sukkot commemorates the years that the Jews spent in the desert on their way to the Promised Land, and celebrates the way in which God protected them under difficult desert conditions. The word sukkot is the plural of the Hebrew word sukkah, meaning booth. Jews are commanded to "dwell" in booths during the holiday. This generally means taking meals, but some sleep in the sukkah as well, particularly in Israel. There are specific rules for constructing a sukkah.
Along with dwelling in a sukkah, the principal ritual unique to this holiday is use of the Four Species: lulav (palm), hadass (myrtle), aravah (willow) and etrog (citron). On each day of the holiday other than Shabbat, these are waved in association with the recitation of Hallel in the synagogue, then walked in a procession around the synagogue called the Hoshanot.
The seventh day of the Sukkot is called Hoshanah Rabbah, the "Great Hoshanah" (singular of Hoshanot and the source of the English word hosanna). The climax of the day's prayers includes seven processions of Hoshanot around the synagogue. This tradition mimics practices from the Temple in Jerusalem. Many aspects of the day's customs also resemble those of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Hoshanah Rabbah is traditionally taken to be the day of the "delivery" of the final judgment of Yom Kippur, and offers a last opportunity for pleas of repentance before the holiday season closes.
The holiday of Shemini Atzeret (Hebrew: שמיני עצרת) immediately follows the conclusion of the holiday of Sukkot. The Hebrew word shemini means "eighth", and refers to its position on "the eighth day" of Sukkot, actually a seven-day holiday. This name reflects the fact that while in many respects Shemini Atzeret is a separate holiday in its own right, in certain respects its celebration is linked to that of Sukkot. Outside Israel, meals are still taken in the Sukkah on this day.
The main notable custom of this holiday is the celebration of Simchat Torah (Hebrew: שמחת תורה), meaning "rejoicing with the Torah". This name originally referred to a special "ceremony": the last weekly Torah portion is read from Deuteronomy, completing the annual cycle, and is followed immediately by the reading of the first chapter of Genesis, beginning the new annual cycle. Services are especially joyous, and all attendees, young and old, are involved.
This ceremony so dominates the holiday that in Israel, where the holiday is one day long, the whole holiday is often referred to as Simchat Torah. Outside Israel, the holiday is two days long; the name Shemini Atzeret is used for the first day, while the second is normally called Simchat Torah.
The story of Hanukkah (Hebrew: חנוכה) is preserved in the books of the First and Second Maccabees. These books are not part of the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), they are apocryphal books instead. The miracle of the one-day supply of olive oil miraculously lasting eight days is first described in the Talmud (Shabbat 21b), written about 600 years after the events described in the books of Maccabees.
Hanukkah marks the defeat of Seleucid Empire forces that had tried to prevent the people of Israel from practicing Judaism. Judah Maccabee and his brothers destroyed overwhelming forces, and rededicated the Temple in Jerusalem. The eight-day festival is marked by the kindling of lights—one on the first night, two on the second, and so on—using a special candle holder called a Hanukkiah, or a Hanukkah menorah.
Religiously, Hanukkah is a minor holiday. Except on Shabbat, restrictions on work do not apply. Aside from the kindling of lights, formal religious observance is restricted to changes in liturgy. Hanukkah celebration tends to be informal and based on custom rather than law. Three widely practiced customs include:
The Tenth of Tevet (Hebrew: עשרה בטבת, Asarah B'Tevet) is a minor fast day, marking the beginning of the siege of Jerusalem as outlined in 2 Kings 25:1
This fast's commemoration also includes other events occurring on 8, 9 and 10 Tevet.
This fast is observed like other minor fasts (see Tzom Gedalia, above). This is the only minor fast that can fall on a Friday under the current fixed Jewish calendar.
Tu Bishvat (ט"ו בשבט) (lit., "fifteenth of Shevat", as ט״ו is the number "15" in Hebrew letters), is the new year for trees. It is also known as חג האילנות (Ḥag ha-Ilanot, Festival of Trees), or ראש השנה לאילנות (Rosh ha-Shanah la-Ilanot, New Year for Trees). According to the Mishnah, it marks the day from which fruit tithes are counted each year. Starting on this date, the biblical prohibition on eating the first three years of fruit (orlah) and the requirement to bring the fourth year fruit (neta revai) to the Temple in Jerusalem were counted.
During the 17th century, Rabbi Yitzchak Luria of Safed and his disciples created a short seder, called Hemdat ha‑Yamim, reminiscent of the seder that Jews observe on Passover, that explores the holiday's Kabbalistic themes. This Tu Bishvat seder has witnessed a revival in recent years. More generally, Tu Bishvat is celebrated in modern times by eating various fruits and nuts associated with the Land of Israel.
Traditionally, trees are planted on this day. Many children collect funds leading up to this day to plant trees in Israel. Trees are usually planted locally as well.
Purim Katan (פורים קטן) (lit., "small Purim") is observed on the 14th and 15th of First Adar in leap years. These days are marked by a small increase in festivity, including a prohibition on fasting, and slight changes in the liturgy.
Ta'anit Esther (תענית אסתר), or "Fast of Esther", is named in honor of the fast of Esther and her court as Esther prepared to approach the king unbidden to invite him and Haman to a banquet. It commemorates that fast, as well as one alluded to later in the Book of Esther, undertaken as the Jews prepared to battle their enemies.
This fast is observed like other minor fasts (see Tzom Gedalia, above). While normally observed on 13 Adar, the eve of Purim, this fast is advanced to Thursday, 11 Adar, when 13 Adar falls on Shabbat.
Purim (פורים) commemorates the events that took place in the Book of Esther. The principal celebrations or commemorations include:
Several customs have evolved from these principal commemorations. One widespread custom to act out the story of Purim. The Purim spiel, or Purim play, has its origins in this, although the Purim spiel is not limited to that subject. Wearing of costumes and masks is also very common. These may be an outgrowth of Purim plays, but there are several theories as to the origin of the custom, most related in some way to the "hidden" nature of the miracles of Purim.
Purim carnivals of various types have also become customary. In Israel there are festive parades, known as Ad-D'lo-Yada, in the town's main street. The largest and most renowned is in Holon.
Most Jews celebrate Purim on 14 Adar, the day of celebration after the Jews defeated their enemies. Because Jews in the capital city of Shushan fought with their enemies an extra day, Purim is celebrated a day later there, on the day known as שושן פורים, Shushan Purim. This observance was expanded to "walled cities", which are defined as cities "walled since the time of Joshua". In practice, there are no Jews living in Shushan (Shush, Iran), and Shushan Purim is observed fully only in Jerusalem. Cities like Safed and Tiberias also partially observe Shushan Purim. Elsewhere, Shushan Purim is marked only by a small increase in festivity, including a prohibition on fasting, and slight changes in the liturgy.
As a rule, the month of Nisan is considered to be one of extra joy. Traditionally, throughout the entire month, Tahanun is omitted from the prayer service, many public mourning practices (such as delivering a eulogy at a funeral) are eliminated, and voluntary fasting is prohibited. However, practices sometimes vary.
The day before Passover (Erev Pesach, lit., "Passover eve") is significant for three reasons:
When Passover starts on Sunday, and the eve of Passover is therefore Shabbat, the above schedule is altered. See Eve of Passover on Shabbat for details.
Passover (פּסח) (Pesach), also known liturgically as חג המצות ("Ḥag haMatzot", the "Festival of Unleavened Bread"), is one of the Three Pilgrimage Festivals (shalosh regalim) mentioned in the Torah. Passover commemorates the Exodus, the liberation of the Israelite slaves from Egypt. No chametz (leavened food) is eaten, or even owned, during the week of Passover, in commemoration of the biblical narrative in which the Israelites left Egypt so quickly that their bread did not have enough time to rise. Observant Jews go to great lengths to remove all chametz from their homes and offices in the run-up to Passover.
Along with the avoidance of chametz, the principal ritual unique to this holiday is the seder. The seder, meaning "order", is an ordered ritual meal eaten on the first night of Passover, and outside Israel also on the second night. This meal is known for its distinctive ritual foods—matzo (unleavened bread), maror (bitter herbs), and four cups of wine—as well as its prayer text/handbook/study guide, the Haggadah. Participation in a Passover seder is one of the most widely observed Jewish rituals, even among less affiliated or less observant Jews.
Passover lasts seven days in Israel, and eight days outside Israel. The holiday of the last day of Passover (outside Israel, last two days) commemorates the Splitting of the Red Sea; according to tradition this occurred on the seventh day of Passover.
Pesach Sheni (פסח שני) ("Second Passover") is a day prescribed in the Torah to allow those who did not bring the Paschal Lamb offering (Korban Pesach) a second chance to do so. Eligibility was limited to those who were distant from Jerusalem on Passover, or those who were ritually impure and ineligible to participate in a sacrificial offering. Today, some have the custom to eat matzo on Pesach Sheni, and some make a small change to the liturgy.
Sefirah (lit. "Counting"; more fully, Sefirat HaOmer, "Counting of the Omer") (ספירת העומר), is the 49-day period between the biblical pilgrimage festivals of Passover and Shavuot. The Torah states that this period is to be counted, both in days and in weeks. The first day of this period is the day of the first grain offering of the new year's crop, an omer of barley. The day following the 49th day of the period is the festival of Shavuot; the Torah specifies a grain offering of wheat on that day.
Symbolically, this period has come to represent the spiritual development of the Israelites from slaves in the polytheistic society of Ancient Egypt to free, monotheistic people worthy of the revelation of the Torah, traditionally said to have occurred on Shavuot. Spiritual development remains a key rabbinic teaching of this period.
Sefirah has long been observed as a period of semi-mourning. The customary explanation cites a plague that killed 24,000 students of Rabbi Akiva (BT Yevamot 62b). In broad terms, the mourning practices observed include limiting actual celebrations (such as weddings), not listening to music, not wearing new clothing, and not shaving or taking a haircut. There is a wide variety of practice as to the specifics of this observance. See Counting of the Omer (Semi-mourning).
Lag Ba'Omer (לַ״ג בָּעוֹמֶר) is the 33rd day in the Omer count (לַ״ג is the number 33 in Hebrew). By Ashkenazi practice, the semi-mourning observed during the period of Sefirah (see above) is lifted on Lag Ba'Omer, while Sefardi practice is to lift it at the end of Lag Ba'Omer. Minor liturgical changes are made on Lag Ba'omer; because mourning practices are suspended, weddings are often conducted on this day.
Lag Ba'Omer is identified as the Yom Hillula (yahrzeit) of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, one of the leading Tannaim (teachers quoted in the Mishna) and ascribed author of the core text of Kabbalah, the Zohar. Customary celebrations include bonfires, picnics, and bow and arrow play by children. Boys sometimes receive their first haircuts on Lag Ba'Omer, while Hasidic rebbes hold tishes in honor of the day.
In Israel, Lag Ba'Omer is associated with the Bar Kokhba revolt against the Roman Empire. In Zionist thought, the plague that decimated Rabbi Akiva's 24,000 disciples is explained as a veiled reference to the revolt; the 33rd day representing the end of the plague is explained as the day of Bar Kokhba's victory. The traditional bonfires and bow-and-arrow play were thus reinterpreted as celebrations of military victory. In this vein, the order originally creating the Israel Defense Forces was issued on Lag Ba'Omer 1948, 13 days after Israel declared independence.
Shavuot (שבועות), the Feast of Weeks, is one of the three pilgrimage festivals (Shalosh regalim) ordained in the Torah. Different from other biblical holidays, the date for Shavuot is not explicitly fixed in the Torah. Instead, it is observed on the day following the 49th and final day in the counting of the Omer. In the current era of the fixed Jewish calendar, this puts the date of Shavuot as 6 Sivan. In Israel and in Reform Judaism, it is a one-day holiday; elsewhere, it is a two-day holiday extending through 7 Sivan.
According to Rabbinic tradition, codified in the Talmud at Shabbat 87b, the Ten Commandments were given on this day. In the era of the Temple, there were certain specific offerings mandated for Shavuot, and Shavuot was the first day for bringing of Bikkurim to the Temple. Other than those, there are no explicit mitzvot unique to Shavuot given in the Torah (parallel to matzo on Passover or Sukkah on Sukkot).
Nevertheless, there are a number of widespread customs observed on Shavuot. During this holiday the Torah portion containing the Ten Commandments is read in the synagogue, and the biblical Book of Ruth is read as well. It is traditional to eat dairy meals during Shavuot. In observant circles, all night Torah study is common on the first night of Shavuot, while in Reform Judaism, Shavuot is the customary date for Confirmation ceremonies.
The three-week period starting on 17 Tammuz and concluding after Tisha B'Av has traditionally been observed as a period of mourning for the destruction of Jerusalem and the Holy Temple there.
The Seventeenth of Tamuz (שבעה עשר בתמוז, Shiva Asar B'Tamuz) traditionally marks the first breach in the walls of the Jerusalem during the Roman conquest in 70 CE, at the end of the Second Temple period. According to tradition, this day has had negative connotations since Moses broke the first set of tablets on this day. The Mishnah cites five negative events that happened on 17 Tammuz.
This fast is observed like other minor fasts (see Tzom Gedalia, above). When this fast falls out on Shabbat, its observance is postponed until Sunday.
The period between the fasts of 17 Tammuz and 9 Av, known as the "Three Weeks" (Hebrew: בין המצרים, "between the straits"), features a steadily increasing level of mourning practices as Tisha B'Av approaches. Ashkenazi Jews refrain from conducting weddings and other joyful events throughout the period unless the date is established by Jewish law (as for a bris or pidyon haben). They do not cut their hair during this period. Starting on the first of Av and throughout the nine days between the 1st and 9th days of Av, Ashkenazim traditionally refrain from eating meat and drinking wine, except on Shabbat or at a Seudat Mitzvah (a Mitzvah meal, such as for a bris or siyum). They also refrain from bathing for pleasure. Sefardic practice varies some from this; the less severe restrictions usually begin on 1 Av, while the more severe restrictions apply during the week of Tisha B'Av itself.
Subject to the variations described above, Orthodox Judaism continues to maintain the traditional prohibitions. In Conservative Judaism, the Rabbinical Assembly's Committee on Jewish Law and Standards has issued several responsa (legal rulings) which hold that the prohibitions against weddings in this timeframe are deeply held traditions, but should not be construed as binding law. Thus, Conservative Jewish practice would allow weddings during this time, except on the 17th of Tammuz and 9th of Av themselves. Rabbis within Reform Judaism and Reconstructionist Judaism hold that halakha (Jewish law) is no longer binding and follow their individual consciences on such matters. Nevertheless, the rabbinical manual of the Reform movement encourages Reform rabbis not to conduct weddings on Tisha B'Av itself "out of historical consciousness and respect" for the Jewish community.
Tisha B'Av (תשעה באב) is a major fast day and day of mourning. A Midrashic tradition states that the spies' negative report concerning the Land of Israel was delivered on Tisha B'Av. Consequently, the day became auspicious for negative events in Jewish history. Most notably, both the First Temple, originally built by King Solomon, and the Second Temple of Roman times were destroyed on Tisha B'Av. Other calamities throughout Jewish history are said to have taken place on Tisha B'Av, including King Edward I's edict compelling the Jews to leave England (1290) and the Jewish expulsion from Spain in 1492.
Tisha B'Av is a major fast. It is a 25-hour fast, running from sundown to nightfall. As on Yom Kippur, not only are eating and drinking prohibited, but also bathing, anointing, marital relations and the wearing of leather shoes. Work is not prohibited, as on biblical holidays, but is discouraged. In the evening, the Book of Lamentations is read in the synagogue, while in the morning lengthy kinot, poems of elegy, are recited. From evening until noon mourning rituals resembling those of shiva are observed, including sitting on low stools or the floor; after noon those restrictions are somewhat lightened, in keeping with the tradition that Messiah will be born on Tisha B'Av.
While the fast ends at nightfall of 9–10 Av, the restrictions of the Three Weeks and Nine Days continue through noon on 10 Av because the Second Temple continued to burn through most of that day. When 9 Av falls on Shabbat, when fasting is prohibited, the fast is postponed until 10 Av. In that case, the restrictions of the Three Weeks and Nine Days end with the fast, except for the prohibition against eating meat and drinking wine, which extend until the morning of 10 Av.
Tu B'av (ט״ו באב), lit. "15th of Av", is a day mentioned in the Talmud alongside Yom Kippur as "happiest of the year". It was a day celebrating the bringing of wood used for the Temple Service, as well as a day when marriages were arranged. Today, it is marked by a small change in liturgy. In modern Israel, the day has become somewhat of an analog to Valentine's Day.
Several other fast days of ancient or medieval origin continue to be observed to some degree in modern times. Such continued observance is usually by Orthodox Jews only, and is not universal today even among Orthodox Jews.
As a general rule, the biblical Jewish holidays (Sabbath, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Passover, Shavuot, Sukkot and Purim) are observed as public holidays in Israel. Chanukah is a school holiday, but businesses remain open. On Tisha B'Av, restaurants and places of entertainment are closed. Other Jewish holidays listed above are observed in varying ways and to varying degrees.
Between the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the aftermath of the Six-Day War, the Knesset, generally in consultation with the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, established four national holidays or days of remembrance:
The status of these days as religious events is not uniform within the Jewish world. Non-Orthodox, Religious Zionist and Modern Orthodox Jewish religious movements accept these days as religious as well as national in nature.
As a rule, these four days are not accepted as religious observances by most Haredi Jews, including Hasidim. Some ḥaredim are opposed to the existence of the State of Israel altogether on religious grounds; others simply feel that there are not sufficient grounds under Jewish law to justify the establishment of new religious holidays. For details, see Haredim and Zionism.
Observance of these days in Jewish communities outside Israel is typically more muted than their observance in Israel. Events held in government and public venues within Israel are often held in Jewish communal settings (synagogues and community centers) abroad.
More recently, the Knesset established two additional holidays:
Finally, the Israeli government also recognizes several ethnic Jewish observances with holiday status.
Yom HaShoah (lit. "Holocaust Day") is a day of remembrance for victims of the Holocaust. Its full name is Yom Hazikaron LaShoah v'LiGevurah (lit. "Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day") (יום הזכרון לשואה ולגבורה), and reflects a desire to recognize martyrs who died in active resistance to the Nazis alongside those who died as passive victims. Its date, 27 Nisan, was chosen because it commemorates the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the best known of the armed Jewish uprisings.
Places of public entertainment are closed throughout Israel in recognition of the day. Public commemoration of Yom HaShoah usually includes religious elements such as the recitation of Psalms, memorial prayers, and kaddish, and the lighting of memorial candles. In Israel, the most notable observances are the State memorial ceremony at Yad Vashem and the sirens marking off a two-minute silence at 10:00 am. Religious Zionist and Modern Orthodox Jews generally participate in such public observances along with secular Jews and Jews who adhere to more liberal religious movements. Outside Israel, Jewish communities observe Yom HaShoah in addition to or instead of their countries' Holocaust Memorial Days. Probably the most notable commemoration is the March of the Living, held at the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau, attended by Jews from all parts of the world.
Outside Orthodoxy, a liturgy for Yom HaShoah is beginning to develop. The Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist prayer books all include liturgical elements for Yom HaShoah, to be added to the regular weekday prayers. Conservative Judaism has written a scroll, called Megillat HaShoah, intended to become a definitive liturgical reading for Yom HaShoah. The Orthodox world–even the segment that participates publicly in Yom HaShoah–has been reluctant to write a liturgy for the day, preferring to compose Kinnot (prayers of lamentation) for recitation on Tisha B'Av.
In order to ensure that public Yom HaShoah ceremonies in Israel do not violate Shabbat prohibitions, the date for Yom HaShoah varies as follows:
Yom Hazikaron (lit. "Memorial Day") is a day of remembrance of the fallen of Israel's wars. During the first years of Israel's independence, this remembrance was observed on Yom Ha'atzmaut (Independence Day) itself. However, by 1951, the memorial observance was separated from the festive celebration of Independence Day and moved to its current date, the day before Yom Ha'atzmaut. Since 2000, the scope of the memorial has expanded to include civilians slain by acts of hostile terrorism. Its full name is now יום הזכרון לחללי מערכות ישראל ולנפגעי פעולות האיבה ("Day of Remembrance for the Fallen of the Battles of Israel and the Victims of Terror").
Places of public entertainment are closed throughout Israel in recognition of the day. Many schools, businesses and other institutions conduct memorial services on this day, and it is customary to visit the graves of fallen soldiers and to recite memorial prayers there. The principal public observances are the evening opening ceremony at the Western Wall and the morning services of remembrance at military cemeteries throughout the country, each opened by the sounding of sirens. The public observances conclude with the service at the military cemetery on Mount Herzl that serves as the transition to Yom Ha'atzmaut.
Outside Israel, Yom HaZikaron observances are often folded into Yom Ha'atzmaut celebrations. Within Israel, Yom Hazikaron is always the day before Yom Ha'atzmaut, but that date moves to prevent violation of Sabbath prohibitions during the ceremonies of either day. See following section for details.
Yom Ha'atzmaut (יום העצמאות) is Israel's Independence Day. Observance of this day by Jews inside and outside Israel is widespread, and varies in tone from secular (military parades and barbecues) to religious (recitation of Hallel and new liturgies).
Although Israel's independence was declared on a Friday, the Chief Rabbinate has long been mindful of the possibility of Yom Ha'atzmaut (and Yom Hazikaron) observances leading to violation of Sabbath prohibitions. To prevent such violations, the dates of Yom Hazikaron and Yom Ha'atzmaut vary as follows:
Nearly all non-ḥaredi Jewish religious communities have incorporated changes or enhancements to the liturgy in honor of Yom Ha'atzmaut and suspend the mourning practices of the period of Sefirat Ha'Omer. (See Yom Ha'atzmaut—Religious Customs for details.) Within the Religious Zionist and Modern Orthodox communities, these changes are not without controversy, and customs continue to evolve.
Ḥaredi religious observance of Yom Ha'atzmaut varies widely. A few ḥaredim (especially Sefardic Ḥaredim) celebrate the day in a reasonably similar way to the way non-ḥaredim do. Most ḥaredim simply treat the day indifferently; i.e., as a regular day. And finally others (notably Satmar Ḥasidim and Neturei Karta) mourn on the day because of their opposition to the enterprise of the State of Israel.
Jerusalem Day (יום ירושלים) marks the 1967 reunification of Jerusalem under Israeli control during the Six-Day War. This marked the first time in 19 years that the Temple Mount was accessible to Jews, and the first time since the destruction of the Second Temple 1897 years earlier that the Temple Mount was under Jewish political control.
As with Yom Ha'atzmaut, celebrations of Yom Yerushalayim range from completely secular (including hikes to Jerusalem and a large parade through downtown Jerusalem) to religious (recitation of Hallel and new liturgies). Although Haredim do not participate in the liturgical changes, they are somewhat more likely to celebrate Yom Yerushalayim than the other modern Israeli holidays because of the importance of the liberation of the Western Wall and the Old City of Jerusalem.
Outside Israel, observance of Yom Yerushalayim is widespread, especially in Orthodox circles. It has not gained as widespread acceptance as Yom Ha'atzmaut, especially among more politically liberal Jews, because of the continuing conflicts over the future of the city.
Yom Yerushalayim has not traditionally moved to avoid Shabbat desecration, although in 2012 the Chief Rabbinate began some efforts in that direction.
Aliyah Day (יום העלייה) is an Israeli national holiday celebrated annually on the tenth of Nisan. The day was established to acknowledge Aliyah, immigration to the Jewish state, as a core value of the State of Israel, and honor the ongoing contributions of Olim (immigrants) to Israeli society.
Immigration to Israel is a recognized religious value of Judaism, sometimes referred to as the Gathering of Israel. The date chosen for Yom HaAliyah, 10 Nisan, has religious significance: it is the day on which Joshua and the Israelites crossed the Jordan River at Gilgal into the Promised Land. It was thus the first documented "mass Aliyah". The alternative date observed in the school system, 7 Heshvan, falls during the week of the Torah portion in which God instructs Abraham to leave his home and his family and go up to the Land of Israel.
At the present time, observance of this day appears to be secular in nature.
The Knesset established this observance in 2014. The purpose of this observance is to recognize the collective trauma of Mizrahi Jews during the period around the establishment of the State of Israel. Many Mizrachi Jews felt that their own suffering was being ignored, both in comparison to the suffering of European Jewry during the Holocaust and in comparison to the Palestinian Nakba. The Gregorian-calendar date chosen is the day after the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine was adopted, as that date marked the beginning of concentrated pressure and hostility against the community.
At the present time, observance of this day appears to be secular in nature.
The Israeli government officially recognizes three traditional holidays of ethnic Jewish communities in Israel. These days are also observed by their respective communities outside Israel. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Jewish holidays, also known as Jewish festivals or Yamim Tovim (Hebrew: Hebrew: ימים טובים, romanized: yāmim ṭovim, lit. 'Good Days', or singular Hebrew: יום טוב Yom Tov, in transliterated Hebrew [English: /ˈjɔːm ˈtɔːv, joʊm ˈtoʊv/]), are holidays observed by Jews throughout the Hebrew calendar. They include religious, cultural and national elements, derived from three sources: biblical mitzvot (\"commandments\"), rabbinic mandates, and the history of Judaism and the State of Israel.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Jewish holidays occur on the same dates every year in the Hebrew calendar, but the dates vary in the Gregorian. This is because the Hebrew calendar is a lunisolar calendar (based on the cycles of both the sun and moon), whereas the Gregorian is a solar calendar. Each holiday can only occur on certain days of the week, four for most, but five for holidays in Tevet and Shevat and six for Hanukkah (see Days of week on Hebrew calendar).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Certain terms are used very commonly for groups of holidays.",
"title": "General concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Certain terminology is used in referring to different categories of holidays, depending on their source and their nature:",
"title": "General concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Shabbat (Hebrew: שבת) (Ashkenazi pron. from Yiddish shabbos), or Sabbath, is referred to by that name exclusively. Similarly, Rosh Chodesh (Hebrew: ראש חודש) is referred to by that name exclusively.",
"title": "General concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The most notable common feature of Shabbat and the biblical festivals is the requirement to refrain from melacha on these days. Melacha is most commonly translated as \"work\"; perhaps a better translation is \"creative-constructive work\". Strictly speaking, Melacha is defined in Jewish law (halacha) by 39 categories of labor that were used in constructing the Tabernacle while the Jews wandered in the desert. As understood traditionally and in Orthodox Judaism:",
"title": "General concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In principle, Conservative Judaism understands the requirement to refrain from melacha in the same way as Orthodox Judaism. In practice, Conservative rabbis frequently rule on prohibitions around melacha differently from Orthodox authorities. Still, there are a number of Conservative/Masorti communities around the world where Sabbath and Festival observance fairly closely resembles Orthodox observance.",
"title": "General concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "However, many, if not most, lay members of Conservative congregations in North America do not consider themselves Sabbath-observant, even by Conservative standards. At the same time, adherents of Reform Judaism and Reconstructionist Judaism do not accept halacha, and therefore restrictions on melacha, as binding at all. Jews fitting any of these descriptions refrain from melacha in practice only as they personally see fit.",
"title": "General concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Shabbat and holiday work restrictions are always put aside in cases of pikuach nefesh, which is saving a human life. At the most fundamental level, if there is any possibility whatsoever that action must be taken to save a life, Shabbat restrictions are set aside immediately, and without reservation. Where the danger to life is present but less immediate, there is some preference to minimize violation of Shabbat work restrictions where possible. The laws in this area are complex.",
"title": "General concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The Torah specifies a single date on the Jewish calendar for observance of holidays. Nevertheless, festivals of biblical origin other than Shabbat and Yom Kippur are observed for two days outside the land of Israel, and Rosh Hashanah is observed for two days even inside the land of Israel.",
"title": "General concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Dates for holidays on the Jewish calendar are expressed in the Torah as \"day x of month y\". Accordingly, the beginning of month y needs to be determined before the proper date of the holiday on day x can be fixed. Months in the Jewish calendar are lunar, and originally were thought to have been proclaimed by the blowing of a shofar. Later, the Sanhedrin received testimony of witnesses saying they saw the new crescent moon. Then the Sanhedrin would inform Jewish communities away from its meeting place that it had proclaimed a new moon. The practice of observing a second festival day stemmed from delays in disseminating that information.",
"title": "General concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Yom Kippur is not observed for two days anywhere because of the difficulty of maintaining a fast over two days.",
"title": "General concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Adherents of Reform Judaism and Reconstructionist Judaism generally do not observe the second day of festivals, although some do observe two days of Rosh Hashanah.",
"title": "General concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Jewish law (halacha) accords Shabbat (Hebrew: שבת) the status of a holiday, a day of rest celebrated on the seventh day of each week. Jewish law defines a day as ending at either sundown or nightfall, when the next day then begins. Thus,",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The fundamental rituals and observances of Shabbat include:",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In many ways, halakha (Jewish law) sees Shabbat as the most important holy day in the Jewish calendar.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Rosh Chodesh (Hebrew: ראש חודש) (lit., \"head of the month\") is a minor holiday or observance occurring on the first day of each month of the Jewish calendar, as well as the last day of the preceding month if it has thirty days.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Beyond the preceding, current observance is limited to changes in liturgy.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Related observances:",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The month of Elul that precedes Rosh Hashanah is considered to be a propitious time for repentance. For this reason, additional penitential prayers called Selichot are added to the daily prayers, except on Shabbat. Sephardi Jews add these prayers each weekday during Elul. Ashkenazi Jews recite them from the last Sunday (or Saturday night) preceding Rosh Hashanah that allows at least four days of recitations.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "According to oral tradition, Rosh Hashanah (Hebrew: ראש השנה) (lit., \"Head of the Year\") is the Day of Memorial or Remembrance (Hebrew: יום הזכרון, Yom HaZikaron), and the day of judgment (Hebrew: יום הדין, Yom HaDin). God appears in the role of King, remembering and judging each person individually according to his/her deeds, and making a decree for each person for the following year.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The holiday is characterized by one specific mitzvah: blowing the shofar. According to the Torah, this is the first day of the seventh month of the calendar year, and marks the beginning of a ten-day period leading up to Yom Kippur. According to one of two Talmudic opinions, the creation of the world was completed on Rosh Hashanah.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Morning prayer services are lengthy on Rosh Hashanah, and focus on the themes described above: majesty and judgment, remembrance, the birth of the world, and the blowing of the shofar. Ashkenazi Jews recite the brief Tashlikh prayer, a symbolic casting off of the previous year's sins, during the afternoon of Rosh Hashanah.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The Bible specifies Rosh Hashanah as a one-day holiday, but it is traditionally celebrated for two days, even within the Land of Israel. (See Second day of biblical festivals, above.)",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The Torah itself does not use any term like \"New Year\" in reference to Rosh Hashanah. The Mishnah in Rosh Hashanah specifies four different \"New Year's Days\" for different purposes:",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The first ten days of Tishrei (from the beginning of Rosh Hashana until the end of Yom Kippur) are known as the Ten Days of Repentance (עשרת ימי תשובה, Aseret Yemei Teshuva). During this time, in anticipation of Yom Kippur, it is \"exceedingly appropriate\" for Jews to practice teshuvah (literally \"return\"), an examination of one's deeds and repentance for sins one has committed against other people and God. This repentance can take the form of additional supplications, confessing one's deeds before God, fasting, self-reflection, and an increase of involvement with, or donations to, charity.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The Fast of Gedalia (Hebrew: צום גדליה) is a minor Jewish fast day. It commemorates the assassination of the governor of Judah, Gedalia, which ended any level of Jewish rule following the destruction of the First Temple.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "As on all minor fast days, fasting from dawn to dusk is required, but other laws of mourning are not normally observed. A Torah reading is included in both the Shacharit and Mincha prayers, and a Haftarah is also included at Mincha. There are also a number of additions to the liturgy of both services.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Yom Kippur (Hebrew: יום כיפור) is the holiest day of the year for Jews. Its central theme is atonement and reconciliation. This is accomplished through prayer and complete fasting—including abstinence from all food and drink (including water)—by all healthy adults. Bathing, wearing of perfume or cologne, wearing of leather shoes, and sexual relations are some of the other prohibitions on Yom Kippur—all them designed to ensure one's attention is completely and absolutely focused on the quest for atonement with God. Yom Kippur is also unique among holidays as having work-related restrictions identical to those of Shabbat. The fast and other prohibitions commence on 10 Tishrei at sunset—sunset being the beginning of the day in Jewish tradition.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "A traditional prayer in Aramaic called Kol Nidre (\"All Vows\") is traditionally recited just before sunset. Although often regarded as the start of the Yom Kippur evening service—to such a degree that Erev Yom Kippur (\"Yom Kippur Evening\") is often called \"Kol Nidre\" (also spelled \"Kol Nidrei\")—it is technically a separate tradition. This is especially so because, being recited before sunset, it is actually recited on 9 Tishrei, which is the day before Yom Kippur; it is not recited on Yom Kippur itself (on 10 Tishrei, which begins after the sun sets).",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "A Tallit (four-cornered prayer shawl) is donned for evening and afternoon prayers–the only day of the year in which this is done. In traditional Ashkenazi communities, men wear the kittel throughout the day's prayers. The prayers on Yom Kippur evening are lengthier than on any other night of the year. Once services reconvene in the morning, the services (in all traditions) are the longest of the year. In some traditional synagogues prayers run continuously from morning until nightfall, or nearly so. Two highlights of the morning prayers in traditional synagogues are the recitation of Yizkor, the prayer of remembrance, and of liturgical poems (piyyutim) describing the temple service of Yom Kippur.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Two other highlights happen late in the day. During the Minchah prayer, the haftarah reading features the entire Book of Jonah. Finally, the day concludes with Ne'ilah, a special service recited only on the day of Yom Kippur. Ne'ilah deals with the closing of the holiday, and contains a fervent final plea to God for forgiveness just before the conclusion of the fast. Yom Kippur comes to an end with the blowing of the shofar, which marks the conclusion of the fast. It is always observed as a one-day holiday, both inside and outside the boundaries of the Land of Israel.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Yom Kippur is considered, along with 15th of Av, as the happiest days of the year (Talmud Bavli—Tractate Ta'anit).",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Sukkot (Hebrew: סוכות or Hebrew: סֻכּוֹת, sukkōt) or Succoth is a seven-day festival, also known as the Feast of Booths, the Feast of Tabernacles, or just Tabernacles. It is one of the Three Pilgrimage Festivals (shalosh regalim) mentioned in the Bible. Sukkot commemorates the years that the Jews spent in the desert on their way to the Promised Land, and celebrates the way in which God protected them under difficult desert conditions. The word sukkot is the plural of the Hebrew word sukkah, meaning booth. Jews are commanded to \"dwell\" in booths during the holiday. This generally means taking meals, but some sleep in the sukkah as well, particularly in Israel. There are specific rules for constructing a sukkah.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Along with dwelling in a sukkah, the principal ritual unique to this holiday is use of the Four Species: lulav (palm), hadass (myrtle), aravah (willow) and etrog (citron). On each day of the holiday other than Shabbat, these are waved in association with the recitation of Hallel in the synagogue, then walked in a procession around the synagogue called the Hoshanot.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The seventh day of the Sukkot is called Hoshanah Rabbah, the \"Great Hoshanah\" (singular of Hoshanot and the source of the English word hosanna). The climax of the day's prayers includes seven processions of Hoshanot around the synagogue. This tradition mimics practices from the Temple in Jerusalem. Many aspects of the day's customs also resemble those of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Hoshanah Rabbah is traditionally taken to be the day of the \"delivery\" of the final judgment of Yom Kippur, and offers a last opportunity for pleas of repentance before the holiday season closes.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The holiday of Shemini Atzeret (Hebrew: שמיני עצרת) immediately follows the conclusion of the holiday of Sukkot. The Hebrew word shemini means \"eighth\", and refers to its position on \"the eighth day\" of Sukkot, actually a seven-day holiday. This name reflects the fact that while in many respects Shemini Atzeret is a separate holiday in its own right, in certain respects its celebration is linked to that of Sukkot. Outside Israel, meals are still taken in the Sukkah on this day.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "The main notable custom of this holiday is the celebration of Simchat Torah (Hebrew: שמחת תורה), meaning \"rejoicing with the Torah\". This name originally referred to a special \"ceremony\": the last weekly Torah portion is read from Deuteronomy, completing the annual cycle, and is followed immediately by the reading of the first chapter of Genesis, beginning the new annual cycle. Services are especially joyous, and all attendees, young and old, are involved.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "This ceremony so dominates the holiday that in Israel, where the holiday is one day long, the whole holiday is often referred to as Simchat Torah. Outside Israel, the holiday is two days long; the name Shemini Atzeret is used for the first day, while the second is normally called Simchat Torah.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The story of Hanukkah (Hebrew: חנוכה) is preserved in the books of the First and Second Maccabees. These books are not part of the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), they are apocryphal books instead. The miracle of the one-day supply of olive oil miraculously lasting eight days is first described in the Talmud (Shabbat 21b), written about 600 years after the events described in the books of Maccabees.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Hanukkah marks the defeat of Seleucid Empire forces that had tried to prevent the people of Israel from practicing Judaism. Judah Maccabee and his brothers destroyed overwhelming forces, and rededicated the Temple in Jerusalem. The eight-day festival is marked by the kindling of lights—one on the first night, two on the second, and so on—using a special candle holder called a Hanukkiah, or a Hanukkah menorah.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Religiously, Hanukkah is a minor holiday. Except on Shabbat, restrictions on work do not apply. Aside from the kindling of lights, formal religious observance is restricted to changes in liturgy. Hanukkah celebration tends to be informal and based on custom rather than law. Three widely practiced customs include:",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The Tenth of Tevet (Hebrew: עשרה בטבת, Asarah B'Tevet) is a minor fast day, marking the beginning of the siege of Jerusalem as outlined in 2 Kings 25:1",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "This fast's commemoration also includes other events occurring on 8, 9 and 10 Tevet.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "This fast is observed like other minor fasts (see Tzom Gedalia, above). This is the only minor fast that can fall on a Friday under the current fixed Jewish calendar.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Tu Bishvat (ט\"ו בשבט) (lit., \"fifteenth of Shevat\", as ט״ו is the number \"15\" in Hebrew letters), is the new year for trees. It is also known as חג האילנות (Ḥag ha-Ilanot, Festival of Trees), or ראש השנה לאילנות (Rosh ha-Shanah la-Ilanot, New Year for Trees). According to the Mishnah, it marks the day from which fruit tithes are counted each year. Starting on this date, the biblical prohibition on eating the first three years of fruit (orlah) and the requirement to bring the fourth year fruit (neta revai) to the Temple in Jerusalem were counted.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "During the 17th century, Rabbi Yitzchak Luria of Safed and his disciples created a short seder, called Hemdat ha‑Yamim, reminiscent of the seder that Jews observe on Passover, that explores the holiday's Kabbalistic themes. This Tu Bishvat seder has witnessed a revival in recent years. More generally, Tu Bishvat is celebrated in modern times by eating various fruits and nuts associated with the Land of Israel.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Traditionally, trees are planted on this day. Many children collect funds leading up to this day to plant trees in Israel. Trees are usually planted locally as well.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Purim Katan (פורים קטן) (lit., \"small Purim\") is observed on the 14th and 15th of First Adar in leap years. These days are marked by a small increase in festivity, including a prohibition on fasting, and slight changes in the liturgy.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Ta'anit Esther (תענית אסתר), or \"Fast of Esther\", is named in honor of the fast of Esther and her court as Esther prepared to approach the king unbidden to invite him and Haman to a banquet. It commemorates that fast, as well as one alluded to later in the Book of Esther, undertaken as the Jews prepared to battle their enemies.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "This fast is observed like other minor fasts (see Tzom Gedalia, above). While normally observed on 13 Adar, the eve of Purim, this fast is advanced to Thursday, 11 Adar, when 13 Adar falls on Shabbat.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Purim (פורים) commemorates the events that took place in the Book of Esther. The principal celebrations or commemorations include:",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Several customs have evolved from these principal commemorations. One widespread custom to act out the story of Purim. The Purim spiel, or Purim play, has its origins in this, although the Purim spiel is not limited to that subject. Wearing of costumes and masks is also very common. These may be an outgrowth of Purim plays, but there are several theories as to the origin of the custom, most related in some way to the \"hidden\" nature of the miracles of Purim.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Purim carnivals of various types have also become customary. In Israel there are festive parades, known as Ad-D'lo-Yada, in the town's main street. The largest and most renowned is in Holon.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Most Jews celebrate Purim on 14 Adar, the day of celebration after the Jews defeated their enemies. Because Jews in the capital city of Shushan fought with their enemies an extra day, Purim is celebrated a day later there, on the day known as שושן פורים, Shushan Purim. This observance was expanded to \"walled cities\", which are defined as cities \"walled since the time of Joshua\". In practice, there are no Jews living in Shushan (Shush, Iran), and Shushan Purim is observed fully only in Jerusalem. Cities like Safed and Tiberias also partially observe Shushan Purim. Elsewhere, Shushan Purim is marked only by a small increase in festivity, including a prohibition on fasting, and slight changes in the liturgy.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "As a rule, the month of Nisan is considered to be one of extra joy. Traditionally, throughout the entire month, Tahanun is omitted from the prayer service, many public mourning practices (such as delivering a eulogy at a funeral) are eliminated, and voluntary fasting is prohibited. However, practices sometimes vary.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "The day before Passover (Erev Pesach, lit., \"Passover eve\") is significant for three reasons:",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "When Passover starts on Sunday, and the eve of Passover is therefore Shabbat, the above schedule is altered. See Eve of Passover on Shabbat for details.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Passover (פּסח) (Pesach), also known liturgically as חג המצות (\"Ḥag haMatzot\", the \"Festival of Unleavened Bread\"), is one of the Three Pilgrimage Festivals (shalosh regalim) mentioned in the Torah. Passover commemorates the Exodus, the liberation of the Israelite slaves from Egypt. No chametz (leavened food) is eaten, or even owned, during the week of Passover, in commemoration of the biblical narrative in which the Israelites left Egypt so quickly that their bread did not have enough time to rise. Observant Jews go to great lengths to remove all chametz from their homes and offices in the run-up to Passover.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Along with the avoidance of chametz, the principal ritual unique to this holiday is the seder. The seder, meaning \"order\", is an ordered ritual meal eaten on the first night of Passover, and outside Israel also on the second night. This meal is known for its distinctive ritual foods—matzo (unleavened bread), maror (bitter herbs), and four cups of wine—as well as its prayer text/handbook/study guide, the Haggadah. Participation in a Passover seder is one of the most widely observed Jewish rituals, even among less affiliated or less observant Jews.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Passover lasts seven days in Israel, and eight days outside Israel. The holiday of the last day of Passover (outside Israel, last two days) commemorates the Splitting of the Red Sea; according to tradition this occurred on the seventh day of Passover.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Pesach Sheni (פסח שני) (\"Second Passover\") is a day prescribed in the Torah to allow those who did not bring the Paschal Lamb offering (Korban Pesach) a second chance to do so. Eligibility was limited to those who were distant from Jerusalem on Passover, or those who were ritually impure and ineligible to participate in a sacrificial offering. Today, some have the custom to eat matzo on Pesach Sheni, and some make a small change to the liturgy.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Sefirah (lit. \"Counting\"; more fully, Sefirat HaOmer, \"Counting of the Omer\") (ספירת העומר), is the 49-day period between the biblical pilgrimage festivals of Passover and Shavuot. The Torah states that this period is to be counted, both in days and in weeks. The first day of this period is the day of the first grain offering of the new year's crop, an omer of barley. The day following the 49th day of the period is the festival of Shavuot; the Torah specifies a grain offering of wheat on that day.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Symbolically, this period has come to represent the spiritual development of the Israelites from slaves in the polytheistic society of Ancient Egypt to free, monotheistic people worthy of the revelation of the Torah, traditionally said to have occurred on Shavuot. Spiritual development remains a key rabbinic teaching of this period.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Sefirah has long been observed as a period of semi-mourning. The customary explanation cites a plague that killed 24,000 students of Rabbi Akiva (BT Yevamot 62b). In broad terms, the mourning practices observed include limiting actual celebrations (such as weddings), not listening to music, not wearing new clothing, and not shaving or taking a haircut. There is a wide variety of practice as to the specifics of this observance. See Counting of the Omer (Semi-mourning).",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Lag Ba'Omer (לַ״ג בָּעוֹמֶר) is the 33rd day in the Omer count (לַ״ג is the number 33 in Hebrew). By Ashkenazi practice, the semi-mourning observed during the period of Sefirah (see above) is lifted on Lag Ba'Omer, while Sefardi practice is to lift it at the end of Lag Ba'Omer. Minor liturgical changes are made on Lag Ba'omer; because mourning practices are suspended, weddings are often conducted on this day.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Lag Ba'Omer is identified as the Yom Hillula (yahrzeit) of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, one of the leading Tannaim (teachers quoted in the Mishna) and ascribed author of the core text of Kabbalah, the Zohar. Customary celebrations include bonfires, picnics, and bow and arrow play by children. Boys sometimes receive their first haircuts on Lag Ba'Omer, while Hasidic rebbes hold tishes in honor of the day.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "In Israel, Lag Ba'Omer is associated with the Bar Kokhba revolt against the Roman Empire. In Zionist thought, the plague that decimated Rabbi Akiva's 24,000 disciples is explained as a veiled reference to the revolt; the 33rd day representing the end of the plague is explained as the day of Bar Kokhba's victory. The traditional bonfires and bow-and-arrow play were thus reinterpreted as celebrations of military victory. In this vein, the order originally creating the Israel Defense Forces was issued on Lag Ba'Omer 1948, 13 days after Israel declared independence.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Shavuot (שבועות), the Feast of Weeks, is one of the three pilgrimage festivals (Shalosh regalim) ordained in the Torah. Different from other biblical holidays, the date for Shavuot is not explicitly fixed in the Torah. Instead, it is observed on the day following the 49th and final day in the counting of the Omer. In the current era of the fixed Jewish calendar, this puts the date of Shavuot as 6 Sivan. In Israel and in Reform Judaism, it is a one-day holiday; elsewhere, it is a two-day holiday extending through 7 Sivan.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "According to Rabbinic tradition, codified in the Talmud at Shabbat 87b, the Ten Commandments were given on this day. In the era of the Temple, there were certain specific offerings mandated for Shavuot, and Shavuot was the first day for bringing of Bikkurim to the Temple. Other than those, there are no explicit mitzvot unique to Shavuot given in the Torah (parallel to matzo on Passover or Sukkah on Sukkot).",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Nevertheless, there are a number of widespread customs observed on Shavuot. During this holiday the Torah portion containing the Ten Commandments is read in the synagogue, and the biblical Book of Ruth is read as well. It is traditional to eat dairy meals during Shavuot. In observant circles, all night Torah study is common on the first night of Shavuot, while in Reform Judaism, Shavuot is the customary date for Confirmation ceremonies.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "The three-week period starting on 17 Tammuz and concluding after Tisha B'Av has traditionally been observed as a period of mourning for the destruction of Jerusalem and the Holy Temple there.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "The Seventeenth of Tamuz (שבעה עשר בתמוז, Shiva Asar B'Tamuz) traditionally marks the first breach in the walls of the Jerusalem during the Roman conquest in 70 CE, at the end of the Second Temple period. According to tradition, this day has had negative connotations since Moses broke the first set of tablets on this day. The Mishnah cites five negative events that happened on 17 Tammuz.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "This fast is observed like other minor fasts (see Tzom Gedalia, above). When this fast falls out on Shabbat, its observance is postponed until Sunday.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "The period between the fasts of 17 Tammuz and 9 Av, known as the \"Three Weeks\" (Hebrew: בין המצרים, \"between the straits\"), features a steadily increasing level of mourning practices as Tisha B'Av approaches. Ashkenazi Jews refrain from conducting weddings and other joyful events throughout the period unless the date is established by Jewish law (as for a bris or pidyon haben). They do not cut their hair during this period. Starting on the first of Av and throughout the nine days between the 1st and 9th days of Av, Ashkenazim traditionally refrain from eating meat and drinking wine, except on Shabbat or at a Seudat Mitzvah (a Mitzvah meal, such as for a bris or siyum). They also refrain from bathing for pleasure. Sefardic practice varies some from this; the less severe restrictions usually begin on 1 Av, while the more severe restrictions apply during the week of Tisha B'Av itself.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Subject to the variations described above, Orthodox Judaism continues to maintain the traditional prohibitions. In Conservative Judaism, the Rabbinical Assembly's Committee on Jewish Law and Standards has issued several responsa (legal rulings) which hold that the prohibitions against weddings in this timeframe are deeply held traditions, but should not be construed as binding law. Thus, Conservative Jewish practice would allow weddings during this time, except on the 17th of Tammuz and 9th of Av themselves. Rabbis within Reform Judaism and Reconstructionist Judaism hold that halakha (Jewish law) is no longer binding and follow their individual consciences on such matters. Nevertheless, the rabbinical manual of the Reform movement encourages Reform rabbis not to conduct weddings on Tisha B'Av itself \"out of historical consciousness and respect\" for the Jewish community.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Tisha B'Av (תשעה באב) is a major fast day and day of mourning. A Midrashic tradition states that the spies' negative report concerning the Land of Israel was delivered on Tisha B'Av. Consequently, the day became auspicious for negative events in Jewish history. Most notably, both the First Temple, originally built by King Solomon, and the Second Temple of Roman times were destroyed on Tisha B'Av. Other calamities throughout Jewish history are said to have taken place on Tisha B'Av, including King Edward I's edict compelling the Jews to leave England (1290) and the Jewish expulsion from Spain in 1492.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Tisha B'Av is a major fast. It is a 25-hour fast, running from sundown to nightfall. As on Yom Kippur, not only are eating and drinking prohibited, but also bathing, anointing, marital relations and the wearing of leather shoes. Work is not prohibited, as on biblical holidays, but is discouraged. In the evening, the Book of Lamentations is read in the synagogue, while in the morning lengthy kinot, poems of elegy, are recited. From evening until noon mourning rituals resembling those of shiva are observed, including sitting on low stools or the floor; after noon those restrictions are somewhat lightened, in keeping with the tradition that Messiah will be born on Tisha B'Av.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "While the fast ends at nightfall of 9–10 Av, the restrictions of the Three Weeks and Nine Days continue through noon on 10 Av because the Second Temple continued to burn through most of that day. When 9 Av falls on Shabbat, when fasting is prohibited, the fast is postponed until 10 Av. In that case, the restrictions of the Three Weeks and Nine Days end with the fast, except for the prohibition against eating meat and drinking wine, which extend until the morning of 10 Av.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Tu B'av (ט״ו באב), lit. \"15th of Av\", is a day mentioned in the Talmud alongside Yom Kippur as \"happiest of the year\". It was a day celebrating the bringing of wood used for the Temple Service, as well as a day when marriages were arranged. Today, it is marked by a small change in liturgy. In modern Israel, the day has become somewhat of an analog to Valentine's Day.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Several other fast days of ancient or medieval origin continue to be observed to some degree in modern times. Such continued observance is usually by Orthodox Jews only, and is not universal today even among Orthodox Jews.",
"title": "Holidays of biblical and rabbinic (Talmudic) origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "As a general rule, the biblical Jewish holidays (Sabbath, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Passover, Shavuot, Sukkot and Purim) are observed as public holidays in Israel. Chanukah is a school holiday, but businesses remain open. On Tisha B'Av, restaurants and places of entertainment are closed. Other Jewish holidays listed above are observed in varying ways and to varying degrees.",
"title": "Israeli/Jewish national holidays and days of remembrance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Between the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the aftermath of the Six-Day War, the Knesset, generally in consultation with the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, established four national holidays or days of remembrance:",
"title": "Israeli/Jewish national holidays and days of remembrance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "The status of these days as religious events is not uniform within the Jewish world. Non-Orthodox, Religious Zionist and Modern Orthodox Jewish religious movements accept these days as religious as well as national in nature.",
"title": "Israeli/Jewish national holidays and days of remembrance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "As a rule, these four days are not accepted as religious observances by most Haredi Jews, including Hasidim. Some ḥaredim are opposed to the existence of the State of Israel altogether on religious grounds; others simply feel that there are not sufficient grounds under Jewish law to justify the establishment of new religious holidays. For details, see Haredim and Zionism.",
"title": "Israeli/Jewish national holidays and days of remembrance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "Observance of these days in Jewish communities outside Israel is typically more muted than their observance in Israel. Events held in government and public venues within Israel are often held in Jewish communal settings (synagogues and community centers) abroad.",
"title": "Israeli/Jewish national holidays and days of remembrance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "More recently, the Knesset established two additional holidays:",
"title": "Israeli/Jewish national holidays and days of remembrance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "Finally, the Israeli government also recognizes several ethnic Jewish observances with holiday status.",
"title": "Israeli/Jewish national holidays and days of remembrance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Yom HaShoah (lit. \"Holocaust Day\") is a day of remembrance for victims of the Holocaust. Its full name is Yom Hazikaron LaShoah v'LiGevurah (lit. \"Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day\") (יום הזכרון לשואה ולגבורה), and reflects a desire to recognize martyrs who died in active resistance to the Nazis alongside those who died as passive victims. Its date, 27 Nisan, was chosen because it commemorates the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the best known of the armed Jewish uprisings.",
"title": "Israeli/Jewish national holidays and days of remembrance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Places of public entertainment are closed throughout Israel in recognition of the day. Public commemoration of Yom HaShoah usually includes religious elements such as the recitation of Psalms, memorial prayers, and kaddish, and the lighting of memorial candles. In Israel, the most notable observances are the State memorial ceremony at Yad Vashem and the sirens marking off a two-minute silence at 10:00 am. Religious Zionist and Modern Orthodox Jews generally participate in such public observances along with secular Jews and Jews who adhere to more liberal religious movements. Outside Israel, Jewish communities observe Yom HaShoah in addition to or instead of their countries' Holocaust Memorial Days. Probably the most notable commemoration is the March of the Living, held at the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau, attended by Jews from all parts of the world.",
"title": "Israeli/Jewish national holidays and days of remembrance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "Outside Orthodoxy, a liturgy for Yom HaShoah is beginning to develop. The Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist prayer books all include liturgical elements for Yom HaShoah, to be added to the regular weekday prayers. Conservative Judaism has written a scroll, called Megillat HaShoah, intended to become a definitive liturgical reading for Yom HaShoah. The Orthodox world–even the segment that participates publicly in Yom HaShoah–has been reluctant to write a liturgy for the day, preferring to compose Kinnot (prayers of lamentation) for recitation on Tisha B'Av.",
"title": "Israeli/Jewish national holidays and days of remembrance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "In order to ensure that public Yom HaShoah ceremonies in Israel do not violate Shabbat prohibitions, the date for Yom HaShoah varies as follows:",
"title": "Israeli/Jewish national holidays and days of remembrance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Yom Hazikaron (lit. \"Memorial Day\") is a day of remembrance of the fallen of Israel's wars. During the first years of Israel's independence, this remembrance was observed on Yom Ha'atzmaut (Independence Day) itself. However, by 1951, the memorial observance was separated from the festive celebration of Independence Day and moved to its current date, the day before Yom Ha'atzmaut. Since 2000, the scope of the memorial has expanded to include civilians slain by acts of hostile terrorism. Its full name is now יום הזכרון לחללי מערכות ישראל ולנפגעי פעולות האיבה (\"Day of Remembrance for the Fallen of the Battles of Israel and the Victims of Terror\").",
"title": "Israeli/Jewish national holidays and days of remembrance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "Places of public entertainment are closed throughout Israel in recognition of the day. Many schools, businesses and other institutions conduct memorial services on this day, and it is customary to visit the graves of fallen soldiers and to recite memorial prayers there. The principal public observances are the evening opening ceremony at the Western Wall and the morning services of remembrance at military cemeteries throughout the country, each opened by the sounding of sirens. The public observances conclude with the service at the military cemetery on Mount Herzl that serves as the transition to Yom Ha'atzmaut.",
"title": "Israeli/Jewish national holidays and days of remembrance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "Outside Israel, Yom HaZikaron observances are often folded into Yom Ha'atzmaut celebrations. Within Israel, Yom Hazikaron is always the day before Yom Ha'atzmaut, but that date moves to prevent violation of Sabbath prohibitions during the ceremonies of either day. See following section for details.",
"title": "Israeli/Jewish national holidays and days of remembrance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "Yom Ha'atzmaut (יום העצמאות) is Israel's Independence Day. Observance of this day by Jews inside and outside Israel is widespread, and varies in tone from secular (military parades and barbecues) to religious (recitation of Hallel and new liturgies).",
"title": "Israeli/Jewish national holidays and days of remembrance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "Although Israel's independence was declared on a Friday, the Chief Rabbinate has long been mindful of the possibility of Yom Ha'atzmaut (and Yom Hazikaron) observances leading to violation of Sabbath prohibitions. To prevent such violations, the dates of Yom Hazikaron and Yom Ha'atzmaut vary as follows:",
"title": "Israeli/Jewish national holidays and days of remembrance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "Nearly all non-ḥaredi Jewish religious communities have incorporated changes or enhancements to the liturgy in honor of Yom Ha'atzmaut and suspend the mourning practices of the period of Sefirat Ha'Omer. (See Yom Ha'atzmaut—Religious Customs for details.) Within the Religious Zionist and Modern Orthodox communities, these changes are not without controversy, and customs continue to evolve.",
"title": "Israeli/Jewish national holidays and days of remembrance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "Ḥaredi religious observance of Yom Ha'atzmaut varies widely. A few ḥaredim (especially Sefardic Ḥaredim) celebrate the day in a reasonably similar way to the way non-ḥaredim do. Most ḥaredim simply treat the day indifferently; i.e., as a regular day. And finally others (notably Satmar Ḥasidim and Neturei Karta) mourn on the day because of their opposition to the enterprise of the State of Israel.",
"title": "Israeli/Jewish national holidays and days of remembrance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "Jerusalem Day (יום ירושלים) marks the 1967 reunification of Jerusalem under Israeli control during the Six-Day War. This marked the first time in 19 years that the Temple Mount was accessible to Jews, and the first time since the destruction of the Second Temple 1897 years earlier that the Temple Mount was under Jewish political control.",
"title": "Israeli/Jewish national holidays and days of remembrance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "As with Yom Ha'atzmaut, celebrations of Yom Yerushalayim range from completely secular (including hikes to Jerusalem and a large parade through downtown Jerusalem) to religious (recitation of Hallel and new liturgies). Although Haredim do not participate in the liturgical changes, they are somewhat more likely to celebrate Yom Yerushalayim than the other modern Israeli holidays because of the importance of the liberation of the Western Wall and the Old City of Jerusalem.",
"title": "Israeli/Jewish national holidays and days of remembrance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "Outside Israel, observance of Yom Yerushalayim is widespread, especially in Orthodox circles. It has not gained as widespread acceptance as Yom Ha'atzmaut, especially among more politically liberal Jews, because of the continuing conflicts over the future of the city.",
"title": "Israeli/Jewish national holidays and days of remembrance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "Yom Yerushalayim has not traditionally moved to avoid Shabbat desecration, although in 2012 the Chief Rabbinate began some efforts in that direction.",
"title": "Israeli/Jewish national holidays and days of remembrance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "Aliyah Day (יום העלייה) is an Israeli national holiday celebrated annually on the tenth of Nisan. The day was established to acknowledge Aliyah, immigration to the Jewish state, as a core value of the State of Israel, and honor the ongoing contributions of Olim (immigrants) to Israeli society.",
"title": "Israeli/Jewish national holidays and days of remembrance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "Immigration to Israel is a recognized religious value of Judaism, sometimes referred to as the Gathering of Israel. The date chosen for Yom HaAliyah, 10 Nisan, has religious significance: it is the day on which Joshua and the Israelites crossed the Jordan River at Gilgal into the Promised Land. It was thus the first documented \"mass Aliyah\". The alternative date observed in the school system, 7 Heshvan, falls during the week of the Torah portion in which God instructs Abraham to leave his home and his family and go up to the Land of Israel.",
"title": "Israeli/Jewish national holidays and days of remembrance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "At the present time, observance of this day appears to be secular in nature.",
"title": "Israeli/Jewish national holidays and days of remembrance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "The Knesset established this observance in 2014. The purpose of this observance is to recognize the collective trauma of Mizrahi Jews during the period around the establishment of the State of Israel. Many Mizrachi Jews felt that their own suffering was being ignored, both in comparison to the suffering of European Jewry during the Holocaust and in comparison to the Palestinian Nakba. The Gregorian-calendar date chosen is the day after the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine was adopted, as that date marked the beginning of concentrated pressure and hostility against the community.",
"title": "Israeli/Jewish national holidays and days of remembrance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "At the present time, observance of this day appears to be secular in nature.",
"title": "Israeli/Jewish national holidays and days of remembrance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "The Israeli government officially recognizes three traditional holidays of ethnic Jewish communities in Israel. These days are also observed by their respective communities outside Israel.",
"title": "Israeli/Jewish national holidays and days of remembrance"
}
]
| Jewish holidays, also known as Jewish festivals or Yamim Tovim, are holidays observed by Jews throughout the Hebrew calendar. They include religious, cultural and national elements, derived from three sources: biblical mitzvot ("commandments"), rabbinic mandates, and the history of Judaism and the State of Israel. Jewish holidays occur on the same dates every year in the Hebrew calendar, but the dates vary in the Gregorian. This is because the Hebrew calendar is a lunisolar calendar, whereas the Gregorian is a solar calendar. Each holiday can only occur on certain days of the week, four for most, but five for holidays in Tevet and Shevat and six for Hanukkah. | 2001-10-01T00:20:09Z | 2023-12-10T08:41:37Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_holidays |
16,148 | John Engler | John Mathias Engler (born October 12, 1948) is an American politician, lawyer, businessman, and lobbyist who served as the 46th governor of Michigan from 1991 to 2003. Considered one of the country's top lobbyists, he is a member of the Republican Party.
Engler was serving in the Michigan Senate when he enrolled at Thomas M. Cooley Law School and graduated with a Juris Doctor degree, having served as a Michigan State senator since 1979. He was elected Senate majority leader in 1984 and served there until being elected governor in 1990. He was reelected in 1994 and 1998, and is the last Michigan governor to serve more than two terms. After his governorship, he worked for Business Roundtable.
Engler served on the board of advisors of the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal, an educational organization that continues the intellectual legacy of noted conservative and Michigan native Russell Kirk. Engler also served on the board of trustees of the Marguerite Eyer Wilbur Foundation, which funds many Kirk Center programs. Engler was a member of the Annie E. Casey Foundation board of trustees until 2014. As of 2018, he serves on the board of directors of Universal Forest Products. Previous board service included serving as a director of Dow Jones and Delta Air Lines and as a trustee of Munder Funds.
Engler, a Roman Catholic, was born in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, on October 12, 1948, to Mathias John Engler and his wife, Agnes Marie (née Neyer), but grew up on a cattle farm near Beal City.
He attended Michigan State University, graduating with a degree in agricultural economics in 1971, and Thomas M. Cooley Law School, graduating with a Doctor of Jurisprudence degree in 1981.
He was elected to the Michigan House of Representatives as a state representative in 1970 at the age of 22. He served in the House from 1971 to 1978. His campaign manager in that first election was a college friend, Dick Posthumus. Engler later became the first Republican youth vice-chair for the Michigan Republican Party, defeating future U.S. Senator Spencer Abraham. Posthumus later went on to be elected a state senator, Senate Majority Leader and Lieutenant Governor. He was Engler's running mate in the 1998 election and served from 1999 to 2003.
Engler's administration was characterized by privatization of state services, income tax reduction, a sales tax increase, educational reform, welfare reform, and major reorganization of executive branch departments.
In 1996, he was elected chairman of the Republican Governors Association, and in 2001, he was elected to head the National Governors Association.
In 2002, near the end of his final term, Engler and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality attempted to negotiate a consent order with Dow Chemical that would have resulted in a ninefold increase in the allowable levels of dioxins. The consent order would have resulted in Dow not having to pay to clean up high levels of toxins in Midland, Michigan, near its plant there, as well as in the Tittabawassee flood plain, which had been contaminated by dioxins dumped into the river from the facility and from overflow from waste ponds. The consent order fell through in late 2002.
During the 1996 presidential election, Engler was considered to be a potential vice presidential running mate for Republican nominee Bob Dole. However, Dole instead selected Jack Kemp, a former representative and HUD secretary.
Engler endorsed Texas Governor George W. Bush in the 2000 Republican primary. After Bush secured the GOP nomination, Engler's name was again floated as a possible running mate. In his book Decision Points, Bush says that Engler was someone he was "close" with and could "work well with." Ultimately, Engler was passed over for the running mate position in favor of Dick Cheney. After the election, Engler's close political ally Spencer Abraham, who narrowly lost his re-election bid for the Senate to Debbie Stabenow, was chosen as Bush's Secretary of Energy.
Engler's lieutenant governor, Dick Posthumus, sought to succeed Engler in the 2002 gubernatorial race. Posthumus lost the race to the state's attorney general, Democrat Jennifer Granholm.
In 1990, Engler, then the state senate majority leader, challenged Governor James Blanchard in his bid for a third term. Political observers viewed his bid as a long shot, and he trailed Blanchard by double digits in the polls the weekend before the election. However, on election day, Engler pulled off the upset, defeating Blanchard by approximately 17,000 votes—a margin of less than one percentage point. In 1994, Engler ran for his second term. The Democrats nominated former Representative Howard Wolpe, who had close ties to the labor movement—a potent force in Democratic politics in Michigan. Engler bested Wolpe 61 to 39 percent, and the state Republican Party made significant gains. Spencer Abraham picked up the Senate seat of retiring Democrat Donald Riegle. Republicans gained a seat to break a tie in the state House of Representatives, taking a 56–54 majority, while also picking up a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Republican Candice Miller won an upset victory to win the post of Secretary of State.
Michigan voters re-elected Engler to his third and final term in 1998. He won a landslide victory over lawyer Geoffrey Fieger. Engler took 1,883,005 votes—62 percent of the total—to Fieger's 38 percent and 1,143,574 votes. Engler's landslide helped the state Republican Party to gain six seats in the state House of Representatives, taking control of the chamber they had lost two years previously with a 58–52 margin, as well as picking up an additional seat in the State Senate, for a 23–15 majority. Republicans also gained a seat on the technically non-partisan state Supreme Court, holding a 4–3 majority over the Democrats.
After leaving the governor's mansion in January 2003, Engler served as president of the state and local government sector of Electronic Data Systems. Engler left that position in June 2004 to be elected president and CEO of the National Association of Manufacturers. Engler's tenure at the NAM ended in January 2011. In January 2011, Engler was named president of the Business Roundtable.
In 2017, Engler was appointed to a four-year term on the governing board of the National Assessment of Educational Progress project.
On January 30, 2018, Engler was named the interim president of Michigan State University to replace Lou Anna Simon, who was embroiled with the school in the USA Gymnastics sex abuse scandal involving Larry Nassar. The appointment of Engler sparked controversy due to his previous handling of sexual misconduct as governor of Michigan. Engler's tenure as interim president was plagued by controversies, brought on by Engler's apparent callous statements and actions toward survivors during Board of Trustees meetings and statements that were reported by the press. One on Nassar's victims, Rachael Denhollander, said Engler "chose to stand against every child and every sexual assault victim in the entire state, to protect an institution."
Engler resigned on January 16, 2019 after the Board of Trustees indicated its intent to ask him to resign following a series of embarrassing incidents regarding Nassar's victims and his responses to issues in the aftermath. Engler initially indicated he planned to resign on January 23, 2019 but the Board required him to resign the morning after he submitted his resignation letter.
In 1974, Engler married Colleen House, who served in the Michigan House of Representatives and ran for lieutenant governor of Michigan in 1986. She filed for divorce in 1986.
Engler married Michelle DeMunbrun, a Texas attorney, December 8, 1990. The couple has triplet daughters born November 13, 1994. As First Lady, Michelle Engler served as the founding chair of the Michigan Community Service Commission. Michelle Engler was named to the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) board in 2001 by President George W. Bush and re-appointed in 2002. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "John Mathias Engler (born October 12, 1948) is an American politician, lawyer, businessman, and lobbyist who served as the 46th governor of Michigan from 1991 to 2003. Considered one of the country's top lobbyists, he is a member of the Republican Party.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Engler was serving in the Michigan Senate when he enrolled at Thomas M. Cooley Law School and graduated with a Juris Doctor degree, having served as a Michigan State senator since 1979. He was elected Senate majority leader in 1984 and served there until being elected governor in 1990. He was reelected in 1994 and 1998, and is the last Michigan governor to serve more than two terms. After his governorship, he worked for Business Roundtable.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Engler served on the board of advisors of the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal, an educational organization that continues the intellectual legacy of noted conservative and Michigan native Russell Kirk. Engler also served on the board of trustees of the Marguerite Eyer Wilbur Foundation, which funds many Kirk Center programs. Engler was a member of the Annie E. Casey Foundation board of trustees until 2014. As of 2018, he serves on the board of directors of Universal Forest Products. Previous board service included serving as a director of Dow Jones and Delta Air Lines and as a trustee of Munder Funds.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Engler, a Roman Catholic, was born in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, on October 12, 1948, to Mathias John Engler and his wife, Agnes Marie (née Neyer), but grew up on a cattle farm near Beal City.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "He attended Michigan State University, graduating with a degree in agricultural economics in 1971, and Thomas M. Cooley Law School, graduating with a Doctor of Jurisprudence degree in 1981.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "He was elected to the Michigan House of Representatives as a state representative in 1970 at the age of 22. He served in the House from 1971 to 1978. His campaign manager in that first election was a college friend, Dick Posthumus. Engler later became the first Republican youth vice-chair for the Michigan Republican Party, defeating future U.S. Senator Spencer Abraham. Posthumus later went on to be elected a state senator, Senate Majority Leader and Lieutenant Governor. He was Engler's running mate in the 1998 election and served from 1999 to 2003.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Engler's administration was characterized by privatization of state services, income tax reduction, a sales tax increase, educational reform, welfare reform, and major reorganization of executive branch departments.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In 1996, he was elected chairman of the Republican Governors Association, and in 2001, he was elected to head the National Governors Association.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In 2002, near the end of his final term, Engler and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality attempted to negotiate a consent order with Dow Chemical that would have resulted in a ninefold increase in the allowable levels of dioxins. The consent order would have resulted in Dow not having to pay to clean up high levels of toxins in Midland, Michigan, near its plant there, as well as in the Tittabawassee flood plain, which had been contaminated by dioxins dumped into the river from the facility and from overflow from waste ponds. The consent order fell through in late 2002.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "During the 1996 presidential election, Engler was considered to be a potential vice presidential running mate for Republican nominee Bob Dole. However, Dole instead selected Jack Kemp, a former representative and HUD secretary.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Engler endorsed Texas Governor George W. Bush in the 2000 Republican primary. After Bush secured the GOP nomination, Engler's name was again floated as a possible running mate. In his book Decision Points, Bush says that Engler was someone he was \"close\" with and could \"work well with.\" Ultimately, Engler was passed over for the running mate position in favor of Dick Cheney. After the election, Engler's close political ally Spencer Abraham, who narrowly lost his re-election bid for the Senate to Debbie Stabenow, was chosen as Bush's Secretary of Energy.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Engler's lieutenant governor, Dick Posthumus, sought to succeed Engler in the 2002 gubernatorial race. Posthumus lost the race to the state's attorney general, Democrat Jennifer Granholm.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In 1990, Engler, then the state senate majority leader, challenged Governor James Blanchard in his bid for a third term. Political observers viewed his bid as a long shot, and he trailed Blanchard by double digits in the polls the weekend before the election. However, on election day, Engler pulled off the upset, defeating Blanchard by approximately 17,000 votes—a margin of less than one percentage point. In 1994, Engler ran for his second term. The Democrats nominated former Representative Howard Wolpe, who had close ties to the labor movement—a potent force in Democratic politics in Michigan. Engler bested Wolpe 61 to 39 percent, and the state Republican Party made significant gains. Spencer Abraham picked up the Senate seat of retiring Democrat Donald Riegle. Republicans gained a seat to break a tie in the state House of Representatives, taking a 56–54 majority, while also picking up a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Republican Candice Miller won an upset victory to win the post of Secretary of State.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Michigan voters re-elected Engler to his third and final term in 1998. He won a landslide victory over lawyer Geoffrey Fieger. Engler took 1,883,005 votes—62 percent of the total—to Fieger's 38 percent and 1,143,574 votes. Engler's landslide helped the state Republican Party to gain six seats in the state House of Representatives, taking control of the chamber they had lost two years previously with a 58–52 margin, as well as picking up an additional seat in the State Senate, for a 23–15 majority. Republicans also gained a seat on the technically non-partisan state Supreme Court, holding a 4–3 majority over the Democrats.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "After leaving the governor's mansion in January 2003, Engler served as president of the state and local government sector of Electronic Data Systems. Engler left that position in June 2004 to be elected president and CEO of the National Association of Manufacturers. Engler's tenure at the NAM ended in January 2011. In January 2011, Engler was named president of the Business Roundtable.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In 2017, Engler was appointed to a four-year term on the governing board of the National Assessment of Educational Progress project.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "On January 30, 2018, Engler was named the interim president of Michigan State University to replace Lou Anna Simon, who was embroiled with the school in the USA Gymnastics sex abuse scandal involving Larry Nassar. The appointment of Engler sparked controversy due to his previous handling of sexual misconduct as governor of Michigan. Engler's tenure as interim president was plagued by controversies, brought on by Engler's apparent callous statements and actions toward survivors during Board of Trustees meetings and statements that were reported by the press. One on Nassar's victims, Rachael Denhollander, said Engler \"chose to stand against every child and every sexual assault victim in the entire state, to protect an institution.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Engler resigned on January 16, 2019 after the Board of Trustees indicated its intent to ask him to resign following a series of embarrassing incidents regarding Nassar's victims and his responses to issues in the aftermath. Engler initially indicated he planned to resign on January 23, 2019 but the Board required him to resign the morning after he submitted his resignation letter.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In 1974, Engler married Colleen House, who served in the Michigan House of Representatives and ran for lieutenant governor of Michigan in 1986. She filed for divorce in 1986.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Engler married Michelle DeMunbrun, a Texas attorney, December 8, 1990. The couple has triplet daughters born November 13, 1994. As First Lady, Michelle Engler served as the founding chair of the Michigan Community Service Commission. Michelle Engler was named to the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) board in 2001 by President George W. Bush and re-appointed in 2002.",
"title": "Personal life"
}
]
| John Mathias Engler is an American politician, lawyer, businessman, and lobbyist who served as the 46th governor of Michigan from 1991 to 2003. Considered one of the country's top lobbyists, he is a member of the Republican Party. Engler was serving in the Michigan Senate when he enrolled at Thomas M. Cooley Law School and graduated with a Juris Doctor degree, having served as a Michigan State senator since 1979. He was elected Senate majority leader in 1984 and served there until being elected governor in 1990. He was reelected in 1994 and 1998, and is the last Michigan governor to serve more than two terms. After his governorship, he worked for Business Roundtable. Engler served on the board of advisors of the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal, an educational organization that continues the intellectual legacy of noted conservative and Michigan native Russell Kirk. Engler also served on the board of trustees of the Marguerite Eyer Wilbur Foundation, which funds many Kirk Center programs. Engler was a member of the Annie E. Casey Foundation board of trustees until 2014. As of 2018, he serves on the board of directors of Universal Forest Products. Previous board service included serving as a director of Dow Jones and Delta Air Lines and as a trustee of Munder Funds. | 2002-02-25T15:51:15Z | 2023-12-11T10:12:10Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Engler |
16,153 | Jacques Lacan | Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (UK: /læˈkɒ̃/, US: /ləˈkɑːn/, French: [ʒak maʁi emil lakɑ̃]; 13 April 1901 – 9 September 1981) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. Described as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud", Lacan gave yearly seminars in Paris, from 1953 to 1981, and published papers that were later collected in the book Écrits. Transcriptions of his seminars, given between 1954 and 1976, were also published. His work made a significant impact on continental philosophy and cultural theory in areas such as post-structuralism, critical theory, feminist theory and film theory, as well as on the practice of psychoanalysis itself.
Lacan took up and discussed the whole range of Freudian concepts, emphasizing the philosophical dimension of Freud's thought and applying concepts derived from structuralism in linguistics and anthropology to its development in his own work, which he would further augment by employing formulae from predicate logic and topology. Taking this new direction, and introducing controversial innovations in clinical practice, led to expulsion for Lacan and his followers from the International Psychoanalytic Association. In consequence, Lacan went on to establish new psychoanalytic institutions to promote and develop his work, which he declared to be a "return to Freud", in opposition to prevalent trends in psychology and institutional psychoanalysis collusive of adaptation to social norms.
Lacan was born in Paris, the eldest of Émilie and Alfred Lacan's three children. His father was a successful soap and oils salesman. His mother was ardently Catholic – his younger brother entered a monastery in 1929. Lacan attended the Collège Stanislas between 1907 and 1918. An interest in philosophy led him to a preoccupation with the work of Spinoza, one outcome of which was his abandonment of religious faith for atheism. There were tensions in the family around this issue, and he regretted not persuading his brother to take a different path, but by 1924 his parents had moved to Boulogne and he was living in rooms in Montmartre.
During the early 1920s, Lacan actively engaged with the Parisian literary and artistic avant-garde. Having met James Joyce, he was present at the Parisian bookshop where the first readings of passages from Ulysses in French and English took place, shortly before it was published in 1922. He also had meetings with Charles Maurras, whom he admired as a literary stylist, and he occasionally attended meetings of Action Française (of which Maurras was a leading ideologue), of which he would later be highly critical.
In 1920, after being rejected for military service on the grounds that he was too thin, Lacan entered medical school. Between 1927 and 1931, after completing his studies at the faculty of medicine of the University of Paris, he specialised in psychiatry under the direction of Henri Claude at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, the major psychiatric hospital serving central Paris, at the Infirmary for the Insane of the Police Prefecture under Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault and also at the Hospital Henri-Rousselle.
Lacan was involved with the Parisian surrealist movement of the 1930s, associating with André Breton, Georges Bataille, Salvador Dalí, and Pablo Picasso. For a time, he served as Picasso's personal therapist. He attended the mouvement Psyché that Maryse Choisy founded and published in the Surrealist journal Minotaure. "[Lacan's] interest in surrealism predated his interest in psychoanalysis," former Lacanian analyst and biographer Dylan Evans explains, speculating that "perhaps Lacan never really abandoned his early surrealist sympathies, its neo-Romantic view of madness as 'convulsive beauty', its celebration of irrationality." Translator and historian David Macey writes that "the importance of surrealism can hardly be over-stated... to the young Lacan... [who] also shared the surrealists' taste for scandal and provocation, and viewed provocation as an important element in psycho-analysis itself".
In 1931, after a second year at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, Lacan was awarded his Diplôme de médecin légiste (a medical examiner's qualification) and became a licensed forensic psychiatrist. The following year he was awarded his Diplôme d'État de docteur en médecine [fr] (roughly equivalent to an M.D. degree) for his thesis "On Paranoiac Psychosis in its Relations to the Personality" ("De la Psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité". Its publication had little immediate impact on French psychoanalysis but it did meet with acclaim amongst Lacan's circle of surrealist writers and artists. In their only recorded instance of direct communication, Lacan sent a copy of his thesis to Sigmund Freud who acknowledged its receipt with a postcard.
Lacan's thesis was based on observations of several patients with a primary focus on one female patient whom he called Aimée. Its exhaustive reconstruction of her family history and social relations, on which he based his analysis of her paranoid state of mind, demonstrated his dissatisfaction with traditional psychiatry and the growing influence of Freud on his ideas. Also in 1932, Lacan published a translation of Freud's 1922 text, "Über einige neurotische Mechanismen bei Eifersucht, Paranoia und Homosexualität" ("Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality") as "De quelques mécanismes névrotiques dans la jalousie, la paranoïa et l'homosexualité" in the Revue française de psychanalyse [fr]. In Autumn 1932, Lacan began his training analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein, which was to last until 1938.
In 1934 Lacan became a candidate member of the Société psychanalytique de Paris (SPP). He began his private psychoanalytic practice in 1936 whilst still seeing patients at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, and the same year presented his first analytic report at the Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) in Marienbad on the "Mirror Phase". The congress chairman, Ernest Jones, terminated the lecture before its conclusion, since he was unwilling to extend Lacan's stated presentation time. Insulted, Lacan left the congress to witness the Berlin Olympic Games. No copy of the original lecture remains, Lacan having decided not to hand in his text for publication in the conference proceedings.
Lacan's attendance at Kojève's lectures on Hegel, given between 1933 and 1939, and which focused on the Phenomenology and the master-slave dialectic in particular, was formative for his subsequent work, initially in his formulation of his theory of the mirror phase, for which he was also indebted to the experimental work on child development of Henri Wallon.
It was Wallon who commissioned from Lacan the last major text of his pre-war period, a contribution to the 1938 Encyclopédie française entitled "La Famille" (reprinted in 1984 as "Les Complexes familiaux dans la formation de l'individu", Paris: Navarin). 1938 was also the year of Lacan's accession to full membership (membre titulaire) of the SPP, notwithstanding considerable opposition from many of its senior members who were unimpressed by his recasting of Freudian theory in philosophical terms.
Lacan married Marie-Louise Blondin in January 1934 and in January 1937 they had the first of their three children, a daughter named Caroline. A son, Thibaut, was born in August 1939 and a daughter, Sybille, in November 1940.
The SPP was disbanded due to Nazi Germany's occupation of France in 1940. Lacan was called up for military service which he undertook in periods of duty at the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris, whilst at the same time continuing his private psychoanalytic practice. In 1942 he moved into apartments at 5 rue de Lille, which he would occupy until his death. During the war he did not publish any work, turning instead to a study of Chinese for which he obtained a degree from the École spéciale des langues orientales.
In a relationship they formed before the war, Sylvia Bataille (née Maklès), the estranged wife of his friend Georges Bataille, became Lacan's mistress and, in 1953, his second wife. During the war their relationship was complicated by the threat of deportation for Sylvia, who was Jewish, since this required her to live in the unoccupied territories. Lacan intervened personally with the authorities to obtain papers detailing her family origins, which he destroyed. In 1941 they had a child, Judith. She kept the name Bataille because Lacan wished to delay the announcement of his planned separation and divorce until after the war.
After the war, the SPP recommenced their meetings. In 1945 Lacan visited England for a five-week study trip, where he met the British analysts Ernest Jones, Wilfred Bion and John Rickman. Bion's analytic work with groups influenced Lacan, contributing to his own subsequent emphasis on study groups as a structure within which to advance theoretical work in psychoanalysis. He published a report of his visit as 'La Psychiatrique anglaise et la guerre' (Evolution psychiatrique 1, 1947, pp. 293–318).
In 1949, Lacan presented a new paper on the mirror stage, 'The Mirror-Stage, as Formative of the I, as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience', to the sixteenth IPA congress in Zurich. The same year he set out in the Doctrine de la Commission de l'Enseignement, produced for the Training Commission of the SPP, the protocols for the training of candidates.
With the purchase in 1951 of a country mansion at Guitrancourt, Lacan established a base for weekend retreats for work, leisure—including extravagant social occasions—and for the accommodation of his vast library. His art collection included Courbet's L'Origine du monde, which he had concealed in his study by a removable wooden screen on which an abstract representation of the Courbet by the artist André Masson was portrayed.
In 1951, Lacan started to hold a private weekly seminar in Paris in which he inaugurated what he described as "a return to Freud," whose doctrines were to be re-articulated through a reading of Saussure's linguistics and Levi-Strauss's structuralist anthropology. Becoming public in 1953, Lacan's 27-year-long seminar was highly influential in Parisian cultural life, as well as in psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice.
In January 1953 Lacan was elected president of the SPP. When, at a meeting the following June, a formal motion was passed against him criticising his abandonment of the standard analytic training session for the variable-length session, he immediately resigned his presidency. He and a number of colleagues then resigned from the SPP to form the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP). One consequence of this was to eventually deprive the new group of membership of the International Psychoanalytical Association.
Encouraged by the reception of "the return to Freud" and of his report "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis," Lacan began to re-read Freud's works in relation to contemporary philosophy, linguistics, ethnology, biology, and topology. From 1953 to 1964 at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, he held his Seminars and presented case histories of patients. During this period he wrote the texts that are found in the collection Écrits, which was first published in 1966. In his seventh seminar "The Ethics of Psychoanalysis" (1959–60), which according to Lewis A. Kirshner "arguably represents the most far-reaching attempt to derive a comprehensive ethical position from psychoanalysis," Lacan defined the ethical foundations of psychoanalysis and presented his "ethics for our time"—one that would, in the words of Freud, prove to be equal to the tragedy of modern man and to the "discontent of civilization." At the roots of the ethics is desire: the only promise of analysis is austere, it is the entrance-into-the-I (in French a play on words between l'entrée en je and l'entrée en jeu). "I must come to the place where the id was," where the analysand discovers, in its absolute nakedness, the truth of his desire. The end of psychoanalysis entails "the purification of desire." He defended three assertions: that psychoanalysis must have a scientific status; that Freudian ideas have radically changed the concepts of subject, of knowledge, and of desire; and that the analytic field is the only place from which it is possible to question the insufficiencies of science and philosophy.
Starting in 1962, a complex negotiation took place to determine the status of the SFP within the IPA. Lacan's practice (with its controversial indeterminate-length sessions) and his critical stance towards psychoanalytic orthodoxy led, in August 1963, to the IPA setting the condition that registration of the SFP was dependent upon the removal of Lacan from the list of SFP analysts. With the SFP's decision to honour this request in November 1963, Lacan had effectively been stripped of the right to conduct training analyses and thus was constrained to form his own institution in order to accommodate the many candidates who desired to continue their analyses with him. This he did, on 21 June 1964, in the "Founding Act" of what became known as the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP), taking "many representatives of the third generation with him: among them were Maud and Octave Mannoni, Serge Leclaire ... and Jean Clavreul".
With the support of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Louis Althusser, Lacan was appointed lecturer at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. He started with a seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis in January 1964 in the Dussane room at the École Normale Supérieure. Lacan began to set forth his own approach to psychoanalysis to an audience of colleagues that had joined him from the SFP. His lectures also attracted many of the École Normale's students. He divided the École Freudienne de Paris into three sections: the section of pure psychoanalysis (training and elaboration of the theory, where members who have been analyzed but have not become analysts can participate); the section for applied psychoanalysis (therapeutic and clinical, physicians who either have not started or have not yet completed analysis are welcome); and the section for taking inventory of the Freudian field (concerning the critique of psychoanalytic literature and the analysis of the theoretical relations with related or affiliated sciences). In 1967 he invented the procedure of the Pass, which was added to the statutes after being voted in by the members of the EFP the following year.
1966 saw the publication of Lacan's collected writings, the Écrits, compiled with an index of concepts by Jacques-Alain Miller. Printed by the prestigious publishing house Éditions du Seuil, the Écrits did much to establish Lacan's reputation to a wider public. The success of the publication led to a subsequent two-volume edition in 1969.
By the 1960s, Lacan was associated, at least in the public mind, with the far left in France. In May 1968, Lacan voiced his sympathy for the student protests and as a corollary his followers set up a Department of Psychology at the University of Vincennes (Paris VIII). However, Lacan's unequivocal comments in 1971 on revolutionary ideals in politics draw a sharp line between the actions of some of his followers and his own style of "revolt."
In 1969, Lacan moved his public seminars to the Faculté de Droit (Panthéon), where he continued to deliver his expositions of analytic theory and practice until the dissolution of his school in 1980.
Throughout the final decade of his life, Lacan continued his widely followed seminars. During this period, he developed his concepts of masculine and feminine jouissance and placed an increased emphasis on the concept of "the Real" as a point of impossible contradiction in the "symbolic order". Lacan continued to draw widely on various disciplines, working closely on classical Chinese literature with François Cheng and on the life and work of James Joyce with Jacques Aubert. The growing success of the Écrits, which was translated (in abridged form) into German and English, led to invitations to lecture in Italy, Japan and the United States. He gave lectures in 1975 at Yale, Columbia and MIT.
Lacan's failing health made it difficult for him to meet the demands of the year-long Seminars he had been delivering since the fifties, but his teaching continued into the first year of the eighties. After dissolving his School, the EFP, in January 1980, Lacan travelled to Caracas to found the Freudian Field Institute on 12 July.
The Overture to the Caracas Encounter was to be Lacan's final public address. His last texts from the spring of 1981 are brief institutional documents pertaining to the newly formed Freudian Field Institute.
Lacan died on 9 September 1981.
Lacan's "return to Freud" emphasizes a renewed attention to the original texts of Freud, and included a radical critique of ego psychology, whereas "Lacan's quarrel with Object Relations psychoanalysis" was a more muted affair. Here he attempted "to restore to the notion of the Object Relation... the capital of experience that legitimately belongs to it", building upon what he termed "the hesitant, but controlled work of Melanie Klein... Through her we know the function of the imaginary primordial enclosure formed by the imago of the mother's body", as well as upon "the notion of the transitional object, introduced by D. W. Winnicott... a key-point for the explanation of the genesis of fetishism". Nevertheless, "Lacan systematically questioned those psychoanalytic developments from the 1930s to the 1970s, which were increasingly and almost exclusively focused on the child's early relations with the mother... the pre-Oedipal or Kleinian mother"; and Lacan's rereading of Freud—"characteristically, Lacan insists that his return to Freud supplies the only valid model"—formed a basic conceptual starting-point in that oppositional strategy.
Lacan thought that Freud's ideas of "slips of the tongue", jokes, and the interpretation of dreams all emphasized the agency of language in subjects' own constitution of themselves. In "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud," he proposes that "the psychoanalytic experience discovers in the unconscious the whole structure of language". The unconscious is not a primitive or archetypal part of the mind separate from the conscious, linguistic ego, he explained, but rather a formation as complex and structurally sophisticated as consciousness itself. Lacan is associated with the idea that "the unconscious is structured like a language", but the first time this sentence occurs in his work, he clarifies that he means that both the unconscious and language are structured, not that they share a single structure; and that the structure of language is such that the subject cannot necessarily be equated with the speaker. This results in the self being denied any point of reference to which to be "restored" following trauma or a crisis of identity.
André Green objected that "when you read Freud, it is obvious that this proposition doesn't work for a minute. Freud very clearly opposes the unconscious (which he says is constituted by thing-presentations and nothing else) to the pre-conscious. What is related to language can only belong to the pre-conscious". Freud certainly contrasted "the presentation of the word and the presentation of the thing... the unconscious presentation is the presentation of the thing alone" in his metapsychology. Dylan Evans, however, in his Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, "... takes issue with those who, like André Green, question the linguistic aspect of the unconscious, emphasizing Lacan's distinction between das Ding and die Sache in Freud's account of thing-presentation". Green's criticism of Lacan also included accusations of intellectual dishonesty, he said, "[He] cheated everybody... the return to Freud was an excuse, it just meant going to Lacan."
Lacan's first official contribution to psychoanalysis was the mirror stage, which he described as "formative of the function of the 'I' as revealed in psychoanalytic experience." By the early 1950s, he came to regard the mirror stage as more than a moment in the life of the infant; instead, it formed part of the permanent structure of subjectivity. In the "imaginary order", the subject's own image permanently catches and captivates the subject. Lacan explains that "the mirror stage is a phenomenon to which I assign a twofold value. In the first place, it has historical value as it marks a decisive turning-point in the mental development of the child. In the second place, it typifies an essential libidinal relationship with the body-image".
As this concept developed further, the stress fell less on its historical value and more on its structural value. In his fourth seminar, "La relation d'objet", Lacan states that "the mirror stage is far from a mere phenomenon which occurs in the development of the child. It illustrates the conflictual nature of the dual relationship. "
The mirror stage describes the formation of the ego via the process of objectification, the ego being the result of a conflict between one's perceived visual appearance and one's emotional experience. This identification is what Lacan called "alienation". At six months, the baby still lacks physical co-ordination. The child is able to recognize itself in a mirror prior to the attainment of control over their bodily movements. The child sees its image as a whole and the synthesis of this image produces a sense of contrast with the lack of co-ordination of the body, which is perceived as a fragmented body. The child experiences this contrast initially as a rivalry with its image, because the wholeness of the image threatens the child with fragmentation—thus the mirror stage gives rise to an aggressive tension between the subject and the image. To resolve this aggressive tension, the child identifies with the image: this primary identification with the counterpart forms the ego. Lacan understood this moment of identification as a moment of jubilation, since it leads to an imaginary sense of mastery; yet when the child compares its own precarious sense of mastery with the omnipotence of the mother, a depressive reaction may accompany the jubilation.
Lacan calls the specular image "orthopaedic", since it leads the child to anticipate the overcoming of its "real specific prematurity of birth". The vision of the body as integrated and contained, in opposition to the child's actual experience of motor incapacity and the sense of his or her body as fragmented, induces a movement from "insufficiency to anticipation". In other words, the mirror image initiates and then aids, like a crutch, the process of the formation of an integrated sense of self.
In the mirror stage a "misunderstanding" (méconnaissance) constitutes the ego—the "me" (moi) becomes alienated from itself through the introduction of an imaginary dimension to the subject. The mirror stage also has a significant symbolic dimension, due to the presence of the figure of the adult who carries the infant. Having jubilantly assumed the image as their own, the child turns their head towards this adult, who represents the big other, as if to call on the adult to ratify this image.
While Freud uses the term "other", referring to der Andere (the other person) and das Andere (otherness), Lacan (influenced by the seminar of Alexandre Kojève) theorizes alterity in a manner more closely resembling Hegel's philosophy.
Lacan often used an algebraic symbology for his concepts: the big other (l'Autre) is designated A, and the little other (l'autre) is designated a. He asserts that an awareness of this distinction is fundamental to analytic practice: "the analyst must be imbued with the difference between A and a, so he can situate himself in the place of Other, and not the other". Dylan Evans explains that:
For Lacan "the Other must first of all be considered a locus in which speech is constituted," so that the other as another subject is secondary to the other as symbolic order. We can speak of the other as a subject in a secondary sense only when a subject occupies this position and thereby embodies the other for another subject.
In arguing that speech originates in neither the ego nor in the subject but rather in the other, Lacan stresses that speech and language are beyond the subject's conscious control. They come from another place, outside of consciousness—"the unconscious is the discourse of the Other". When conceiving the other as a place, Lacan refers to Freud's concept of psychical locality, in which the unconscious is described as "the other scene".
"It is the mother who first occupies the position of the big Other for the child", Dylan Evans explains, "it is she who receives the child's primitive cries and retroactively sanctions them as a particular message". The castration complex is formed when the child discovers that this other is not complete because there is a "lack (manque)" in the other. This means that there is always a signifier missing from the trove of signifiers constituted by the other. Lacan illustrates this incomplete other graphically by striking a bar through the symbol A; hence another name for the castrated, incomplete other is the "barred other".
Feminist thinkers have both utilised and criticised Lacan's concepts of castration and the phallus. Feminists such as Avital Ronell, Jane Gallop, and Elizabeth Grosz, have interpreted Lacan's work as opening up new possibilities for feminist theory.
Some feminists have argued that Lacan's phallocentric analysis provides a useful means of understanding gender biases and imposed roles, while others, most notably Luce Irigaray, accuse Lacan of maintaining the sexist tradition in psychoanalysis. For Irigaray, the phallus does not define a single axis of gender by its presence or absence; instead, gender has two positive poles. Like Irigaray, French philosopher Jacques Derrida, in criticizing Lacan's concept of castration, discusses the phallus in a chiasmus with the hymen, as both one and other.
Lacan considered psychic functions to occur within a universal matrix. The Real, Imaginary and Symbolic are properties of this matrix, which make up part of every psychic function. This is not analogous to Freud's concept of id, ego and superego since in Freud's model certain functions take place within components of the psyche while Lacan thought that all three orders were part of every function. Lacan refined the concept of the orders over decades, resulting in inconsistencies in his writings. He eventually added a fourth component, the sinthome.
The Imaginary is the field of images and imagination. The main illusions of this order are synthesis, autonomy, duality, and resemblance. Lacan thought that the relationship created within the mirror stage between the ego and the reflected image means that the ego and the Imaginary order itself are places of radical alienation: "alienation is constitutive of the Imaginary order". This relationship is also narcissistic.
In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan argues that the Symbolic order structures the visual field of the Imaginary, which means that it involves a linguistic dimension. If the signifier is the foundation of the symbolic, the signified and signification are part of the Imaginary order. Language has symbolic and Imaginary connotations—in its Imaginary aspect, language is the "wall of language" that inverts and distorts the discourse of the Other. The Imaginary, however, is rooted in the subject's relationship with his or her own body (the image of the body). In Fetishism: the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real, Lacan argues that in the sexual plane the Imaginary appears as sexual display and courtship love.
Insofar as identification with the analyst is the objective of analysis, Lacan accused major psychoanalytic schools of reducing the practice of psychoanalysis to the Imaginary order. Instead, Lacan proposes the use of the symbolic to dislodge the disabling fixations of the Imaginary—the analyst transforms the images into words. "The use of the Symbolic", he argued, "is the only way for the analytic process to cross the plane of identification."
In his Seminar IV, "La relation d'objet", Lacan argues that the concepts of "Law" and "Structure" are unthinkable without language—thus the Symbolic is a linguistic dimension. This order is not equivalent to language, however, since language involves the Imaginary and the Real as well. The dimension proper to language in the Symbolic is that of the signifier—that is, a dimension in which elements have no positive existence, but which are constituted by virtue of their mutual differences.
The Symbolic is also the field of radical alterity—that is, the Other; the unconscious is the discourse of this Other. It is the realm of the Law that regulates desire in the Oedipus complex. The Symbolic is the domain of culture as opposed to the Imaginary order of nature. As important elements in the Symbolic, the concepts of death and lack (manque) connive to make of the pleasure principle the regulator of the distance from the Thing (in German, "das Ding an sich") and the death drive that goes "beyond the pleasure principle by means of repetition"—"the death drive is only a mask of the Symbolic order".
By working in the Symbolic order, the analyst is able to produce changes in the subjective position of the person undergoing psychoanalysis. These changes will produce imaginary effects because the Imaginary is structured by the Symbolic.
Lacan's concept of the Real dates back to 1936 and his doctoral thesis on psychosis. It was a term that was popular at the time, particularly with Émile Meyerson, who referred to it as "an ontological absolute, a true being-in-itself". Lacan returned to the theme of the Real in 1953 and continued to develop it until his death. The Real, for Lacan, is not synonymous with reality. Not only opposed to the Imaginary, the Real is also exterior to the Symbolic. Unlike the latter, which is constituted in terms of oppositions (i.e. presence/absence), "there is no absence in the Real". Whereas the Symbolic opposition "presence/absence" implies the possibility that something may be missing from the Symbolic, "the Real is always in its place". If the Symbolic is a set of differentiated elements (signifiers), the Real in itself is undifferentiated—it bears no fissure. The Symbolic introduces "a cut in the real" in the process of signification: "it is the world of words that creates the world of things—things originally confused in the 'here and now' of the all in the process of coming into being". The Real is that which is outside language and that resists symbolization absolutely. In Seminar XI Lacan defines the Real as "the impossible" because it is impossible to imagine, impossible to integrate into the Symbolic, and impossible to attain. It is this resistance to symbolization that lends the Real its traumatic quality. Finally, the Real is the object of anxiety, insofar as it lacks any possible mediation and is "the essential object which is not an object any longer, but this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail, the object of anxiety par excellence."
The term "sinthome" (French: [sɛ̃tom]) was introduced by Jacques Lacan in his seminar Le sinthome (1975–76). According to Lacan, sinthome is the Latin way (1495 Rabelais, IV,63) of spelling the Greek origin of the French word symptôme, meaning symptom. The seminar is a continuing elaboration of his topology, extending the previous seminar's focus (RSI) on the Borromean Knot and an exploration of the writings of James Joyce. Lacan redefines the psychoanalytic symptom in terms of his topology of the subject.
In "Psychoanalysis and its Teachings" (Écrits) Lacan views the symptom as inscribed in a writing process, not as ciphered message which was the traditional notion. In his seminar "L'angoisse" (1962–63) he states that the symptom does not call for interpretation: in itself it is not a call to the Other but a pure jouissance addressed to no-one. This is a shift from the linguistic definition of the symptom—as a signifier—to his assertion that "the symptom can only be defined as the way in which each subject enjoys (jouit) the unconscious in so far as the unconscious determines the subject". He goes from conceiving the symptom as a message which can be deciphered by reference to the unconscious structured like a language to seeing it as the trace of the particular modality of the subject's jouissance.
Lacan's concept of desire is related to Hegel's Begierde, a term that implies a continuous force, and therefore somehow differs from Freud's concept of Wunsch. Lacan's desire refers always to unconscious desire because it is unconscious desire that forms the central concern of psychoanalysis.
The aim of psychoanalysis is to lead the analysand to recognize his/her desire and by doing so to uncover the truth about his/her desire. However this is possible only if desire is articulated in speech: "It is only once it is formulated, named in the presence of the other, that desire appears in the full sense of the term." And again in The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis: "what is important is to teach the subject to name, to articulate, to bring desire into existence. The subject should come to recognize and to name her/his desire. But it isn't a question of recognizing something that could be entirely given. In naming it, the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world." The truth about desire is somehow present in discourse, although discourse is never able to articulate the entire truth about desire; whenever discourse attempts to articulate desire, there is always a leftover or surplus.
Lacan distinguishes desire from need and from demand. Need is a biological instinct where the subject depends on the Other to satisfy its own needs: in order to get the Other's help, "need" must be articulated in "demand". But the presence of the Other not only ensures the satisfaction of the "need", it also represents the Other's love. Consequently, "demand" acquires a double function: on the one hand, it articulates "need", and on the other, acts as a "demand for love". Even after the "need" articulated in demand is satisfied, the "demand for love" remains unsatisfied since the Other cannot provide the unconditional love that the subject seeks. "Desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second." Desire is a surplus, a leftover, produced by the articulation of need in demand: "desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need". Unlike need, which can be satisfied, desire can never be satisfied: it is constant in its pressure and eternal. The attainment of desire does not consist in being fulfilled but in its reproduction as such. As Slavoj Žižek puts it, "desire's raison d'être is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire".
Lacan also distinguishes between desire and the drives: desire is one and drives are many. The drives are the partial manifestations of a single force called desire. Lacan's concept of "objet petit a" is the object of desire, although this object is not that towards which desire tends, but rather the cause of desire. Desire is not a relation to an object but a relation to a lack (manque).
In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis Lacan argues that "man's desire is the desire of the Other." This entails the following:
Last but not least for Lacan, the first person who occupies the place of the Other is the mother and at first the child is at her mercy. Only when the father articulates desire with the Law by castrating the mother is the subject liberated from desire for the mother.
Lacan maintains Freud's distinction between drive (Trieb) and instinct (Instinkt). Drives differ from biological needs because they can never be satisfied and do not aim at an object but rather circle perpetually around it. He argues that the purpose of the drive (Triebziel) is not to reach a goal but to follow its aim, meaning "the way itself" instead of "the final destination"—that is, to circle around the object. The purpose of the drive is to return to its circular path and the true source of jouissance is the repetitive movement of this closed circuit. Lacan posits drives as both cultural and symbolic constructs: to him, "the drive is not a given, something archaic, primordial". He incorporates the four elements of drives as defined by Freud (pressure, end, object and source) to his theory of the drive's circuit: the drive originates in the erogenous zone, circles round the object, and returns to the erogenous zone. Three grammatical voices structure this circuit:
The active and reflexive voices are autoerotic—they lack a subject. It is only when the drive completes its circuit with the passive voice that a new subject appears, implying that, prior to that instance, there was no subject. Despite being the "passive" voice, the drive is essentially active: "to make oneself be seen" rather than "to be seen". The circuit of the drive is the only way for the subject to transgress the pleasure principle.
To Freud sexuality is composed of partial drives (i.e. the oral or the anal drives) each specified by a different erotogenic zone. At first these partial drives function independently (i.e. the polymorphous perversity of children), it is only in puberty that they become organized under the aegis of the genital organs. Lacan accepts the partial nature of drives, but (1) he rejects the notion that partial drives can ever attain any complete organization—the primacy of the genital zone, if achieved, is always precarious; and (2) he argues that drives are partial in that they represent sexuality only partially and not in the sense that they are a part of the whole. Drives do not represent the reproductive function of sexuality but only the dimension of jouissance.
Lacan identifies four partial drives: the oral drive (the erogenous zones are the lips (the partial object the breast—the verb is "to suck"), the anal drive (the anus and the faeces, "to shit"), the scopic drive (the eyes and the gaze, "to see") and the invocatory drive (the ears and the voice, "to hear"). The first two drives relate to demand and the last two to desire.
The notion of dualism is maintained throughout Freud's various reformulations of the drive-theory. From the initial opposition between sexual drives and ego-drives (self-preservation) to the final opposition between the life drives (Lebenstriebe) and the death drives (Todestriebe). Lacan retains Freud's dualism, but in terms of an opposition between the symbolic and the imaginary and not referred to different kinds of drives. For Lacan all drives are sexual drives, and every drive is a death drive (pulsion de mort) since every drive is excessive, repetitive and destructive.
The drives are closely related to desire, since both originate in the field of the subject. But they are not to be confused: drives are the partial aspects in which desire is realized—desire is one and undivided, whereas the drives are its partial manifestations. A drive is a demand that is not caught up in the dialectical mediation of desire; drive is a "mechanical" insistence that is not ensnared in demand's dialectical mediation.
Building on Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Lacan long argued that "every unsuccessful act is a successful, not to say 'well-turned', discourse", highlighting as well "sudden transformations of errors into truths, which seemed to be due to nothing more than perseverance". In a late seminar, he generalised more fully the psychoanalytic discovery of "truth—arising from misunderstanding", so as to maintain that "the subject is naturally erring... discourse structures alone give him his moorings and reference points, signs identify and orient him; if he neglects, forgets, or loses them, he is condemned to err anew".
Because of "the alienation to which speaking beings are subjected due to their being in language", to survive "one must let oneself be taken in by signs and become the dupe of a discourse... [of] fictions organized in to a discourse". For Lacan, with "masculine knowledge irredeemably an erring", the individual "must thus allow himself to be fooled by these signs to have a chance of getting his bearings amidst them; he must place and maintain himself in the wake of a discourse... become the dupe of a discourse... les non-dupes errent".
Lacan comes close here to one of the points where "very occasionally he sounds like Thomas Kuhn (whom he never mentions)", with Lacan's "discourse" resembling Kuhn's "paradigm" seen as "the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by the members of a given community".
The "variable-length psychoanalytic session" was one of Lacan's crucial clinical innovations, and a key element in his conflicts with the IPA, to whom his "innovation of reducing the fifty-minute analytic hour to a Delphic seven or eight minutes (or sometimes even to a single oracular parole murmured in the waiting-room)" was unacceptable. Lacan's variable-length sessions lasted anywhere from a few minutes (or even, if deemed appropriate by the analyst, a few seconds) to several hours. This practice replaced the classical Freudian "fifty minute hour".
With respect to what he called "the cutting up of the 'timing'", Lacan asked the question, "Why make an intervention impossible at this point, which is consequently privileged in this way?" By allowing the analyst's intervention on timing, the variable-length session removed the patient's former certainty as to the length of time that they would be on the couch. When Lacan adopted the practice, "the psychoanalytic establishment were scandalized"—and, given that "between 1979 and 1980 he saw an average of ten patients an hour", it is perhaps not hard to see why. Psychoanalysis was "reduced to zero",, though the treatments were no less lucrative.
At the time of his original innovation, Lacan described the issue as concerning "the systematic use of shorter sessions in certain analyses, and in particular in training analyses"; and in practice it was certainly a shortening of the session around the so-called "critical moment" which took place, so that critics wrote that "everyone is well aware what is meant by the deceptive phrase 'variable length' ... sessions systematically reduced to just a few minutes". Irrespective of the theoretical merits of breaking up patients' expectations, it was clear that "the Lacanian analyst never wants to 'shake up' the routine by keeping them for more rather than less time". Lacan's shorter sessions enabled him to take many more clients than therapists using orthodox Freudian methods, and this growth continued as Lacan's students and followers adopted the same practice.
Accepting the importance of "the critical moment when insight arises", object relations theory would nonetheless suggest that "if the analyst does not provide the patient with space in which nothing needs to happen there is no space in which something can happen". Julia Kristeva would concur that "Lacan, alert to the scandal of the timeless intrinsic to the analytic experience, was mistaken in wanting to ritualize it as a technique of scansion (short sessions)".
According to Jean-Michel Rabaté, Lacan in the mid-1950s classed the seminars as commentaries on Freud rather than presentations of his own doctrine (like the writings), while Lacan by 1971 placed the most value on his teaching and "the interactive space of his seminar" (in contrast to Sigmund Freud). Rabaté also argued that from 1964 onward, the seminars include original ideas. However, Rabaté also wrote that the seminars are "more problematic" because of the importance of the interactive performances, and because they were partly edited and rewritten.
Most of Lacan's psychoanalytic writings from the 1940s through to the early 1960s were compiled with an index of concepts by Jacques-Alain Miller in the 1966 collection, titled simply Écrits. Published in French by Éditions du Seuil, they were later issued as a two-volume set (1970/1) with a new "Preface". A selection of the writings (chosen by Lacan himself) were translated by Alan Sheridan and published by Tavistock Press in 1977. The full 35-text volume appeared for the first time in English in Bruce Fink's translation published by Norton & Co. (2006). The Écrits were included on the list of 100 most influential books of the 20th century compiled and polled by the broadsheet Le Monde.
Lacan's writings from the late sixties and seventies (thus subsequent to the 1966 collection) were collected posthumously, along with some early texts from the nineteen thirties, in the Éditions du Seuil volume Autres écrits (2001).
Although most of the texts in Écrits and Autres écrits are closely related to Lacan's lectures or lessons from his Seminar, more often than not the style is denser than Lacan's oral delivery, and a clear distinction between the writings and the transcriptions of the oral teaching is evident to the reader.
An often neglected aspect of Lacan's oral and writing style is his influence from his colleague and personal friend Henry Corbin, who introduced Lacan to the thought of Ibn Arabi. Both Lacan and Ibn Arabi share nearly identical ideas and writing styles according to the researcher Abdesselem Rechak.
Jacques-Alain Miller is the sole editor of Lacan's seminars, which contain the majority of his life's work. "There has been considerable controversy over the accuracy or otherwise of the transcription and editing", as well as over "Miller's refusal to allow any critical or annotated edition to be published". Despite Lacan's status as a major figure in the history of psychoanalysis, some of his seminars remain unpublished. Since 1984, Miller has been regularly conducting a series of lectures, "L'orientation lacanienne." Miller's teachings have been published in the US by the journal Lacanian Ink.
Lacan's writing is notoriously difficult, due in part to the repeated Hegelian/Kojèvean allusions, wide theoretical divergences from other psychoanalytic and philosophical theory, and an obscure prose style. For some, "the impenetrability of Lacan's prose... [is] too often regarded as profundity precisely because it cannot be understood". Arguably at least, "the imitation of his style by other 'Lacanian' commentators" has resulted in "an obscurantist antisystematic tradition in Lacanian literature".
Although Lacan is a major influence on psychoanalysis in France and parts of Latin America, in the English-speaking world his influence on clinical psychology has been far less and his ideas are best known in the arts and humanities. However, there are Lacanian psychoanalytic societies in both North America and the United Kingdom that carry on his work.
One example of Lacan's work being practiced in the United States is found in the works of Annie G. Rogers (A Shining Affliction; The Unsayable: The Hidden Language of Trauma), which credit Lacanian theory for many therapeutic insights in successfully treating sexually abused young women. Lacan's work has also reached Quebec, where The Interdisciplinary Freudian Group for Research and Clinical and Cultural Interventions (GIFRIC) claims that it has used a modified form of Lacanian psychoanalysis in successfully treating psychosis in many of its patients, a task once thought to be unsuited for psychoanalysis, even by psychoanalysts themselves.
In his introduction to the 1994 Penguin edition of Lacan's The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, translator and historian David Macey describes Lacan as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud". His ideas had a significant impact on post-structuralism, critical theory, French philosophy, film theory, and clinical psychoanalysis.
In 2003, Rabaté described "The Freudian Thing" (1956) as one of his "most important and programmatic essays".
Social psychologist, psychoanalyst, and humanistic philosopher Erich Fromm rejected Lacan's view on psychonalysis whereby "true psychoanalysis is founded on the relation between man and talk [parole]," and denounced the reduction of analysis to "a pure and simple exchange of words," arguing that the relation is instead about an "exchange of signs." Fromm supports "clarity and unambiguity" in the communication with others (autrui) and opposes the Lacanian "wordplay [that] is associated with the provision of meaning." Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalyst Élisabeth Roudinesco, in her biography of Lacan, writes that some writings of her subject were "incomprehensible" also to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Martin Heidegger.
Former Lacan student Didier Anzieu, in a 1967 article titled "Against Lacan," described him as a "danger" because he kept his students tied to an "unending dependence on an idol, a logic, or a language," by holding out the promise of "fundamental truths" to be revealed "but always at some further point ...and only to those who continued to travel with him." According to Sherry Turkle, these attitudes are "representative of how most members of the Association talk about Lacan."
By 1977, Lacan was declaring that he was not "too keen" ("pas chaud-chaud") to claim that "when one practices psychoanalysis, one knows where one goes," stating that "psychoanalysis, like every other human activity, undoubtedly participates in abuse. One does as if one knows something."
Lacan's charismatic authority has been linked to the many conflicts among his followers and in the analytic schools he was involved with. His intellectual style has also come in for much criticism. Eclectic in his use of sources, Lacan has been seen as concealing his own thought behind the apparent explication of that of others. Thus, his "return to Freud" was called by Malcolm Bowie "a complete pattern of dissenting assent to the ideas of Freud . . . Lacan's argument is conducted on Freud's behalf and, at the same time, against him". Bowie has also suggested that Lacan suffered from both a love of system and a deep-seated opposition to all forms of system.
Lacan, in his psychoanalytic practice, came to hold sessions of diminishing duration. Eventually, Lacan's student relates, they often lasted no more than five minutes, held sometimes with Lacan standing in the typically open door of the room. According to Godin, Lacan sometimes struck patients, once literally kicking out a female patient. Author and Lacanian psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller asserts that "[Lacan]'s morality derives from a superior cynicism."
Lacan was criticised for being aggressive with his clients, often physically hitting them, sometimes sleeping with them, and charging "exorbitant amounts of money" for each session. Jean Laplanche argued that Lacan could have "harmed" some of his clients.
Others have been more forceful still, describing him as "The Shrink from Hell" and listing the many associates —from lovers and family to colleagues, patients, and editors— who were left damaged in his wake.
Many feminist thinkers have criticized Lacan's thought. American philosopher Cynthia Willett accuses Lacan for portraying the mother less as a "loving," "nurturing" presence in the infant's world, but rather as a "whore" who abandons the child to a "higher bidder for her affections," while Judith Butler, philosopher and gender studies scholar, reworks these notions as "gender performativity."
Psycholinguist and cultural theorist Luce Irigaray "ridicules" through "mimicry and exaggeration" these representations of femininity posited as natural and proper by Lacan. Irigaray accuses Lacan of perpetuating phallocentric mastery in philosophical and psychoanalytic discourse.
Others have echoed this accusation, seeing Lacan as trapped in the very phallocentric mastery his language ostensibly sought to undermine. The result, Castoriadis would maintain, was to make all thought depend upon Lacan himself, and thus to stifle the capacity for independent thought among all those around him.
In an interview with anthropologist James Hunt, Sylvia Lacan said of her late husband: "He was a man who worked tremendously hard. Tremendously intelligent. He was...what is called, well, a domestic tyrant... But he was worth the trouble. I have absolutely no reproaches to make against him. Just the contrary. But it was not possible to be a wife, a mother to my children, and an actress at the same time."
In their work Fashionable Nonsense (1997), through which their stated intention was to show that "famous intellectuals" abuse scientific terminology and concepts, professors of Physics Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont examine Lacan's frequent references to Mathematics. They are highly critical of his use of terms from mathematical fields, accusing him of "superficial erudition", of abusing scientific concepts that he does not understand, and of producing statements that are "not even wrong."
In a seminar held in 1959, he confuses the irrational numbers with the imaginary numbers, despite claiming to be "precise." A year later, the mathematical "calculations" he presents in another seminar are assessed as "pure fantasies."
Sokal and Bricmont find Lacan to be "fond" of topology, in which, though, they see Lacan committing serious errors. He uses technical terms erroneously, e.g. "space", "bounded", "closed", and even "topology" itself, and posits claims about a literal and not just symbolic or even metaphorical relation of topological mathematics with neurosis.
In the book's preface, the authors state they shall not enter into the debate over the purely psychoanalytic part of Lacan's work. Nonetheless, after presenting their case, they comment that "Lacan never explains the relevance of his mathematical concepts for psychoanalysis," stating that "the link with psychoanalysis is not supported by any argument." Equally meaningless they find his "famous formulae of sexuation" offered in support for the maxim "There are no sexual relations." Considering the "cryptic writings," the "play on words" and "fractured syntax", as well as the "reverent exegesis" accorded to Lacan's work by "disciples", they point out a similarity to religiosity.
Several critics have dismissed Lacan's work wholesale. French philosopher François Roustang [fr] called it an "incoherent system of pseudo-scientific gibberish", and quoted linguist Noam Chomsky's opinion that Lacan was an "amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan". Noam Chomsky, in a 2012 interview on Veterans Unplugged, said: "[Q]uite frankly I thought [Lacan] was a total charlatan. He was just posturing for the television cameras in the way many Paris intellectuals do. Why this is influential, I haven't the slightest idea. I don't see anything there that should be influential."
Academic and former Lacanian analyst Dylan Evans came to dismiss Lacanianism as lacking a sound scientific basis and as harming rather than helping patients. He criticized Lacan's followers for treating Lacan's writings as "holy writ". Richard Webster decries what he sees as Lacan's obscurity, arrogance, and the resultant "Cult of Lacan".
Roger Scruton included Lacan in his book Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left, and named him as the only 'fool' included in the book—his other targets merely being misguided or frauds.
In Les Freudiens hérétiques, the 8th tome of his work Contre-histoire de la philosophie (Anti-History of Philosophy), philosopher and author Michel Onfray describes Lacan's Écrits as "illegible". According to Onfray, Lacan engages in constant word play, has a taste for the formulaic, and deploys "incantatory glossolalia" and unnecessary neologisms. He calls Lacan a "charlatan," and a "dandy figure" who "sinks into autism," eventually becoming senile.
Selected works published in English listed below. More complete listings can be found at Lacan.com. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (UK: /læˈkɒ̃/, US: /ləˈkɑːn/, French: [ʒak maʁi emil lakɑ̃]; 13 April 1901 – 9 September 1981) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. Described as \"the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud\", Lacan gave yearly seminars in Paris, from 1953 to 1981, and published papers that were later collected in the book Écrits. Transcriptions of his seminars, given between 1954 and 1976, were also published. His work made a significant impact on continental philosophy and cultural theory in areas such as post-structuralism, critical theory, feminist theory and film theory, as well as on the practice of psychoanalysis itself.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Lacan took up and discussed the whole range of Freudian concepts, emphasizing the philosophical dimension of Freud's thought and applying concepts derived from structuralism in linguistics and anthropology to its development in his own work, which he would further augment by employing formulae from predicate logic and topology. Taking this new direction, and introducing controversial innovations in clinical practice, led to expulsion for Lacan and his followers from the International Psychoanalytic Association. In consequence, Lacan went on to establish new psychoanalytic institutions to promote and develop his work, which he declared to be a \"return to Freud\", in opposition to prevalent trends in psychology and institutional psychoanalysis collusive of adaptation to social norms.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Lacan was born in Paris, the eldest of Émilie and Alfred Lacan's three children. His father was a successful soap and oils salesman. His mother was ardently Catholic – his younger brother entered a monastery in 1929. Lacan attended the Collège Stanislas between 1907 and 1918. An interest in philosophy led him to a preoccupation with the work of Spinoza, one outcome of which was his abandonment of religious faith for atheism. There were tensions in the family around this issue, and he regretted not persuading his brother to take a different path, but by 1924 his parents had moved to Boulogne and he was living in rooms in Montmartre.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "During the early 1920s, Lacan actively engaged with the Parisian literary and artistic avant-garde. Having met James Joyce, he was present at the Parisian bookshop where the first readings of passages from Ulysses in French and English took place, shortly before it was published in 1922. He also had meetings with Charles Maurras, whom he admired as a literary stylist, and he occasionally attended meetings of Action Française (of which Maurras was a leading ideologue), of which he would later be highly critical.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In 1920, after being rejected for military service on the grounds that he was too thin, Lacan entered medical school. Between 1927 and 1931, after completing his studies at the faculty of medicine of the University of Paris, he specialised in psychiatry under the direction of Henri Claude at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, the major psychiatric hospital serving central Paris, at the Infirmary for the Insane of the Police Prefecture under Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault and also at the Hospital Henri-Rousselle.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Lacan was involved with the Parisian surrealist movement of the 1930s, associating with André Breton, Georges Bataille, Salvador Dalí, and Pablo Picasso. For a time, he served as Picasso's personal therapist. He attended the mouvement Psyché that Maryse Choisy founded and published in the Surrealist journal Minotaure. \"[Lacan's] interest in surrealism predated his interest in psychoanalysis,\" former Lacanian analyst and biographer Dylan Evans explains, speculating that \"perhaps Lacan never really abandoned his early surrealist sympathies, its neo-Romantic view of madness as 'convulsive beauty', its celebration of irrationality.\" Translator and historian David Macey writes that \"the importance of surrealism can hardly be over-stated... to the young Lacan... [who] also shared the surrealists' taste for scandal and provocation, and viewed provocation as an important element in psycho-analysis itself\".",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In 1931, after a second year at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, Lacan was awarded his Diplôme de médecin légiste (a medical examiner's qualification) and became a licensed forensic psychiatrist. The following year he was awarded his Diplôme d'État de docteur en médecine [fr] (roughly equivalent to an M.D. degree) for his thesis \"On Paranoiac Psychosis in its Relations to the Personality\" (\"De la Psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité\". Its publication had little immediate impact on French psychoanalysis but it did meet with acclaim amongst Lacan's circle of surrealist writers and artists. In their only recorded instance of direct communication, Lacan sent a copy of his thesis to Sigmund Freud who acknowledged its receipt with a postcard.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Lacan's thesis was based on observations of several patients with a primary focus on one female patient whom he called Aimée. Its exhaustive reconstruction of her family history and social relations, on which he based his analysis of her paranoid state of mind, demonstrated his dissatisfaction with traditional psychiatry and the growing influence of Freud on his ideas. Also in 1932, Lacan published a translation of Freud's 1922 text, \"Über einige neurotische Mechanismen bei Eifersucht, Paranoia und Homosexualität\" (\"Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality\") as \"De quelques mécanismes névrotiques dans la jalousie, la paranoïa et l'homosexualité\" in the Revue française de psychanalyse [fr]. In Autumn 1932, Lacan began his training analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein, which was to last until 1938.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In 1934 Lacan became a candidate member of the Société psychanalytique de Paris (SPP). He began his private psychoanalytic practice in 1936 whilst still seeing patients at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, and the same year presented his first analytic report at the Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) in Marienbad on the \"Mirror Phase\". The congress chairman, Ernest Jones, terminated the lecture before its conclusion, since he was unwilling to extend Lacan's stated presentation time. Insulted, Lacan left the congress to witness the Berlin Olympic Games. No copy of the original lecture remains, Lacan having decided not to hand in his text for publication in the conference proceedings.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Lacan's attendance at Kojève's lectures on Hegel, given between 1933 and 1939, and which focused on the Phenomenology and the master-slave dialectic in particular, was formative for his subsequent work, initially in his formulation of his theory of the mirror phase, for which he was also indebted to the experimental work on child development of Henri Wallon.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "It was Wallon who commissioned from Lacan the last major text of his pre-war period, a contribution to the 1938 Encyclopédie française entitled \"La Famille\" (reprinted in 1984 as \"Les Complexes familiaux dans la formation de l'individu\", Paris: Navarin). 1938 was also the year of Lacan's accession to full membership (membre titulaire) of the SPP, notwithstanding considerable opposition from many of its senior members who were unimpressed by his recasting of Freudian theory in philosophical terms.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Lacan married Marie-Louise Blondin in January 1934 and in January 1937 they had the first of their three children, a daughter named Caroline. A son, Thibaut, was born in August 1939 and a daughter, Sybille, in November 1940.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The SPP was disbanded due to Nazi Germany's occupation of France in 1940. Lacan was called up for military service which he undertook in periods of duty at the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris, whilst at the same time continuing his private psychoanalytic practice. In 1942 he moved into apartments at 5 rue de Lille, which he would occupy until his death. During the war he did not publish any work, turning instead to a study of Chinese for which he obtained a degree from the École spéciale des langues orientales.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In a relationship they formed before the war, Sylvia Bataille (née Maklès), the estranged wife of his friend Georges Bataille, became Lacan's mistress and, in 1953, his second wife. During the war their relationship was complicated by the threat of deportation for Sylvia, who was Jewish, since this required her to live in the unoccupied territories. Lacan intervened personally with the authorities to obtain papers detailing her family origins, which he destroyed. In 1941 they had a child, Judith. She kept the name Bataille because Lacan wished to delay the announcement of his planned separation and divorce until after the war.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "After the war, the SPP recommenced their meetings. In 1945 Lacan visited England for a five-week study trip, where he met the British analysts Ernest Jones, Wilfred Bion and John Rickman. Bion's analytic work with groups influenced Lacan, contributing to his own subsequent emphasis on study groups as a structure within which to advance theoretical work in psychoanalysis. He published a report of his visit as 'La Psychiatrique anglaise et la guerre' (Evolution psychiatrique 1, 1947, pp. 293–318).",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In 1949, Lacan presented a new paper on the mirror stage, 'The Mirror-Stage, as Formative of the I, as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience', to the sixteenth IPA congress in Zurich. The same year he set out in the Doctrine de la Commission de l'Enseignement, produced for the Training Commission of the SPP, the protocols for the training of candidates.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "With the purchase in 1951 of a country mansion at Guitrancourt, Lacan established a base for weekend retreats for work, leisure—including extravagant social occasions—and for the accommodation of his vast library. His art collection included Courbet's L'Origine du monde, which he had concealed in his study by a removable wooden screen on which an abstract representation of the Courbet by the artist André Masson was portrayed.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In 1951, Lacan started to hold a private weekly seminar in Paris in which he inaugurated what he described as \"a return to Freud,\" whose doctrines were to be re-articulated through a reading of Saussure's linguistics and Levi-Strauss's structuralist anthropology. Becoming public in 1953, Lacan's 27-year-long seminar was highly influential in Parisian cultural life, as well as in psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In January 1953 Lacan was elected president of the SPP. When, at a meeting the following June, a formal motion was passed against him criticising his abandonment of the standard analytic training session for the variable-length session, he immediately resigned his presidency. He and a number of colleagues then resigned from the SPP to form the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP). One consequence of this was to eventually deprive the new group of membership of the International Psychoanalytical Association.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Encouraged by the reception of \"the return to Freud\" and of his report \"The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,\" Lacan began to re-read Freud's works in relation to contemporary philosophy, linguistics, ethnology, biology, and topology. From 1953 to 1964 at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, he held his Seminars and presented case histories of patients. During this period he wrote the texts that are found in the collection Écrits, which was first published in 1966. In his seventh seminar \"The Ethics of Psychoanalysis\" (1959–60), which according to Lewis A. Kirshner \"arguably represents the most far-reaching attempt to derive a comprehensive ethical position from psychoanalysis,\" Lacan defined the ethical foundations of psychoanalysis and presented his \"ethics for our time\"—one that would, in the words of Freud, prove to be equal to the tragedy of modern man and to the \"discontent of civilization.\" At the roots of the ethics is desire: the only promise of analysis is austere, it is the entrance-into-the-I (in French a play on words between l'entrée en je and l'entrée en jeu). \"I must come to the place where the id was,\" where the analysand discovers, in its absolute nakedness, the truth of his desire. The end of psychoanalysis entails \"the purification of desire.\" He defended three assertions: that psychoanalysis must have a scientific status; that Freudian ideas have radically changed the concepts of subject, of knowledge, and of desire; and that the analytic field is the only place from which it is possible to question the insufficiencies of science and philosophy.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Starting in 1962, a complex negotiation took place to determine the status of the SFP within the IPA. Lacan's practice (with its controversial indeterminate-length sessions) and his critical stance towards psychoanalytic orthodoxy led, in August 1963, to the IPA setting the condition that registration of the SFP was dependent upon the removal of Lacan from the list of SFP analysts. With the SFP's decision to honour this request in November 1963, Lacan had effectively been stripped of the right to conduct training analyses and thus was constrained to form his own institution in order to accommodate the many candidates who desired to continue their analyses with him. This he did, on 21 June 1964, in the \"Founding Act\" of what became known as the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP), taking \"many representatives of the third generation with him: among them were Maud and Octave Mannoni, Serge Leclaire ... and Jean Clavreul\".",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "With the support of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Louis Althusser, Lacan was appointed lecturer at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. He started with a seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis in January 1964 in the Dussane room at the École Normale Supérieure. Lacan began to set forth his own approach to psychoanalysis to an audience of colleagues that had joined him from the SFP. His lectures also attracted many of the École Normale's students. He divided the École Freudienne de Paris into three sections: the section of pure psychoanalysis (training and elaboration of the theory, where members who have been analyzed but have not become analysts can participate); the section for applied psychoanalysis (therapeutic and clinical, physicians who either have not started or have not yet completed analysis are welcome); and the section for taking inventory of the Freudian field (concerning the critique of psychoanalytic literature and the analysis of the theoretical relations with related or affiliated sciences). In 1967 he invented the procedure of the Pass, which was added to the statutes after being voted in by the members of the EFP the following year.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "1966 saw the publication of Lacan's collected writings, the Écrits, compiled with an index of concepts by Jacques-Alain Miller. Printed by the prestigious publishing house Éditions du Seuil, the Écrits did much to establish Lacan's reputation to a wider public. The success of the publication led to a subsequent two-volume edition in 1969.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "By the 1960s, Lacan was associated, at least in the public mind, with the far left in France. In May 1968, Lacan voiced his sympathy for the student protests and as a corollary his followers set up a Department of Psychology at the University of Vincennes (Paris VIII). However, Lacan's unequivocal comments in 1971 on revolutionary ideals in politics draw a sharp line between the actions of some of his followers and his own style of \"revolt.\"",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In 1969, Lacan moved his public seminars to the Faculté de Droit (Panthéon), where he continued to deliver his expositions of analytic theory and practice until the dissolution of his school in 1980.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Throughout the final decade of his life, Lacan continued his widely followed seminars. During this period, he developed his concepts of masculine and feminine jouissance and placed an increased emphasis on the concept of \"the Real\" as a point of impossible contradiction in the \"symbolic order\". Lacan continued to draw widely on various disciplines, working closely on classical Chinese literature with François Cheng and on the life and work of James Joyce with Jacques Aubert. The growing success of the Écrits, which was translated (in abridged form) into German and English, led to invitations to lecture in Italy, Japan and the United States. He gave lectures in 1975 at Yale, Columbia and MIT.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Lacan's failing health made it difficult for him to meet the demands of the year-long Seminars he had been delivering since the fifties, but his teaching continued into the first year of the eighties. After dissolving his School, the EFP, in January 1980, Lacan travelled to Caracas to found the Freudian Field Institute on 12 July.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The Overture to the Caracas Encounter was to be Lacan's final public address. His last texts from the spring of 1981 are brief institutional documents pertaining to the newly formed Freudian Field Institute.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Lacan died on 9 September 1981.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Lacan's \"return to Freud\" emphasizes a renewed attention to the original texts of Freud, and included a radical critique of ego psychology, whereas \"Lacan's quarrel with Object Relations psychoanalysis\" was a more muted affair. Here he attempted \"to restore to the notion of the Object Relation... the capital of experience that legitimately belongs to it\", building upon what he termed \"the hesitant, but controlled work of Melanie Klein... Through her we know the function of the imaginary primordial enclosure formed by the imago of the mother's body\", as well as upon \"the notion of the transitional object, introduced by D. W. Winnicott... a key-point for the explanation of the genesis of fetishism\". Nevertheless, \"Lacan systematically questioned those psychoanalytic developments from the 1930s to the 1970s, which were increasingly and almost exclusively focused on the child's early relations with the mother... the pre-Oedipal or Kleinian mother\"; and Lacan's rereading of Freud—\"characteristically, Lacan insists that his return to Freud supplies the only valid model\"—formed a basic conceptual starting-point in that oppositional strategy.",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Lacan thought that Freud's ideas of \"slips of the tongue\", jokes, and the interpretation of dreams all emphasized the agency of language in subjects' own constitution of themselves. In \"The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud,\" he proposes that \"the psychoanalytic experience discovers in the unconscious the whole structure of language\". The unconscious is not a primitive or archetypal part of the mind separate from the conscious, linguistic ego, he explained, but rather a formation as complex and structurally sophisticated as consciousness itself. Lacan is associated with the idea that \"the unconscious is structured like a language\", but the first time this sentence occurs in his work, he clarifies that he means that both the unconscious and language are structured, not that they share a single structure; and that the structure of language is such that the subject cannot necessarily be equated with the speaker. This results in the self being denied any point of reference to which to be \"restored\" following trauma or a crisis of identity.",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "André Green objected that \"when you read Freud, it is obvious that this proposition doesn't work for a minute. Freud very clearly opposes the unconscious (which he says is constituted by thing-presentations and nothing else) to the pre-conscious. What is related to language can only belong to the pre-conscious\". Freud certainly contrasted \"the presentation of the word and the presentation of the thing... the unconscious presentation is the presentation of the thing alone\" in his metapsychology. Dylan Evans, however, in his Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, \"... takes issue with those who, like André Green, question the linguistic aspect of the unconscious, emphasizing Lacan's distinction between das Ding and die Sache in Freud's account of thing-presentation\". Green's criticism of Lacan also included accusations of intellectual dishonesty, he said, \"[He] cheated everybody... the return to Freud was an excuse, it just meant going to Lacan.\"",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Lacan's first official contribution to psychoanalysis was the mirror stage, which he described as \"formative of the function of the 'I' as revealed in psychoanalytic experience.\" By the early 1950s, he came to regard the mirror stage as more than a moment in the life of the infant; instead, it formed part of the permanent structure of subjectivity. In the \"imaginary order\", the subject's own image permanently catches and captivates the subject. Lacan explains that \"the mirror stage is a phenomenon to which I assign a twofold value. In the first place, it has historical value as it marks a decisive turning-point in the mental development of the child. In the second place, it typifies an essential libidinal relationship with the body-image\".",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "As this concept developed further, the stress fell less on its historical value and more on its structural value. In his fourth seminar, \"La relation d'objet\", Lacan states that \"the mirror stage is far from a mere phenomenon which occurs in the development of the child. It illustrates the conflictual nature of the dual relationship. \"",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The mirror stage describes the formation of the ego via the process of objectification, the ego being the result of a conflict between one's perceived visual appearance and one's emotional experience. This identification is what Lacan called \"alienation\". At six months, the baby still lacks physical co-ordination. The child is able to recognize itself in a mirror prior to the attainment of control over their bodily movements. The child sees its image as a whole and the synthesis of this image produces a sense of contrast with the lack of co-ordination of the body, which is perceived as a fragmented body. The child experiences this contrast initially as a rivalry with its image, because the wholeness of the image threatens the child with fragmentation—thus the mirror stage gives rise to an aggressive tension between the subject and the image. To resolve this aggressive tension, the child identifies with the image: this primary identification with the counterpart forms the ego. Lacan understood this moment of identification as a moment of jubilation, since it leads to an imaginary sense of mastery; yet when the child compares its own precarious sense of mastery with the omnipotence of the mother, a depressive reaction may accompany the jubilation.",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Lacan calls the specular image \"orthopaedic\", since it leads the child to anticipate the overcoming of its \"real specific prematurity of birth\". The vision of the body as integrated and contained, in opposition to the child's actual experience of motor incapacity and the sense of his or her body as fragmented, induces a movement from \"insufficiency to anticipation\". In other words, the mirror image initiates and then aids, like a crutch, the process of the formation of an integrated sense of self.",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In the mirror stage a \"misunderstanding\" (méconnaissance) constitutes the ego—the \"me\" (moi) becomes alienated from itself through the introduction of an imaginary dimension to the subject. The mirror stage also has a significant symbolic dimension, due to the presence of the figure of the adult who carries the infant. Having jubilantly assumed the image as their own, the child turns their head towards this adult, who represents the big other, as if to call on the adult to ratify this image.",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "While Freud uses the term \"other\", referring to der Andere (the other person) and das Andere (otherness), Lacan (influenced by the seminar of Alexandre Kojève) theorizes alterity in a manner more closely resembling Hegel's philosophy.",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Lacan often used an algebraic symbology for his concepts: the big other (l'Autre) is designated A, and the little other (l'autre) is designated a. He asserts that an awareness of this distinction is fundamental to analytic practice: \"the analyst must be imbued with the difference between A and a, so he can situate himself in the place of Other, and not the other\". Dylan Evans explains that:",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "For Lacan \"the Other must first of all be considered a locus in which speech is constituted,\" so that the other as another subject is secondary to the other as symbolic order. We can speak of the other as a subject in a secondary sense only when a subject occupies this position and thereby embodies the other for another subject.",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "In arguing that speech originates in neither the ego nor in the subject but rather in the other, Lacan stresses that speech and language are beyond the subject's conscious control. They come from another place, outside of consciousness—\"the unconscious is the discourse of the Other\". When conceiving the other as a place, Lacan refers to Freud's concept of psychical locality, in which the unconscious is described as \"the other scene\".",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "\"It is the mother who first occupies the position of the big Other for the child\", Dylan Evans explains, \"it is she who receives the child's primitive cries and retroactively sanctions them as a particular message\". The castration complex is formed when the child discovers that this other is not complete because there is a \"lack (manque)\" in the other. This means that there is always a signifier missing from the trove of signifiers constituted by the other. Lacan illustrates this incomplete other graphically by striking a bar through the symbol A; hence another name for the castrated, incomplete other is the \"barred other\".",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Feminist thinkers have both utilised and criticised Lacan's concepts of castration and the phallus. Feminists such as Avital Ronell, Jane Gallop, and Elizabeth Grosz, have interpreted Lacan's work as opening up new possibilities for feminist theory.",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Some feminists have argued that Lacan's phallocentric analysis provides a useful means of understanding gender biases and imposed roles, while others, most notably Luce Irigaray, accuse Lacan of maintaining the sexist tradition in psychoanalysis. For Irigaray, the phallus does not define a single axis of gender by its presence or absence; instead, gender has two positive poles. Like Irigaray, French philosopher Jacques Derrida, in criticizing Lacan's concept of castration, discusses the phallus in a chiasmus with the hymen, as both one and other.",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Lacan considered psychic functions to occur within a universal matrix. The Real, Imaginary and Symbolic are properties of this matrix, which make up part of every psychic function. This is not analogous to Freud's concept of id, ego and superego since in Freud's model certain functions take place within components of the psyche while Lacan thought that all three orders were part of every function. Lacan refined the concept of the orders over decades, resulting in inconsistencies in his writings. He eventually added a fourth component, the sinthome.",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The Imaginary is the field of images and imagination. The main illusions of this order are synthesis, autonomy, duality, and resemblance. Lacan thought that the relationship created within the mirror stage between the ego and the reflected image means that the ego and the Imaginary order itself are places of radical alienation: \"alienation is constitutive of the Imaginary order\". This relationship is also narcissistic.",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan argues that the Symbolic order structures the visual field of the Imaginary, which means that it involves a linguistic dimension. If the signifier is the foundation of the symbolic, the signified and signification are part of the Imaginary order. Language has symbolic and Imaginary connotations—in its Imaginary aspect, language is the \"wall of language\" that inverts and distorts the discourse of the Other. The Imaginary, however, is rooted in the subject's relationship with his or her own body (the image of the body). In Fetishism: the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real, Lacan argues that in the sexual plane the Imaginary appears as sexual display and courtship love.",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Insofar as identification with the analyst is the objective of analysis, Lacan accused major psychoanalytic schools of reducing the practice of psychoanalysis to the Imaginary order. Instead, Lacan proposes the use of the symbolic to dislodge the disabling fixations of the Imaginary—the analyst transforms the images into words. \"The use of the Symbolic\", he argued, \"is the only way for the analytic process to cross the plane of identification.\"",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "In his Seminar IV, \"La relation d'objet\", Lacan argues that the concepts of \"Law\" and \"Structure\" are unthinkable without language—thus the Symbolic is a linguistic dimension. This order is not equivalent to language, however, since language involves the Imaginary and the Real as well. The dimension proper to language in the Symbolic is that of the signifier—that is, a dimension in which elements have no positive existence, but which are constituted by virtue of their mutual differences.",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The Symbolic is also the field of radical alterity—that is, the Other; the unconscious is the discourse of this Other. It is the realm of the Law that regulates desire in the Oedipus complex. The Symbolic is the domain of culture as opposed to the Imaginary order of nature. As important elements in the Symbolic, the concepts of death and lack (manque) connive to make of the pleasure principle the regulator of the distance from the Thing (in German, \"das Ding an sich\") and the death drive that goes \"beyond the pleasure principle by means of repetition\"—\"the death drive is only a mask of the Symbolic order\".",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "By working in the Symbolic order, the analyst is able to produce changes in the subjective position of the person undergoing psychoanalysis. These changes will produce imaginary effects because the Imaginary is structured by the Symbolic.",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Lacan's concept of the Real dates back to 1936 and his doctoral thesis on psychosis. It was a term that was popular at the time, particularly with Émile Meyerson, who referred to it as \"an ontological absolute, a true being-in-itself\". Lacan returned to the theme of the Real in 1953 and continued to develop it until his death. The Real, for Lacan, is not synonymous with reality. Not only opposed to the Imaginary, the Real is also exterior to the Symbolic. Unlike the latter, which is constituted in terms of oppositions (i.e. presence/absence), \"there is no absence in the Real\". Whereas the Symbolic opposition \"presence/absence\" implies the possibility that something may be missing from the Symbolic, \"the Real is always in its place\". If the Symbolic is a set of differentiated elements (signifiers), the Real in itself is undifferentiated—it bears no fissure. The Symbolic introduces \"a cut in the real\" in the process of signification: \"it is the world of words that creates the world of things—things originally confused in the 'here and now' of the all in the process of coming into being\". The Real is that which is outside language and that resists symbolization absolutely. In Seminar XI Lacan defines the Real as \"the impossible\" because it is impossible to imagine, impossible to integrate into the Symbolic, and impossible to attain. It is this resistance to symbolization that lends the Real its traumatic quality. Finally, the Real is the object of anxiety, insofar as it lacks any possible mediation and is \"the essential object which is not an object any longer, but this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail, the object of anxiety par excellence.\"",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "The term \"sinthome\" (French: [sɛ̃tom]) was introduced by Jacques Lacan in his seminar Le sinthome (1975–76). According to Lacan, sinthome is the Latin way (1495 Rabelais, IV,63) of spelling the Greek origin of the French word symptôme, meaning symptom. The seminar is a continuing elaboration of his topology, extending the previous seminar's focus (RSI) on the Borromean Knot and an exploration of the writings of James Joyce. Lacan redefines the psychoanalytic symptom in terms of his topology of the subject.",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "In \"Psychoanalysis and its Teachings\" (Écrits) Lacan views the symptom as inscribed in a writing process, not as ciphered message which was the traditional notion. In his seminar \"L'angoisse\" (1962–63) he states that the symptom does not call for interpretation: in itself it is not a call to the Other but a pure jouissance addressed to no-one. This is a shift from the linguistic definition of the symptom—as a signifier—to his assertion that \"the symptom can only be defined as the way in which each subject enjoys (jouit) the unconscious in so far as the unconscious determines the subject\". He goes from conceiving the symptom as a message which can be deciphered by reference to the unconscious structured like a language to seeing it as the trace of the particular modality of the subject's jouissance.",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Lacan's concept of desire is related to Hegel's Begierde, a term that implies a continuous force, and therefore somehow differs from Freud's concept of Wunsch. Lacan's desire refers always to unconscious desire because it is unconscious desire that forms the central concern of psychoanalysis.",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The aim of psychoanalysis is to lead the analysand to recognize his/her desire and by doing so to uncover the truth about his/her desire. However this is possible only if desire is articulated in speech: \"It is only once it is formulated, named in the presence of the other, that desire appears in the full sense of the term.\" And again in The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis: \"what is important is to teach the subject to name, to articulate, to bring desire into existence. The subject should come to recognize and to name her/his desire. But it isn't a question of recognizing something that could be entirely given. In naming it, the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world.\" The truth about desire is somehow present in discourse, although discourse is never able to articulate the entire truth about desire; whenever discourse attempts to articulate desire, there is always a leftover or surplus.",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Lacan distinguishes desire from need and from demand. Need is a biological instinct where the subject depends on the Other to satisfy its own needs: in order to get the Other's help, \"need\" must be articulated in \"demand\". But the presence of the Other not only ensures the satisfaction of the \"need\", it also represents the Other's love. Consequently, \"demand\" acquires a double function: on the one hand, it articulates \"need\", and on the other, acts as a \"demand for love\". Even after the \"need\" articulated in demand is satisfied, the \"demand for love\" remains unsatisfied since the Other cannot provide the unconditional love that the subject seeks. \"Desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second.\" Desire is a surplus, a leftover, produced by the articulation of need in demand: \"desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need\". Unlike need, which can be satisfied, desire can never be satisfied: it is constant in its pressure and eternal. The attainment of desire does not consist in being fulfilled but in its reproduction as such. As Slavoj Žižek puts it, \"desire's raison d'être is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire\".",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Lacan also distinguishes between desire and the drives: desire is one and drives are many. The drives are the partial manifestations of a single force called desire. Lacan's concept of \"objet petit a\" is the object of desire, although this object is not that towards which desire tends, but rather the cause of desire. Desire is not a relation to an object but a relation to a lack (manque).",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis Lacan argues that \"man's desire is the desire of the Other.\" This entails the following:",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Last but not least for Lacan, the first person who occupies the place of the Other is the mother and at first the child is at her mercy. Only when the father articulates desire with the Law by castrating the mother is the subject liberated from desire for the mother.",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Lacan maintains Freud's distinction between drive (Trieb) and instinct (Instinkt). Drives differ from biological needs because they can never be satisfied and do not aim at an object but rather circle perpetually around it. He argues that the purpose of the drive (Triebziel) is not to reach a goal but to follow its aim, meaning \"the way itself\" instead of \"the final destination\"—that is, to circle around the object. The purpose of the drive is to return to its circular path and the true source of jouissance is the repetitive movement of this closed circuit. Lacan posits drives as both cultural and symbolic constructs: to him, \"the drive is not a given, something archaic, primordial\". He incorporates the four elements of drives as defined by Freud (pressure, end, object and source) to his theory of the drive's circuit: the drive originates in the erogenous zone, circles round the object, and returns to the erogenous zone. Three grammatical voices structure this circuit:",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "The active and reflexive voices are autoerotic—they lack a subject. It is only when the drive completes its circuit with the passive voice that a new subject appears, implying that, prior to that instance, there was no subject. Despite being the \"passive\" voice, the drive is essentially active: \"to make oneself be seen\" rather than \"to be seen\". The circuit of the drive is the only way for the subject to transgress the pleasure principle.",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "To Freud sexuality is composed of partial drives (i.e. the oral or the anal drives) each specified by a different erotogenic zone. At first these partial drives function independently (i.e. the polymorphous perversity of children), it is only in puberty that they become organized under the aegis of the genital organs. Lacan accepts the partial nature of drives, but (1) he rejects the notion that partial drives can ever attain any complete organization—the primacy of the genital zone, if achieved, is always precarious; and (2) he argues that drives are partial in that they represent sexuality only partially and not in the sense that they are a part of the whole. Drives do not represent the reproductive function of sexuality but only the dimension of jouissance.",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Lacan identifies four partial drives: the oral drive (the erogenous zones are the lips (the partial object the breast—the verb is \"to suck\"), the anal drive (the anus and the faeces, \"to shit\"), the scopic drive (the eyes and the gaze, \"to see\") and the invocatory drive (the ears and the voice, \"to hear\"). The first two drives relate to demand and the last two to desire.",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "The notion of dualism is maintained throughout Freud's various reformulations of the drive-theory. From the initial opposition between sexual drives and ego-drives (self-preservation) to the final opposition between the life drives (Lebenstriebe) and the death drives (Todestriebe). Lacan retains Freud's dualism, but in terms of an opposition between the symbolic and the imaginary and not referred to different kinds of drives. For Lacan all drives are sexual drives, and every drive is a death drive (pulsion de mort) since every drive is excessive, repetitive and destructive.",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "The drives are closely related to desire, since both originate in the field of the subject. But they are not to be confused: drives are the partial aspects in which desire is realized—desire is one and undivided, whereas the drives are its partial manifestations. A drive is a demand that is not caught up in the dialectical mediation of desire; drive is a \"mechanical\" insistence that is not ensnared in demand's dialectical mediation.",
"title": "Major concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Building on Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Lacan long argued that \"every unsuccessful act is a successful, not to say 'well-turned', discourse\", highlighting as well \"sudden transformations of errors into truths, which seemed to be due to nothing more than perseverance\". In a late seminar, he generalised more fully the psychoanalytic discovery of \"truth—arising from misunderstanding\", so as to maintain that \"the subject is naturally erring... discourse structures alone give him his moorings and reference points, signs identify and orient him; if he neglects, forgets, or loses them, he is condemned to err anew\".",
"title": "Lacan on error and knowledge"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Because of \"the alienation to which speaking beings are subjected due to their being in language\", to survive \"one must let oneself be taken in by signs and become the dupe of a discourse... [of] fictions organized in to a discourse\". For Lacan, with \"masculine knowledge irredeemably an erring\", the individual \"must thus allow himself to be fooled by these signs to have a chance of getting his bearings amidst them; he must place and maintain himself in the wake of a discourse... become the dupe of a discourse... les non-dupes errent\".",
"title": "Lacan on error and knowledge"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Lacan comes close here to one of the points where \"very occasionally he sounds like Thomas Kuhn (whom he never mentions)\", with Lacan's \"discourse\" resembling Kuhn's \"paradigm\" seen as \"the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by the members of a given community\".",
"title": "Lacan on error and knowledge"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "The \"variable-length psychoanalytic session\" was one of Lacan's crucial clinical innovations, and a key element in his conflicts with the IPA, to whom his \"innovation of reducing the fifty-minute analytic hour to a Delphic seven or eight minutes (or sometimes even to a single oracular parole murmured in the waiting-room)\" was unacceptable. Lacan's variable-length sessions lasted anywhere from a few minutes (or even, if deemed appropriate by the analyst, a few seconds) to several hours. This practice replaced the classical Freudian \"fifty minute hour\".",
"title": "Clinical contributions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "With respect to what he called \"the cutting up of the 'timing'\", Lacan asked the question, \"Why make an intervention impossible at this point, which is consequently privileged in this way?\" By allowing the analyst's intervention on timing, the variable-length session removed the patient's former certainty as to the length of time that they would be on the couch. When Lacan adopted the practice, \"the psychoanalytic establishment were scandalized\"—and, given that \"between 1979 and 1980 he saw an average of ten patients an hour\", it is perhaps not hard to see why. Psychoanalysis was \"reduced to zero\",, though the treatments were no less lucrative.",
"title": "Clinical contributions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "At the time of his original innovation, Lacan described the issue as concerning \"the systematic use of shorter sessions in certain analyses, and in particular in training analyses\"; and in practice it was certainly a shortening of the session around the so-called \"critical moment\" which took place, so that critics wrote that \"everyone is well aware what is meant by the deceptive phrase 'variable length' ... sessions systematically reduced to just a few minutes\". Irrespective of the theoretical merits of breaking up patients' expectations, it was clear that \"the Lacanian analyst never wants to 'shake up' the routine by keeping them for more rather than less time\". Lacan's shorter sessions enabled him to take many more clients than therapists using orthodox Freudian methods, and this growth continued as Lacan's students and followers adopted the same practice.",
"title": "Clinical contributions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Accepting the importance of \"the critical moment when insight arises\", object relations theory would nonetheless suggest that \"if the analyst does not provide the patient with space in which nothing needs to happen there is no space in which something can happen\". Julia Kristeva would concur that \"Lacan, alert to the scandal of the timeless intrinsic to the analytic experience, was mistaken in wanting to ritualize it as a technique of scansion (short sessions)\".",
"title": "Clinical contributions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "According to Jean-Michel Rabaté, Lacan in the mid-1950s classed the seminars as commentaries on Freud rather than presentations of his own doctrine (like the writings), while Lacan by 1971 placed the most value on his teaching and \"the interactive space of his seminar\" (in contrast to Sigmund Freud). Rabaté also argued that from 1964 onward, the seminars include original ideas. However, Rabaté also wrote that the seminars are \"more problematic\" because of the importance of the interactive performances, and because they were partly edited and rewritten.",
"title": "Writings and writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Most of Lacan's psychoanalytic writings from the 1940s through to the early 1960s were compiled with an index of concepts by Jacques-Alain Miller in the 1966 collection, titled simply Écrits. Published in French by Éditions du Seuil, they were later issued as a two-volume set (1970/1) with a new \"Preface\". A selection of the writings (chosen by Lacan himself) were translated by Alan Sheridan and published by Tavistock Press in 1977. The full 35-text volume appeared for the first time in English in Bruce Fink's translation published by Norton & Co. (2006). The Écrits were included on the list of 100 most influential books of the 20th century compiled and polled by the broadsheet Le Monde.",
"title": "Writings and writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Lacan's writings from the late sixties and seventies (thus subsequent to the 1966 collection) were collected posthumously, along with some early texts from the nineteen thirties, in the Éditions du Seuil volume Autres écrits (2001).",
"title": "Writings and writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Although most of the texts in Écrits and Autres écrits are closely related to Lacan's lectures or lessons from his Seminar, more often than not the style is denser than Lacan's oral delivery, and a clear distinction between the writings and the transcriptions of the oral teaching is evident to the reader.",
"title": "Writings and writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "An often neglected aspect of Lacan's oral and writing style is his influence from his colleague and personal friend Henry Corbin, who introduced Lacan to the thought of Ibn Arabi. Both Lacan and Ibn Arabi share nearly identical ideas and writing styles according to the researcher Abdesselem Rechak.",
"title": "Writings and writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Jacques-Alain Miller is the sole editor of Lacan's seminars, which contain the majority of his life's work. \"There has been considerable controversy over the accuracy or otherwise of the transcription and editing\", as well as over \"Miller's refusal to allow any critical or annotated edition to be published\". Despite Lacan's status as a major figure in the history of psychoanalysis, some of his seminars remain unpublished. Since 1984, Miller has been regularly conducting a series of lectures, \"L'orientation lacanienne.\" Miller's teachings have been published in the US by the journal Lacanian Ink.",
"title": "Writings and writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Lacan's writing is notoriously difficult, due in part to the repeated Hegelian/Kojèvean allusions, wide theoretical divergences from other psychoanalytic and philosophical theory, and an obscure prose style. For some, \"the impenetrability of Lacan's prose... [is] too often regarded as profundity precisely because it cannot be understood\". Arguably at least, \"the imitation of his style by other 'Lacanian' commentators\" has resulted in \"an obscurantist antisystematic tradition in Lacanian literature\".",
"title": "Writings and writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Although Lacan is a major influence on psychoanalysis in France and parts of Latin America, in the English-speaking world his influence on clinical psychology has been far less and his ideas are best known in the arts and humanities. However, there are Lacanian psychoanalytic societies in both North America and the United Kingdom that carry on his work.",
"title": "Writings and writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "One example of Lacan's work being practiced in the United States is found in the works of Annie G. Rogers (A Shining Affliction; The Unsayable: The Hidden Language of Trauma), which credit Lacanian theory for many therapeutic insights in successfully treating sexually abused young women. Lacan's work has also reached Quebec, where The Interdisciplinary Freudian Group for Research and Clinical and Cultural Interventions (GIFRIC) claims that it has used a modified form of Lacanian psychoanalysis in successfully treating psychosis in many of its patients, a task once thought to be unsuited for psychoanalysis, even by psychoanalysts themselves.",
"title": "Writings and writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "In his introduction to the 1994 Penguin edition of Lacan's The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, translator and historian David Macey describes Lacan as \"the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud\". His ideas had a significant impact on post-structuralism, critical theory, French philosophy, film theory, and clinical psychoanalysis.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "In 2003, Rabaté described \"The Freudian Thing\" (1956) as one of his \"most important and programmatic essays\".",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Social psychologist, psychoanalyst, and humanistic philosopher Erich Fromm rejected Lacan's view on psychonalysis whereby \"true psychoanalysis is founded on the relation between man and talk [parole],\" and denounced the reduction of analysis to \"a pure and simple exchange of words,\" arguing that the relation is instead about an \"exchange of signs.\" Fromm supports \"clarity and unambiguity\" in the communication with others (autrui) and opposes the Lacanian \"wordplay [that] is associated with the provision of meaning.\" Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalyst Élisabeth Roudinesco, in her biography of Lacan, writes that some writings of her subject were \"incomprehensible\" also to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Martin Heidegger.",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "Former Lacan student Didier Anzieu, in a 1967 article titled \"Against Lacan,\" described him as a \"danger\" because he kept his students tied to an \"unending dependence on an idol, a logic, or a language,\" by holding out the promise of \"fundamental truths\" to be revealed \"but always at some further point ...and only to those who continued to travel with him.\" According to Sherry Turkle, these attitudes are \"representative of how most members of the Association talk about Lacan.\"",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "By 1977, Lacan was declaring that he was not \"too keen\" (\"pas chaud-chaud\") to claim that \"when one practices psychoanalysis, one knows where one goes,\" stating that \"psychoanalysis, like every other human activity, undoubtedly participates in abuse. One does as if one knows something.\"",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "Lacan's charismatic authority has been linked to the many conflicts among his followers and in the analytic schools he was involved with. His intellectual style has also come in for much criticism. Eclectic in his use of sources, Lacan has been seen as concealing his own thought behind the apparent explication of that of others. Thus, his \"return to Freud\" was called by Malcolm Bowie \"a complete pattern of dissenting assent to the ideas of Freud . . . Lacan's argument is conducted on Freud's behalf and, at the same time, against him\". Bowie has also suggested that Lacan suffered from both a love of system and a deep-seated opposition to all forms of system.",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Lacan, in his psychoanalytic practice, came to hold sessions of diminishing duration. Eventually, Lacan's student relates, they often lasted no more than five minutes, held sometimes with Lacan standing in the typically open door of the room. According to Godin, Lacan sometimes struck patients, once literally kicking out a female patient. Author and Lacanian psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller asserts that \"[Lacan]'s morality derives from a superior cynicism.\"",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Lacan was criticised for being aggressive with his clients, often physically hitting them, sometimes sleeping with them, and charging \"exorbitant amounts of money\" for each session. Jean Laplanche argued that Lacan could have \"harmed\" some of his clients.",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "Others have been more forceful still, describing him as \"The Shrink from Hell\" and listing the many associates —from lovers and family to colleagues, patients, and editors— who were left damaged in his wake.",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "Many feminist thinkers have criticized Lacan's thought. American philosopher Cynthia Willett accuses Lacan for portraying the mother less as a \"loving,\" \"nurturing\" presence in the infant's world, but rather as a \"whore\" who abandons the child to a \"higher bidder for her affections,\" while Judith Butler, philosopher and gender studies scholar, reworks these notions as \"gender performativity.\"",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Psycholinguist and cultural theorist Luce Irigaray \"ridicules\" through \"mimicry and exaggeration\" these representations of femininity posited as natural and proper by Lacan. Irigaray accuses Lacan of perpetuating phallocentric mastery in philosophical and psychoanalytic discourse.",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "Others have echoed this accusation, seeing Lacan as trapped in the very phallocentric mastery his language ostensibly sought to undermine. The result, Castoriadis would maintain, was to make all thought depend upon Lacan himself, and thus to stifle the capacity for independent thought among all those around him.",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "In an interview with anthropologist James Hunt, Sylvia Lacan said of her late husband: \"He was a man who worked tremendously hard. Tremendously intelligent. He was...what is called, well, a domestic tyrant... But he was worth the trouble. I have absolutely no reproaches to make against him. Just the contrary. But it was not possible to be a wife, a mother to my children, and an actress at the same time.\"",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "In their work Fashionable Nonsense (1997), through which their stated intention was to show that \"famous intellectuals\" abuse scientific terminology and concepts, professors of Physics Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont examine Lacan's frequent references to Mathematics. They are highly critical of his use of terms from mathematical fields, accusing him of \"superficial erudition\", of abusing scientific concepts that he does not understand, and of producing statements that are \"not even wrong.\"",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "In a seminar held in 1959, he confuses the irrational numbers with the imaginary numbers, despite claiming to be \"precise.\" A year later, the mathematical \"calculations\" he presents in another seminar are assessed as \"pure fantasies.\"",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "Sokal and Bricmont find Lacan to be \"fond\" of topology, in which, though, they see Lacan committing serious errors. He uses technical terms erroneously, e.g. \"space\", \"bounded\", \"closed\", and even \"topology\" itself, and posits claims about a literal and not just symbolic or even metaphorical relation of topological mathematics with neurosis.",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "In the book's preface, the authors state they shall not enter into the debate over the purely psychoanalytic part of Lacan's work. Nonetheless, after presenting their case, they comment that \"Lacan never explains the relevance of his mathematical concepts for psychoanalysis,\" stating that \"the link with psychoanalysis is not supported by any argument.\" Equally meaningless they find his \"famous formulae of sexuation\" offered in support for the maxim \"There are no sexual relations.\" Considering the \"cryptic writings,\" the \"play on words\" and \"fractured syntax\", as well as the \"reverent exegesis\" accorded to Lacan's work by \"disciples\", they point out a similarity to religiosity.",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "Several critics have dismissed Lacan's work wholesale. French philosopher François Roustang [fr] called it an \"incoherent system of pseudo-scientific gibberish\", and quoted linguist Noam Chomsky's opinion that Lacan was an \"amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan\". Noam Chomsky, in a 2012 interview on Veterans Unplugged, said: \"[Q]uite frankly I thought [Lacan] was a total charlatan. He was just posturing for the television cameras in the way many Paris intellectuals do. Why this is influential, I haven't the slightest idea. I don't see anything there that should be influential.\"",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "Academic and former Lacanian analyst Dylan Evans came to dismiss Lacanianism as lacking a sound scientific basis and as harming rather than helping patients. He criticized Lacan's followers for treating Lacan's writings as \"holy writ\". Richard Webster decries what he sees as Lacan's obscurity, arrogance, and the resultant \"Cult of Lacan\".",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "Roger Scruton included Lacan in his book Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left, and named him as the only 'fool' included in the book—his other targets merely being misguided or frauds.",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "In Les Freudiens hérétiques, the 8th tome of his work Contre-histoire de la philosophie (Anti-History of Philosophy), philosopher and author Michel Onfray describes Lacan's Écrits as \"illegible\". According to Onfray, Lacan engages in constant word play, has a taste for the formulaic, and deploys \"incantatory glossolalia\" and unnecessary neologisms. He calls Lacan a \"charlatan,\" and a \"dandy figure\" who \"sinks into autism,\" eventually becoming senile.",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "Selected works published in English listed below. More complete listings can be found at Lacan.com.",
"title": "Works"
}
]
| Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. Described as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud", Lacan gave yearly seminars in Paris, from 1953 to 1981, and published papers that were later collected in the book Écrits. Transcriptions of his seminars, given between 1954 and 1976, were also published. His work made a significant impact on continental philosophy and cultural theory in areas such as post-structuralism, critical theory, feminist theory and film theory, as well as on the practice of psychoanalysis itself. Lacan took up and discussed the whole range of Freudian concepts, emphasizing the philosophical dimension of Freud's thought and applying concepts derived from structuralism in linguistics and anthropology to its development in his own work, which he would further augment by employing formulae from predicate logic and topology. Taking this new direction, and introducing controversial innovations in clinical practice, led to expulsion for Lacan and his followers from the International Psychoanalytic Association. In consequence, Lacan went on to establish new psychoanalytic institutions to promote and develop his work, which he declared to be a "return to Freud", in opposition to prevalent trends in psychology and institutional psychoanalysis collusive of adaptation to social norms. | 2001-10-01T10:46:04Z | 2023-11-12T17:29:03Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Lacan |
16,154 | Jupiter Ace | The Jupiter Ace by Jupiter Cantab was a British home computer released in 1982. The Ace differed from other microcomputers of the time in that its programming environment used Forth instead of the more popular BASIC. This difference, along with limited available software and poor character based graphic display, limited sales and the machine was not a success.
Jupiter Cantab was formed by Richard Altwasser and Steven Vickers. Both had been on the design team for the ZX Spectrum: Altwasser worked on ZX81 development and hardware design of the Spectrum. Vickers adapted and expanded the 4K ZX80 ROM to the 8K ZX81 ROM and wrote most of the ROM for the Spectrum.
The Jupiter Ace was named after an early British computer, the Pilot ACE, and went on sale on September 22, 1982 with a price of £89.95.
Sales to the general public were slow. Initially the computer was only available by mail order, and Jupiter Cantab reported that there were production difficulties, but these had been overcome by January 1983 and that units were arriving in shops.
The use of Forth rather than the more usual choice of BASIC, and the availability and success of the ZX Spectrum, as well as limited published software, the poor case and small initial memory all weighed against wider market acceptance. Eventually Jupiter Cantab ceased trading by the end of October 1983.
The brand was then acquired by Boldfield Computing Ltd in 1984 that sold the remaining stock by mail order for £26. The brand was again sold to Paul Andrews's company Andrews UK Limited in 2015.
Sales of the machine were never very large; the reported number of Ace's sold before Jupiter Cantab closed for business was around 5,000. As of the early 2000s, surviving machines are uncommon, often fetching high prices as collector's items.
Forth, while being structured and powerful, was considered difficult to learn, and a knowledge of BASIC acquired from familiarity with other home computers was of no practical help in learning it. A 1982 review stated that "The success of the Jupiter Ace will depend on the machine-buying public's acceptance of another microcomputer language."
Further, there was only a very limited range of published software – either commercial programs or type-in programs printed in hobby magazines – for the machine, and these were restricted by the base model's small amount of RAM.
Attempts to promote the Ace in the educational market also failed; doubts over whether Forth would be relevant for exam syllabuses, and the lack of support for Forth from teaching staff were key issues. Pupils were more interested in learning the widely used BASIC than a language used by only one (uncommon) machine with a peculiar RPN syntax.
Finally, the tile-based graphics compared poorly to the pixel-based graphics of other machines – which were also colour rather than the Ace's monochrome. This restricted sales largely to a niche market of technical programming enthusiasts.
The Jupiter Ace is often compared with ZX81 due to its similar size, low cost, and similar form factor. Internally its design is more similar to the ZX Spectrum although the Ace also had a dedicated video memory of 2 KB, partly avoiding the slow down when programs accessed the same bank (same chips) as the video memory. Like the Spectrum, the Ace used black conductive rubber keys although unlike the Spectrum, the keys had a conductive pad that was squashed directly onto tracks on the PCB rather than using a membrane. As a result, the keys would often stop working reliably until they were cleaned or the conductive material was refreshed.
Audio capabilities were CPU-controlled with programmable frequency and duration. Sound output was through a small built-in speaker.
As was common at the time, it used a common tape recorder instead of disk/tape drives. Similarly, a television was needed as a display – but this was in black and white only, rather than the colour supported by competing models such as the Spectrum. A secondary (undocumented) edge connector on the back of the case made some video signals available, presumably for a forthcoming colour video card, but no official product that used this connector was ever released.
The Jupiter Ace was based on the Zilog Z80, which the designers had previous experience of from working on the Sinclair ZX81 and ZX Spectrum.
Both graphics and text could be displayed at the same time: (1) redefinition of the character tiles provided standard 256×192 graphics limited to the 128 available (definable) 8×8 chars, concurrent with plotting of 64×48 graphics.
Internal speaker directly controlled by the CPU in single task mode, with control of sound frequency and duration in milliseconds.
Storage was through a cassette-tape interface at 1500 baud. Files could be used for either storage of Forth programs (compiled code) or raw dumps of memory.
The Ace had an 8 KB ROM containing the Forth kernel and operating system, and the predefined dictionary of Forth words in about 5 KB. The remaining 3 KB of ROM supported several functionalities: floating-point numbers library and character definitions table, tape recorder access, decompiling and redefining newly re-edited 'words' (i.e. routines). Some of the ROM was written in Z80 machine code, but some was also coded in Forth.
The next 8 KB was built in RAM that was only partially decoded, with 2 KB of video RAM echoed twice, and 1 KB of user RAM echoed 4 times (with the same memory appearing at several different memory addresses).
Using the lower-address mirror of the video RAM would select CPU priority, resulting in some momentary random pixels on the screen when video subsystem and the CPU accessed the video RAM in the same clock cycle. Using the higher-address would briefly pause the CPU on the interference, affecting the program timing and making this mode unsuitable for I/O operations. Since video RAM was partially separated from the main address and data busses, for the most part the video subsystem and the CPU could operate in parallel.
The first 16 KB of the memory map was used for ROM, Video and User-available RAM, leaving the second 16 KB of the memory map free for RAM extension and the topmost 32 KB undefined.
One 1K bank allowed redefinition of most of its 128 ASCII-based characters in 8×8 pixel bitmap format. The other 1K bank stored the full screen display of 24 rows × 32 columns of characters in black and white. Colour was intended to be achieved as expansion, but although a colour-graphics board was designed, none was ever produced commercially.
1 KB RAM with the option of a 16 KB RAM-Pack, and later a 32 KB one. A PCB was also marketed by Boldfield Computing that converted the edge connector to electrical compatibility with a Sinclair ZX81, allowing use of the ZX81 16K RAM pack.
References to the Ace RAM sometimes include the separate 2 KB video memory, which was not available for programming, thus leading to some confusion. Similarly, it is sometimes argued that because of Forth's efficiency, the 1 KB standard RAM was in effect comparable to at least 2 KB on a BASIC system.
Its most distinctive characteristic was the choice of Forth, a structured language. Threaded compilation allowed programs written to run nearly as fast as many native-compiled languages loaded by more expensive computers. Forth was considered well-adapted to microcomputers with their small memory and relatively low-performance processors. Forth programs are memory-efficient; as they become bigger, they reuse more previously-defined code. Control structures could be nested to any level, limited only by available memory. This allowed complex programs to be implemented, even allowing recursive programming. The Ace's Forth was stated to be "ten times faster than Basic" and used less than half the memory (a significant cost percentage of low end computers of the time) of an equivalent program written in interpreted BASIC. It also allowed easy implementation of machine code routines if needed.
Ace's Forth was based mostly on Forth-79, with some relevant differences, in particular it added syntax checking to control structures and definer constructions and a few extra words were added based on common BASIC sound, video and tape commands. The implementation lacked some less frequently used Forth words, these being easily implemented if needed. Runtime error checking could be turned off to raise speed by 25% to 50%.
Its Forth was adapted to the disk-less tape-using home computer hardware by being able to save/load user "compiled vocabularies", instead of the usual numbered programming blocks used by diskette systems.
Decompiling avoided wasting RAM in simulating an absent Block System, used with both disk and tape drivers (these last not to be confused with tape recorders). As replacement, it included an extra data file, for raw binary data. These solutions were unique to the Jupiter Ace.
To allow decompile, it distinguished usual Forth definer and compiler words creation, replacing the CREATE .. DOES>, creation pair with:
These two defining pairs, instead of one alone, allowed the Ace to decompile its programs, unlike usual Forth systems. This decompiling ability was a solution to the absence of the more flexible disk system used by Forth. Not storing the source of a Forth program, but compiling the code after editing, it avoided completely the emulation of a disk/tape drive on RAM saving computer memory. It also saved time in reading and writing programs from cassette tape. This tape-friendly and RAM-saving solution was unique to the Jupiter Ace Forth.
The names can be equivocal out of a Forth context, as all Words are compiled when declared. DEFINER defines a new Class (as an array) that will build (compile) an array Object. These are active on 'Interpreter'. Pairing this Interaction mode, COMPILER defines a programming structure (usually a pair or a triplet) as IF-ELSE-THEN. These 'Structured Programming' are active on 'Compile' mode (which is simply building a new Forth Word). In short, "Interpreting mode" means Run stage, while "Compiling mode" refers to an Editing stage.
Avoiding sources was compensated by storing comments entered in the code with the compiled output, traditional compilation would discard such comments. The comments were then recovered on decompiling. As a result of "code is the source", modified words (edited) would demand actualization of all code using the one newly edited. This was done with the non standard REDEFINE command.
Although not explicitly designed for such a purpose, the compiled Forth could be utilised for ROM extensions to the built in system. External ROMs were developed with Ace Forth to be used as control applications.
The machine was able to use some ZX81 add-ons due to similar RAM locations, and external expansion slot. Jupiter Cantab made a 16 KB RAM pack, and external companies made similar RAM packs as well as other peripherals and interfaces.
The original Jupiter Ace issue 1 was introduced in 1982, and came in a vacuum-drawn case. Reportedly 5000 units were produced.
The Jupiter Ace 4000 was introduced in 1983, and came on stronger injection-moulded case. Reportedly 800 units were produced.
Other Forth-based microcomputers: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Jupiter Ace by Jupiter Cantab was a British home computer released in 1982. The Ace differed from other microcomputers of the time in that its programming environment used Forth instead of the more popular BASIC. This difference, along with limited available software and poor character based graphic display, limited sales and the machine was not a success.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Jupiter Cantab was formed by Richard Altwasser and Steven Vickers. Both had been on the design team for the ZX Spectrum: Altwasser worked on ZX81 development and hardware design of the Spectrum. Vickers adapted and expanded the 4K ZX80 ROM to the 8K ZX81 ROM and wrote most of the ROM for the Spectrum.",
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{
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"text": "The Jupiter Ace was named after an early British computer, the Pilot ACE, and went on sale on September 22, 1982 with a price of £89.95.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Sales to the general public were slow. Initially the computer was only available by mail order, and Jupiter Cantab reported that there were production difficulties, but these had been overcome by January 1983 and that units were arriving in shops.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The use of Forth rather than the more usual choice of BASIC, and the availability and success of the ZX Spectrum, as well as limited published software, the poor case and small initial memory all weighed against wider market acceptance. Eventually Jupiter Cantab ceased trading by the end of October 1983.",
"title": "History"
},
{
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"text": "The brand was then acquired by Boldfield Computing Ltd in 1984 that sold the remaining stock by mail order for £26. The brand was again sold to Paul Andrews's company Andrews UK Limited in 2015.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Sales of the machine were never very large; the reported number of Ace's sold before Jupiter Cantab closed for business was around 5,000. As of the early 2000s, surviving machines are uncommon, often fetching high prices as collector's items.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Forth, while being structured and powerful, was considered difficult to learn, and a knowledge of BASIC acquired from familiarity with other home computers was of no practical help in learning it. A 1982 review stated that \"The success of the Jupiter Ace will depend on the machine-buying public's acceptance of another microcomputer language.\"",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Further, there was only a very limited range of published software – either commercial programs or type-in programs printed in hobby magazines – for the machine, and these were restricted by the base model's small amount of RAM.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Attempts to promote the Ace in the educational market also failed; doubts over whether Forth would be relevant for exam syllabuses, and the lack of support for Forth from teaching staff were key issues. Pupils were more interested in learning the widely used BASIC than a language used by only one (uncommon) machine with a peculiar RPN syntax.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Finally, the tile-based graphics compared poorly to the pixel-based graphics of other machines – which were also colour rather than the Ace's monochrome. This restricted sales largely to a niche market of technical programming enthusiasts.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The Jupiter Ace is often compared with ZX81 due to its similar size, low cost, and similar form factor. Internally its design is more similar to the ZX Spectrum although the Ace also had a dedicated video memory of 2 KB, partly avoiding the slow down when programs accessed the same bank (same chips) as the video memory. Like the Spectrum, the Ace used black conductive rubber keys although unlike the Spectrum, the keys had a conductive pad that was squashed directly onto tracks on the PCB rather than using a membrane. As a result, the keys would often stop working reliably until they were cleaned or the conductive material was refreshed.",
"title": "Design"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Audio capabilities were CPU-controlled with programmable frequency and duration. Sound output was through a small built-in speaker.",
"title": "Design"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "As was common at the time, it used a common tape recorder instead of disk/tape drives. Similarly, a television was needed as a display – but this was in black and white only, rather than the colour supported by competing models such as the Spectrum. A secondary (undocumented) edge connector on the back of the case made some video signals available, presumably for a forthcoming colour video card, but no official product that used this connector was ever released.",
"title": "Design"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The Jupiter Ace was based on the Zilog Z80, which the designers had previous experience of from working on the Sinclair ZX81 and ZX Spectrum.",
"title": "Design"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Both graphics and text could be displayed at the same time: (1) redefinition of the character tiles provided standard 256×192 graphics limited to the 128 available (definable) 8×8 chars, concurrent with plotting of 64×48 graphics.",
"title": "Design"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Internal speaker directly controlled by the CPU in single task mode, with control of sound frequency and duration in milliseconds.",
"title": "Design"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Storage was through a cassette-tape interface at 1500 baud. Files could be used for either storage of Forth programs (compiled code) or raw dumps of memory.",
"title": "Design"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The Ace had an 8 KB ROM containing the Forth kernel and operating system, and the predefined dictionary of Forth words in about 5 KB. The remaining 3 KB of ROM supported several functionalities: floating-point numbers library and character definitions table, tape recorder access, decompiling and redefining newly re-edited 'words' (i.e. routines). Some of the ROM was written in Z80 machine code, but some was also coded in Forth.",
"title": "Design"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The next 8 KB was built in RAM that was only partially decoded, with 2 KB of video RAM echoed twice, and 1 KB of user RAM echoed 4 times (with the same memory appearing at several different memory addresses).",
"title": "Design"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Using the lower-address mirror of the video RAM would select CPU priority, resulting in some momentary random pixels on the screen when video subsystem and the CPU accessed the video RAM in the same clock cycle. Using the higher-address would briefly pause the CPU on the interference, affecting the program timing and making this mode unsuitable for I/O operations. Since video RAM was partially separated from the main address and data busses, for the most part the video subsystem and the CPU could operate in parallel.",
"title": "Design"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The first 16 KB of the memory map was used for ROM, Video and User-available RAM, leaving the second 16 KB of the memory map free for RAM extension and the topmost 32 KB undefined.",
"title": "Design"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "One 1K bank allowed redefinition of most of its 128 ASCII-based characters in 8×8 pixel bitmap format. The other 1K bank stored the full screen display of 24 rows × 32 columns of characters in black and white. Colour was intended to be achieved as expansion, but although a colour-graphics board was designed, none was ever produced commercially.",
"title": "Design"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "1 KB RAM with the option of a 16 KB RAM-Pack, and later a 32 KB one. A PCB was also marketed by Boldfield Computing that converted the edge connector to electrical compatibility with a Sinclair ZX81, allowing use of the ZX81 16K RAM pack.",
"title": "Design"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "References to the Ace RAM sometimes include the separate 2 KB video memory, which was not available for programming, thus leading to some confusion. Similarly, it is sometimes argued that because of Forth's efficiency, the 1 KB standard RAM was in effect comparable to at least 2 KB on a BASIC system.",
"title": "Design"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Its most distinctive characteristic was the choice of Forth, a structured language. Threaded compilation allowed programs written to run nearly as fast as many native-compiled languages loaded by more expensive computers. Forth was considered well-adapted to microcomputers with their small memory and relatively low-performance processors. Forth programs are memory-efficient; as they become bigger, they reuse more previously-defined code. Control structures could be nested to any level, limited only by available memory. This allowed complex programs to be implemented, even allowing recursive programming. The Ace's Forth was stated to be \"ten times faster than Basic\" and used less than half the memory (a significant cost percentage of low end computers of the time) of an equivalent program written in interpreted BASIC. It also allowed easy implementation of machine code routines if needed.",
"title": "Programming"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Ace's Forth was based mostly on Forth-79, with some relevant differences, in particular it added syntax checking to control structures and definer constructions and a few extra words were added based on common BASIC sound, video and tape commands. The implementation lacked some less frequently used Forth words, these being easily implemented if needed. Runtime error checking could be turned off to raise speed by 25% to 50%.",
"title": "Programming"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Its Forth was adapted to the disk-less tape-using home computer hardware by being able to save/load user \"compiled vocabularies\", instead of the usual numbered programming blocks used by diskette systems.",
"title": "Programming"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Decompiling avoided wasting RAM in simulating an absent Block System, used with both disk and tape drivers (these last not to be confused with tape recorders). As replacement, it included an extra data file, for raw binary data. These solutions were unique to the Jupiter Ace.",
"title": "Programming"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "To allow decompile, it distinguished usual Forth definer and compiler words creation, replacing the CREATE .. DOES>, creation pair with:",
"title": "Programming"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "These two defining pairs, instead of one alone, allowed the Ace to decompile its programs, unlike usual Forth systems. This decompiling ability was a solution to the absence of the more flexible disk system used by Forth. Not storing the source of a Forth program, but compiling the code after editing, it avoided completely the emulation of a disk/tape drive on RAM saving computer memory. It also saved time in reading and writing programs from cassette tape. This tape-friendly and RAM-saving solution was unique to the Jupiter Ace Forth.",
"title": "Programming"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The names can be equivocal out of a Forth context, as all Words are compiled when declared. DEFINER defines a new Class (as an array) that will build (compile) an array Object. These are active on 'Interpreter'. Pairing this Interaction mode, COMPILER defines a programming structure (usually a pair or a triplet) as IF-ELSE-THEN. These 'Structured Programming' are active on 'Compile' mode (which is simply building a new Forth Word). In short, \"Interpreting mode\" means Run stage, while \"Compiling mode\" refers to an Editing stage.",
"title": "Programming"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Avoiding sources was compensated by storing comments entered in the code with the compiled output, traditional compilation would discard such comments. The comments were then recovered on decompiling. As a result of \"code is the source\", modified words (edited) would demand actualization of all code using the one newly edited. This was done with the non standard REDEFINE command.",
"title": "Programming"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Although not explicitly designed for such a purpose, the compiled Forth could be utilised for ROM extensions to the built in system. External ROMs were developed with Ace Forth to be used as control applications.",
"title": "Programming"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The machine was able to use some ZX81 add-ons due to similar RAM locations, and external expansion slot. Jupiter Cantab made a 16 KB RAM pack, and external companies made similar RAM packs as well as other peripherals and interfaces.",
"title": "Add-ons"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The original Jupiter Ace issue 1 was introduced in 1982, and came in a vacuum-drawn case. Reportedly 5000 units were produced.",
"title": "Models"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The Jupiter Ace 4000 was introduced in 1983, and came on stronger injection-moulded case. Reportedly 800 units were produced.",
"title": "Models"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Other Forth-based microcomputers:",
"title": "See also"
}
]
| The Jupiter Ace by Jupiter Cantab was a British home computer released in 1982. The Ace differed from other microcomputers of the time in that its programming environment used Forth instead of the more popular BASIC. This difference, along with limited available software and poor character based graphic display, limited sales and the machine was not a success. | 2002-02-25T15:51:15Z | 2023-11-28T06:56:06Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Ace |
16,156 | Jacksonville Jaguars | The Jacksonville Jaguars are a professional American football team based in Jacksonville, Florida. The Jaguars compete in the National Football League (NFL) as a member club of the American Football Conference (AFC) South Division. The team plays its home games at EverBank Stadium.
Founded alongside the Carolina Panthers in 1995 as an expansion team, the Jaguars competed in the AFC Central until they were moved to the AFC South in 2002. The franchise is owned by Shahid Khan, who bought the team from its original majority owner Wayne Weaver in 2012.
The Jaguars saw early success, making the playoffs in each of their second through fifth seasons, a four-year span in which they won two division titles and appeared in two AFC Championship Games. They are the youngest NFL expansion team to appear in a conference championship (by their second season in 1996, along with the Panthers) and clinch their conference's top seed (by their fifth season in 1999). The Jaguars have been less successful since, with only four playoff appearances and two division titles since 2000. Jacksonville is one of four NFL franchises that have never played in the Super Bowl, alongside the Cleveland Browns, Detroit Lions, and division rival Houston Texans.
The day after the NFL awarded the expansion team to Jacksonville, Jaguars owner Wayne Weaver held up the Jaguars' proposed silver helmet and teal jersey at the NFL owners' meeting in Chicago. The team's colors were to be teal, gold, and silver with black accents. However, this jersey and helmet design, with a gold leaping jaguar, created controversy. Ford Motor Company, then-parent of the automaker Jaguar, believed that the Jaguars' logo bore too much resemblance to the automaker's logo. Though no lawsuit was brought to trial, lawyers from the team and the automaker negotiated an ultimately amicable agreement whereby Jaguar would be named the official car of the Jaguars, and the Jaguars would redesign their uniforms.
The new logo was a snarling jaguar head with a teal tongue, which Weaver said was his wife's touch. He also claimed that the teal tongue came from "feeding Panthers to our Jaguars" — an obvious jab at their expansion brethren. During the Jaguars' first-ever preseason game teal-colored candies were handed out to all the fans who attended, turning their tongues a teal color just like on the logo. Additionally, raspberry lollipops were handed out by the "Candy Man" in section 142 to also turn the home fans' tongues teal.
In 2009, Weaver announced that he wanted to "clean up" the team's image. This meant the elimination of the full-body crawling Jaguar logo, the clawing Jaguar, and the two previous wordmarks which bent the text around these logos.
In February 2013, Jaguars owner Shahid Khan, who had acquired the team in late 2011, introduced a new brand identity for the team that included a new logo, wordmark, and secondary logo. The new Jaguar head logo was intended to be "fiercer" and more realistic. The secondary logo incorporated the new Jaguar head logo along with the first official usage of the team's popular nickname "Jags". The two images were encased in a shield-style shape, designed to be a tribute to Jacksonville's military community.
Beginning in 2013, the Jaguars began to feature gold more prominently than in the past. From 2009 to 2012, gold had only been used in the team logo and as a minor accent color.
For most of their history, the Jaguars have done what many other NFL teams located in subtropical climates traditionally practice: wear their white jerseys at home during the first half of the season — forcing opponents to wear their dark ones under the sweltering autumns in Jacksonville. The only exceptions were in 2004 and 2008–2010, when the Jaguars chose to wear teal for all home games. In the preseason, the Jaguars typically wear teal at home, since these games are played at night when there is very little advantage with the heat.
Following the logo change, the redesigned uniforms featured an all-black helmet, white pants with teal, black, and gold stripes, and numbers with gold inner trim and black outer trim. The home jersey was teal with white numbers and the away jersey was white with teal numbers. Both jerseys had a black collar and no sleeve stripes.
A prowling jaguar on each sleeve replaced the leaping jaguar going across both shoulders in the original design. The Jaguars in 1995 were the first NFL team to have two-tone borders on their numbers and lettering, and the first NFL team to show a complex logo (the crawling jaguar) on the sleeve.
Minor modifications were introduced to the Jaguars uniform during this time, most notably the font of the jersey numbers, replacing the original block numbers with a unique font. Two stripes were also added to the end of the sleeves below the prowling jaguar.
The team introduced a black alternate jersey in 2002. During that same year, the team also introduced alternate black pants, worn with either the white or the teal jersey. After the black pants were introduced, the white pants would only be seen for the first few games of the year, presumably due to the heat. The black pants originally included two teal stripes down each side. The fan reaction to the extra black in the alternate jersey and alternate pants was positive, so in 2004 the Jaguars went through a formal uniform change, which teams are only allowed to do once every five years. These changes were mostly to the away look. Before 2004, the white away jerseys had teal numbers with black and gold trim, but after, the white jerseys had black numbers with teal and gold trim. The black pants were also changed. The teal stripes were replaced with the jaguar logo on each hip. Teal almost disappeared from the away uniform.
The stripes on the white pants were altered in 2008 so that the center, thickest stripe was black, and its accents were teal. In the 2008 year, the gold in the uniforms noticeably shifted from a bright yellow metallic appearance to more beige.
The Jaguars unveiled new uniforms for the 2009 season. Team owner Wayne Weaver reportedly wanted to "clean up" the look, feeling that the team had too many uniform styles. The new uniforms were introduced in a press conference on April 22.
At this press conference, Weaver elaborated that different people had taken different liberties with the Jaguars' image over the years, singling out the "all black" look which the team wore for every prime-time home game from 2003 to 2007 as a point of regret. He also said that the team would wear their teal jerseys at home even on hot days, saying that the practice of choosing to wear white on hot days had also diluted the team's image. The new uniform reflected a simpler look overall. The collar and sleeve ends are the same color as the rest of the jersey. The crawling jaguar was removed. The numbers on the jerseys were changed to a simpler, block font with a thicker, single color border. After all of these subtractions, two features were added. The first was a "Jaguars" wordmark underneath the NFL insignia on the chest. The second was two thin "stripes" of off-color fabric which were added to each midseam of the jersey, curling up to the neckline on the front and below the number on the back. The stripe on the home jersey is a white line next to a black line, matching the color of the numbers, and the stripe on the away jersey is a black line next to a teal line, again matching the numbers. The pants have similar stripes, both for the home and away uniform. The away uniforms were still black pants and numbers on a white jersey, but they now used teal as the only accent color as opposed to using gold in previous years. The Jaguars' identity, in terms of colors, beginning in 2009 is exclusively teal and black, with gold only being used in the logo. The final change made to the Jaguars' uniforms in 2009 was to the helmet. The new helmet and facemask were black just like the old ones, but when light hit the new ones a certain way, both the helmet and face mask sparkled with a shiny teal appearance. These were the first helmets in professional football which changed color with different angles of light. The logo and number decals also incorporated this effect.
Prior to the 2012 season, new Jaguars owner Shahid Khan announced that the team would once again use a black jersey, something they had not done since 2008. In September of that year, the team announced that it would use the black jersey and black pants as their primary home uniform. The teal jersey was resurrected as an alternate.
On April 23, 2013, the Jaguars unveiled new uniforms designed by Nike. The primary home jersey is black with white numerals outlined in teal and gold. The road jersey is white with teal numerals outlined in black and gold, marking the first time since 2003 that the team has used teal numbers on their road jersey. The alternate jersey is teal with black numerals outlined in white and gold. The team had never before used black numbers on their teal jersey. All three jerseys feature a contrasting stripe that bends around the neck, and semi-glossy patches on the shoulders meant to resemble claw marks. The team added their new shield logo onto a patch just above the player's heart, meant to pay tribute to Jacksonville's military heritage.
The helmet, first of its kind in the NFL, featured a glossy gold finish in the back that fades to matte black in the front, via a color gradient.
The new uniform set includes black and white pants with the Jaguars logo on the hip and a tri-color pattern down the player's leg.
In November 2015, as one of eight teams participating in Nike's "Color Rush" initiative for four games of Thursday Night Football during the 2015 season, Jacksonville introduced an all-gold second alternative uniform. The set features a gold jersey with black sleeves and black trim, as well as all gold pants. The white front and back numbers are lined in the teal accent color and bordered by black. The TV numbers on the shoulders are white with black bordering. The set also features gold undershirts and socks.
On April 19, 2018, the Jaguars again revealed re-designed uniforms. The new design returns to an all-black gloss helmet and removes many of the complicated details from the previous set. For the first time, there are no borders at all on any of the jersey numbers. There are no stripes or team logo on the pants; only an NFL logo and a Nike logo, which is the first and only of its kind in the NFL. Like the 2009 uniform set, the only gold in the uniform set belongs to the jaguar logo itself, and the block number font is not distinct from that used by other teams. The sleeve trim and collar trim are both a different color than the rest of the jersey, that and the solitary jaguar logo are the only distinct markings on the jersey. For the first time, the sock has a teal stripe between the black and white. The black jersey is the primary, as it has been since 2012, and the teal is the alternate. The Jaguars continued to pair the uniforms with either black or white pants, but added alternate teal pants for the first time.
In 2019, the Jaguars began wearing either solid black or white socks as part of a new NFL mandate allowing solid-colored hosiery on the field.
In Week 3 of the 2020 season against the Miami Dolphins, the Jaguars wore an all-teal ensemble for the first time, complete with solid teal socks.
On February 17, 2021, the Jaguars announced that the club would return to wearing teal jerseys as its designated primary home jersey color.
EverBank Stadium (formerly known as Jacksonville Municipal Stadium, Alltel Stadium, EverBank Field, and TIAA Bank Field) is located on the north bank of the St. Johns River, and has been the home of the Jaguars since the team's first season in 1995. The stadium has a capacity of 67,814, with additional seating added during Florida–Georgia Game and the Gator Bowl.
The stadium served as the site of Super Bowl XXXIX in addition to five Jaguar playoff games including the 1999 AFC Championship Game. It also hosted the ACC Championship Game from 2005 to 2007 and the River City Showdown in 2007 and 2008.
From 1995 to 1997 and again from 2006 to 2009, the stadium was named Jacksonville Municipal Stadium. From 1997 to 2006, the stadium was referred to as Alltel Stadium. The naming rights were purchased by EverBank prior to the 2010 season. Prior to the 2018 season the Jaguars announced the stadium would be renamed TIAA Bank Field.
The stadium received a substantial upgrade in 2014 with the addition of new scoreboards, pools, cabana seating and premium seating that includes 180 field-level seats. The scoreboards are 60 feet (18 m) high and 362 feet (110 m) long. The new scoreboards are the world's largest video boards. Two 25 feet (7.6 m) by 12 feet (3.7 m) pools were installed in the north end zone along with the cabana seating. The cost of the stadium upgrades were $63 million, of which owner Shahid Khan helped finance $20 million.
The Jaguars share rivalries with the other three teams in the AFC South: the Indianapolis Colts, Houston Texans, and Tennessee Titans. The Jaguars also have geographic rivalries with the two other Florida-based teams: the Miami Dolphins and Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The Jaguars, Dolphins, and Buccaneers frequently play each other during the preseason. During the AFC Central days of the mid-1990s and early 2000s, the Jaguars had a rivalry with the Pittsburgh Steelers as the two teams were consistently in playoff contention. The rivalry would reach new heights in the 2000s and 2010s when the Jaguars and Steelers joined the AFC South and North respectively. Jacksonville also defeated Pittsburgh in the playoffs in 2007 and 2017.
The Jaguars' rivalry with the Tennessee Titans dates back to the Jaguars inaugural season in the NFL prior to the 1995 season. when the Titans were then-known as the Houston Oilers. During the 1995 season, the Jaguars recorded their first win as a franchise over the Oilers in Houston. The rivalry intensified in the late 1990s as both teams were consistently near the top of the AFC Central standings. In 1999, the Jaguars posted a 14–2 record with both losses coming to Tennessee. The two teams met in the AFC Championship Game, with Tennessee beating Jacksonville for a third time that season, 33–14. The rivalry continued into the 2000s as both teams were placed in the newly formed AFC South in 2002. The Titans lead the overall series, 34–23, having also won the only playoff game in the series.
The Jaguars share a divisional rivalry with the Houston Texans. Both franchises are two of the youngest in the league, the two teams clashed particularly during Jacksonville's notorious "Sacksonville" era defenses while the Texans often fought hard for control of the division. The Texans currently lead the all-time series versus the Jaguars, 29–14.
The Jaguars have taken part in a minor rivalry with the Miami Dolphins as both teams are the only two AFC franchises located in Florida. The two teams first met during the 1998 NFL season on a Monday Night Football matchup. Both teams later met in the 1999 AFC Divisional Round in what would ultimately be the final career game for Dolphins' hall-of-fame quarterback Dan Marino. The Dolphins entered the game as heavy underdogs as they had finished the 1999 season 9–7, securing the lowest wild card berth. Meanwhile; the Jaguars had boasted an impressive 14–2 campaign under pro-bowl quarterback Mark Brunell; culminating in the Jaguars defeating Miami in a 62–7 blowout loss. The Jaguars managed an improbable upset victory during the 2021 season as the team had declined severely under controversial head coach Urban Meyer. Despite this; the Jaguars managed a comeback victory against the Dolphins in London during Week 6. The teams are tied 5–5 all time, though the Jaguars lead 1–0 in the postseason.
This is a partial list of the Jaguars' last five completed seasons. For the full season-by-season franchise results, see List of Jacksonville Jaguars seasons.
Note: The Finish, Wins, Losses, and Ties columns list regular season results and exclude any postseason play.
As of January 14, 2021
A contest was held in July 2006 to name the club's ring of honor as "Pride of the Jaguars" was chosen with 36% of the vote. It was unveiled during the 2006 season during a game against the New York Jets on October 8. Former offensive tackle Tony Boselli was the first player inducted.
On January 1, 2012, team owner Wayne Weaver and his wife Delores were added to the Pride of the Jaguars in their final game before the sale of the team to Shahid Khan. On June 7, 2012, the Jaguars announced Fred Taylor would be the next inductee into the Pride of the Jaguars. He was inducted on September 30, 2012. Longtime Jaguars quarterback Mark Brunell was also inducted into the "Pride of the Jaguars" on December 15, 2013. Former wide receiver Jimmy Smith was inducted in 2016. On November 9, 2023, it was announced that former head coach Tom Coughlin would be inducted on an unspecified date in 2024.
On October 9, 2022, the Jacksonville Jaguars retired Tony Boselli's number 71, at a halftime ceremony against the division-rival Houston Texans. It is the first number retired by the organization.
Also, despite not being formally retired, the Jaguars have not reissued the numbers 8, 28, or 82, worn by Mark Brunell, Fred Taylor, and Jimmy Smith respectively, since they retired or left the team. Additionally, Brunell and Smith are the only players in franchise history to have worn their respective numbers.
The Jaguars have had nine head coaches (including two interim coaches) throughout their franchise history. Their first head coach was Tom Coughlin, who compiled a 72–64 (.529) overall record with the team from 1995 to 2002. Jack Del Rio was the longest-tenured head coach in Jaguars history, holding the position from 2003 to 2011. The current head coach is Doug Pederson, who was hired on February 3, 2022, and is the ninth head coach in franchise history.
Since his introduction in 1996, Jaxson de Ville has served as the Jaguars' mascot. Jaxson entertains the crowd before and during games with his antics. The mascot has established a reputation for making dramatic entrances including bungee jumping off the stadium lights, sliding down a rope from the scoreboard, and parachuting into the stadium.
Jaxson's antics got him into trouble in 1998 and stemmed the changing of the NFL's mascot rules, and also caused him to calm down. However, Jaxson was still seen, by some, as a mascot that gets in the way during the game. After the October 22, 2007 game against Indianapolis, Colts President Bill Polian complained to the NFL, and Jaxson was reprimanded again.
Jaxson's first appearance was on August 18, 1996, and was played by Curtis Dvorak from his inception until his retirement in June 2015.
The Jacksonville Roar is the professional cheerleading squad of the Jaguars. The group was established in 1995, the team's inaugural year, and regularly performs choreographed routines during the team's home contests.
In addition to performing at games and pep rallies, members function as goodwill ambassadors of the team, participating in corporate, community, and charitable events in the Jacksonville metropolitan area where they sign autographs and pose for pictures. They also join NFL tours to entertain American servicemen and women around the world.
The Jacksonville Jaguars Foundation was established in 1994, when the franchise deal was first announced. Since then, the Foundation has given over $20 million to area efforts in community improvement. The Foundation focuses on many initiatives, such as Honor Rows, anti-tobacco programs, NFL Play 60, and support for veterans. The Foundation grants over $1 million annually to organizations that assist "economically and socially disadvantaged youth and families".
The Jaguars' first head coach, Tom Coughlin, established the Tom Coughlin Jay Fund Foundation in 1996 to help young cancer victims and their families with emotional and financial assistance. The charity remained in Jacksonville after Coughlin left to coach the New York Giants.
From their inaugural 1995 season until 2013, the Jaguars' flagship radio station was WOKV, which simulcasts on both AM 690 and on 104.5 FM.
Starting with the 2014 season, the team moved their broadcast to WJXL and WJXL-FM (1010 AM and 92.5 FM) and simulcast on 99.9 Gator Country
Frank Frangie is the play-by-play announcer with former Jaguars players Tony Boselli and Jeff Lageman providing color analysis.
WJAX-TV or WFOX-TV televises all preseason games and also televises regular season games that are televised nationally on ESPN or NFL Network. | [
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"title": ""
},
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"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Founded alongside the Carolina Panthers in 1995 as an expansion team, the Jaguars competed in the AFC Central until they were moved to the AFC South in 2002. The franchise is owned by Shahid Khan, who bought the team from its original majority owner Wayne Weaver in 2012.",
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"text": "The Jaguars saw early success, making the playoffs in each of their second through fifth seasons, a four-year span in which they won two division titles and appeared in two AFC Championship Games. They are the youngest NFL expansion team to appear in a conference championship (by their second season in 1996, along with the Panthers) and clinch their conference's top seed (by their fifth season in 1999). The Jaguars have been less successful since, with only four playoff appearances and two division titles since 2000. Jacksonville is one of four NFL franchises that have never played in the Super Bowl, alongside the Cleveland Browns, Detroit Lions, and division rival Houston Texans.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The day after the NFL awarded the expansion team to Jacksonville, Jaguars owner Wayne Weaver held up the Jaguars' proposed silver helmet and teal jersey at the NFL owners' meeting in Chicago. The team's colors were to be teal, gold, and silver with black accents. However, this jersey and helmet design, with a gold leaping jaguar, created controversy. Ford Motor Company, then-parent of the automaker Jaguar, believed that the Jaguars' logo bore too much resemblance to the automaker's logo. Though no lawsuit was brought to trial, lawyers from the team and the automaker negotiated an ultimately amicable agreement whereby Jaguar would be named the official car of the Jaguars, and the Jaguars would redesign their uniforms.",
"title": "Logos and uniforms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The new logo was a snarling jaguar head with a teal tongue, which Weaver said was his wife's touch. He also claimed that the teal tongue came from \"feeding Panthers to our Jaguars\" — an obvious jab at their expansion brethren. During the Jaguars' first-ever preseason game teal-colored candies were handed out to all the fans who attended, turning their tongues a teal color just like on the logo. Additionally, raspberry lollipops were handed out by the \"Candy Man\" in section 142 to also turn the home fans' tongues teal.",
"title": "Logos and uniforms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In 2009, Weaver announced that he wanted to \"clean up\" the team's image. This meant the elimination of the full-body crawling Jaguar logo, the clawing Jaguar, and the two previous wordmarks which bent the text around these logos.",
"title": "Logos and uniforms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In February 2013, Jaguars owner Shahid Khan, who had acquired the team in late 2011, introduced a new brand identity for the team that included a new logo, wordmark, and secondary logo. The new Jaguar head logo was intended to be \"fiercer\" and more realistic. The secondary logo incorporated the new Jaguar head logo along with the first official usage of the team's popular nickname \"Jags\". The two images were encased in a shield-style shape, designed to be a tribute to Jacksonville's military community.",
"title": "Logos and uniforms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Beginning in 2013, the Jaguars began to feature gold more prominently than in the past. From 2009 to 2012, gold had only been used in the team logo and as a minor accent color.",
"title": "Logos and uniforms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "For most of their history, the Jaguars have done what many other NFL teams located in subtropical climates traditionally practice: wear their white jerseys at home during the first half of the season — forcing opponents to wear their dark ones under the sweltering autumns in Jacksonville. The only exceptions were in 2004 and 2008–2010, when the Jaguars chose to wear teal for all home games. In the preseason, the Jaguars typically wear teal at home, since these games are played at night when there is very little advantage with the heat.",
"title": "Logos and uniforms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Following the logo change, the redesigned uniforms featured an all-black helmet, white pants with teal, black, and gold stripes, and numbers with gold inner trim and black outer trim. The home jersey was teal with white numbers and the away jersey was white with teal numbers. Both jerseys had a black collar and no sleeve stripes.",
"title": "Logos and uniforms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "A prowling jaguar on each sleeve replaced the leaping jaguar going across both shoulders in the original design. The Jaguars in 1995 were the first NFL team to have two-tone borders on their numbers and lettering, and the first NFL team to show a complex logo (the crawling jaguar) on the sleeve.",
"title": "Logos and uniforms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Minor modifications were introduced to the Jaguars uniform during this time, most notably the font of the jersey numbers, replacing the original block numbers with a unique font. Two stripes were also added to the end of the sleeves below the prowling jaguar.",
"title": "Logos and uniforms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The team introduced a black alternate jersey in 2002. During that same year, the team also introduced alternate black pants, worn with either the white or the teal jersey. After the black pants were introduced, the white pants would only be seen for the first few games of the year, presumably due to the heat. The black pants originally included two teal stripes down each side. The fan reaction to the extra black in the alternate jersey and alternate pants was positive, so in 2004 the Jaguars went through a formal uniform change, which teams are only allowed to do once every five years. These changes were mostly to the away look. Before 2004, the white away jerseys had teal numbers with black and gold trim, but after, the white jerseys had black numbers with teal and gold trim. The black pants were also changed. The teal stripes were replaced with the jaguar logo on each hip. Teal almost disappeared from the away uniform.",
"title": "Logos and uniforms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The stripes on the white pants were altered in 2008 so that the center, thickest stripe was black, and its accents were teal. In the 2008 year, the gold in the uniforms noticeably shifted from a bright yellow metallic appearance to more beige.",
"title": "Logos and uniforms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The Jaguars unveiled new uniforms for the 2009 season. Team owner Wayne Weaver reportedly wanted to \"clean up\" the look, feeling that the team had too many uniform styles. The new uniforms were introduced in a press conference on April 22.",
"title": "Logos and uniforms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "At this press conference, Weaver elaborated that different people had taken different liberties with the Jaguars' image over the years, singling out the \"all black\" look which the team wore for every prime-time home game from 2003 to 2007 as a point of regret. He also said that the team would wear their teal jerseys at home even on hot days, saying that the practice of choosing to wear white on hot days had also diluted the team's image. The new uniform reflected a simpler look overall. The collar and sleeve ends are the same color as the rest of the jersey. The crawling jaguar was removed. The numbers on the jerseys were changed to a simpler, block font with a thicker, single color border. After all of these subtractions, two features were added. The first was a \"Jaguars\" wordmark underneath the NFL insignia on the chest. The second was two thin \"stripes\" of off-color fabric which were added to each midseam of the jersey, curling up to the neckline on the front and below the number on the back. The stripe on the home jersey is a white line next to a black line, matching the color of the numbers, and the stripe on the away jersey is a black line next to a teal line, again matching the numbers. The pants have similar stripes, both for the home and away uniform. The away uniforms were still black pants and numbers on a white jersey, but they now used teal as the only accent color as opposed to using gold in previous years. The Jaguars' identity, in terms of colors, beginning in 2009 is exclusively teal and black, with gold only being used in the logo. The final change made to the Jaguars' uniforms in 2009 was to the helmet. The new helmet and facemask were black just like the old ones, but when light hit the new ones a certain way, both the helmet and face mask sparkled with a shiny teal appearance. These were the first helmets in professional football which changed color with different angles of light. The logo and number decals also incorporated this effect.",
"title": "Logos and uniforms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Prior to the 2012 season, new Jaguars owner Shahid Khan announced that the team would once again use a black jersey, something they had not done since 2008. In September of that year, the team announced that it would use the black jersey and black pants as their primary home uniform. The teal jersey was resurrected as an alternate.",
"title": "Logos and uniforms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "On April 23, 2013, the Jaguars unveiled new uniforms designed by Nike. The primary home jersey is black with white numerals outlined in teal and gold. The road jersey is white with teal numerals outlined in black and gold, marking the first time since 2003 that the team has used teal numbers on their road jersey. The alternate jersey is teal with black numerals outlined in white and gold. The team had never before used black numbers on their teal jersey. All three jerseys feature a contrasting stripe that bends around the neck, and semi-glossy patches on the shoulders meant to resemble claw marks. The team added their new shield logo onto a patch just above the player's heart, meant to pay tribute to Jacksonville's military heritage.",
"title": "Logos and uniforms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The helmet, first of its kind in the NFL, featured a glossy gold finish in the back that fades to matte black in the front, via a color gradient.",
"title": "Logos and uniforms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The new uniform set includes black and white pants with the Jaguars logo on the hip and a tri-color pattern down the player's leg.",
"title": "Logos and uniforms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In November 2015, as one of eight teams participating in Nike's \"Color Rush\" initiative for four games of Thursday Night Football during the 2015 season, Jacksonville introduced an all-gold second alternative uniform. The set features a gold jersey with black sleeves and black trim, as well as all gold pants. The white front and back numbers are lined in the teal accent color and bordered by black. The TV numbers on the shoulders are white with black bordering. The set also features gold undershirts and socks.",
"title": "Logos and uniforms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "On April 19, 2018, the Jaguars again revealed re-designed uniforms. The new design returns to an all-black gloss helmet and removes many of the complicated details from the previous set. For the first time, there are no borders at all on any of the jersey numbers. There are no stripes or team logo on the pants; only an NFL logo and a Nike logo, which is the first and only of its kind in the NFL. Like the 2009 uniform set, the only gold in the uniform set belongs to the jaguar logo itself, and the block number font is not distinct from that used by other teams. The sleeve trim and collar trim are both a different color than the rest of the jersey, that and the solitary jaguar logo are the only distinct markings on the jersey. For the first time, the sock has a teal stripe between the black and white. The black jersey is the primary, as it has been since 2012, and the teal is the alternate. The Jaguars continued to pair the uniforms with either black or white pants, but added alternate teal pants for the first time.",
"title": "Logos and uniforms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In 2019, the Jaguars began wearing either solid black or white socks as part of a new NFL mandate allowing solid-colored hosiery on the field.",
"title": "Logos and uniforms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "In Week 3 of the 2020 season against the Miami Dolphins, the Jaguars wore an all-teal ensemble for the first time, complete with solid teal socks.",
"title": "Logos and uniforms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "On February 17, 2021, the Jaguars announced that the club would return to wearing teal jerseys as its designated primary home jersey color.",
"title": "Logos and uniforms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "EverBank Stadium (formerly known as Jacksonville Municipal Stadium, Alltel Stadium, EverBank Field, and TIAA Bank Field) is located on the north bank of the St. Johns River, and has been the home of the Jaguars since the team's first season in 1995. The stadium has a capacity of 67,814, with additional seating added during Florida–Georgia Game and the Gator Bowl.",
"title": "Stadium"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The stadium served as the site of Super Bowl XXXIX in addition to five Jaguar playoff games including the 1999 AFC Championship Game. It also hosted the ACC Championship Game from 2005 to 2007 and the River City Showdown in 2007 and 2008.",
"title": "Stadium"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "From 1995 to 1997 and again from 2006 to 2009, the stadium was named Jacksonville Municipal Stadium. From 1997 to 2006, the stadium was referred to as Alltel Stadium. The naming rights were purchased by EverBank prior to the 2010 season. Prior to the 2018 season the Jaguars announced the stadium would be renamed TIAA Bank Field.",
"title": "Stadium"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The stadium received a substantial upgrade in 2014 with the addition of new scoreboards, pools, cabana seating and premium seating that includes 180 field-level seats. The scoreboards are 60 feet (18 m) high and 362 feet (110 m) long. The new scoreboards are the world's largest video boards. Two 25 feet (7.6 m) by 12 feet (3.7 m) pools were installed in the north end zone along with the cabana seating. The cost of the stadium upgrades were $63 million, of which owner Shahid Khan helped finance $20 million.",
"title": "Stadium"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The Jaguars share rivalries with the other three teams in the AFC South: the Indianapolis Colts, Houston Texans, and Tennessee Titans. The Jaguars also have geographic rivalries with the two other Florida-based teams: the Miami Dolphins and Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The Jaguars, Dolphins, and Buccaneers frequently play each other during the preseason. During the AFC Central days of the mid-1990s and early 2000s, the Jaguars had a rivalry with the Pittsburgh Steelers as the two teams were consistently in playoff contention. The rivalry would reach new heights in the 2000s and 2010s when the Jaguars and Steelers joined the AFC South and North respectively. Jacksonville also defeated Pittsburgh in the playoffs in 2007 and 2017.",
"title": "Rivalries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The Jaguars' rivalry with the Tennessee Titans dates back to the Jaguars inaugural season in the NFL prior to the 1995 season. when the Titans were then-known as the Houston Oilers. During the 1995 season, the Jaguars recorded their first win as a franchise over the Oilers in Houston. The rivalry intensified in the late 1990s as both teams were consistently near the top of the AFC Central standings. In 1999, the Jaguars posted a 14–2 record with both losses coming to Tennessee. The two teams met in the AFC Championship Game, with Tennessee beating Jacksonville for a third time that season, 33–14. The rivalry continued into the 2000s as both teams were placed in the newly formed AFC South in 2002. The Titans lead the overall series, 34–23, having also won the only playoff game in the series.",
"title": "Rivalries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The Jaguars share a divisional rivalry with the Houston Texans. Both franchises are two of the youngest in the league, the two teams clashed particularly during Jacksonville's notorious \"Sacksonville\" era defenses while the Texans often fought hard for control of the division. The Texans currently lead the all-time series versus the Jaguars, 29–14.",
"title": "Rivalries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The Jaguars have taken part in a minor rivalry with the Miami Dolphins as both teams are the only two AFC franchises located in Florida. The two teams first met during the 1998 NFL season on a Monday Night Football matchup. Both teams later met in the 1999 AFC Divisional Round in what would ultimately be the final career game for Dolphins' hall-of-fame quarterback Dan Marino. The Dolphins entered the game as heavy underdogs as they had finished the 1999 season 9–7, securing the lowest wild card berth. Meanwhile; the Jaguars had boasted an impressive 14–2 campaign under pro-bowl quarterback Mark Brunell; culminating in the Jaguars defeating Miami in a 62–7 blowout loss. The Jaguars managed an improbable upset victory during the 2021 season as the team had declined severely under controversial head coach Urban Meyer. Despite this; the Jaguars managed a comeback victory against the Dolphins in London during Week 6. The teams are tied 5–5 all time, though the Jaguars lead 1–0 in the postseason.",
"title": "Rivalries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "This is a partial list of the Jaguars' last five completed seasons. For the full season-by-season franchise results, see List of Jacksonville Jaguars seasons.",
"title": "Statistics and records"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Note: The Finish, Wins, Losses, and Ties columns list regular season results and exclude any postseason play.",
"title": "Statistics and records"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "As of January 14, 2021",
"title": "Statistics and records"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "A contest was held in July 2006 to name the club's ring of honor as \"Pride of the Jaguars\" was chosen with 36% of the vote. It was unveiled during the 2006 season during a game against the New York Jets on October 8. Former offensive tackle Tony Boselli was the first player inducted.",
"title": "Players of note"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "On January 1, 2012, team owner Wayne Weaver and his wife Delores were added to the Pride of the Jaguars in their final game before the sale of the team to Shahid Khan. On June 7, 2012, the Jaguars announced Fred Taylor would be the next inductee into the Pride of the Jaguars. He was inducted on September 30, 2012. Longtime Jaguars quarterback Mark Brunell was also inducted into the \"Pride of the Jaguars\" on December 15, 2013. Former wide receiver Jimmy Smith was inducted in 2016. On November 9, 2023, it was announced that former head coach Tom Coughlin would be inducted on an unspecified date in 2024.",
"title": "Players of note"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "On October 9, 2022, the Jacksonville Jaguars retired Tony Boselli's number 71, at a halftime ceremony against the division-rival Houston Texans. It is the first number retired by the organization.",
"title": "Players of note"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Also, despite not being formally retired, the Jaguars have not reissued the numbers 8, 28, or 82, worn by Mark Brunell, Fred Taylor, and Jimmy Smith respectively, since they retired or left the team. Additionally, Brunell and Smith are the only players in franchise history to have worn their respective numbers.",
"title": "Players of note"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "The Jaguars have had nine head coaches (including two interim coaches) throughout their franchise history. Their first head coach was Tom Coughlin, who compiled a 72–64 (.529) overall record with the team from 1995 to 2002. Jack Del Rio was the longest-tenured head coach in Jaguars history, holding the position from 2003 to 2011. The current head coach is Doug Pederson, who was hired on February 3, 2022, and is the ninth head coach in franchise history.",
"title": "Head coaches and coordinators"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Since his introduction in 1996, Jaxson de Ville has served as the Jaguars' mascot. Jaxson entertains the crowd before and during games with his antics. The mascot has established a reputation for making dramatic entrances including bungee jumping off the stadium lights, sliding down a rope from the scoreboard, and parachuting into the stadium.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Jaxson's antics got him into trouble in 1998 and stemmed the changing of the NFL's mascot rules, and also caused him to calm down. However, Jaxson was still seen, by some, as a mascot that gets in the way during the game. After the October 22, 2007 game against Indianapolis, Colts President Bill Polian complained to the NFL, and Jaxson was reprimanded again.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Jaxson's first appearance was on August 18, 1996, and was played by Curtis Dvorak from his inception until his retirement in June 2015.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The Jacksonville Roar is the professional cheerleading squad of the Jaguars. The group was established in 1995, the team's inaugural year, and regularly performs choreographed routines during the team's home contests.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "In addition to performing at games and pep rallies, members function as goodwill ambassadors of the team, participating in corporate, community, and charitable events in the Jacksonville metropolitan area where they sign autographs and pose for pictures. They also join NFL tours to entertain American servicemen and women around the world.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The Jacksonville Jaguars Foundation was established in 1994, when the franchise deal was first announced. Since then, the Foundation has given over $20 million to area efforts in community improvement. The Foundation focuses on many initiatives, such as Honor Rows, anti-tobacco programs, NFL Play 60, and support for veterans. The Foundation grants over $1 million annually to organizations that assist \"economically and socially disadvantaged youth and families\".",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "The Jaguars' first head coach, Tom Coughlin, established the Tom Coughlin Jay Fund Foundation in 1996 to help young cancer victims and their families with emotional and financial assistance. The charity remained in Jacksonville after Coughlin left to coach the New York Giants.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "From their inaugural 1995 season until 2013, the Jaguars' flagship radio station was WOKV, which simulcasts on both AM 690 and on 104.5 FM.",
"title": "Broadcast media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Starting with the 2014 season, the team moved their broadcast to WJXL and WJXL-FM (1010 AM and 92.5 FM) and simulcast on 99.9 Gator Country",
"title": "Broadcast media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Frank Frangie is the play-by-play announcer with former Jaguars players Tony Boselli and Jeff Lageman providing color analysis.",
"title": "Broadcast media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "WJAX-TV or WFOX-TV televises all preseason games and also televises regular season games that are televised nationally on ESPN or NFL Network.",
"title": "Broadcast media"
}
]
| The Jacksonville Jaguars are a professional American football team based in Jacksonville, Florida. The Jaguars compete in the National Football League (NFL) as a member club of the American Football Conference (AFC) South Division. The team plays its home games at EverBank Stadium. Founded alongside the Carolina Panthers in 1995 as an expansion team, the Jaguars competed in the AFC Central until they were moved to the AFC South in 2002. The franchise is owned by Shahid Khan, who bought the team from its original majority owner Wayne Weaver in 2012. The Jaguars saw early success, making the playoffs in each of their second through fifth seasons, a four-year span in which they won two division titles and appeared in two AFC Championship Games. They are the youngest NFL expansion team to appear in a conference championship and clinch their conference's top seed. The Jaguars have been less successful since, with only four playoff appearances and two division titles since 2000. Jacksonville is one of four NFL franchises that have never played in the Super Bowl, alongside the Cleveland Browns, Detroit Lions, and division rival Houston Texans. | 2001-10-11T20:43:15Z | 2023-12-20T21:38:33Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacksonville_Jaguars |
16,158 | Jutes | The Jutes (/dʒuːts/ JOOTS) were one of the Germanic tribes who settled in Great Britain after the departure of the Romans. According to Bede, they were one of the three most powerful Germanic nations, along with the Angles and the Saxons:
Those who came over were of the three most powerful nations of Germany—Saxons, Angles, and Jutes. From the Jutes are descended the people of Kent, and of the Isle of Wight, and those also in the province of the West Saxons who are to this day called Jutes, seated opposite to the Isle of Wight.
There is no consensus amongst historians on the origins of the Jutes. One hypothesis is that they originated from the Jutland Peninsula but after a Danish invasion of that area, migrated to the Frisian coast. From the Frisian coast they went on to settle southern Britain in the later fifth century during the Migration Period, as part of a larger wave of Germanic migration into Britain.
During the period after the Roman occupation and before the Norman conquest, people of Germanic descent arrived in England. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle provides what historians regard as foundation legends for Anglo-Saxon settlement.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes how the brothers Hengist and Horsa in the year 449 were invited to Sub-Roman Britain by Vortigern to assist his forces in fighting the Picts. They landed at Wippidsfleet (Ebbsfleet), and went on to defeat the Picts wherever they fought them. Hengist and Horsa sent word home to Germany asking for assistance. Their request was granted and support arrived. Afterward, more people arrived in Britain from "the three powers of Germany; the Old Saxons, the Angles, and the Jutes". The Saxons populated Essex, Sussex and Wessex; the Jutes Kent, the Isle of Wight and Hampshire; and the Angles East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria (leaving their original homeland, Angeln, deserted).
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle also lists Wihtgar and Stuf as founders of the Wihtwara (Isle of Wight) and a man named Port and his two sons Bieda and Maeglaof as founders of the Meonwara (southern Hampshire). In 686 Bede tells us that Jutish Hampshire extended to the western edge of the New Forest; however, that seems to include another Jutish people, the Ytene, and it is not certain that these two territories formed a continuous coastal block. Towards the end of the Roman occupation of England, raids on the east coast became more intense and the expedient adopted by Romano-British leaders was to enlist the help of mercenaries to whom they ceded territory. It is thought that mercenaries may have started arriving in Sussex as early as the 5th century.
Before the 7th century, there is a dearth of contemporary written material about the Anglo-Saxons' arrival. Most material that does exist was written several hundred years after the events. The earlier dates for the beginnings of settlement, provided by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, has been contested by some findings in archaeology. One alternative hypothesis to the foundation legend suggests, because previously inhabited sites on the Frisian and north German coasts had been rendered uninhabitable by flooding, that the migration was due to displacement. Under this alternative hypothesis, the British provided land for the refugees to settle on in return for peaceful coexistence and military cooperation.
Ship construction in the 2nd or 3rd century adopted the use of iron fastenings, instead of the old sewn fastenings, to hold together the plank built boats of the Jutland peninsula. This enabled them to build stronger sea going vessels. Vessels going from Jutland to Britain probably would have sailed along the coastal regions of Lower Saxony and the Netherlands before crossing the English Channel. This was because navigation techniques of the time required the ship to be moored up overnight. Marine archaeology has suggested that migrating ships would have sheltered in various river estuaries on the route. Artefacts and parts of ships, of the period, have been found that support this theory.
It is likely that the Jutes initially inhabited Kent and from there they occupied the Isle of Wight, southern Hampshire and also possibly the area around Hastings in East Sussex (Haestingas). J E A Jolliffe compared agricultural and farming practices across 5th century Sussex to that of 5th century Kent. He suggested that the Kentish system underlaid the 5th century farming practices of Sussex. He hypothesised that Sussex was probably settled by Jutes before the arrival of the Saxons, with Jutish territory stretching from Kent to the New Forest. The north Solent coast had been a trading area since Roman times. The old Roman roads between Sidlesham and Chichester and Chichester to Winchester would have provided access to the Jutish settlements in Hampshire. Therefore, it is possible that the German folk arriving in the 5th century that landed in the Selsey area would have been directed north to Southampton Water. From there into the mouth of the Meon valley and would have been allowed to settle near the existing Romano-British people. The Jutish kingdom in Hampshire that Bede describes has various placenames that identify the locations as Jutish. These include Bishopstoke (Ytingstoc) and the Meon Valley (Ytedene).
In Kent, Hlothhere had been ruler since 673/4. He must have come into conflict with Mercia, because in 676 the Mercian king Æthelred invaded Kent and according to Bede:
In the year of our Lord's incarnation 676, when Ethelred, king of the Mercians, ravaged Kent with a powerful army, and profaned churches and monasteries, without regard to religion, or the fear of God, he among the rest destroyed the city of Rochester
In 681 Wulfhere of Mercia advanced into southern Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. Shortly after he gave the Isle of Wight and Meonwara to Æthelwealh of Sussex.
In Kent, Eadric was for a time co-ruler alongside his uncle Hlothhere with a law code being issued in their names. Ultimately, Eadric revolted against his uncle and with help from a South Saxon army in about 685, was able to kill Hlothhere, and replace him as ruler of Kent.
In the 680s, the Kingdom of Wessex was in the ascendant, the alliance between the South Saxons and the Mercians and their control of southern England, put the West Saxons under pressure. Their king Caedwalla, probably concerned about Mercian and South Saxon influence in Southern England, conquered the land of the South Saxons and took over the Jutish areas in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. Bede describes how Caedwalla brutally suppressed the South Saxons and attempted to slaughter the Jutes of the Isle of Wight and replace them with people from "his own province", but maintained that he was unable to do so, and Jutes remained a majority on the island.
"AFTER Caedwalla had possessed himself of the kingdom of the Gewissae, he also took the Isle of Wight, which till then was entirely given over to idolatry, and by cruel slaughter endeavoured to destroy all the inhabitants thereof, and to place in their stead people from his own province.."
Caedwalla killed Aruald, the king of the Isle of Wight. Aruald's two younger brothers, who were heirs to the throne, escaped from the island but were hunted down and found at Stoneham, Hampshire. They were killed on Cædwalla's orders. The Isle of Wight was then permanently under West Saxon control and the Meonwara was integrated into Wessex. Caedwalla also invaded Kent and installed his brother Mul as leader. However, it was not long before Mul and twelve others were burnt to death by the Kentishmen. After Caedwalla was superseded by Ine of Wessex, Kent agreed to pay compensation to Wessex for the death of Mul, but they retained their independence.
When the Jutish kingdom of Kent was founded, around the middle of the 5th century, Roman ways and influences must have still had a strong presence. The Roman settlement of Durovernum Cantiacorum became Canterbury. The people of Kent were described as Cantawara, a Germanised form of the Latin Cantiaci.
Although not all historians accept Bede's scheme for the settlement of Britain into Anglian, Jutish and Saxon areas as perfectly accurate, the archaeological evidence indicates that the peoples of west Kent were culturally distinct from those in the east of Kent. With west Kent sharing the 'Saxon' characteristics of its neighbours, in the south east of England. Brooches and bracteates found in east Kent, the Isle of Wight and southern Hampshire showed a strong Frankish and North Sea influence from the mid-fifth century to the late sixth century compared to north German styles found elsewhere in Anglo-Saxon England. There is discussion about who crafted the jewellery (found in the archaeological sites of Kent). Suggestions include crafts people who had been trained in the Roman workshops of northern Gaul or the Rhineland. It is also possible that those artisans went on to develop their own individual style. By the late 6th century grave goods indicate that west Kent had adopted the distinctive east Kent material culture.
The Frankish princess Bertha arrived in Kent around 580 to marry the king Æthelberht of Kent. Bertha was already a Christian and had brought a bishop, Liudhard, with her across the Channel. Æthelberht rebuilt an old Romano-British structure and dedicated it to St Martin allowing Bertha to continue practising her Christian faith. In 597 Pope Gregory I sent Augustine to Kent, on a mission to convert the Anglo-Saxons, There are suggestions that Æthelberht had already been baptised when he "courteously received" the popes mission. Æthelberht was the first of the Anglo-Saxon rulers to be baptised.
The simplified Christian burial was introduced at this time. Christian graves were usually aligned East to West, whereas with some exceptions pagan burial sites were not. The lack of archaeological grave evidence in the land of the Haestingas is seen as supporting the hypothesis that the peoples there would have been Christian Jutes who had migrated from Kent. In contrast to Kent, the Isle of Wight was the last area of Anglo-Saxon England to be evangelised in 686.
The Jutes used a system of partible inheritance known as gavelkind and this was practised in Kent until the 20th century. The custom of gavelkind was also found in other areas of Jutish settlement. In England and Wales gavelkind was abolished by the Administration of Estates Act 1925. Before abolition in 1925, all land in Kent was presumed to be held by gavelkind until the contrary was proved. The popular reason given for the practice remaining so long, is due to the "Swanscombe Legend", according to this, Kent made a deal with William the Conqueror whereby he would allow them to keep local customs in return for peace.
Although historians are confident of where the Jutes settled in England, they are divided on where they actually came from.
The chroniclers, Procopius, Constantius of Lyon, Gildas, Bede, Nennius, and also the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Alfred the Great and Asser provide the names of tribes who settled Britain during the mid-fifth century, and in their combined testimony, the four tribes mentioned are the Angli, Saxones, Iutae and Frisii.
The Roman historian Tacitus refers to a people called the Eudoses, a tribe who possibly developed into the Jutes.
The Jutes have also been identified with the Eotenas (ēotenas) involved in the Frisian conflict with the Danes as described in the Finnesburg episode in the Old English poem Beowulf. Theudebert, king of the Franks wrote to the Emperor Justinian and in the letter claimed that he had lordship over a nation called the Saxones Eucii . The Eucii are thought to have been Jutes and may have been the same as a little-documented tribe called the Euthiones. The Euthiones are mentioned in a poem by Venantius Fortunatus (583) as being under the suzerainty of Chilperic I of the Franks. The Euthiones were located somewhere in northern Francia, modern day Flanders, an area of the European mainland opposite to Kent.
Bede inferred that the Jutish homeland was on the Jutland peninsula. However, analysis of grave goods of the time have provided a link between East Kent, south Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, but little evidence of any link with Jutland. There is evidence that the Jutes who migrated to England came from northern Francia or from Frisia. Historians have posited that Jutland was the homeland of the Jutes, but when the Danes invaded the Jutland Peninsula in about AD 200, some of the Jutes would have been absorbed by the Danish culture and others may have migrated to northern Francia and Frisia.
There is a hypothesis, suggested by Pontus Fahlbeck in 1884, that the Geats were Jutes. According to this hypothesis the Geats resided in southern Sweden and also in Jutland (where Beowulf would have lived).
The evidence adduced for this hypothesis includes:
However, the tribal names possibly were confused in the above sources in both Beowulf (8th – 11th centuries) and Widsith (late 7th – 10th century). The Eoten (in the Finn passage) are clearly distinguished from the Geatas.
The Finnish surname Juutilainen, which comes from the word "juutti", is speculated by some to have had a connection to Jutland or the Jutes.
The runic alphabet is thought to have originated in the Germanic homelands that were in contact with the Roman Empire, and as such was a response to the Latin alphabet. In fact some of the runes emulated their Latin counterpart. The runic alphabet crossed the sea with the Anglo-Saxons and there have been examples, of its use, found in Kent. As the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were evangelised the script of the Latin alphabet was introduced by Irish Christian missionaries. However, they ran into problems when they were unable to find a Latin equivalent to some of the Anglo-Saxon phonetics. They overcame this by modifying the Latin alphabet to include some runic characters. This became the Old English Latin alphabet. The runic characters were eventually replaced by Latin characters by the end of the 14th century.
The language that the Anglo-Saxon settlers spoke is known as Old English. There are four main dialectal forms, namely Mercian, Northumbrian, West Saxon and Kentish. Based on Bede's description of where the Jutes settled, Kentish was spoken in what are now the modern-day counties of Kent, Surrey, southern Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. However, historians are divided on what dialect it would have been and where it originated from. The Jutish peninsula has been seen by historians as a pivotal region between the Northern and the Western Germanic dialects. It has not been possible to prove whether Jutish has always been a Scandinavian dialect which later became heavily influenced by West Germanic dialects, or whether Jutland was originally part of the West Germanic dialectal continuum. An analysis of the Kentish dialect by linguists indicates that there was a similarity between Kentish and Frisian. Whether the two can be classed as the same dialect or whether Kentish was a version of Jutish, heavily influenced by Frisian and other dialects, is open to conjecture. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Jutes (/dʒuːts/ JOOTS) were one of the Germanic tribes who settled in Great Britain after the departure of the Romans. According to Bede, they were one of the three most powerful Germanic nations, along with the Angles and the Saxons:",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Those who came over were of the three most powerful nations of Germany—Saxons, Angles, and Jutes. From the Jutes are descended the people of Kent, and of the Isle of Wight, and those also in the province of the West Saxons who are to this day called Jutes, seated opposite to the Isle of Wight.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "There is no consensus amongst historians on the origins of the Jutes. One hypothesis is that they originated from the Jutland Peninsula but after a Danish invasion of that area, migrated to the Frisian coast. From the Frisian coast they went on to settle southern Britain in the later fifth century during the Migration Period, as part of a larger wave of Germanic migration into Britain.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "During the period after the Roman occupation and before the Norman conquest, people of Germanic descent arrived in England. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle provides what historians regard as foundation legends for Anglo-Saxon settlement.",
"title": "Settlement in southern Britain"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes how the brothers Hengist and Horsa in the year 449 were invited to Sub-Roman Britain by Vortigern to assist his forces in fighting the Picts. They landed at Wippidsfleet (Ebbsfleet), and went on to defeat the Picts wherever they fought them. Hengist and Horsa sent word home to Germany asking for assistance. Their request was granted and support arrived. Afterward, more people arrived in Britain from \"the three powers of Germany; the Old Saxons, the Angles, and the Jutes\". The Saxons populated Essex, Sussex and Wessex; the Jutes Kent, the Isle of Wight and Hampshire; and the Angles East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria (leaving their original homeland, Angeln, deserted).",
"title": "Settlement in southern Britain"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle also lists Wihtgar and Stuf as founders of the Wihtwara (Isle of Wight) and a man named Port and his two sons Bieda and Maeglaof as founders of the Meonwara (southern Hampshire). In 686 Bede tells us that Jutish Hampshire extended to the western edge of the New Forest; however, that seems to include another Jutish people, the Ytene, and it is not certain that these two territories formed a continuous coastal block. Towards the end of the Roman occupation of England, raids on the east coast became more intense and the expedient adopted by Romano-British leaders was to enlist the help of mercenaries to whom they ceded territory. It is thought that mercenaries may have started arriving in Sussex as early as the 5th century.",
"title": "Settlement in southern Britain"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Before the 7th century, there is a dearth of contemporary written material about the Anglo-Saxons' arrival. Most material that does exist was written several hundred years after the events. The earlier dates for the beginnings of settlement, provided by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, has been contested by some findings in archaeology. One alternative hypothesis to the foundation legend suggests, because previously inhabited sites on the Frisian and north German coasts had been rendered uninhabitable by flooding, that the migration was due to displacement. Under this alternative hypothesis, the British provided land for the refugees to settle on in return for peaceful coexistence and military cooperation.",
"title": "Settlement in southern Britain"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Ship construction in the 2nd or 3rd century adopted the use of iron fastenings, instead of the old sewn fastenings, to hold together the plank built boats of the Jutland peninsula. This enabled them to build stronger sea going vessels. Vessels going from Jutland to Britain probably would have sailed along the coastal regions of Lower Saxony and the Netherlands before crossing the English Channel. This was because navigation techniques of the time required the ship to be moored up overnight. Marine archaeology has suggested that migrating ships would have sheltered in various river estuaries on the route. Artefacts and parts of ships, of the period, have been found that support this theory.",
"title": "Settlement in southern Britain"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "It is likely that the Jutes initially inhabited Kent and from there they occupied the Isle of Wight, southern Hampshire and also possibly the area around Hastings in East Sussex (Haestingas). J E A Jolliffe compared agricultural and farming practices across 5th century Sussex to that of 5th century Kent. He suggested that the Kentish system underlaid the 5th century farming practices of Sussex. He hypothesised that Sussex was probably settled by Jutes before the arrival of the Saxons, with Jutish territory stretching from Kent to the New Forest. The north Solent coast had been a trading area since Roman times. The old Roman roads between Sidlesham and Chichester and Chichester to Winchester would have provided access to the Jutish settlements in Hampshire. Therefore, it is possible that the German folk arriving in the 5th century that landed in the Selsey area would have been directed north to Southampton Water. From there into the mouth of the Meon valley and would have been allowed to settle near the existing Romano-British people. The Jutish kingdom in Hampshire that Bede describes has various placenames that identify the locations as Jutish. These include Bishopstoke (Ytingstoc) and the Meon Valley (Ytedene).",
"title": "Settlement in southern Britain"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In Kent, Hlothhere had been ruler since 673/4. He must have come into conflict with Mercia, because in 676 the Mercian king Æthelred invaded Kent and according to Bede:",
"title": "Settlement in southern Britain"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In the year of our Lord's incarnation 676, when Ethelred, king of the Mercians, ravaged Kent with a powerful army, and profaned churches and monasteries, without regard to religion, or the fear of God, he among the rest destroyed the city of Rochester",
"title": "Settlement in southern Britain"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In 681 Wulfhere of Mercia advanced into southern Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. Shortly after he gave the Isle of Wight and Meonwara to Æthelwealh of Sussex.",
"title": "Settlement in southern Britain"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In Kent, Eadric was for a time co-ruler alongside his uncle Hlothhere with a law code being issued in their names. Ultimately, Eadric revolted against his uncle and with help from a South Saxon army in about 685, was able to kill Hlothhere, and replace him as ruler of Kent.",
"title": "Settlement in southern Britain"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In the 680s, the Kingdom of Wessex was in the ascendant, the alliance between the South Saxons and the Mercians and their control of southern England, put the West Saxons under pressure. Their king Caedwalla, probably concerned about Mercian and South Saxon influence in Southern England, conquered the land of the South Saxons and took over the Jutish areas in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. Bede describes how Caedwalla brutally suppressed the South Saxons and attempted to slaughter the Jutes of the Isle of Wight and replace them with people from \"his own province\", but maintained that he was unable to do so, and Jutes remained a majority on the island.",
"title": "Settlement in southern Britain"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "\"AFTER Caedwalla had possessed himself of the kingdom of the Gewissae, he also took the Isle of Wight, which till then was entirely given over to idolatry, and by cruel slaughter endeavoured to destroy all the inhabitants thereof, and to place in their stead people from his own province..\"",
"title": "Settlement in southern Britain"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Caedwalla killed Aruald, the king of the Isle of Wight. Aruald's two younger brothers, who were heirs to the throne, escaped from the island but were hunted down and found at Stoneham, Hampshire. They were killed on Cædwalla's orders. The Isle of Wight was then permanently under West Saxon control and the Meonwara was integrated into Wessex. Caedwalla also invaded Kent and installed his brother Mul as leader. However, it was not long before Mul and twelve others were burnt to death by the Kentishmen. After Caedwalla was superseded by Ine of Wessex, Kent agreed to pay compensation to Wessex for the death of Mul, but they retained their independence.",
"title": "Settlement in southern Britain"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "When the Jutish kingdom of Kent was founded, around the middle of the 5th century, Roman ways and influences must have still had a strong presence. The Roman settlement of Durovernum Cantiacorum became Canterbury. The people of Kent were described as Cantawara, a Germanised form of the Latin Cantiaci.",
"title": "Influences and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Although not all historians accept Bede's scheme for the settlement of Britain into Anglian, Jutish and Saxon areas as perfectly accurate, the archaeological evidence indicates that the peoples of west Kent were culturally distinct from those in the east of Kent. With west Kent sharing the 'Saxon' characteristics of its neighbours, in the south east of England. Brooches and bracteates found in east Kent, the Isle of Wight and southern Hampshire showed a strong Frankish and North Sea influence from the mid-fifth century to the late sixth century compared to north German styles found elsewhere in Anglo-Saxon England. There is discussion about who crafted the jewellery (found in the archaeological sites of Kent). Suggestions include crafts people who had been trained in the Roman workshops of northern Gaul or the Rhineland. It is also possible that those artisans went on to develop their own individual style. By the late 6th century grave goods indicate that west Kent had adopted the distinctive east Kent material culture.",
"title": "Influences and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The Frankish princess Bertha arrived in Kent around 580 to marry the king Æthelberht of Kent. Bertha was already a Christian and had brought a bishop, Liudhard, with her across the Channel. Æthelberht rebuilt an old Romano-British structure and dedicated it to St Martin allowing Bertha to continue practising her Christian faith. In 597 Pope Gregory I sent Augustine to Kent, on a mission to convert the Anglo-Saxons, There are suggestions that Æthelberht had already been baptised when he \"courteously received\" the popes mission. Æthelberht was the first of the Anglo-Saxon rulers to be baptised.",
"title": "Influences and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The simplified Christian burial was introduced at this time. Christian graves were usually aligned East to West, whereas with some exceptions pagan burial sites were not. The lack of archaeological grave evidence in the land of the Haestingas is seen as supporting the hypothesis that the peoples there would have been Christian Jutes who had migrated from Kent. In contrast to Kent, the Isle of Wight was the last area of Anglo-Saxon England to be evangelised in 686.",
"title": "Influences and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The Jutes used a system of partible inheritance known as gavelkind and this was practised in Kent until the 20th century. The custom of gavelkind was also found in other areas of Jutish settlement. In England and Wales gavelkind was abolished by the Administration of Estates Act 1925. Before abolition in 1925, all land in Kent was presumed to be held by gavelkind until the contrary was proved. The popular reason given for the practice remaining so long, is due to the \"Swanscombe Legend\", according to this, Kent made a deal with William the Conqueror whereby he would allow them to keep local customs in return for peace.",
"title": "Influences and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Although historians are confident of where the Jutes settled in England, they are divided on where they actually came from.",
"title": "Homeland and historical accounts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The chroniclers, Procopius, Constantius of Lyon, Gildas, Bede, Nennius, and also the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Alfred the Great and Asser provide the names of tribes who settled Britain during the mid-fifth century, and in their combined testimony, the four tribes mentioned are the Angli, Saxones, Iutae and Frisii.",
"title": "Homeland and historical accounts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The Roman historian Tacitus refers to a people called the Eudoses, a tribe who possibly developed into the Jutes.",
"title": "Homeland and historical accounts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The Jutes have also been identified with the Eotenas (ēotenas) involved in the Frisian conflict with the Danes as described in the Finnesburg episode in the Old English poem Beowulf. Theudebert, king of the Franks wrote to the Emperor Justinian and in the letter claimed that he had lordship over a nation called the Saxones Eucii . The Eucii are thought to have been Jutes and may have been the same as a little-documented tribe called the Euthiones. The Euthiones are mentioned in a poem by Venantius Fortunatus (583) as being under the suzerainty of Chilperic I of the Franks. The Euthiones were located somewhere in northern Francia, modern day Flanders, an area of the European mainland opposite to Kent.",
"title": "Homeland and historical accounts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Bede inferred that the Jutish homeland was on the Jutland peninsula. However, analysis of grave goods of the time have provided a link between East Kent, south Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, but little evidence of any link with Jutland. There is evidence that the Jutes who migrated to England came from northern Francia or from Frisia. Historians have posited that Jutland was the homeland of the Jutes, but when the Danes invaded the Jutland Peninsula in about AD 200, some of the Jutes would have been absorbed by the Danish culture and others may have migrated to northern Francia and Frisia.",
"title": "Homeland and historical accounts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "There is a hypothesis, suggested by Pontus Fahlbeck in 1884, that the Geats were Jutes. According to this hypothesis the Geats resided in southern Sweden and also in Jutland (where Beowulf would have lived).",
"title": "Homeland and historical accounts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The evidence adduced for this hypothesis includes:",
"title": "Homeland and historical accounts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "However, the tribal names possibly were confused in the above sources in both Beowulf (8th – 11th centuries) and Widsith (late 7th – 10th century). The Eoten (in the Finn passage) are clearly distinguished from the Geatas.",
"title": "Homeland and historical accounts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The Finnish surname Juutilainen, which comes from the word \"juutti\", is speculated by some to have had a connection to Jutland or the Jutes.",
"title": "Homeland and historical accounts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The runic alphabet is thought to have originated in the Germanic homelands that were in contact with the Roman Empire, and as such was a response to the Latin alphabet. In fact some of the runes emulated their Latin counterpart. The runic alphabet crossed the sea with the Anglo-Saxons and there have been examples, of its use, found in Kent. As the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were evangelised the script of the Latin alphabet was introduced by Irish Christian missionaries. However, they ran into problems when they were unable to find a Latin equivalent to some of the Anglo-Saxon phonetics. They overcame this by modifying the Latin alphabet to include some runic characters. This became the Old English Latin alphabet. The runic characters were eventually replaced by Latin characters by the end of the 14th century.",
"title": "Homeland and historical accounts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The language that the Anglo-Saxon settlers spoke is known as Old English. There are four main dialectal forms, namely Mercian, Northumbrian, West Saxon and Kentish. Based on Bede's description of where the Jutes settled, Kentish was spoken in what are now the modern-day counties of Kent, Surrey, southern Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. However, historians are divided on what dialect it would have been and where it originated from. The Jutish peninsula has been seen by historians as a pivotal region between the Northern and the Western Germanic dialects. It has not been possible to prove whether Jutish has always been a Scandinavian dialect which later became heavily influenced by West Germanic dialects, or whether Jutland was originally part of the West Germanic dialectal continuum. An analysis of the Kentish dialect by linguists indicates that there was a similarity between Kentish and Frisian. Whether the two can be classed as the same dialect or whether Kentish was a version of Jutish, heavily influenced by Frisian and other dialects, is open to conjecture.",
"title": "Homeland and historical accounts"
}
]
| The Jutes were one of the Germanic tribes who settled in Great Britain after the departure of the Romans. According to Bede, they were one of the three most powerful Germanic nations, along with the Angles and the Saxons: There is no consensus amongst historians on the origins of the Jutes. One hypothesis is that they originated from the Jutland Peninsula but after a Danish invasion of that area, migrated to the Frisian coast. From the Frisian coast they went on to settle southern Britain in the later fifth century during the Migration Period, as part of a larger wave of Germanic migration into Britain. | 2001-10-01T21:42:34Z | 2023-10-09T11:44:54Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jutes |
16,161 | Jewish prayer | Jewish prayer (Hebrew: תְּפִילָּה, tefilla [tfiˈla]; plural תְּפִילּוֹת tefillot [tfiˈlot]; Yiddish: תּפֿלה, romanized: tfile [ˈtfɪlə], plural תּפֿלות tfilles [ˈtfɪləs]; Yinglish: davening /ˈdɑːvənɪŋ/ from Yiddish דאַוון davn 'pray') is the prayer recitation that forms part of the observance of Rabbinic Judaism. These prayers, often with instructions and commentary, are found in the Siddur, the traditional Jewish prayer book.
Prayer, as a "service of the heart", is in principle a Torah-based commandment. It is not time-dependent and is mandatory for both Jewish men and women. However, the rabbinic requirement to recite a specific prayer text does differentiate between men and women: Jewish men are obligated to recite three prayers each day within specific time ranges (zmanim), while, according to many approaches, women are only required to pray once or twice a day, and may not be required to recite a specific text.
Traditionally, three prayer services are recited daily:
Two additional services are recited on Shabbat and holidays:
A distinction is made between individual prayer and communal prayer, which requires a quorum known as a minyan, with communal prayer being preferable as it permits the inclusion of prayers that otherwise would be omitted.
According to tradition, many of the current standard prayers were composed by the sages of the Great Assembly in the early Second Temple period (516 BCE – 70 CE). The language of the prayers, while clearly from this period, often employs biblical idiom. The main structure of the modern prayer service was fixed in the tannaic era (1st–2nd centuries CE), with some additions and the exact text of blessings coming later. Jewish prayerbooks emerged during the early Middle Ages during the period of the Geonim of Babylonia (6th–11th centuries CE).
Over the last 2000 years, traditional variations have emerged among the traditional liturgical customs of different Jewish communities, such as Ashkenazic, Sephardic, Yemenite, Eretz Yisrael and others, or rather recent liturgical inventions such as Hassidic, and Chabad. However the differences are minor compared with the commonalities. Most of the Jewish liturgy is sung or chanted with traditional melodies or trope. Synagogues may designate or employ a professional or lay hazzan (cantor) for the purpose of leading the congregation in prayer, especially on Shabbat or holidays.
According to the Babylonian Talmud, prayer is a biblical command:
You shall serve God with your whole heart' – What service is performed with the heart? This is prayer.
Based on this passage, Maimonides categorizes daily prayer as one of the 613 commandments. He rules that the commandment is fulfilled by any prayer at any time in the day, not a specific text; and thus is not time-dependent, and is mandatory for both Jewish men and women. In contrast, the requirement to say specific prayers at specific times is based not on biblical law, but rather rabbinic decree.
Additional references in the Hebrew Bible have been interpreted to suggest that King David and the prophet Daniel prayed three times a day. In Psalms, David states:
Evening, morning, and noontime, I speak and moan, and He hearkened to my voice.
And in the Book of Daniel:
And Daniel, when he knew that a writ had been inscribed, came to his house, where there were open windows in his upper chamber, opposite Jerusalem, and three times a day he kneeled on his knees and prayed and offered thanks before his God just as he had done prior to this.
The Talmud gives two reasons why there are three basic prayers each day:
The earliest parts of Jewish prayer are the Shema Yisrael and the Priestly Blessing, which are in the Torah.
Maimonides asserts that until the Babylonian exile, all Jews composed their own prayers. After the exile, however, when the exiles' understanding of Hebrew diminished and they found it difficult to compose prayers in Hebrew, Ezra and his court composed the Amidah prayer. Modern scholarship dating from the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement of 19th-century Germany, as well as textual analysis influenced by the 20th-century discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, suggests that dating from the Second Temple period there existed "liturgical formulations of a communal nature designated for particular occasions and conducted in a centre totally independent of Jerusalem and the Temple, making use of terminology and theological concepts that were later to become dominant in Jewish and, in some cases, Christian prayer."
The structure of the modern Jewish prayer service was established during the period of the Tannaim, "from their traditions, later committed to writing, we learn that the generation of rabbis active at the time of the destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) gave Jewish prayer its structure and, in outline form at least, its contents." This liturgy included the twice-daily recitation of the Shema, the Amidah, and the cycle of public Torah reading.
The Amidah (or Shemoneh Esreh) prayer is traditionally ascribed to the Great Assembly (in the time of Ezra, near the end of the biblical period), though other sources suggest it was established by Simeon HaPakoli in the late 1st century. Even in the 1st century, though, the precise wording of the blessings was not yet fixed, and varied from locale to locale. By the Middle Ages the texts of the blessings was nearly fixed, and in the form in which they are still used today.
Readings from the Torah (five books of Moses) and the Nevi'im ("Prophets") are specified in the Mishnah and Talmud, as are the order of blessings surrounding the Shema. Other parts of the service, such as Pesukei dezimra, have little mention in early sources, but became established by custom.
The oldest prayer books date from the time of the Geonim of Babylonia; "some were composed by respected rabbinic scholars at the request of far-flung communities seeking an authoritative text of the required prayers for daily use, Shabbat, and holidays." The earliest existing codification of the prayerbook was drawn up by Rav Amram Gaon of Sura, Babylon, about 850 CE. Half a century later Rav Saadia Gaon, also of Sura, composed a siddur, in which the rubrical matter is in Arabic. These were the basis of Simcha ben Samuel's Machzor Vitry (11th-century France), which was based on the ideas of his teacher, Rashi. Another formulation of the prayers was that appended by Maimonides to the laws of prayer in his Mishneh Torah: this forms the basis of the Yemenite liturgy, and has had some influence on other rites. From this point forward, all Jewish prayerbooks had the same basic order and contents.
The siddur was printed by Soncino in Italy as early as 1486, though a siddur was first mass-distributed only in 1865. The siddur began appearing in the vernacular as early as 1538. The first English translation, by Gamaliel ben Pedahzur (a pseudonym), appeared in London in 1738; a different translation was released in the United States in 1837.
Over the last 2000 years, the various branches of Judaism have resulted in small variations in the Rabbinic liturgy customs among different Jewish communities, with each community having a slightly different nusach (customary liturgy). The principal difference is between Ashkenazic and Sephardic customs, although there are other communities (e.g., Yemenite and Italian Jews, and in the past Eretz Yisrael), and rather recent liturgical inventions such as Hassidic, Chabad, Reform and other communities also have distinct customs, variations, and special prayers. However, the differences between all these customs are quite minor compared with the commonalities.
According to halakha, all individual prayers and virtually all communal prayers may be said in any language that the person praying understands. For example, the Mishnah mentions that the Shema need not be said in Hebrew. A list of prayers that must be said in Hebrew is given in the Mishna, and among these only the Priestly Blessing is in use today, as the others are prayers that are to be said only in a Temple in Jerusalem, by a priest, or by a reigning King.
Despite this, the tradition of most Ashkenazi Orthodox synagogues is to use Hebrew for all except a small number of prayers, including Kaddish and Yekum Purkan in Aramaic, and Gott Fun Avraham, which was written in Yiddish. In other streams of Judaism there is considerable variability: Sephardic communities may use Ladino or Portuguese for many prayers; Conservative synagogues tend to use the local language to a varying degree; and at some Reform synagogues almost the whole service may be in the local language.
The language of the prayers, while clearly being from the Second Temple period, often employs biblical idiom, and according to some authorities it should not contain rabbinic or Mishnaic idiom apart from in the sections of Mishnah that are featured.
Conservative services generally use the same basic format for services as Orthodox Judaism, with some doctrinal leniencies and some prayers in English. In practice, there is wide variation among Conservative congregations. In traditionalist congregations the liturgy can be almost identical to that of Orthodox Judaism, almost entirely in Hebrew (and Aramaic), with a few minor exceptions, including excision of a study session on Temple sacrifices, and modifications of prayers for the restoration of the sacrificial system. In more liberal Conservative synagogues there are greater changes to the service, with up to a third of the service in English; abbreviation or omission of many of the preparatory prayers; and replacement of some traditional prayers with more contemporary forms. There are some changes for doctrinal reasons, including egalitarian language, fewer references to restoring sacrifices in the Temple in Jerusalem, and an option to eliminate special roles for Kohanim and Levites.
The liturgies of Reform and Reconstructionist are based on traditional elements, but contain language more reflective of liberal belief than the traditional liturgy. Doctrinal revisions generally include revising or omitting references to traditional doctrines such as bodily resurrection, a personal Jewish Messiah, and other elements of traditional Jewish eschatology, Divine revelation of the Torah at Mount Sinai, angels, conceptions of reward and punishment, and other personal miraculous and supernatural elements. Services are often from 40% to 90% in the vernacular.
Reform Judaism has made greater alterations to the traditional service in accord with its more liberal theology including dropping references to traditional elements of Jewish eschatology such as a personal Messiah, a bodily resurrection of the dead, and others. The Hebrew portion of the service is substantially abbreviated and modernized and modern prayers substituted for traditional ones. In addition, in keeping with their view that the laws of Shabbat (including a traditional prohibition on playing instruments) are inapplicable to modern circumstances, Reform services often play instrumental or recorded music with prayers on the Jewish Sabbath. All Reform synagogues are Egalitarian with respect to gender roles.
In Jewish philosophy and in Rabbinic literature, it is noted that the Hebrew verb for prayer—hitpallel (התפלל)—is in fact the reflexive form of palal (פלל), to judge. Thus, "to pray" conveys the notion of "judging oneself": ultimately, the purpose of prayer—tefillah (תפלה)—is to transform oneself.
This etymology is consistent with the Jewish conception of divine simplicity. It is not God that changes through one's prayer—man does not influence God as a defendant influences a human judge who has emotions and is subject to change—rather it is man himself who is changed. It is further consistent with Maimonides' view on Divine Providence. Here, Tefillah is the medium which God gave to man by means of which he can change himself, and thereby establish a new relationship with God—and thus a new destiny for himself in life; see also under Psalms.
Kabbalah (esoteric Jewish mysticism) uses a series of kavanot, directions of intent, to specify the path the prayer ascends in the dialogue with God, to increase its chances of being answered favorably. Kabbalism ascribes a higher meaning to the purpose of prayer, which is no less than affecting the very fabric of reality itself, restructuring and repairing the universe in a real fashion. In this view, every word of every prayer, and indeed, even every letter of every word, has a precise meaning and a precise effect. Prayers thus literally affect the mystical forces of the universe, and repair the fabric of creation.
This approach has been taken by the Chassidei Ashkenaz (German pietists of the Middle-Ages), the Zohar, the Arizal's Kabbalist tradition, the Ramchal, most of Hassidism, the Vilna Gaon and Jacob Emden.
Hassidism, although incorporating the kabbalistic worldview and its corresponding kavanot, also emphasized straightforward sincerity and depth of emotional engagement in prayer. The Baal Shem Tov's great-grandson, Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, particularly emphasized speaking to God in one's own words, which he called Hitbodedut (self-seclusion) and advised setting aside an hour to do this every day.
Daven is the originally exclusively Eastern Yiddish verb meaning "pray"; it is widely used by Ashkenazic Orthodox Jews. In Yinglish, this has become the Anglicised davening.
The origin of the word is obscure, but is thought by some to have come from Arabic (from diwan, a collection of poems or prayers), French (from devoner, 'to devote' or 'dedicate' or possibly from the French 'devant'- 'in front of' with the idea that the person praying is mindful of before whom they stand), Latin (from divin, 'divine') or even English (from dawn). Others believe that it derives from a Slavic word meaning "to give" (Russian: давать, romanized: davat'). Some claim that it originates from an Aramaic word, de'avuhon or d'avinun, meaning 'of their/our forefathers', as the three prayers are said to have been invented by Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Another Aramaic derivation, proposed by Avigdor Chaikin, cites the Talmudic phrase, "ka davai lamizrach", 'gazing wistfully to the east' Kevin A. Brook, cites Zeiden's suggestion that the word daven comes from the Turkish root tabun- meaning 'to pray', and that in Kipchak Turkish, the initial t morphs into d.
In Western Yiddish, the term for pray is oren, a word with clear roots in Romance languages, similar to Spanish and Portuguese orar and Latin orare.
Individual prayer is considered acceptable, but prayer with a quorum of ten Jewish adults—a minyan—is the most highly recommended form of prayer and is required for some prayers. An adult in this context means over the age of 12 or 13 (bat or bar mitzvah). Judaism had originally counted only men in the minyan for formal prayer, on the basis that one does not count someone who is not obligated to participate. The rabbis had exempted women from almost all time-specific positive mitzvot (commandments), including those parts of the prayer that cannot be recited without a quorum, due to women in the past being bound up in an endless cycle of pregnancy, birthing and nursing from a very early age. Orthodox Judaism still follows this reasoning and excludes women from the minyan.
Since 1973, Conservative congregations have overwhelmingly become egalitarian and count women in the minyan. A very small number of congregations that identify themselves as Conservative have resisted these changes and continue to exclude women from the minyan. Those Reform and Reconstructionist congregations that consider a minyan mandatory for communal prayer, count both men and women for a minyan. All denominations of Judaism except for Orthodox Judaism ordain female rabbis and cantors.
There is a publicly said prayer, called Birkhat HaGomel, for giving thanks for surviving an illness or danger. which, in addition to needing a Minyan, also needs a Torah scroll taken out for a scheduled Torah reading.
In the event one of the prayers was missed inadvertently, the Amidah prayer is said twice in the next service—a procedure known as tefillat tashlumin.
Many Jews sway their body back and forth during prayer. This practice, referred to as shuckling in Yiddish, is not mandatory.
Many are accustomed to giving charity before, during (especially during Vayivarech David) or after prayer, in the hopes that this will make their prayer more likely to be heard.
According to the Talmud, during prayer one should face toward Jerusalem, and specifically the site of the Temple in Jerusalem. This is based on Solomon's prayer "...and they will pray to You toward their land, which You gave to their fathers; the city which You have chosen; and the house which I have built for Your name" (1 Kings 8:48).
The Shacharit (from shachar, morning light) prayer is recited in the morning. Halacha limits parts of its recitation to the first three (Shema) or four (Amidah) hours of the day, where "hours" are 1/12 of daylight time, making these times dependent on the season.
Shacharit is generally the lengthiest prayer of the day. Its components include Birkot hashachar, Korbanot, Pesukei dezimra, the Shema Yisrael and its blessings, the Amidah, and Tachanun. Of these, the recitation of Shema Yisrael and the Amidah constitute the core of the Shacharit service. Those Jews who wear tallit and tefillin generally only do so during the Shacharit prayer.
Mincha or Minha may be recited from half an hour after halachic noontime, until sunset. Sephardim and Italian Jews start the Mincha prayers with Psalm 84 and Korbanot, and usually continue with the Pittum hakketoret. The opening section is concluded with Malachi 3:4.
Ashrei is recited, followed by half-Kaddish, the Amidah (including repetition), Tachanun, and then the full Kaddish. Sephardim insert a Psalm, followed by the Mourner's Kaddish. After this follows, in most modern rites, the Aleinu. Most Ashkenazim then conclude with the Mourner's Kaddish. In Ashkenazic, Italian and Yemenite communities, the service leaders often wears a tallit.
Generally, the time when Maariv can first be recited is when the time for reciting Mincha ends. But there are varying opinions on this. Maariv should not begin before 1¼ hours before sunset. Others delay Maariv until after sunset or after dusk. If Maariv is recited prior to dusk, individuals repeat the Shema later in the evening.
The main components of Maariv are the recitation of the Shema (with two blessings before it and two after it), followed by the Amidah (which is not repeated, unlike with other recitations of the Amidah). Some communities add a third blessing between the Shema and Amidah. Some additional prayers and biblical verses are recited as well; these vary by community and occasion.
On Shabbat (the Sabbath), prayers are similar in structure to those on weekdays, although almost every part is lengthened. One exception is the Amidah, the main prayer, which is abridged. The first three and last three blessings are recited as usual, but the middle thirteen are replaced with a single blessing known as "sanctity of the day," describing the Sabbath. Atypically, this middle blessing is different for each of the prayers.
Shabbat services begin on Friday evening with the weekday Mincha, followed in some communities by the Song of Songs, and then in most communities by the Kabbalat Shabbat, the mystical prelude to Shabbat services composed by 16th-century Kabbalists. This Hebrew term literally means "Receiving the Sabbath". In many communities, the piyut Yedid Nefesh introduces the Kabbalat Shabbat prayers.
Kabbalat Shabbat is, except among many Italian and many Sephardic Jews (including Spanish and Portuguese Jews, but also many Middle Eastern Sephardic communities), composed of six Psalms, representing the six weekdays. Next comes the poem Lekha Dodi, based on the words of the Talmudic sage Hanina: "Come, let us go out to meet the Queen Sabbath" Kabbalat Shabbat is concluded by Psalm 92 (the recital of which constitutes acceptance of the current Shabbat with all its obligations) and Psalm 93. Many add a study section here, including Bameh Madlikin and Amar rabbi El'azar and the concluding Kaddish deRabbanan (in the Western Ashkenazic rite, a mourners kaddish is instead recited after Bameh Madlikin) and is then followed by the Maariv service; other communities delay the study session until after Maariv. Others add here a passage from the Zohar, entitled Kegavna. In modern times the Kabbalat Shabbat has been set to music by many composers including: Robert Strassburg and Samuel Adler
The Shema section of the Friday night service varies in some details from the weekday services—mainly in the different ending of the Hashkivenu prayer and the omission of Baruch Adonai le-Olam prayer in those traditions where this section is otherwise recited. In the Italian rite, there are also different versions of the Ma'ariv aravim prayer (beginning asher killah) and the Emet Ve-Emunah prayer.
Most commemorate the Shabbat at this point with VeShameru. The custom to recite these verses appears in many early sources such as Siddur Rav Saadya Gaon (who recited the blessing Yiru Eineinu after these verses) and is found in the vast majority of old prayer books of a variety of rites. However, it is absent from the Yemenite Baladi tradition (although has been added in most Baladi communities in the last few hundred years), and it is not recited according to the traditions of the Vilna Gaon or Chabad who are opposed to adding additional readings to the siddur which are not mentioned in the Talmud.
On Friday night, the middle blessing of the Amidah discusses the conclusion of creation, quoting the relevant verses from Genesis. The Amidah is then followed by the Seven-Faceted Blessing, the hazzan's mini-repetition of the Amidah. In some Ashkenazi Orthodox synagogues the second chapter of Mishnah tractate Shabbat, Bameh Madlikin, is read at this point, instead of earlier. Kiddush is recited in the synagogue in Ashkenazi and a few Sephardi communities. The service then follows with Aleinu. Most Sephardi and many Ashkenazi synagogues end with the singing of Yigdal, a poetic adaptation of Maimonides' 13 principles of Jewish faith. Other Ashkenazi synagogues end with Adon Olam instead.
Shabbat morning prayers differ from weekday morning prayers in several ways: an expanded version of Pesukei dezimra, a longer version of the Yotzer ohr blessing, the seven-blessing Shabbat version of the Amidah, no Tachanun, a longer Torah reading, and some additional prayers after the Torah reading. In many communities, the rabbi (or a learned member of the congregation) delivers a sermon at the very end of Shacharit and before Mussaf, usually on the topic of the Torah reading.
The Musaf service starts with the silent recitation of the Amidah. The middle blessing includes the Tikanta Shabbat reading on the holiness of Shabbat (in Yemenita communities, as well as some Sephardic communities Le-Mosheh Tsivita is recited instead of Tikanta Shabbat), and then by a reading from the biblical Book of Numbers about the sacrifices that used to be performed in the Temple in Jerusalem. Next comes Yismechu, "They shall rejoice in Your sovereignty", and Eloheynu, "Our God and God of our Ancestors, may you be pleased with our rest" (which is recited during all Amidahs of the Sabbath). After the silent prayer, the leader repeats the prayer, adding an expanded version of Kedushah. In some Sephardic and Yemenite communities, rather than the silent prayer and repetition, the leader recited his own prayer aloud and the congregation prays along with him.
After the Amidah comes the full Kaddish, followed by Ein keloheinu. In Orthodox Judaism this is followed by a reading from the Talmud on the incense offering called Pittum Haketoreth and daily psalms that used to be recited in the Temple in Jerusalem. These readings are usually omitted by Conservative Jews, and are always omitted by Reform Jews.
The Musaf service culminates with the Rabbi's Kaddish (in the Western Ashkenazic rite, the Mourners Kaddish is recited instead), the Aleinu, followed in many communities by the Mourner's Kaddish. Some synagogues conclude with the reading of Shir Hayichud, Anim Zemirot (sometimes followed by a Mourner's Kaddish), the Psalm of the Day (sometimes followed by a Mourner's Kaddish) - in some communities, these are recited before the Torah reading or at the beginning of services instead. Many communities conclude with either Adon Olam or Yigdal.
Mincha commences with Ashrei and the prayer Uva letzion, after which the first section of the next weekly portion is read from the Torah scroll. The Amidah follows the same pattern as the other Shabbat Amidah prayers, with the middle blessing starting Attah Echad. The short prayer Tzidkatcha is recited after the Amidah, followed by Kaddish and Aleinu.
The week-day Ma'ariv is recited on the evening immediately following Shabbat, concluding with Vihi No'am, Ve-Yitten lekha, and Havdalah.
The services for the Days of Awe, Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, take on a solemn tone as befits these days. Traditional solemn tunes are used in the prayers.
The musaf service on Rosh Hashana has nine blessings; the three middle blessings include biblical verses attesting to sovereignty, remembrance and the shofar, which is sounded during the service.
Yom Kippur is the only day in the year when there are five prayer services. The evening service, containing the Ma'ariv prayer, is widely known as "Kol Nidrei", the opening declaration made preceding the prayer. During the daytime, shacharit, musaf (which is recited on Shabbat and all festivals) and mincha are followed, as the sun begins to set, by Ne'ila, which is recited just this once a year.
The services for the three festivals of Pesach ("Passover"), Shavuot ("Feast of Weeks" or "Pentecost"), and Sukkot ("Feast of Tabernacles") are alike, except for interpolated piyyutim and readings for each individual festival. The preliminaries and conclusions of the prayers are the same as on Shabbat. The Amidah on these festivals only contains seven benedictions, with Attah Bechartanu as the main one. Hallel (communal recitation of Psalms 113–118) follows.
The Musaf service includes Umi-Penei Hata'enu, with reference to the special festival and Temple sacrifices on the occasion.
The Priestly Blessing ("dukhening") is pronounced during the repetition of the Amidah. While this occurs daily in Israel and most Sephardic congregations, it occurs only on Pesach, Shavuot, Sukkot, Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kippur in Ashkenazic (and some Sephardic communities) congregations of the Jewish diaspora. Even when it is omitted, or when there are no kohanim present, a special prayer is instead recited by the hazzan after the Modim ("Thanksgiving") prayer) in commemoration of the priestly blessing. (American Reform Jews omit the Musaf service.)
According to halakha, Jewish men are obligated to perform public prayer three times a day, within specific time ranges (zmanim), plus additional services on Jewish holidays.
According to the Talmud, women are generally exempted from obligations that have to be performed at a certain time. (This has interpreted as being due to the need to constantly care for small children, or due to women's alleged higher spiritual level which makes it unnecessary for them to connect to God at specific times, since they are always connected to God.) In accordance with the general exemption from time-bound obligations, women are not required to recite the morning and evening Shema (though Mishnah Berurah suggests that they say it anyway), and most Orthodox authorities have exempted women from reciting Maariv.
Authorities have disagreed on whether this exemption applies to additional prayers. According to (Ashkenazi) Magen Avraham and more recently (Sephardi) Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, women are only required to pray once a day, in any form they choose, so long as the prayer contains praise of (brakhot), requests to (bakashot), and thanks of (hodot) God. However, most Orthodox authorities agree that women are not completely exempt from time-bound prayer. The Mishnah Berurah, an important code of Ashkenazic Jewish law, holds that the Men of the Great Assembly obligated women to recite Shacharit and Minchah each day, "just like men". Nonetheless, even the most liberal Orthodox authorities hold that women cannot count in a minyan for purposes of public prayer.
Traditionally, women were also reciting individual tkhine prayers in Yiddish.
Conservative Judaism regards the halakhic system of multiple daily services as mandatory. Since 2002, Jewish women from Conservative congregations have been regarded as having undertaken a communal obligation to pray the same prayers at the same times as men, with traditional communities and individual women permitted to opt out. Reform and Reconstructionist congregations do not regard halakha as binding and hence regard appropriate prayer times as matters of personal spiritual decision rather than a matter of religious requirement.
Throughout Orthodox Judaism, including its most liberal forms, men and women are required to sit in separate sections with a mechitza (partition) separating them. Historically, a learned woman in the weibershul (women's section or annex) of a synagogue took on the informal role of precentress or firzogerin for the women praying in parallel to the main service led in the men's section. Conservative/Masorti Judaism permits mixed seating (almost universally in the United States, but not in all countries). All Reform and Reconstructionist congregations have mixed seating.
Haredi and the vast majority of Modern Orthodox Judaism has a blanket prohibition on women leading public congregational prayers. Conservative Judaism has developed a blanket justification for women leading all or virtually all such prayers, holding that although only obligated individuals can lead prayers and women were not traditionally obligated, Conservative Jewish women in modern times have as a collective whole voluntarily undertaken such an obligation. Reform and Reconstructionist congregations permit women to perform all prayer roles because they do not regard halakha as binding.
A small liberal wing within Modern Orthodox Judaism, particularly rabbis friendly to the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA), has begun re-examining the role of women in prayers based on an individual, case-by-case look at the historical role of specific prayers and services, doing so within classical halakhic interpretation. Accepting that where obligation exists only the obligated can lead, this small group has typically made three general arguments for expanded women's roles:
A very small number of Modern Orthodox congregations accept some such arguments, but very few Orthodox congregations or authorities accept all or even most of them. Many of those who do not accept this reasoning point to kol isha, the tradition that prohibits a man from hearing a woman other than his wife or close blood relative sing. JOFA refers to congregations generally accepting such arguments as Partnership Minyanim. On Shabbat in a Partnership Minyan, women can typically lead Kabbalat Shabbat, the P'seukei D'Zimrah, the services for removing the Torah from and replacing it to the Ark, and Torah reading, as well as give a D'Var Torah or sermon.
The first Orthodox Jewish women's prayer group was created on the holiday of Simhat Torah at Lincoln Square Synagogue in Manhattan in the late 1960s.
Ephraim Mirvis, an Orthodox rabbi who serves as the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, supports Shabbat prayer groups for Orthodox women, saying, "Some of our congregations have women prayer groups for Friday night, some Saturday mornings. This is without women reading from the Torah. But for women to come together as a group to pray, this is a good thing."
However, many Modern Orthodox rabbis, including Rabbi Hershel Schachter, Rabbi Mordechai Willig, Rabbi Nisson Alpert and others have ruled that this practice is not permitted. These practices are also unheard of in the Hareidi world
In most divisions of Judaism boys prior to bar mitzvah cannot act as a Chazzen for prayer services that contain devarim sheb'kidusha, i.e. Kaddish, Barechu, the amida, etc., or receive an aliya or chant the Torah for the congregation. Since Kabbalat Shabbat and Pesukei D'zimra do not technically require a chazzan at all, it is possible for a boy prior to bar mitzvah to lead these services. The conclusion of the service on Shabbat and chagim may also be led by children. Under the Moroccan, Yemenite, and Mizrachi customs, a boy prior to bar mitzvah may lead certain prayers, read the Torah, and have an aliyah. It is customary among many Ashkenazim to have children sing "Adon 'Olam" after Mussaf and "Yigdal" after Shabbat and Holiday Maariv. Among Sefardim, Mizrachim, Yemenites, and some Askenazim, a child leads the congregation in Kiryat Shema.
Conservative services generally use the same basic format for services as in Orthodox Judaism, with some doctrinal leniencies and some prayers in English. In practice, there is wide variation among Conservative congregations. In traditionalist congregations the liturgy can be almost identical to that of Orthodox Judaism, almost entirely in Hebrew (and Aramaic), with a few minor exceptions, including excision of a study session on Temple sacrifices, and modifications of prayers for the restoration of the sacrificial system. In more liberal Conservative synagogues there are greater changes to the service, with up to a third of the service in English; abbreviation or omission of many of the preparatory prayers; and replacement of some traditional prayers with more contemporary forms. There are some changes for doctrinal reasons, including egalitarian language, fewer references to restoring sacrifices in the Temple in Jerusalem, and an option to eliminate special roles for Kohanim and Levites.
The liturgies of Reform and Reconstructionist are based on traditional elements, but contains language more reflective of liberal belief than the traditional liturgy. Doctrinal revisions generally include revising or omitting references to traditional doctrines such as bodily resurrection, a personal Jewish Messiah, and other elements of traditional Jewish eschatology, Divine revelation of the Torah at Mount Sinai, angels, conceptions of reward and punishment, and other personal miraculous and supernatural elements. Services are often from 40% to 90% in the vernacular.
Reform Judaism has made greater alterations to the traditional service in accord with its more liberal theology including dropping references to traditional elements of Jewish eschatology such as a personal Messiah, a bodily resurrection of the dead, and others. The Hebrew portion of the service is substantially abbreviated and modernized and modern prayers substituted for traditional ones. In addition, in keeping with their view that the laws of Shabbat (including a traditional prohibition on playing instruments) are inapplicable to modern circumstances, Reform services often play instrumental or recorded music with prayers on the Jewish Sabbath. All Reform synagogues are egalitarian with respect to gender roles. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Jewish prayer (Hebrew: תְּפִילָּה, tefilla [tfiˈla]; plural תְּפִילּוֹת tefillot [tfiˈlot]; Yiddish: תּפֿלה, romanized: tfile [ˈtfɪlə], plural תּפֿלות tfilles [ˈtfɪləs]; Yinglish: davening /ˈdɑːvənɪŋ/ from Yiddish דאַוון davn 'pray') is the prayer recitation that forms part of the observance of Rabbinic Judaism. These prayers, often with instructions and commentary, are found in the Siddur, the traditional Jewish prayer book.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Prayer, as a \"service of the heart\", is in principle a Torah-based commandment. It is not time-dependent and is mandatory for both Jewish men and women. However, the rabbinic requirement to recite a specific prayer text does differentiate between men and women: Jewish men are obligated to recite three prayers each day within specific time ranges (zmanim), while, according to many approaches, women are only required to pray once or twice a day, and may not be required to recite a specific text.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Traditionally, three prayer services are recited daily:",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Two additional services are recited on Shabbat and holidays:",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "A distinction is made between individual prayer and communal prayer, which requires a quorum known as a minyan, with communal prayer being preferable as it permits the inclusion of prayers that otherwise would be omitted.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "According to tradition, many of the current standard prayers were composed by the sages of the Great Assembly in the early Second Temple period (516 BCE – 70 CE). The language of the prayers, while clearly from this period, often employs biblical idiom. The main structure of the modern prayer service was fixed in the tannaic era (1st–2nd centuries CE), with some additions and the exact text of blessings coming later. Jewish prayerbooks emerged during the early Middle Ages during the period of the Geonim of Babylonia (6th–11th centuries CE).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Over the last 2000 years, traditional variations have emerged among the traditional liturgical customs of different Jewish communities, such as Ashkenazic, Sephardic, Yemenite, Eretz Yisrael and others, or rather recent liturgical inventions such as Hassidic, and Chabad. However the differences are minor compared with the commonalities. Most of the Jewish liturgy is sung or chanted with traditional melodies or trope. Synagogues may designate or employ a professional or lay hazzan (cantor) for the purpose of leading the congregation in prayer, especially on Shabbat or holidays.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "According to the Babylonian Talmud, prayer is a biblical command:",
"title": "Origin and history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "You shall serve God with your whole heart' – What service is performed with the heart? This is prayer.",
"title": "Origin and history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Based on this passage, Maimonides categorizes daily prayer as one of the 613 commandments. He rules that the commandment is fulfilled by any prayer at any time in the day, not a specific text; and thus is not time-dependent, and is mandatory for both Jewish men and women. In contrast, the requirement to say specific prayers at specific times is based not on biblical law, but rather rabbinic decree.",
"title": "Origin and history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Additional references in the Hebrew Bible have been interpreted to suggest that King David and the prophet Daniel prayed three times a day. In Psalms, David states:",
"title": "Origin and history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Evening, morning, and noontime, I speak and moan, and He hearkened to my voice.",
"title": "Origin and history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "And in the Book of Daniel:",
"title": "Origin and history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "And Daniel, when he knew that a writ had been inscribed, came to his house, where there were open windows in his upper chamber, opposite Jerusalem, and three times a day he kneeled on his knees and prayed and offered thanks before his God just as he had done prior to this.",
"title": "Origin and history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The Talmud gives two reasons why there are three basic prayers each day:",
"title": "Origin and history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The earliest parts of Jewish prayer are the Shema Yisrael and the Priestly Blessing, which are in the Torah.",
"title": "Origin and history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Maimonides asserts that until the Babylonian exile, all Jews composed their own prayers. After the exile, however, when the exiles' understanding of Hebrew diminished and they found it difficult to compose prayers in Hebrew, Ezra and his court composed the Amidah prayer. Modern scholarship dating from the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement of 19th-century Germany, as well as textual analysis influenced by the 20th-century discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, suggests that dating from the Second Temple period there existed \"liturgical formulations of a communal nature designated for particular occasions and conducted in a centre totally independent of Jerusalem and the Temple, making use of terminology and theological concepts that were later to become dominant in Jewish and, in some cases, Christian prayer.\"",
"title": "Origin and history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The structure of the modern Jewish prayer service was established during the period of the Tannaim, \"from their traditions, later committed to writing, we learn that the generation of rabbis active at the time of the destruction of the Second Temple (70 CE) gave Jewish prayer its structure and, in outline form at least, its contents.\" This liturgy included the twice-daily recitation of the Shema, the Amidah, and the cycle of public Torah reading.",
"title": "Origin and history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The Amidah (or Shemoneh Esreh) prayer is traditionally ascribed to the Great Assembly (in the time of Ezra, near the end of the biblical period), though other sources suggest it was established by Simeon HaPakoli in the late 1st century. Even in the 1st century, though, the precise wording of the blessings was not yet fixed, and varied from locale to locale. By the Middle Ages the texts of the blessings was nearly fixed, and in the form in which they are still used today.",
"title": "Origin and history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Readings from the Torah (five books of Moses) and the Nevi'im (\"Prophets\") are specified in the Mishnah and Talmud, as are the order of blessings surrounding the Shema. Other parts of the service, such as Pesukei dezimra, have little mention in early sources, but became established by custom.",
"title": "Origin and history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The oldest prayer books date from the time of the Geonim of Babylonia; \"some were composed by respected rabbinic scholars at the request of far-flung communities seeking an authoritative text of the required prayers for daily use, Shabbat, and holidays.\" The earliest existing codification of the prayerbook was drawn up by Rav Amram Gaon of Sura, Babylon, about 850 CE. Half a century later Rav Saadia Gaon, also of Sura, composed a siddur, in which the rubrical matter is in Arabic. These were the basis of Simcha ben Samuel's Machzor Vitry (11th-century France), which was based on the ideas of his teacher, Rashi. Another formulation of the prayers was that appended by Maimonides to the laws of prayer in his Mishneh Torah: this forms the basis of the Yemenite liturgy, and has had some influence on other rites. From this point forward, all Jewish prayerbooks had the same basic order and contents.",
"title": "Origin and history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The siddur was printed by Soncino in Italy as early as 1486, though a siddur was first mass-distributed only in 1865. The siddur began appearing in the vernacular as early as 1538. The first English translation, by Gamaliel ben Pedahzur (a pseudonym), appeared in London in 1738; a different translation was released in the United States in 1837.",
"title": "Origin and history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Over the last 2000 years, the various branches of Judaism have resulted in small variations in the Rabbinic liturgy customs among different Jewish communities, with each community having a slightly different nusach (customary liturgy). The principal difference is between Ashkenazic and Sephardic customs, although there are other communities (e.g., Yemenite and Italian Jews, and in the past Eretz Yisrael), and rather recent liturgical inventions such as Hassidic, Chabad, Reform and other communities also have distinct customs, variations, and special prayers. However, the differences between all these customs are quite minor compared with the commonalities.",
"title": "Origin and history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "According to halakha, all individual prayers and virtually all communal prayers may be said in any language that the person praying understands. For example, the Mishnah mentions that the Shema need not be said in Hebrew. A list of prayers that must be said in Hebrew is given in the Mishna, and among these only the Priestly Blessing is in use today, as the others are prayers that are to be said only in a Temple in Jerusalem, by a priest, or by a reigning King.",
"title": "Origin and history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Despite this, the tradition of most Ashkenazi Orthodox synagogues is to use Hebrew for all except a small number of prayers, including Kaddish and Yekum Purkan in Aramaic, and Gott Fun Avraham, which was written in Yiddish. In other streams of Judaism there is considerable variability: Sephardic communities may use Ladino or Portuguese for many prayers; Conservative synagogues tend to use the local language to a varying degree; and at some Reform synagogues almost the whole service may be in the local language.",
"title": "Origin and history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The language of the prayers, while clearly being from the Second Temple period, often employs biblical idiom, and according to some authorities it should not contain rabbinic or Mishnaic idiom apart from in the sections of Mishnah that are featured.",
"title": "Origin and history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Conservative services generally use the same basic format for services as Orthodox Judaism, with some doctrinal leniencies and some prayers in English. In practice, there is wide variation among Conservative congregations. In traditionalist congregations the liturgy can be almost identical to that of Orthodox Judaism, almost entirely in Hebrew (and Aramaic), with a few minor exceptions, including excision of a study session on Temple sacrifices, and modifications of prayers for the restoration of the sacrificial system. In more liberal Conservative synagogues there are greater changes to the service, with up to a third of the service in English; abbreviation or omission of many of the preparatory prayers; and replacement of some traditional prayers with more contemporary forms. There are some changes for doctrinal reasons, including egalitarian language, fewer references to restoring sacrifices in the Temple in Jerusalem, and an option to eliminate special roles for Kohanim and Levites.",
"title": "Denominational variations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The liturgies of Reform and Reconstructionist are based on traditional elements, but contain language more reflective of liberal belief than the traditional liturgy. Doctrinal revisions generally include revising or omitting references to traditional doctrines such as bodily resurrection, a personal Jewish Messiah, and other elements of traditional Jewish eschatology, Divine revelation of the Torah at Mount Sinai, angels, conceptions of reward and punishment, and other personal miraculous and supernatural elements. Services are often from 40% to 90% in the vernacular.",
"title": "Denominational variations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Reform Judaism has made greater alterations to the traditional service in accord with its more liberal theology including dropping references to traditional elements of Jewish eschatology such as a personal Messiah, a bodily resurrection of the dead, and others. The Hebrew portion of the service is substantially abbreviated and modernized and modern prayers substituted for traditional ones. In addition, in keeping with their view that the laws of Shabbat (including a traditional prohibition on playing instruments) are inapplicable to modern circumstances, Reform services often play instrumental or recorded music with prayers on the Jewish Sabbath. All Reform synagogues are Egalitarian with respect to gender roles.",
"title": "Denominational variations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In Jewish philosophy and in Rabbinic literature, it is noted that the Hebrew verb for prayer—hitpallel (התפלל)—is in fact the reflexive form of palal (פלל), to judge. Thus, \"to pray\" conveys the notion of \"judging oneself\": ultimately, the purpose of prayer—tefillah (תפלה)—is to transform oneself.",
"title": "Philosophy of prayer"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "This etymology is consistent with the Jewish conception of divine simplicity. It is not God that changes through one's prayer—man does not influence God as a defendant influences a human judge who has emotions and is subject to change—rather it is man himself who is changed. It is further consistent with Maimonides' view on Divine Providence. Here, Tefillah is the medium which God gave to man by means of which he can change himself, and thereby establish a new relationship with God—and thus a new destiny for himself in life; see also under Psalms.",
"title": "Philosophy of prayer"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Kabbalah (esoteric Jewish mysticism) uses a series of kavanot, directions of intent, to specify the path the prayer ascends in the dialogue with God, to increase its chances of being answered favorably. Kabbalism ascribes a higher meaning to the purpose of prayer, which is no less than affecting the very fabric of reality itself, restructuring and repairing the universe in a real fashion. In this view, every word of every prayer, and indeed, even every letter of every word, has a precise meaning and a precise effect. Prayers thus literally affect the mystical forces of the universe, and repair the fabric of creation.",
"title": "Philosophy of prayer"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "This approach has been taken by the Chassidei Ashkenaz (German pietists of the Middle-Ages), the Zohar, the Arizal's Kabbalist tradition, the Ramchal, most of Hassidism, the Vilna Gaon and Jacob Emden.",
"title": "Philosophy of prayer"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Hassidism, although incorporating the kabbalistic worldview and its corresponding kavanot, also emphasized straightforward sincerity and depth of emotional engagement in prayer. The Baal Shem Tov's great-grandson, Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, particularly emphasized speaking to God in one's own words, which he called Hitbodedut (self-seclusion) and advised setting aside an hour to do this every day.",
"title": "Philosophy of prayer"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Daven is the originally exclusively Eastern Yiddish verb meaning \"pray\"; it is widely used by Ashkenazic Orthodox Jews. In Yinglish, this has become the Anglicised davening.",
"title": "Methodology and terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The origin of the word is obscure, but is thought by some to have come from Arabic (from diwan, a collection of poems or prayers), French (from devoner, 'to devote' or 'dedicate' or possibly from the French 'devant'- 'in front of' with the idea that the person praying is mindful of before whom they stand), Latin (from divin, 'divine') or even English (from dawn). Others believe that it derives from a Slavic word meaning \"to give\" (Russian: давать, romanized: davat'). Some claim that it originates from an Aramaic word, de'avuhon or d'avinun, meaning 'of their/our forefathers', as the three prayers are said to have been invented by Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Another Aramaic derivation, proposed by Avigdor Chaikin, cites the Talmudic phrase, \"ka davai lamizrach\", 'gazing wistfully to the east' Kevin A. Brook, cites Zeiden's suggestion that the word daven comes from the Turkish root tabun- meaning 'to pray', and that in Kipchak Turkish, the initial t morphs into d.",
"title": "Methodology and terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In Western Yiddish, the term for pray is oren, a word with clear roots in Romance languages, similar to Spanish and Portuguese orar and Latin orare.",
"title": "Methodology and terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Individual prayer is considered acceptable, but prayer with a quorum of ten Jewish adults—a minyan—is the most highly recommended form of prayer and is required for some prayers. An adult in this context means over the age of 12 or 13 (bat or bar mitzvah). Judaism had originally counted only men in the minyan for formal prayer, on the basis that one does not count someone who is not obligated to participate. The rabbis had exempted women from almost all time-specific positive mitzvot (commandments), including those parts of the prayer that cannot be recited without a quorum, due to women in the past being bound up in an endless cycle of pregnancy, birthing and nursing from a very early age. Orthodox Judaism still follows this reasoning and excludes women from the minyan.",
"title": "Methodology and terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Since 1973, Conservative congregations have overwhelmingly become egalitarian and count women in the minyan. A very small number of congregations that identify themselves as Conservative have resisted these changes and continue to exclude women from the minyan. Those Reform and Reconstructionist congregations that consider a minyan mandatory for communal prayer, count both men and women for a minyan. All denominations of Judaism except for Orthodox Judaism ordain female rabbis and cantors.",
"title": "Methodology and terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "There is a publicly said prayer, called Birkhat HaGomel, for giving thanks for surviving an illness or danger. which, in addition to needing a Minyan, also needs a Torah scroll taken out for a scheduled Torah reading.",
"title": "Methodology and terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "In the event one of the prayers was missed inadvertently, the Amidah prayer is said twice in the next service—a procedure known as tefillat tashlumin.",
"title": "Methodology and terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Many Jews sway their body back and forth during prayer. This practice, referred to as shuckling in Yiddish, is not mandatory.",
"title": "Methodology and terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Many are accustomed to giving charity before, during (especially during Vayivarech David) or after prayer, in the hopes that this will make their prayer more likely to be heard.",
"title": "Methodology and terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "According to the Talmud, during prayer one should face toward Jerusalem, and specifically the site of the Temple in Jerusalem. This is based on Solomon's prayer \"...and they will pray to You toward their land, which You gave to their fathers; the city which You have chosen; and the house which I have built for Your name\" (1 Kings 8:48).",
"title": "Methodology and terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The Shacharit (from shachar, morning light) prayer is recited in the morning. Halacha limits parts of its recitation to the first three (Shema) or four (Amidah) hours of the day, where \"hours\" are 1/12 of daylight time, making these times dependent on the season.",
"title": "Daily prayers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Shacharit is generally the lengthiest prayer of the day. Its components include Birkot hashachar, Korbanot, Pesukei dezimra, the Shema Yisrael and its blessings, the Amidah, and Tachanun. Of these, the recitation of Shema Yisrael and the Amidah constitute the core of the Shacharit service. Those Jews who wear tallit and tefillin generally only do so during the Shacharit prayer.",
"title": "Daily prayers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Mincha or Minha may be recited from half an hour after halachic noontime, until sunset. Sephardim and Italian Jews start the Mincha prayers with Psalm 84 and Korbanot, and usually continue with the Pittum hakketoret. The opening section is concluded with Malachi 3:4.",
"title": "Daily prayers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Ashrei is recited, followed by half-Kaddish, the Amidah (including repetition), Tachanun, and then the full Kaddish. Sephardim insert a Psalm, followed by the Mourner's Kaddish. After this follows, in most modern rites, the Aleinu. Most Ashkenazim then conclude with the Mourner's Kaddish. In Ashkenazic, Italian and Yemenite communities, the service leaders often wears a tallit.",
"title": "Daily prayers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Generally, the time when Maariv can first be recited is when the time for reciting Mincha ends. But there are varying opinions on this. Maariv should not begin before 1¼ hours before sunset. Others delay Maariv until after sunset or after dusk. If Maariv is recited prior to dusk, individuals repeat the Shema later in the evening.",
"title": "Daily prayers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The main components of Maariv are the recitation of the Shema (with two blessings before it and two after it), followed by the Amidah (which is not repeated, unlike with other recitations of the Amidah). Some communities add a third blessing between the Shema and Amidah. Some additional prayers and biblical verses are recited as well; these vary by community and occasion.",
"title": "Daily prayers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "On Shabbat (the Sabbath), prayers are similar in structure to those on weekdays, although almost every part is lengthened. One exception is the Amidah, the main prayer, which is abridged. The first three and last three blessings are recited as usual, but the middle thirteen are replaced with a single blessing known as \"sanctity of the day,\" describing the Sabbath. Atypically, this middle blessing is different for each of the prayers.",
"title": "Prayer on Shabbat"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Shabbat services begin on Friday evening with the weekday Mincha, followed in some communities by the Song of Songs, and then in most communities by the Kabbalat Shabbat, the mystical prelude to Shabbat services composed by 16th-century Kabbalists. This Hebrew term literally means \"Receiving the Sabbath\". In many communities, the piyut Yedid Nefesh introduces the Kabbalat Shabbat prayers.",
"title": "Prayer on Shabbat"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Kabbalat Shabbat is, except among many Italian and many Sephardic Jews (including Spanish and Portuguese Jews, but also many Middle Eastern Sephardic communities), composed of six Psalms, representing the six weekdays. Next comes the poem Lekha Dodi, based on the words of the Talmudic sage Hanina: \"Come, let us go out to meet the Queen Sabbath\" Kabbalat Shabbat is concluded by Psalm 92 (the recital of which constitutes acceptance of the current Shabbat with all its obligations) and Psalm 93. Many add a study section here, including Bameh Madlikin and Amar rabbi El'azar and the concluding Kaddish deRabbanan (in the Western Ashkenazic rite, a mourners kaddish is instead recited after Bameh Madlikin) and is then followed by the Maariv service; other communities delay the study session until after Maariv. Others add here a passage from the Zohar, entitled Kegavna. In modern times the Kabbalat Shabbat has been set to music by many composers including: Robert Strassburg and Samuel Adler",
"title": "Prayer on Shabbat"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "The Shema section of the Friday night service varies in some details from the weekday services—mainly in the different ending of the Hashkivenu prayer and the omission of Baruch Adonai le-Olam prayer in those traditions where this section is otherwise recited. In the Italian rite, there are also different versions of the Ma'ariv aravim prayer (beginning asher killah) and the Emet Ve-Emunah prayer.",
"title": "Prayer on Shabbat"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Most commemorate the Shabbat at this point with VeShameru. The custom to recite these verses appears in many early sources such as Siddur Rav Saadya Gaon (who recited the blessing Yiru Eineinu after these verses) and is found in the vast majority of old prayer books of a variety of rites. However, it is absent from the Yemenite Baladi tradition (although has been added in most Baladi communities in the last few hundred years), and it is not recited according to the traditions of the Vilna Gaon or Chabad who are opposed to adding additional readings to the siddur which are not mentioned in the Talmud.",
"title": "Prayer on Shabbat"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "On Friday night, the middle blessing of the Amidah discusses the conclusion of creation, quoting the relevant verses from Genesis. The Amidah is then followed by the Seven-Faceted Blessing, the hazzan's mini-repetition of the Amidah. In some Ashkenazi Orthodox synagogues the second chapter of Mishnah tractate Shabbat, Bameh Madlikin, is read at this point, instead of earlier. Kiddush is recited in the synagogue in Ashkenazi and a few Sephardi communities. The service then follows with Aleinu. Most Sephardi and many Ashkenazi synagogues end with the singing of Yigdal, a poetic adaptation of Maimonides' 13 principles of Jewish faith. Other Ashkenazi synagogues end with Adon Olam instead.",
"title": "Prayer on Shabbat"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Shabbat morning prayers differ from weekday morning prayers in several ways: an expanded version of Pesukei dezimra, a longer version of the Yotzer ohr blessing, the seven-blessing Shabbat version of the Amidah, no Tachanun, a longer Torah reading, and some additional prayers after the Torah reading. In many communities, the rabbi (or a learned member of the congregation) delivers a sermon at the very end of Shacharit and before Mussaf, usually on the topic of the Torah reading.",
"title": "Prayer on Shabbat"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "The Musaf service starts with the silent recitation of the Amidah. The middle blessing includes the Tikanta Shabbat reading on the holiness of Shabbat (in Yemenita communities, as well as some Sephardic communities Le-Mosheh Tsivita is recited instead of Tikanta Shabbat), and then by a reading from the biblical Book of Numbers about the sacrifices that used to be performed in the Temple in Jerusalem. Next comes Yismechu, \"They shall rejoice in Your sovereignty\", and Eloheynu, \"Our God and God of our Ancestors, may you be pleased with our rest\" (which is recited during all Amidahs of the Sabbath). After the silent prayer, the leader repeats the prayer, adding an expanded version of Kedushah. In some Sephardic and Yemenite communities, rather than the silent prayer and repetition, the leader recited his own prayer aloud and the congregation prays along with him.",
"title": "Prayer on Shabbat"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "After the Amidah comes the full Kaddish, followed by Ein keloheinu. In Orthodox Judaism this is followed by a reading from the Talmud on the incense offering called Pittum Haketoreth and daily psalms that used to be recited in the Temple in Jerusalem. These readings are usually omitted by Conservative Jews, and are always omitted by Reform Jews.",
"title": "Prayer on Shabbat"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "The Musaf service culminates with the Rabbi's Kaddish (in the Western Ashkenazic rite, the Mourners Kaddish is recited instead), the Aleinu, followed in many communities by the Mourner's Kaddish. Some synagogues conclude with the reading of Shir Hayichud, Anim Zemirot (sometimes followed by a Mourner's Kaddish), the Psalm of the Day (sometimes followed by a Mourner's Kaddish) - in some communities, these are recited before the Torah reading or at the beginning of services instead. Many communities conclude with either Adon Olam or Yigdal.",
"title": "Prayer on Shabbat"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Mincha commences with Ashrei and the prayer Uva letzion, after which the first section of the next weekly portion is read from the Torah scroll. The Amidah follows the same pattern as the other Shabbat Amidah prayers, with the middle blessing starting Attah Echad. The short prayer Tzidkatcha is recited after the Amidah, followed by Kaddish and Aleinu.",
"title": "Prayer on Shabbat"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "The week-day Ma'ariv is recited on the evening immediately following Shabbat, concluding with Vihi No'am, Ve-Yitten lekha, and Havdalah.",
"title": "Prayer on Shabbat"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "The services for the Days of Awe, Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, take on a solemn tone as befits these days. Traditional solemn tunes are used in the prayers.",
"title": "Special observances and circumstances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "The musaf service on Rosh Hashana has nine blessings; the three middle blessings include biblical verses attesting to sovereignty, remembrance and the shofar, which is sounded during the service.",
"title": "Special observances and circumstances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Yom Kippur is the only day in the year when there are five prayer services. The evening service, containing the Ma'ariv prayer, is widely known as \"Kol Nidrei\", the opening declaration made preceding the prayer. During the daytime, shacharit, musaf (which is recited on Shabbat and all festivals) and mincha are followed, as the sun begins to set, by Ne'ila, which is recited just this once a year.",
"title": "Special observances and circumstances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "The services for the three festivals of Pesach (\"Passover\"), Shavuot (\"Feast of Weeks\" or \"Pentecost\"), and Sukkot (\"Feast of Tabernacles\") are alike, except for interpolated piyyutim and readings for each individual festival. The preliminaries and conclusions of the prayers are the same as on Shabbat. The Amidah on these festivals only contains seven benedictions, with Attah Bechartanu as the main one. Hallel (communal recitation of Psalms 113–118) follows.",
"title": "Special observances and circumstances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "The Musaf service includes Umi-Penei Hata'enu, with reference to the special festival and Temple sacrifices on the occasion.",
"title": "Special observances and circumstances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "The Priestly Blessing (\"dukhening\") is pronounced during the repetition of the Amidah. While this occurs daily in Israel and most Sephardic congregations, it occurs only on Pesach, Shavuot, Sukkot, Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kippur in Ashkenazic (and some Sephardic communities) congregations of the Jewish diaspora. Even when it is omitted, or when there are no kohanim present, a special prayer is instead recited by the hazzan after the Modim (\"Thanksgiving\") prayer) in commemoration of the priestly blessing. (American Reform Jews omit the Musaf service.)",
"title": "Special observances and circumstances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "According to halakha, Jewish men are obligated to perform public prayer three times a day, within specific time ranges (zmanim), plus additional services on Jewish holidays.",
"title": "Role of women"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "According to the Talmud, women are generally exempted from obligations that have to be performed at a certain time. (This has interpreted as being due to the need to constantly care for small children, or due to women's alleged higher spiritual level which makes it unnecessary for them to connect to God at specific times, since they are always connected to God.) In accordance with the general exemption from time-bound obligations, women are not required to recite the morning and evening Shema (though Mishnah Berurah suggests that they say it anyway), and most Orthodox authorities have exempted women from reciting Maariv.",
"title": "Role of women"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Authorities have disagreed on whether this exemption applies to additional prayers. According to (Ashkenazi) Magen Avraham and more recently (Sephardi) Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, women are only required to pray once a day, in any form they choose, so long as the prayer contains praise of (brakhot), requests to (bakashot), and thanks of (hodot) God. However, most Orthodox authorities agree that women are not completely exempt from time-bound prayer. The Mishnah Berurah, an important code of Ashkenazic Jewish law, holds that the Men of the Great Assembly obligated women to recite Shacharit and Minchah each day, \"just like men\". Nonetheless, even the most liberal Orthodox authorities hold that women cannot count in a minyan for purposes of public prayer.",
"title": "Role of women"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Traditionally, women were also reciting individual tkhine prayers in Yiddish.",
"title": "Role of women"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Conservative Judaism regards the halakhic system of multiple daily services as mandatory. Since 2002, Jewish women from Conservative congregations have been regarded as having undertaken a communal obligation to pray the same prayers at the same times as men, with traditional communities and individual women permitted to opt out. Reform and Reconstructionist congregations do not regard halakha as binding and hence regard appropriate prayer times as matters of personal spiritual decision rather than a matter of religious requirement.",
"title": "Role of women"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Throughout Orthodox Judaism, including its most liberal forms, men and women are required to sit in separate sections with a mechitza (partition) separating them. Historically, a learned woman in the weibershul (women's section or annex) of a synagogue took on the informal role of precentress or firzogerin for the women praying in parallel to the main service led in the men's section. Conservative/Masorti Judaism permits mixed seating (almost universally in the United States, but not in all countries). All Reform and Reconstructionist congregations have mixed seating.",
"title": "Role of women"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Haredi and the vast majority of Modern Orthodox Judaism has a blanket prohibition on women leading public congregational prayers. Conservative Judaism has developed a blanket justification for women leading all or virtually all such prayers, holding that although only obligated individuals can lead prayers and women were not traditionally obligated, Conservative Jewish women in modern times have as a collective whole voluntarily undertaken such an obligation. Reform and Reconstructionist congregations permit women to perform all prayer roles because they do not regard halakha as binding.",
"title": "Role of women"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "A small liberal wing within Modern Orthodox Judaism, particularly rabbis friendly to the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA), has begun re-examining the role of women in prayers based on an individual, case-by-case look at the historical role of specific prayers and services, doing so within classical halakhic interpretation. Accepting that where obligation exists only the obligated can lead, this small group has typically made three general arguments for expanded women's roles:",
"title": "Role of women"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "A very small number of Modern Orthodox congregations accept some such arguments, but very few Orthodox congregations or authorities accept all or even most of them. Many of those who do not accept this reasoning point to kol isha, the tradition that prohibits a man from hearing a woman other than his wife or close blood relative sing. JOFA refers to congregations generally accepting such arguments as Partnership Minyanim. On Shabbat in a Partnership Minyan, women can typically lead Kabbalat Shabbat, the P'seukei D'Zimrah, the services for removing the Torah from and replacing it to the Ark, and Torah reading, as well as give a D'Var Torah or sermon.",
"title": "Role of women"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "The first Orthodox Jewish women's prayer group was created on the holiday of Simhat Torah at Lincoln Square Synagogue in Manhattan in the late 1960s.",
"title": "Role of women"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Ephraim Mirvis, an Orthodox rabbi who serves as the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, supports Shabbat prayer groups for Orthodox women, saying, \"Some of our congregations have women prayer groups for Friday night, some Saturday mornings. This is without women reading from the Torah. But for women to come together as a group to pray, this is a good thing.\"",
"title": "Role of women"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "However, many Modern Orthodox rabbis, including Rabbi Hershel Schachter, Rabbi Mordechai Willig, Rabbi Nisson Alpert and others have ruled that this practice is not permitted. These practices are also unheard of in the Hareidi world",
"title": "Role of women"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "In most divisions of Judaism boys prior to bar mitzvah cannot act as a Chazzen for prayer services that contain devarim sheb'kidusha, i.e. Kaddish, Barechu, the amida, etc., or receive an aliya or chant the Torah for the congregation. Since Kabbalat Shabbat and Pesukei D'zimra do not technically require a chazzan at all, it is possible for a boy prior to bar mitzvah to lead these services. The conclusion of the service on Shabbat and chagim may also be led by children. Under the Moroccan, Yemenite, and Mizrachi customs, a boy prior to bar mitzvah may lead certain prayers, read the Torah, and have an aliyah. It is customary among many Ashkenazim to have children sing \"Adon 'Olam\" after Mussaf and \"Yigdal\" after Shabbat and Holiday Maariv. Among Sefardim, Mizrachim, Yemenites, and some Askenazim, a child leads the congregation in Kiryat Shema.",
"title": "Role of minors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Conservative services generally use the same basic format for services as in Orthodox Judaism, with some doctrinal leniencies and some prayers in English. In practice, there is wide variation among Conservative congregations. In traditionalist congregations the liturgy can be almost identical to that of Orthodox Judaism, almost entirely in Hebrew (and Aramaic), with a few minor exceptions, including excision of a study session on Temple sacrifices, and modifications of prayers for the restoration of the sacrificial system. In more liberal Conservative synagogues there are greater changes to the service, with up to a third of the service in English; abbreviation or omission of many of the preparatory prayers; and replacement of some traditional prayers with more contemporary forms. There are some changes for doctrinal reasons, including egalitarian language, fewer references to restoring sacrifices in the Temple in Jerusalem, and an option to eliminate special roles for Kohanim and Levites.",
"title": "Denominational variations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "The liturgies of Reform and Reconstructionist are based on traditional elements, but contains language more reflective of liberal belief than the traditional liturgy. Doctrinal revisions generally include revising or omitting references to traditional doctrines such as bodily resurrection, a personal Jewish Messiah, and other elements of traditional Jewish eschatology, Divine revelation of the Torah at Mount Sinai, angels, conceptions of reward and punishment, and other personal miraculous and supernatural elements. Services are often from 40% to 90% in the vernacular.",
"title": "Denominational variations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Reform Judaism has made greater alterations to the traditional service in accord with its more liberal theology including dropping references to traditional elements of Jewish eschatology such as a personal Messiah, a bodily resurrection of the dead, and others. The Hebrew portion of the service is substantially abbreviated and modernized and modern prayers substituted for traditional ones. In addition, in keeping with their view that the laws of Shabbat (including a traditional prohibition on playing instruments) are inapplicable to modern circumstances, Reform services often play instrumental or recorded music with prayers on the Jewish Sabbath. All Reform synagogues are egalitarian with respect to gender roles.",
"title": "Denominational variations"
}
]
| Jewish prayer is the prayer recitation that forms part of the observance of Rabbinic Judaism. These prayers, often with instructions and commentary, are found in the Siddur, the traditional Jewish prayer book. Prayer, as a "service of the heart", is in principle a Torah-based commandment. It is not time-dependent and is mandatory for both Jewish men and women. However, the rabbinic requirement to recite a specific prayer text does differentiate between men and women: Jewish men are obligated to recite three prayers each day within specific time ranges (zmanim), while, according to many approaches, women are only required to pray once or twice a day, and may not be required to recite a specific text. Traditionally, three prayer services are recited daily: Morning prayer: Shacharit or Shaharit
Afternoon prayer: Mincha or Minha (מִנְחָה), named for the flour offering that accompanied sacrifices at the Temple in Jerusalem,
Evening prayer: Arvit or Maariv Two additional services are recited on Shabbat and holidays: Musaf are recited by Orthodox and Conservative congregations on Shabbat, major Jewish holidays, and Rosh Chodesh.
Ne'ila, is recited only on Yom Kippur. A distinction is made between individual prayer and communal prayer, which requires a quorum known as a minyan, with communal prayer being preferable as it permits the inclusion of prayers that otherwise would be omitted. According to tradition, many of the current standard prayers were composed by the sages of the Great Assembly in the early Second Temple period. The language of the prayers, while clearly from this period, often employs biblical idiom. The main structure of the modern prayer service was fixed in the tannaic era, with some additions and the exact text of blessings coming later. Jewish prayerbooks emerged during the early Middle Ages during the period of the Geonim of Babylonia. Over the last 2000 years, traditional variations have emerged among the traditional liturgical customs of different Jewish communities, such as Ashkenazic, Sephardic, Yemenite, Eretz Yisrael and others, or rather recent liturgical inventions such as Hassidic, and Chabad. However the differences are minor compared with the commonalities. Most of the Jewish liturgy is sung or chanted with traditional melodies or trope. Synagogues may designate or employ a professional or lay hazzan (cantor) for the purpose of leading the congregation in prayer, especially on Shabbat or holidays. | 2001-10-02T02:46:40Z | 2023-12-25T15:03:09Z | [
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16,162 | Jewish eschatology | Jewish eschatology is the area of Jewish theology concerned with events that will happen in the end of days and related concepts. This includes the ingathering of the exiled diaspora, the coming of the Jewish Messiah, the afterlife, and the resurrection of the dead. In Judaism, the end times are usually called the "end of days" (aḥarit ha-yamim, אחרית הימים), a phrase that appears several times in the Tanakh.
These beliefs have evolved over time, and according to some authors there is evidence of Jewish belief in a personal afterlife with reward or punishment referenced in the Torah.
In Judaism, the main textual source for the belief in the end of days and accompanying events is the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible. The roots of Jewish eschatology are to be found in the pre-exile prophets, including Isaiah and Jeremiah, and the exilic prophets Ezekiel and Deutero-Isaiah. The main tenets of Jewish eschatology are the following, in no particular order, elaborated in the Book of Isaiah, the Book of Jeremiah and the Book of Ezekiel.
According to Ezekiel chapter 38, the "war of Gog and Magog" is a climactic war that will happen at the end of the Jewish exile. According to biblical commentator and rabbi David Kimhi, this war will take place in Jerusalem.
The afterlife is known as olam ha-ba (literally “coming world" or "next world", עולם הבא in Hebrew), and is related to concepts of Gan Eden, the Heavenly "Garden in Eden", or Paradise, and Gehinnom. The phrase “olam ha-ba” itself does not occur in the Hebrew Bible. The accepted halakha is that it is impossible for living human beings to know what the world to come is like.
In the late Second Temple period, beliefs about the ultimate fate of an individual were diverse. The Pharisees and Essenes believed in the immortality of the soul, but the Sadducees did not. The Dead Sea Scrolls, Jewish pseudepigrapha and Jewish magical papyri all reflect this variety of opinions.
While all classical rabbinic sources discuss the afterlife, Medieval scholars dispute the nature of existence in the "End of Days" after the Messianic Age. While Maimonides describes an entirely spiritual existence for souls, which he calls "disembodied intellects,” Nachmanides discusses an intensely spiritual existence on Earth, where spirituality and physicality are merged. Both agree that life after death is as Maimonides describes the "End of Days." This existence entails an extremely heightened understanding of and connection to the Divine Presence. This view is shared by all classical rabbinic scholars.
According to Maimonides, any non-Jew who lives according to the Seven Laws of Noah is regarded as a righteous gentile, and is assured of a place in the world to come, the final reward of the righteous.
There is a great deal of surviving rabbinic material concerning the fate of the soul after death, its experiences, and where it goes. At various points in the afterlife journey, the soul may encounter: Hibbut ha-kever, the pains and experiences of the physico-spiritual dissolution or reconfiguration within the grave; Dumah, the angel in charge of funerary matters; Satan as the angel of death or other equally grim figure; the Kaf ha-Kela, the ensnarement or confinement of the stripped-down soul within various ghostly material reallocations (devised for the purpose of cleansing a soul of contamination but not severe enough to warrant Gehinnom, see Tanya Chapter 8)); Gehinnom (pure purgatory); and Gan Eden (heavenly respite or paradise, a purified state). All classical rabbinic scholars agree that these concepts are beyond typical human understanding, so these ideas are expressed throughout rabbinic literature via parables and analogies.
Gehinnom is fairly well defined in rabbinic literature. It is sometimes translated as "hell", but is more similar to the Nicene Christian view of Purgatory than to its Hell. Rabbinic thought maintains that souls are not tortured in Gehinnom forever; the longest that one can be there is said to be eleven months, with the exception of heretics and extremely sinful Jews. This is why Jews mourning for near relatives will not recite mourner's kaddish for more than eleven months after a death. Gehinnom is considered a spiritual forge where the soul is purified for its eventual ascent to Gan Eden ("Garden of Eden").
Rabbinic literature includes many legends about the World to Come and the two Gardens of Eden. As compiled by Louis Ginzberg in the book Legends of the Jews these include the world to come, which is called Paradise, and said to have a double gate made of carbuncle guarded by 600,000 shining angels. Seven clouds of glory overshadow Paradise, and under them, in the center of Paradise, stands the tree of life. The tree of life overshadows Paradise too, and it has fifteen thousand different tastes and aromas that winds blow all across Paradise. Under the tree of life are many pairs of canopies, one of stars and the other of sun and moon, while a cloud of glory separates the two. In each pair of canopies sits a rabbinic scholar who explains the Torah to one. When one enters Paradise, one is proffered by Michael the archangel to God on the altar of the Temple in the heavenly Jerusalem. One is transfigured into an angel, with the ugliest person becoming as beautiful and shining as "the grains of a silver pomegranate upon which fall the rays of the sun”. The angels that guard Paradise's gate adorn the soul in seven clouds of glory, crown it with gems and pearls and gold, place eight myrtles in the hand, and praise it for being righteous while leading it to a garden of eight hundred roses and myrtles watered by many rivers. In the garden is one's canopy, its beauty according to one's merit, but each canopy has four rivers – milk, honey, wine, and balsam – flowing out from it, and has a golden vine and thirty shining pearls hanging from it. Under each canopy is a table of gems and pearls attended to by sixty angels. The light of Paradise is the light of the righteous people therein. Each day in Paradise one wakes up a child and goes to bed an elder to enjoy the pleasures of childhood, youth, adulthood, and old age. In each corner of Paradise is a forest of 800,000 trees, the least among these greater than the best herbs and spices, attended to by 800,000 sweetly singing angels. Paradise is divided into seven sub-paradises, each one 120,000 miles long and wide. Depending on one's merit, a soul is assigned to one of these sections of Paradise: the first is made of glass and cedar and is for converts to Judaism; the second is of silver and cedar and is for penitents; the third is of silver, gold, gems and pearls, and is for the Patriarchs, Moses and Aaron, the Israelites that left Egypt and lived in the wilderness, and the kings of Israel; the fourth is of rubies and olive wood and is for the holy and steadfast in faith; the fifth is like the third, except a river flows through it and its bed was woven by Eve and the angels, and it is for the Messiah and Elijah; and the sixth and seventh divisions are not described, except that they are respectively for those who died doing pious acts and those who died from illness in expiation for Israel's sins.
Above this Paradise is the higher Gan Eden, where God is enthroned and explains the Torah to its inhabitants. The higher Gan Eden contains 310 worlds and is divided into seven compartments. The compartments are not described, though it is implied that each compartment is greater than the previous one and is made open to a soul based on its merit. The first compartment is for Jewish martyrs, the second for those who drowned, the third for "Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai and his disciples," the fourth for those whom the cloud of glory carried off, the fifth for penitents, the sixth for youths who have never sinned; and the seventh for the poor who lived decently and studied Torah.
An early explicit mention of resurrection in Hebrew texts is the Vision of the Valley of Dry Bones in the Book of Ezekiel dated somewhere around 539 BCE. Alan Segal argues that this narrative was intended as a metaphor for national rebirth, promising the Jews return to Israel and reconstruction of the Temple, not as a description of personal resurrection.
The Book of Daniel promised literal resurrection to the Jews, in concrete detail. Alan Segal interprets Daniel as writing that with the coming of the Archangel Michael, misery would beset the world, and only those whose names were in a divine book would be resurrected. Moreover, Daniel's promise of resurrection was intended only for the most righteous and the most sinful because the afterlife was a place for the virtuous individuals to be rewarded and the sinful individuals to receive eternal punishment.
Greek and Persian culture influenced Jewish sects to believe in an afterlife between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE as well.
The Hebrew Bible, at least as seen through interpretation of Bavli Sanhedrin, contains frequent reference to resurrection of the dead. The Mishnah (c. 200) lists belief in the resurrection of the dead as one of three essential beliefs necessary for a Jew to participate in it:
All Israel have a portion in the world to come, for it is written: 'Thy people are all righteous; they shall inherit the land forever, the branch of my planting, the work of my hands, that I may be glorified.' But the following have no portion therein: one who maintains that resurrection is not a biblical doctrine, the Torah was not divinely revealed, and an Apikoros ('heretic').
In the late Second Temple period, the Pharisees believed in resurrection, while Essenes and Sadducees did not. During the Rabbinic period, beginning in the late first century and carrying on to the present, the works of Daniel were included into the Hebrew Bible, signaling the adoption of Jewish resurrection into the officially sacred texts.
Jewish liturgy, most notably the Amidah, contains references to the tenet of the bodily resurrection of the dead. In contemporary Judaism, both Orthodox Judaism and Conservative Judaism maintain the traditional references to it in their liturgy. However, many Conservative Jews interpret the tenet metaphorically rather than literally. Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism have altered traditional references to the resurrection of the dead in the liturgy ("who gives life to the dead") to refer to "who gives life to all."
In Judaism, the day of judgment happens every year on Rosh Hashanah; therefore, the belief in a last day of judgment for all mankind is disputed. Some rabbis hold that there will be such a day following the resurrection of the dead. Others hold that there is no need for that because of Rosh Hashanah. Yet others hold that this accounting and judgment happens when one dies. Other rabbis hold that the last judgment only applies to the gentile nations and not the Jewish people.
Irving Greenberg, representing an Open Orthodox viewpoint, describes the afterlife as a central Jewish teaching, deriving from the belief in reward and punishment. According to Greenberg, suffering Medieval Jews emphasized the World to Come as a counterpoint to the difficulties of this life, while early Jewish modernizers portrayed Judaism as interested only in this world as a counterpoint to "otherworldly" Christianity. Greenberg sees each of these views as leading to an undesired extreme – overemphasizing the afterlife leads to asceticism, while devaluing the afterlife deprives Jews of the consolation of eternal life and justice – and calls for a synthesis, in which Jews can work to perfect this world, while also recognizing the immortality of the soul.
Conservative Judaism both affirms belief in the world beyond (as referenced in the Amidah and Maimonides' Thirteen Precepts of Faith) while recognizing that human understanding is limited and we cannot know exactly what the world beyond consists of. Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism affirm belief in the afterlife, though they downplay the theological implications in favor of emphasizing the importance of the "here and now," as opposed to reward and punishment. The Union for Reform Judaism believes the righteous of any faith have a place in heaven but does not believe in a concept of hell.
The Hebrew word mashiach (or moshiach) refers to the Jewish idea of the messiah. In biblical times the title mashiach was awarded to someone in a high position of nobility and greatness. For example, Cohen ha-Mašíaḥ means High Priest. While the name of the Jewish Messiah is considered to be one of the things that precede creation, he is not considered divine, in contrast to Christianity where Jesus is both divine and the Messiah.
In the Talmudic era the title Mashiach or מלך המשיח, Méleḵ ha-Mašíaḥ literally means "the anointed King". The Messiah is to be a human leader, physically descended from the Davidic line, who will rule and unite the people of Israel and will usher in the Messianic Age of global and universal peace.
Early in the Second Temple period hopes for a better future are described in the Jewish scriptures. After the return from the Babylonian exile, Cyrus the Great was called "messiah" in Isaiah, due to his role in the return of the Jews exiles.
A number of messianic ideas developed during the later Second Temple Period, ranging from this-worldy, political expectations, to apocalyptic expectations of an endtime in which the dead would be resurrected and the Kingdom of Heaven would be established on earth. The Messiah might be a kingly "son of David" or a more heavenly "son of man", but "Messianism became increasingly eschatological, and eschatology was decisively influenced by apocalypticism," while "messianic expectations became increasingly focused on the figure of an individual savior. According to Zwi Werblowsky, "the Messiah no longer symbolized the coming of the new age, but he was somehow supposed to bring it about. The "Lord's anointed" thus became the "savior and redeemer" and the focus of more intense expectations and doctrines." Messianic ideas developed both by new interpretations (pesher, midrash) of the Jewish scriptures, but also by visionary revelations.
The Babylonian Talmud (200–500 CE), tractate Sanhedrin, contains a long discussion of the events leading to the coming of the Messiah. Throughout their history Jews have compared these passages (and others) to contemporary events in search of signs of the Messiah's imminent arrival, continuing into present times.
The Talmud tells many stories about the Messiah, some of which represent famous Talmudic rabbis as receiving personal visitations from Elijah the Prophet and the Messiah.
In rabbinic literature, the rabbis elaborated and explained the prophecies that were found in the Hebrew Bible along with the oral law and rabbinic traditions about its meaning.
Maimonides' commentary to tractate Sanhedrin stresses a relatively naturalistic interpretation of the Messiah, de-emphasizing miraculous elements. His commentary became widely (although not universally) accepted in the non- or less-mystical branches of Orthodox Judaism.
The belief in a human Messiah of the Davidic line is a universal tenet of faith among Orthodox Jews and one of Maimonides' thirteen principles of faith.
Some authorities in Orthodox Judaism believe that this era will lead to supernatural events culminating in a bodily resurrection of the dead. Maimonides, on the other hand, holds that the events of the Messianic Era are not specifically connected with the resurrection.
Conservative Judaism varies in its teachings. While it retains traditional references to a personal redeemer and prayers for the restoration of the Davidic line in the liturgy, Conservative Jews are more inclined to accept the idea of a Messianic Era:
We do not know when the Messiah will come, nor whether he will be a charismatic human figure or is a symbol of the redemption of mankind from the evils of the world. Through the doctrine of a Messianic figure, Judaism teaches us that every individual human being must live as if he or she, individually, has the responsibility to bring about the messianic age. Beyond that, we echo the words of Maimonides based on the prophet Habakkuk (2:3) that though he may tarry, yet do we wait for him each day... (Emet ve-Emunah: Statement of Principles of Conservative Judaism)
Reform Judaism generally concurs with the more liberal Conservative perspective of a future Messianic Era rather than a human Messiah. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Jewish eschatology is the area of Jewish theology concerned with events that will happen in the end of days and related concepts. This includes the ingathering of the exiled diaspora, the coming of the Jewish Messiah, the afterlife, and the resurrection of the dead. In Judaism, the end times are usually called the \"end of days\" (aḥarit ha-yamim, אחרית הימים), a phrase that appears several times in the Tanakh.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "These beliefs have evolved over time, and according to some authors there is evidence of Jewish belief in a personal afterlife with reward or punishment referenced in the Torah.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In Judaism, the main textual source for the belief in the end of days and accompanying events is the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible. The roots of Jewish eschatology are to be found in the pre-exile prophets, including Isaiah and Jeremiah, and the exilic prophets Ezekiel and Deutero-Isaiah. The main tenets of Jewish eschatology are the following, in no particular order, elaborated in the Book of Isaiah, the Book of Jeremiah and the Book of Ezekiel.",
"title": "Sources"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "According to Ezekiel chapter 38, the \"war of Gog and Magog\" is a climactic war that will happen at the end of the Jewish exile. According to biblical commentator and rabbi David Kimhi, this war will take place in Jerusalem.",
"title": "The End of Days"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The afterlife is known as olam ha-ba (literally “coming world\" or \"next world\", עולם הבא in Hebrew), and is related to concepts of Gan Eden, the Heavenly \"Garden in Eden\", or Paradise, and Gehinnom. The phrase “olam ha-ba” itself does not occur in the Hebrew Bible. The accepted halakha is that it is impossible for living human beings to know what the world to come is like.",
"title": "World to come"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In the late Second Temple period, beliefs about the ultimate fate of an individual were diverse. The Pharisees and Essenes believed in the immortality of the soul, but the Sadducees did not. The Dead Sea Scrolls, Jewish pseudepigrapha and Jewish magical papyri all reflect this variety of opinions.",
"title": "World to come"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "While all classical rabbinic sources discuss the afterlife, Medieval scholars dispute the nature of existence in the \"End of Days\" after the Messianic Age. While Maimonides describes an entirely spiritual existence for souls, which he calls \"disembodied intellects,” Nachmanides discusses an intensely spiritual existence on Earth, where spirituality and physicality are merged. Both agree that life after death is as Maimonides describes the \"End of Days.\" This existence entails an extremely heightened understanding of and connection to the Divine Presence. This view is shared by all classical rabbinic scholars.",
"title": "World to come"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "According to Maimonides, any non-Jew who lives according to the Seven Laws of Noah is regarded as a righteous gentile, and is assured of a place in the world to come, the final reward of the righteous.",
"title": "World to come"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "There is a great deal of surviving rabbinic material concerning the fate of the soul after death, its experiences, and where it goes. At various points in the afterlife journey, the soul may encounter: Hibbut ha-kever, the pains and experiences of the physico-spiritual dissolution or reconfiguration within the grave; Dumah, the angel in charge of funerary matters; Satan as the angel of death or other equally grim figure; the Kaf ha-Kela, the ensnarement or confinement of the stripped-down soul within various ghostly material reallocations (devised for the purpose of cleansing a soul of contamination but not severe enough to warrant Gehinnom, see Tanya Chapter 8)); Gehinnom (pure purgatory); and Gan Eden (heavenly respite or paradise, a purified state). All classical rabbinic scholars agree that these concepts are beyond typical human understanding, so these ideas are expressed throughout rabbinic literature via parables and analogies.",
"title": "World to come"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Gehinnom is fairly well defined in rabbinic literature. It is sometimes translated as \"hell\", but is more similar to the Nicene Christian view of Purgatory than to its Hell. Rabbinic thought maintains that souls are not tortured in Gehinnom forever; the longest that one can be there is said to be eleven months, with the exception of heretics and extremely sinful Jews. This is why Jews mourning for near relatives will not recite mourner's kaddish for more than eleven months after a death. Gehinnom is considered a spiritual forge where the soul is purified for its eventual ascent to Gan Eden (\"Garden of Eden\").",
"title": "World to come"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Rabbinic literature includes many legends about the World to Come and the two Gardens of Eden. As compiled by Louis Ginzberg in the book Legends of the Jews these include the world to come, which is called Paradise, and said to have a double gate made of carbuncle guarded by 600,000 shining angels. Seven clouds of glory overshadow Paradise, and under them, in the center of Paradise, stands the tree of life. The tree of life overshadows Paradise too, and it has fifteen thousand different tastes and aromas that winds blow all across Paradise. Under the tree of life are many pairs of canopies, one of stars and the other of sun and moon, while a cloud of glory separates the two. In each pair of canopies sits a rabbinic scholar who explains the Torah to one. When one enters Paradise, one is proffered by Michael the archangel to God on the altar of the Temple in the heavenly Jerusalem. One is transfigured into an angel, with the ugliest person becoming as beautiful and shining as \"the grains of a silver pomegranate upon which fall the rays of the sun”. The angels that guard Paradise's gate adorn the soul in seven clouds of glory, crown it with gems and pearls and gold, place eight myrtles in the hand, and praise it for being righteous while leading it to a garden of eight hundred roses and myrtles watered by many rivers. In the garden is one's canopy, its beauty according to one's merit, but each canopy has four rivers – milk, honey, wine, and balsam – flowing out from it, and has a golden vine and thirty shining pearls hanging from it. Under each canopy is a table of gems and pearls attended to by sixty angels. The light of Paradise is the light of the righteous people therein. Each day in Paradise one wakes up a child and goes to bed an elder to enjoy the pleasures of childhood, youth, adulthood, and old age. In each corner of Paradise is a forest of 800,000 trees, the least among these greater than the best herbs and spices, attended to by 800,000 sweetly singing angels. Paradise is divided into seven sub-paradises, each one 120,000 miles long and wide. Depending on one's merit, a soul is assigned to one of these sections of Paradise: the first is made of glass and cedar and is for converts to Judaism; the second is of silver and cedar and is for penitents; the third is of silver, gold, gems and pearls, and is for the Patriarchs, Moses and Aaron, the Israelites that left Egypt and lived in the wilderness, and the kings of Israel; the fourth is of rubies and olive wood and is for the holy and steadfast in faith; the fifth is like the third, except a river flows through it and its bed was woven by Eve and the angels, and it is for the Messiah and Elijah; and the sixth and seventh divisions are not described, except that they are respectively for those who died doing pious acts and those who died from illness in expiation for Israel's sins.",
"title": "World to come"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Above this Paradise is the higher Gan Eden, where God is enthroned and explains the Torah to its inhabitants. The higher Gan Eden contains 310 worlds and is divided into seven compartments. The compartments are not described, though it is implied that each compartment is greater than the previous one and is made open to a soul based on its merit. The first compartment is for Jewish martyrs, the second for those who drowned, the third for \"Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai and his disciples,\" the fourth for those whom the cloud of glory carried off, the fifth for penitents, the sixth for youths who have never sinned; and the seventh for the poor who lived decently and studied Torah.",
"title": "World to come"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "An early explicit mention of resurrection in Hebrew texts is the Vision of the Valley of Dry Bones in the Book of Ezekiel dated somewhere around 539 BCE. Alan Segal argues that this narrative was intended as a metaphor for national rebirth, promising the Jews return to Israel and reconstruction of the Temple, not as a description of personal resurrection.",
"title": "World to come"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The Book of Daniel promised literal resurrection to the Jews, in concrete detail. Alan Segal interprets Daniel as writing that with the coming of the Archangel Michael, misery would beset the world, and only those whose names were in a divine book would be resurrected. Moreover, Daniel's promise of resurrection was intended only for the most righteous and the most sinful because the afterlife was a place for the virtuous individuals to be rewarded and the sinful individuals to receive eternal punishment.",
"title": "World to come"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Greek and Persian culture influenced Jewish sects to believe in an afterlife between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE as well.",
"title": "World to come"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The Hebrew Bible, at least as seen through interpretation of Bavli Sanhedrin, contains frequent reference to resurrection of the dead. The Mishnah (c. 200) lists belief in the resurrection of the dead as one of three essential beliefs necessary for a Jew to participate in it:",
"title": "World to come"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "All Israel have a portion in the world to come, for it is written: 'Thy people are all righteous; they shall inherit the land forever, the branch of my planting, the work of my hands, that I may be glorified.' But the following have no portion therein: one who maintains that resurrection is not a biblical doctrine, the Torah was not divinely revealed, and an Apikoros ('heretic').",
"title": "World to come"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In the late Second Temple period, the Pharisees believed in resurrection, while Essenes and Sadducees did not. During the Rabbinic period, beginning in the late first century and carrying on to the present, the works of Daniel were included into the Hebrew Bible, signaling the adoption of Jewish resurrection into the officially sacred texts.",
"title": "World to come"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Jewish liturgy, most notably the Amidah, contains references to the tenet of the bodily resurrection of the dead. In contemporary Judaism, both Orthodox Judaism and Conservative Judaism maintain the traditional references to it in their liturgy. However, many Conservative Jews interpret the tenet metaphorically rather than literally. Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism have altered traditional references to the resurrection of the dead in the liturgy (\"who gives life to the dead\") to refer to \"who gives life to all.\"",
"title": "World to come"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In Judaism, the day of judgment happens every year on Rosh Hashanah; therefore, the belief in a last day of judgment for all mankind is disputed. Some rabbis hold that there will be such a day following the resurrection of the dead. Others hold that there is no need for that because of Rosh Hashanah. Yet others hold that this accounting and judgment happens when one dies. Other rabbis hold that the last judgment only applies to the gentile nations and not the Jewish people.",
"title": "World to come"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Irving Greenberg, representing an Open Orthodox viewpoint, describes the afterlife as a central Jewish teaching, deriving from the belief in reward and punishment. According to Greenberg, suffering Medieval Jews emphasized the World to Come as a counterpoint to the difficulties of this life, while early Jewish modernizers portrayed Judaism as interested only in this world as a counterpoint to \"otherworldly\" Christianity. Greenberg sees each of these views as leading to an undesired extreme – overemphasizing the afterlife leads to asceticism, while devaluing the afterlife deprives Jews of the consolation of eternal life and justice – and calls for a synthesis, in which Jews can work to perfect this world, while also recognizing the immortality of the soul.",
"title": "World to come"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Conservative Judaism both affirms belief in the world beyond (as referenced in the Amidah and Maimonides' Thirteen Precepts of Faith) while recognizing that human understanding is limited and we cannot know exactly what the world beyond consists of. Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism affirm belief in the afterlife, though they downplay the theological implications in favor of emphasizing the importance of the \"here and now,\" as opposed to reward and punishment. The Union for Reform Judaism believes the righteous of any faith have a place in heaven but does not believe in a concept of hell.",
"title": "World to come"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The Hebrew word mashiach (or moshiach) refers to the Jewish idea of the messiah. In biblical times the title mashiach was awarded to someone in a high position of nobility and greatness. For example, Cohen ha-Mašíaḥ means High Priest. While the name of the Jewish Messiah is considered to be one of the things that precede creation, he is not considered divine, in contrast to Christianity where Jesus is both divine and the Messiah.",
"title": "Jewish messianism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "In the Talmudic era the title Mashiach or מלך המשיח, Méleḵ ha-Mašíaḥ literally means \"the anointed King\". The Messiah is to be a human leader, physically descended from the Davidic line, who will rule and unite the people of Israel and will usher in the Messianic Age of global and universal peace.",
"title": "Jewish messianism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Early in the Second Temple period hopes for a better future are described in the Jewish scriptures. After the return from the Babylonian exile, Cyrus the Great was called \"messiah\" in Isaiah, due to his role in the return of the Jews exiles.",
"title": "Jewish messianism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "A number of messianic ideas developed during the later Second Temple Period, ranging from this-worldy, political expectations, to apocalyptic expectations of an endtime in which the dead would be resurrected and the Kingdom of Heaven would be established on earth. The Messiah might be a kingly \"son of David\" or a more heavenly \"son of man\", but \"Messianism became increasingly eschatological, and eschatology was decisively influenced by apocalypticism,\" while \"messianic expectations became increasingly focused on the figure of an individual savior. According to Zwi Werblowsky, \"the Messiah no longer symbolized the coming of the new age, but he was somehow supposed to bring it about. The \"Lord's anointed\" thus became the \"savior and redeemer\" and the focus of more intense expectations and doctrines.\" Messianic ideas developed both by new interpretations (pesher, midrash) of the Jewish scriptures, but also by visionary revelations.",
"title": "Jewish messianism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The Babylonian Talmud (200–500 CE), tractate Sanhedrin, contains a long discussion of the events leading to the coming of the Messiah. Throughout their history Jews have compared these passages (and others) to contemporary events in search of signs of the Messiah's imminent arrival, continuing into present times.",
"title": "Jewish messianism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The Talmud tells many stories about the Messiah, some of which represent famous Talmudic rabbis as receiving personal visitations from Elijah the Prophet and the Messiah.",
"title": "Jewish messianism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In rabbinic literature, the rabbis elaborated and explained the prophecies that were found in the Hebrew Bible along with the oral law and rabbinic traditions about its meaning.",
"title": "Jewish messianism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Maimonides' commentary to tractate Sanhedrin stresses a relatively naturalistic interpretation of the Messiah, de-emphasizing miraculous elements. His commentary became widely (although not universally) accepted in the non- or less-mystical branches of Orthodox Judaism.",
"title": "Jewish messianism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The belief in a human Messiah of the Davidic line is a universal tenet of faith among Orthodox Jews and one of Maimonides' thirteen principles of faith.",
"title": "Jewish messianism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Some authorities in Orthodox Judaism believe that this era will lead to supernatural events culminating in a bodily resurrection of the dead. Maimonides, on the other hand, holds that the events of the Messianic Era are not specifically connected with the resurrection.",
"title": "Jewish messianism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Conservative Judaism varies in its teachings. While it retains traditional references to a personal redeemer and prayers for the restoration of the Davidic line in the liturgy, Conservative Jews are more inclined to accept the idea of a Messianic Era:",
"title": "Jewish messianism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "We do not know when the Messiah will come, nor whether he will be a charismatic human figure or is a symbol of the redemption of mankind from the evils of the world. Through the doctrine of a Messianic figure, Judaism teaches us that every individual human being must live as if he or she, individually, has the responsibility to bring about the messianic age. Beyond that, we echo the words of Maimonides based on the prophet Habakkuk (2:3) that though he may tarry, yet do we wait for him each day... (Emet ve-Emunah: Statement of Principles of Conservative Judaism)",
"title": "Jewish messianism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Reform Judaism generally concurs with the more liberal Conservative perspective of a future Messianic Era rather than a human Messiah.",
"title": "Jewish messianism"
}
]
| Jewish eschatology is the area of Jewish theology concerned with events that will happen in the end of days and related concepts. This includes the ingathering of the exiled diaspora, the coming of the Jewish Messiah, the afterlife, and the resurrection of the dead. In Judaism, the end times are usually called the "end of days", a phrase that appears several times in the Tanakh. These beliefs have evolved over time, and according to some authors there is evidence of Jewish belief in a personal afterlife with reward or punishment referenced in the Torah. | 2001-11-04T13:25:32Z | 2023-12-12T20:52:47Z | [
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16,163 | Judah | Judah or Yehuda is the name of a biblical patriarch, Judah (son of Jacob). It may also refer to: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Judah or Yehuda is the name of a biblical patriarch, Judah (son of Jacob). It may also refer to:",
"title": ""
}
]
| Judah or Yehuda is the name of a biblical patriarch, Judah. It may also refer to: | 2001-10-02T12:34:45Z | 2023-10-11T04:09:00Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judah |
16,164 | John Macleod (physiologist) | John James Rickard Macleod, FRS, FRSE (6 September 1876 – 16 March 1935), was a Scottish biochemist and physiologist. He devoted his career to diverse topics in physiology and biochemistry, but was chiefly interested in carbohydrate metabolism. He is noted for his role in the discovery and isolation of insulin during his tenure as a lecturer at the University of Toronto, for which he and Frederick Banting received the 1923 Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Macleod was born in Clunie, near Dunkeld in Perthshire. Soon after he was born, his father Robert Macleod, a minister of the Free Church, was transferred to Aberdeen, where John attended Aberdeen Grammar School and enrolled in the study of medicine at the University of Aberdeen. At the University of Aberdeen, one of Macleod's principal teachers was the young professor John Alexander MacWilliam. He was awarded his medical degree with honours in 1898 and then spent a year studying biochemistry at the University of Leipzig, Germany, on a travelling scholarship. He became a demonstrator at the London Hospital Medical School, where in 1902 he was appointed lecturer in biochemistry. In the same year, he was awarded a doctorate in public health from Cambridge University. Around that time he published his first research article, a paper on phosphorus content in muscles.
In 1903, Macleod became a lecturer in physiology at the Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, where he remained for 15 years. This was the period when he developed an interest in carbohydrate metabolism that was to last for the rest of his career.
In 1910, he delivered a lecture on various forms of experimental diabetes and their significance for diabetes mellitus at the joint meeting of the section on Pharmacology and Therapeutics and the section on Pathology and Physiology of the American Medical Association.
In 1916, he was a Professor of Physiology at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. After the First World War, he went on to teach physiology at the University of Toronto, where he became director of the physiology lab and an assistant to the dean of the medical faculty. He researched various topics in physiology and biochemistry, among which were the chemism of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, electroshocks, creatinine metabolism and blood circulation in the brain.
In 1905 he became interested in carbohydrate metabolism and diabetes, publishing a series of scientific papers and several monographs on the subject from then on. Additionally, Macleod was a popular lecturer and an influential contributor to the development of the six-year course in medicine at the University of Toronto.
At the end of 1920, Macleod was approached by Frederick Banting, a young Canadian physician who had the idea of curing diabetes using an extract from a pancreas whose functioning had been disrupted. Macleod was not enthusiastic, because (unlike Banting) he knew about unsuccessful experiments in this direction by other researchers. He thought it more likely that the nervous system had a crucial role in regulating blood glucose concentration. Macleod was not initially impressed by his interview with Banting. However, he came to the conclusion that it was worth trying because the results may be of "great physiological value," and granted Banting laboratory space while Macleod himself would be away on holiday. In addition to the laboratory, Macleod provided experimental animals and his student Charles Best, who worked as a demonstrator. Macleod instructed Banting on the accepted method of pancreatectomy to be used on the experimental subjects. While he was of the opinion that the project would "go up in smoke," Macleod believed it would at least be good training for Best. While Macleod was away, Banting and Best achieved a breakthrough: They isolated an internal secretion of the pancreas and succeeded in reducing the blood sugar level of another dog, whose pancreas had been surgically removed.
On his return, Macleod expressed doubt about the results, leading tensions between himself and Banting to mount. They argued bitterly over Banting's demands to Macleod, which included a salary for himself and Best, a private room to work in, an assistant to take care of the dogs, and repairs for the operating room. Macleod initially declined on the grounds that this would cause other research in the department to suffer, to which Banting remarked that he would take the research elsewhere if the University of Toronto did not see any value in it. Macleod relented, and for a while their relations improved. Further experiments were successful and the three started to present their work at meetings. Again worsening the relationship between the researchers was Macleod's tendency to speak on behalf of the team. This was exemplified by a December 1921 presentation to the American Physiological Society at Yale, where Banting and Best were due to present their findings. Banting felt he had not presented well but wanted to answer audence questions. However, it was Macleod who addressed the audience next, to which Banting took offense. After their return to Toronto, Macleod was persuaded by another professor to apologize to Banting, smoothing over the relationship once again.
Their discovery was first published in the February 1922 issue of The Journal of Laboratory and Clinical Medicine. Macleod declined co-authorship because he considered it Banting's and Best's work. Despite their success, there remained the issue of how to get enough pancreas extract to continue the experiments. Together, the three researchers developed alcohol extraction, which proved to be far more efficient than other methods. This convinced Macleod to divert the whole laboratory to insulin research and to bring in the biochemist James Collip to help with purifying the extract.
The first human clinical trial was unsuccessful. Towards the end of January 1922, there was an altercation between Banting and Collip, who refused to share details of his alcohol purification. Banting and Best viewed this as a violation of a verbal agreement to share their discoveries with each other. Collip threatened to leave because of the strained atmosphere but the encouragement of others who saw the potential of their research prevented escalation of the conflict. That same month, the team performed the first successful clinical trial, on 13-year-old Leonard Thompson, and it was soon followed by others.
Demonstrations of the method's efficiency drew huge public interest, because the effect on patients, especially children, who until then were bound to die, seemed almost miraculous. The pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly & Co. took over mass production, but without an exclusive license, as the patent was transferred to the Medical Research Council to prevent exploitation.
In the summer of 1923 Macleod resumed other research. He took interest in teleost fish, which have separate regions of islet and acinar tissue in their pancreas. Working at the Marine Biological Station in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, he made extracts from each of those parts separately and proved that insulin is derived from the insular and not the acinar tissue of the pancreas. Meanwhile, Banting remained in Toronto and relationships soon deteriorated again because of conflicting press accounts. Macleod wrote a report on the discovery in 1922, but otherwise refrained from active involvement in controversy about credit. Banting hated him passionately, believing Macleod had purposely overstated his and the University of Toronto's contributions to the discovery, and the two never spoke again. When Macleod left the University of Toronto in 1928, Banting harbored such enmity that he refused to attend the farewell dinner for Macleod.
Macleod returned to Scotland in 1928 to become Regius Professor of Physiology at the University of Aberdeen (in succession to his former teacher, John Alexander MacWilliam who retired in 1927) and later Dean of the University of Aberdeen Medical Faculty. Between 1929 and 1933 he was also a member of the Medical Research Council.
Macleod did not continue to work on insulin, but he remained active as a researcher, lecturer and author. His last major contribution was a proof that the central nervous system does have an important role in maintaining carbohydrate metabolism balance, as was his original hypothesis. His theory about conversion of fats into carbohydrates remained unproven, despite his provision of several indirect proofs. He devoted his spare time to golf, motorcycling and painting. He was married to Mary W. McWalter, but they never had children. He died in 1935 in Aberdeen after several years of suffering from arthritis, despite which he remained active almost until his death. In 1933 he made a lecture tour of the US, and in 1934 he published the 7th edition of his book Physiology and Biochemistry in Modern Medicine.
Macleod was a prolific writer. His first academic article was a paper on phosphorus content in muscles published in 1899. During his career he authored or co-authored over 200 papers and eleven books. Among them are:
John Macleod was a distinguished physiologist prior to the discovery of insulin. He was elected a member of the Royal Society of Canada in 1919 and president of American Physiological Society in 1921. In 1923, Macleod was awarded the Cameron Prize for Therapeutics of the University of Edinburgh. Among the recognitions he received after 1923 were memberships of the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, corresponding membership of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and honorary membership of the Regia Accademia Medica.
Macleod's reputation in Canada was overshadowed by the contributions of Banting and Best. It was only in the 1980s that it became commonly accepted that Banting's and Best's story was distorted, since more documentation had been made publicly available, and it made a precise reconstruction of the events possible. Until Best died, this documentation had been kept confidntial for over 50 years by the University of Toronto, whose administration wanted to avoid fuelling the controversy. The auditorium of the Toronto University Medical Research Centre was named in his honour, as was Diabetes UK's award for patients who survive for 70 years with diabetes. In 2012, he was inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame.
The Nobel Committee reacted almost immediately to the first successful clinical trials. In the autumn of 1923, Banting and Macleod received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, even though the long-term importance of the discovery was not yet apparent. They were nominated by the Danish physiologist and Nobel laureate August Krogh, who had a diabetic wife and had visited Macleod's laboratory and taken the method back to Denmark. The committee concluded that Macleod's work in interpreting the data, managing the clinical trials and providing a high level of public presentation were crucial for success, so they awarded the Nobel prize to both. Upon accepting, Banting gave half of his prize money to Best. Macleod in turn gave half of his to Collip. In 1972 the Nobel Foundation officially conceded that omitting Best was a mistake.
A second controversial aspect of the award was the fact that eight months before Banting's and Best's paper, the Romanian physiologist Nicolae Paulescu had reported the discovery of a pancreas extract that he dubbed pancrein, which lowered blood glucose concentration. Banting and Best cited him in their paper, but misinterpreted his findings, purportedly because of an error in translation from French. Best publicly apologized for that mistake many years later. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "John James Rickard Macleod, FRS, FRSE (6 September 1876 – 16 March 1935), was a Scottish biochemist and physiologist. He devoted his career to diverse topics in physiology and biochemistry, but was chiefly interested in carbohydrate metabolism. He is noted for his role in the discovery and isolation of insulin during his tenure as a lecturer at the University of Toronto, for which he and Frederick Banting received the 1923 Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Macleod was born in Clunie, near Dunkeld in Perthshire. Soon after he was born, his father Robert Macleod, a minister of the Free Church, was transferred to Aberdeen, where John attended Aberdeen Grammar School and enrolled in the study of medicine at the University of Aberdeen. At the University of Aberdeen, one of Macleod's principal teachers was the young professor John Alexander MacWilliam. He was awarded his medical degree with honours in 1898 and then spent a year studying biochemistry at the University of Leipzig, Germany, on a travelling scholarship. He became a demonstrator at the London Hospital Medical School, where in 1902 he was appointed lecturer in biochemistry. In the same year, he was awarded a doctorate in public health from Cambridge University. Around that time he published his first research article, a paper on phosphorus content in muscles.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In 1903, Macleod became a lecturer in physiology at the Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, where he remained for 15 years. This was the period when he developed an interest in carbohydrate metabolism that was to last for the rest of his career.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In 1910, he delivered a lecture on various forms of experimental diabetes and their significance for diabetes mellitus at the joint meeting of the section on Pharmacology and Therapeutics and the section on Pathology and Physiology of the American Medical Association.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In 1916, he was a Professor of Physiology at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. After the First World War, he went on to teach physiology at the University of Toronto, where he became director of the physiology lab and an assistant to the dean of the medical faculty. He researched various topics in physiology and biochemistry, among which were the chemism of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, electroshocks, creatinine metabolism and blood circulation in the brain.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In 1905 he became interested in carbohydrate metabolism and diabetes, publishing a series of scientific papers and several monographs on the subject from then on. Additionally, Macleod was a popular lecturer and an influential contributor to the development of the six-year course in medicine at the University of Toronto.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "At the end of 1920, Macleod was approached by Frederick Banting, a young Canadian physician who had the idea of curing diabetes using an extract from a pancreas whose functioning had been disrupted. Macleod was not enthusiastic, because (unlike Banting) he knew about unsuccessful experiments in this direction by other researchers. He thought it more likely that the nervous system had a crucial role in regulating blood glucose concentration. Macleod was not initially impressed by his interview with Banting. However, he came to the conclusion that it was worth trying because the results may be of \"great physiological value,\" and granted Banting laboratory space while Macleod himself would be away on holiday. In addition to the laboratory, Macleod provided experimental animals and his student Charles Best, who worked as a demonstrator. Macleod instructed Banting on the accepted method of pancreatectomy to be used on the experimental subjects. While he was of the opinion that the project would \"go up in smoke,\" Macleod believed it would at least be good training for Best. While Macleod was away, Banting and Best achieved a breakthrough: They isolated an internal secretion of the pancreas and succeeded in reducing the blood sugar level of another dog, whose pancreas had been surgically removed.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "On his return, Macleod expressed doubt about the results, leading tensions between himself and Banting to mount. They argued bitterly over Banting's demands to Macleod, which included a salary for himself and Best, a private room to work in, an assistant to take care of the dogs, and repairs for the operating room. Macleod initially declined on the grounds that this would cause other research in the department to suffer, to which Banting remarked that he would take the research elsewhere if the University of Toronto did not see any value in it. Macleod relented, and for a while their relations improved. Further experiments were successful and the three started to present their work at meetings. Again worsening the relationship between the researchers was Macleod's tendency to speak on behalf of the team. This was exemplified by a December 1921 presentation to the American Physiological Society at Yale, where Banting and Best were due to present their findings. Banting felt he had not presented well but wanted to answer audence questions. However, it was Macleod who addressed the audience next, to which Banting took offense. After their return to Toronto, Macleod was persuaded by another professor to apologize to Banting, smoothing over the relationship once again.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Their discovery was first published in the February 1922 issue of The Journal of Laboratory and Clinical Medicine. Macleod declined co-authorship because he considered it Banting's and Best's work. Despite their success, there remained the issue of how to get enough pancreas extract to continue the experiments. Together, the three researchers developed alcohol extraction, which proved to be far more efficient than other methods. This convinced Macleod to divert the whole laboratory to insulin research and to bring in the biochemist James Collip to help with purifying the extract.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The first human clinical trial was unsuccessful. Towards the end of January 1922, there was an altercation between Banting and Collip, who refused to share details of his alcohol purification. Banting and Best viewed this as a violation of a verbal agreement to share their discoveries with each other. Collip threatened to leave because of the strained atmosphere but the encouragement of others who saw the potential of their research prevented escalation of the conflict. That same month, the team performed the first successful clinical trial, on 13-year-old Leonard Thompson, and it was soon followed by others.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Demonstrations of the method's efficiency drew huge public interest, because the effect on patients, especially children, who until then were bound to die, seemed almost miraculous. The pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly & Co. took over mass production, but without an exclusive license, as the patent was transferred to the Medical Research Council to prevent exploitation.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In the summer of 1923 Macleod resumed other research. He took interest in teleost fish, which have separate regions of islet and acinar tissue in their pancreas. Working at the Marine Biological Station in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, he made extracts from each of those parts separately and proved that insulin is derived from the insular and not the acinar tissue of the pancreas. Meanwhile, Banting remained in Toronto and relationships soon deteriorated again because of conflicting press accounts. Macleod wrote a report on the discovery in 1922, but otherwise refrained from active involvement in controversy about credit. Banting hated him passionately, believing Macleod had purposely overstated his and the University of Toronto's contributions to the discovery, and the two never spoke again. When Macleod left the University of Toronto in 1928, Banting harbored such enmity that he refused to attend the farewell dinner for Macleod.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Macleod returned to Scotland in 1928 to become Regius Professor of Physiology at the University of Aberdeen (in succession to his former teacher, John Alexander MacWilliam who retired in 1927) and later Dean of the University of Aberdeen Medical Faculty. Between 1929 and 1933 he was also a member of the Medical Research Council.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Macleod did not continue to work on insulin, but he remained active as a researcher, lecturer and author. His last major contribution was a proof that the central nervous system does have an important role in maintaining carbohydrate metabolism balance, as was his original hypothesis. His theory about conversion of fats into carbohydrates remained unproven, despite his provision of several indirect proofs. He devoted his spare time to golf, motorcycling and painting. He was married to Mary W. McWalter, but they never had children. He died in 1935 in Aberdeen after several years of suffering from arthritis, despite which he remained active almost until his death. In 1933 he made a lecture tour of the US, and in 1934 he published the 7th edition of his book Physiology and Biochemistry in Modern Medicine.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Macleod was a prolific writer. His first academic article was a paper on phosphorus content in muscles published in 1899. During his career he authored or co-authored over 200 papers and eleven books. Among them are:",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "John Macleod was a distinguished physiologist prior to the discovery of insulin. He was elected a member of the Royal Society of Canada in 1919 and president of American Physiological Society in 1921. In 1923, Macleod was awarded the Cameron Prize for Therapeutics of the University of Edinburgh. Among the recognitions he received after 1923 were memberships of the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, corresponding membership of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and honorary membership of the Regia Accademia Medica.",
"title": "Awards and honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Macleod's reputation in Canada was overshadowed by the contributions of Banting and Best. It was only in the 1980s that it became commonly accepted that Banting's and Best's story was distorted, since more documentation had been made publicly available, and it made a precise reconstruction of the events possible. Until Best died, this documentation had been kept confidntial for over 50 years by the University of Toronto, whose administration wanted to avoid fuelling the controversy. The auditorium of the Toronto University Medical Research Centre was named in his honour, as was Diabetes UK's award for patients who survive for 70 years with diabetes. In 2012, he was inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame.",
"title": "Awards and honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The Nobel Committee reacted almost immediately to the first successful clinical trials. In the autumn of 1923, Banting and Macleod received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, even though the long-term importance of the discovery was not yet apparent. They were nominated by the Danish physiologist and Nobel laureate August Krogh, who had a diabetic wife and had visited Macleod's laboratory and taken the method back to Denmark. The committee concluded that Macleod's work in interpreting the data, managing the clinical trials and providing a high level of public presentation were crucial for success, so they awarded the Nobel prize to both. Upon accepting, Banting gave half of his prize money to Best. Macleod in turn gave half of his to Collip. In 1972 the Nobel Foundation officially conceded that omitting Best was a mistake.",
"title": "Awards and honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "A second controversial aspect of the award was the fact that eight months before Banting's and Best's paper, the Romanian physiologist Nicolae Paulescu had reported the discovery of a pancreas extract that he dubbed pancrein, which lowered blood glucose concentration. Banting and Best cited him in their paper, but misinterpreted his findings, purportedly because of an error in translation from French. Best publicly apologized for that mistake many years later.",
"title": "Awards and honours"
}
]
| John James Rickard Macleod,, was a Scottish biochemist and physiologist. He devoted his career to diverse topics in physiology and biochemistry, but was chiefly interested in carbohydrate metabolism. He is noted for his role in the discovery and isolation of insulin during his tenure as a lecturer at the University of Toronto, for which he and Frederick Banting received the 1923 Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine. | 2001-10-02T10:31:16Z | 2023-12-20T05:47:44Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Macleod_(physiologist) |
16,167 | Jackson, Mississippi | Jackson is the capital of and the most populous city in the U.S. state of Mississippi. Along with Raymond, Jackson is one of two county seats for Hinds County. The city had a population of 153,701 at the 2020 census, a significant decline from 173,514, or 11.42%, since the 2010 census, representing the largest decline in population during the decade of any major U.S. city. Jackson is the anchor for the Jackson metropolitan statistical area, the largest metropolitan area located entirely in the state and the tenth-largest urban area in the Deep South. With a 2020 population of nearly 600,000, metropolitan Jackson is home to over one-fifth of Mississippi's population. The city sits on the Pearl River and is located in the greater Jackson Prairie region of Mississippi. Jackson is the only city in Mississippi with a population exceeding 100,000 people.
Founded in 1821 as new state capital for Mississippi, Jackson is named after General Andrew Jackson, a war hero in the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812 and subsequently the seventh U.S. president. Following the Battle of Vicksburg, which was fought near Jackson during the American Civil War in 1863, Union forces commanded by General William Tecumseh Sherman launched the siege of Jackson and set the city on fire.
During the 1920s, Jackson surpassed Meridian to become the most populous city in the state following a speculative natural gas boom in the region. The current slogan for the city is "The City with Soul". It has had numerous musicians prominent in blues, gospel, folk, and jazz. The city is located in the deep south halfway between Memphis and New Orleans on Interstate 55 and Dallas and Atlanta on Interstate 20.
The city has a number of museums and cultural institutions, including the Mississippi Children's Museum, Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, Mississippi Museum of Art, Old Capital Museum, Museum of Mississippi History. Other notable locations are the Mississippi Coliseum and the Mississippi Veterans Memorial Stadium, home of the Jackson State Tigers football team.
The Jackson metropolitan statistical area is the state's second-largest metropolitan area. In 2020, the Jackson metropolitan area held a GDP of 30 billion dollars, accounting for 29% of the state's total GDP of 104.1 billion dollars.
Located on the historic Natchez Trace trade route, created by Native Americans and used by European American settlers, and on the Pearl River, the city's first European American settler was Louis LeFleur, a French-Canadian trader. The village became known as LeFleur's Bluff. During the late 18th century and early 19th century, this site had a trading post. It was connected to markets in Tennessee. Soldiers returning to Tennessee from the military campaigns near New Orleans in 1815 built a public road that connected Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana to this district. A United States treaty with the Choctaw, the Treaty of Doak's Stand in 1820, formally opened the area for non-Native American settlers.
LeFleur's Bluff was developed when it was chosen as the site for the new state's capital city. The Mississippi General Assembly decided in 1821 that the state needed a centrally located capital (the legislature was then located in Natchez). They commissioned Thomas Hinds, James Patton, and William Lattimore to look for a suitable site. The absolute center of the state was a swamp, so the group had to widen their search.
After surveying areas north and east of Jackson, they proceeded southwest along with the Pearl River until they reached LeFleur's Bluff in today's Hinds County. Their report to the General Assembly stated that this location had beautiful and healthful surroundings, good water, abundant timber, navigable waters, and proximity to the Natchez Trace. The Assembly passed an act on November 28, 1821, authorizing the site as the permanent seat of the government of the state of Mississippi. On the same day, it passed a resolution to instruct the Washington delegation to press Congress for a donation of public lands on the river for improved navigation to the Gulf of Mexico. One Whig politician lamented the new capital as a "serious violation of principle" because it was not at the absolute center of the state.
The capital was named for General Andrew Jackson, to honor his January 1815 victory at the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812. He was later elected as the seventh president of the United States.
The city of Jackson was originally planned, in April 1822, by Peter Aaron Van Dorn in a "checkerboard" pattern advocated by Thomas Jefferson. City blocks alternated with parks and other open spaces. Over time, many of the park squares have been developed rather than maintained as green space. The state legislature first met in Jackson on December 23, 1822. In 1839, the Mississippi Legislature passed the first state law in the U.S. to permit married women to own and administer their own property.
Jackson was connected by public road to Vicksburg and Clinton in 1826. Jackson was first connected by railroad to other cities in 1840. An 1844 map shows Jackson linked by an east–west rail line running between Vicksburg, Raymond, and Brandon. Unlike Vicksburg, Greenville, and Natchez, Jackson is not located on the Mississippi River, and it did not develop during the antebellum era as those cities did from major river commerce. The construction of railroad lines to the city sparked its growth in the decades following the American Civil War.
Despite its small population, during the Civil War, Jackson became a strategic center of manufacturing for the Confederacy. In 1863, during the military campaign which ended in the capture of Vicksburg, Union forces captured Jackson during two battles—once before the fall of Vicksburg and once after the fall of Vicksburg.
On May 13, 1863, Union forces won the first Battle of Jackson, forcing Confederate forces to flee northward towards Canton. On May 14, Union troops under the command of William Tecumseh Sherman burned and looted key facilities in Jackson, a strategic manufacturing and railroad center for the Confederacy. After driving the Confederate forces out of Jackson, Union forces turned west and engaged the Vicksburg defenders at the Battle of Champion Hill in nearby Edwards. The Union forces began their siege of Vicksburg soon after their victory at Champion Hill. Confederate forces began to reassemble in Jackson in preparation for an attempt to break through the Union lines surrounding Vicksburg and end the siege. The Confederate forces in Jackson built defensive fortifications encircling the city while preparing to march west to Vicksburg.
Confederate forces marched out of Jackson in early July 1863 to break the siege of Vicksburg. But, unknown to them, Vicksburg had already surrendered on July 4, 1863. General Ulysses S. Grant dispatched General Sherman to meet the Confederate forces heading west from Jackson. Upon learning that Vicksburg had already surrendered, the Confederates retreated into Jackson. Union forces began the siege of Jackson, which lasted for approximately one week. Union forces encircled the city and began an artillery bombardment. One of the Union artillery emplacements has been preserved on the grounds of the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson. Another Federal position is preserved on the campus of Millsaps College. John C. Breckinridge, former United States vice president, served as one of the Confederate generals defending Jackson. On July 16, 1863, Confederate forces slipped out of Jackson during the night and retreated across the Pearl River.
Union forces completely burned the city after its capture this second time. The city was called "Chimneyville" because only the chimneys of houses were left standing. The northern line of Confederate defenses in Jackson during the siege was located along a road near downtown Jackson, now known as Fortification Street.
Because of the siege and following destruction, few antebellum structures have survived in Jackson. The Governor's Mansion, built in 1842, served as Sherman's headquarters and has been preserved. Another is the Old Capitol building, which served as the home of the Mississippi state legislature from 1839 to 1903. The Mississippi legislature passed the ordinance of secession from the Union there on January 9, 1861, becoming the second state to secede from the United States. The Jackson City Hall, built in 1846 for less than $8,000, also survived. It is said that Sherman, a Mason, spared it because it housed a Masonic Lodge, though a more likely reason is that it housed an army hospital.
During Reconstruction, Republicans granted African Americans civil rights. Schools were established and African Americans held political offices. Eugene Welborne, Charles Reese, Weldon Hicks, and George Caldwell Granberry were among the legislators who represented Hinds County in the legislature. African Americans also served in local offices, as judges, and as marshalls.
Mississippi had considerable insurgent action, as whites struggled to maintain white supremacy. Jackson's appointed mayor Joseph G. Crane was stabbed to death in 1869. The assailant, Edward M. Yerger, was arrested by military authorities but, after a U.S. Supreme Court case (Ex parte Yerger), he was bonded out, moved to Baltimore and was never tried.
The economic recovery from the Civil War was slow through the start of the 20th century, but there were some developments in transportation. In 1871, the city introduced mule-drawn streetcars which ran on State Street, which were replaced by electric ones in 1899. In 1875, the Red Shirts were formed, one of the second waves of insurgent paramilitary organizations that essentially operated as "the military arm of the Democratic Party" to take back political power from the Republicans and to drive black people from the polls (Mississippi Plan).
Democrats regained control of the state legislature in 1876. The constitutional convention of 1890, which produced Mississippi's Constitution of 1890, was held at the capitol. This was the first of new constitutions or amendments ratified in each Southern state through 1908 that effectively disenfranchised most African Americans and many poor whites, through provisions making voter registration more difficult: such as poll taxes, residency requirements, and literacy tests. These provisions survived a Supreme Court challenge in 1898. As 20th-century Supreme Court decisions later ruled such provisions were unconstitutional, Mississippi and other Southern states rapidly devised new methods to continue disfranchisement of most black people, who comprised a majority in the state until the 1930s. Their exclusion from politics was maintained into the late 1960s.
The so-called New Capitol replaced the older structure upon its completion in 1903. Today the Old Capitol is operated as a historical museum.
Author Eudora Welty was born in Jackson in 1909, lived most of her life in the Belhaven section of the city, and died there in 2001. Her memoir of development as a writer, One Writer's Beginnings (1984), presented a picture of the city in the early 20th century. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for her novel, The Optimist's Daughter, and is best known for her novels and short stories. The main library of the Jackson/Hinds Library System was named in her honor, and her home has been designated as a National Historic Landmark.
Richard Wright, a highly acclaimed African-American author, lived in Jackson as an adolescent and young man in the 1910s and 1920s. He related his experience in his memoir Black Boy (1945). He described the harsh and largely terror-filled life most African Americans experienced in the South and Northern ghettos such as Chicago under segregation in the early 20th century.
Jackson had significant growth in the early 20th century, which produced dramatic changes in the city's skyline. Jackson's new Union Station downtown reflected the city's service by multiple rail lines, including the Illinois Central.
Across the street, the new, luxurious King Edward Hotel opened its doors in 1923, having been built according to a design by New Orleans architect William T. Nolan. It became a center for prestigious events held by Jackson society and Mississippi politicians. Nearby, the 18-story Standard Life Building, designed in 1929 by Claude Lindsley, was the largest reinforced concrete structure in the world upon its completion.
Jackson's economic growth was further stimulated in the 1930s by the discovery of natural gas fields nearby. Speculators had begun searching for oil and natural gas in Jackson beginning in 1920. The initial drilling attempts came up empty. This failure did not stop Ella Render from obtaining a lease from the state's insane asylum to begin a well on its grounds in 1924, where he found natural gas. (Render eventually lost the rights when courts determined that the asylum did not have the right to lease the state's property.) Businessmen jumped on the opportunity and dug wells in the Jackson area. The continued success of these ventures attracted further investment. By 1930, there were 14 derricks in the Jackson skyline.
Mississippi Governor Theodore Bilbo stated:
It is no idle dream to prophesy that the state's share [of the oil and natural gas profits] properly safe-guarded would soon pay the state's entire bonded indebtedness and even be great enough to defray all the state's expenses and make our state tax free so long as obligations are concerned.
This enthusiasm was subdued when the first wells failed to produce oil of a sufficiently high gravity for commercial success. The barrels of oil had considerable amounts of saltwater, which lessened the quality. The governor's prediction was wrong in hindsight, but the oil and natural gas industry did provide an economic boost for the city and state. The effects of the Great Depression were mitigated by the industry's success. At its height in 1934, there were 113 producing wells in the state. The overwhelming majority were closed by 1955.
Due to provisions in the federal Rivers and Harbors Act, on October 25, 1930, city leaders met with U.S. Army engineers to ask for federal help to alleviate Jackson flooding. J.J. Halbert, city engineer, proposed a straightening and dredging of the Pearl River below Jackson.
During Mississippi's extended Prohibition period, from the 1920s until the 1960s, illegal drinking and gambling casinos flourished on the east side of the Pearl River, in Flowood along with the original U.S. Route 80 just across from the city of Jackson. Those illegal casinos, bootleg liquor stores, and nightclubs made up the Gold Coast, a strip of mostly black-market businesses that operated for decades along Flowood Road. Although outside the law, the Gold Coast was a thriving center of nightlife and music, with many local blues musicians appearing regularly in the clubs.
The Gold Coast declined and businesses disappeared after Mississippi's prohibition laws were repealed in 1966, allowing Hinds County, including Jackson, to go "wet". In addition, integration drew off business from establishments that earlier had catered to African Americans, such as the Summers Hotel. When it opened in 1943 on Pearl Street, it was one of two hotels in the city that served black clients. For years its Subway Lounge was a prime performance spot for black musicians playing jazz and blues.
In another major change, in 1990 the state-approved gaming on riverboats. Numerous casinos have been developed on riverboats, mostly in Mississippi Delta towns such as Tunica Resorts, Greenville, and Vicksburg, as well as Biloxi on the Gulf Coast. Before the damage and losses due to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the state ranked second nationally in gambling revenues.
During World War II, Hawkins Field (at that time, also known as the Jackson Army Airbase) the American 21st, 309th, and 310th Bomber Groups that were stationed at the base were re-deployed for combat. Following the German invasion of the Netherlands and the Japanese invasion of the Dutch East Indies, between 688 and 800 members of the Dutch Airforce escaped to the UK or Australia for training and, out of necessity, were eventually given permission by the United States to make use of Hawkins Field.
From May 1942 until the end of the war, all Dutch military aircrews trained at the base and went on to serve in either the British or Australian Air Forces.
In 1949, the poet Margaret Walker began teaching at Jackson State University, a historically black college. She taught there until 1979 and founded the university's Center for African-American Studies. Her poetry collection won a Yale Younger Poets Prize. Her second novel, Jubilee (1966), is considered a major work of African-American literature. She has influenced many younger writers.
The civil rights movement had been active for decades, particularly mounting legal challenges to Mississippi's constitution and laws that disfranchised black people. Beginning in 1960, Jackson as the state capital became the site for dramatic non-violent protests in a new phase of activism that brought in a wide variety of participants in the performance of mass demonstrations.
In 1960, the U.S. Census Bureau reported Jackson's population as 64.3% white and 35.7% black. At the time, public facilities were segregated and Jim Crow was in effect. Efforts to desegregate Jackson facilities began when nine Tougaloo College students tried to read books in the "white only" public library and were arrested. Founded as a historically black college (HBCU) by the American Missionary Association after the Civil War, Tougaloo College helped organize both black and white students of the region to work together for civil rights. It created partnerships with the neighboring mostly white Millsaps College to work with student activists. It has been recognized as a site on the "Civil Rights Trail" by the National Park Service.
The mass demonstrations of the 1960s were initiated with the arrival of more than 300 Freedom Riders on May 24, 1961. They were arrested in Jackson for disturbing the peace after they disembarked from their interstate buses. The interracial teams rode the buses from Washington, D.C., and sat together to demonstrate against segregation on public transportation, as the Constitution provides for unrestricted public transportation. Although the Freedom Riders had intended New Orleans as their final destination, Jackson was the farthest that any managed to travel. New participants kept joining the movement, as they intended to fill the jails in Jackson with their protest. The riders had encountered extreme violence along the way, including a bus burning and physical assaults. They attracted national media attention to the struggle for constitutional rights.
After the Freedom Rides, students and activists of the Freedom Movement launched a series of merchant boycotts, sit-ins and protest marches, from 1961 to 1963. Businesses discriminated against black customers. For instance, at the time, department stores did not hire black salesclerks or allow black customers to use their fitting rooms to try on clothes, or lunch counters for meals while in the store, but they wanted them to shop in their stores.
In Jackson, shortly after midnight on June 12, 1963, Medgar Evers, civil rights activist and leader of the Mississippi chapter of the NAACP, was assassinated by Byron De La Beckwith, a white supremacist associated with the White Citizens' Council. Thousands marched in Evers' funeral procession to protest the killing. Two trials at the time both resulted in hung juries. A portion of U.S. Highway 49, all of Delta Drive, a library, the central post office for the city, and Jackson–Evers International Airport were named in honor of Medgar Evers. In 1994, prosecutors Ed Peters and Bobby DeLaughter finally obtained a murder conviction in a state trial of De La Beckwith based on new evidence.
During 1963 and 1964, civil rights organizers gathered residents for voter education and voter registration. Black people had been essentially disfranchised since 1890. In a pilot project in 1963, activists rapidly registered 80,000 voters across the state, demonstrating the desire of African Americans to vote. In 1964 they created the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as an alternative to the all-white state Democratic Party, and sent an alternate slate of candidates to the national Democratic Party convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, that year.
Segregation and the disfranchisement of African Americans gradually ended after the Civil Rights Movement gained Congressional passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. In June 1966, Jackson was the terminus of the James Meredith March, organized by James Meredith, the first African American to enroll at the University of Mississippi. The march, which began in Memphis, Tennessee, was an attempt to garner support for full implementation of civil rights in practice, following the legislation. It was accompanied by a new drive to register African Americans to vote in Mississippi. In this latter goal, it succeeded in registering between 2,500 and 3,000 black Mississippians to vote. The march ended on June 26 after Meredith, who had been wounded by a sniper's bullet earlier on the march, addressed a large rally of some 15,000 people in Jackson.
In September 1967 a Ku Klux Klan chapter bombed the synagogue of the Beth Israel Congregation in Jackson, and in November bombed the house of its rabbi, Dr. Perry Nussbaum. He and his congregation had supported civil rights.
Gradually the old barriers came down. Since that period, both whites and African Americans in the state have had a consistently high rate of voter registration and turnout. Following the decades of the Great Migration, when more than one million black people left the rural South, since the 1930s the state has been majority white in total population. African Americans are a majority in the city of Jackson, although the metropolitan area is majority white. African Americans are also a majority in several cities and counties of the Mississippi Delta, which are included in the 2nd congressional district. The other three congressional districts are majority white.
The first successful cadaveric lung transplant was performed at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson in June 1963 by Dr. James Hardy. Hardy transplanted the cadaveric lung into a patient suffering from lung cancer. The patient survived for eighteen days before dying of kidney failure.
In 1966 it was estimated that recurring flood damage at Jackson from the Pearl River averaged nearly a million dollars per year. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spent $6.8 million on levees and a new channel in 1966 before the project completion to prevent a flood equal to the December 1961 event plus an additional foot.
Since 1968, Jackson has been the home of Malaco Records, one of the leading record companies for gospel, blues, and soul music in the United States. In January 1973, Paul Simon recorded the songs "Learn How to Fall" and "Take Me to the Mardi Gras", found on the album There Goes Rhymin' Simon, in Jackson at the Malaco Recording Studios. Many well-known Southern artists recorded on the album, including the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section (David Hood, Jimmy Johnson, Roger Hawkins, Barry Beckett), Carson Whitsett, the Onward Brass Band from New Orleans, and others. The label has recorded many leading soul and blues artists, including Bobby Bland, ZZ Hill, Latimore, Shirley Brown, Denise LaSalle, and Tyrone Davis.
On May 15, 1970, Jackson police killed two students and wounded twelve at Jackson State College after a protest of the Vietnam War included students' overturning and burning some cars. These killings occurred eleven days after the National Guard killed four students in an anti-war protest at Kent State University in Ohio, and were part of national social unrest. Newsweek cited the Jackson State killings in its issue of May 18 when it suggested that U.S. President Richard Nixon faced a new home front.
The influx of illegal drugs occurred nationally as smugglers used the highways, seaports, and airports of the Gulf region. The 1980s in Jackson were dominated by Mayor Dale Danks Jr. until he was unseated by lawyer and legislator J. Kane Ditto, who criticized the deficit funding and the politicized police department of the city. Federal investigations of drug trafficking at Jackson's Hawkins Field airport were a part of the Kerry Report, the 1986 U.S. Senate investigation of public corruption and foreign relations.
As Jackson has become the medical and legal center of the state, it has attracted Jewish professionals in both fields. Since the late 20th century, it has developed the largest Jewish community in the state.
In 1997, Harvey Johnson, Jr. was elected as Jackson's first African-American mayor. During his term, he proposed the development of a convention center to attract more business to the city. In 2004, during his second term, 66 percent of the voters passed a referendum for a tax to build the Convention Center.
Mayor Johnson was replaced by Frank Melton on July 4, 2005. Melton generated controversy through his unconventional behavior, which included acting as a law enforcement officer. A dramatic spike in crime ensued during his term, despite Melton's efforts to reduce crime. The lack of jobs contributed to crime. In 2006 a young African-American businessman, Starsky Darnell Redd, was convicted of money laundering in federal court along with his mother, other associates, and Billy Tucker, the former airport security chief.
In 2007, Hinds County sheriff Malcolm McMillin was appointed as the new police chief in Jackson, setting a historic precedent. McMillin was both the county sheriff and city police chief until 2009, when he stepped down due to disagreements with the mayor. Mayor Frank Melton died in May 2009, and City Councilman Leslie McLemore served as acting mayor of Jackson until July 2009, when former Mayor Harvey Johnson was elected and assumed the position.
On June 26, 2011, 49-year-old James Craig Anderson was killed in Jackson after being beaten, robbed, and run over by a group of white teenagers. The district attorney described it as a "hate crime", and the FBI investigated it as a civil rights violation.
On March 18, 2013, a severe hailstorm hit the Jackson metro area. The hail caused major damage to roofs, vehicles, and building siding. Hail ranged in size from golfball to softball. There were more than 40,000 hailstorm claims of homeowner and automobile damage.
In 2013, Jackson was named as one of the top 10 friendliest cities in the United States by CN Traveler. The capital city was tied with Natchez as Number 7. The city was noticed for friendly people, great food, and green and pretty public places.
On July 1, 2013, Chokwe Lumumba was sworn into office as mayor of the city. After eight months in office, Lumumba died on February 25, 2014. Lumumba was a popular yet controversial figure due to his prior membership in the Republic of New Afrika, as well as being a co-founder of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America.
Lumumba's son, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, ran for the mayoral seat following his father's death, but lost to Councillor Tony Yarber on April 22, 2014. In 2017, however, Chokwe Antar Lumumba ran for mayor again, and won. Following his victory, on June 26 he was interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, at which time he declared a commitment to make Jackson the "Most Radical City on the Planet".
For several years, the city water supply failed to meet federal drinking water standards and was subject to many boil water orders in 2021 and 2022. Due to deteriorating water infrastructure, some parts of the city experienced low water pressure, and in some neighborhoods residents reported untreated sewage flowing in city streets. In August 2022, Jackson lost access to water when its largest water treatment plant failed, leaving tap water untreated.
Jackson is located primarily in northeastern Hinds County, with small portions in Madison and Rankin counties. The city of Jackson also includes around 3,000 acres (12.1 km) comprising Jackson-Medgar Evers International Airport in Rankin County and a small portion of Madison County. The Pearl River forms most of the eastern border of the city. A small portion of the city containing Tougaloo College is the portion of Jackson that lies in Madison County, bounded on the west by Interstate 220 and on the east by the U.S. Route 51 and Interstate 55. In the 2010 census, only 622 of the city's residents lived in Madison County, and only 1 lived within the city limits in Rankin County. The city is bordered to the north by Ridgeland in Madison County, to the northeast by Ross Barnett Reservoir on the Pearl River, to the east by Flowood and Richland in Rankin County, to the south by Byram in Hinds County, and to the west by Clinton in Hinds County.
According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 113.2 square miles (293.3 km), of which 111.0 square miles (287.6 km) are land and 2.2 square miles (5.7 km), or 1.94% of the total, are water.
Downtown Jackson is situated directly on the banks of the Pearl River. The downtown district has direct connections to both Interstate 55 via Pearl Street and Pasagoula Street and Interstate 20 via State Street (US 51). Much of the downtown was constructed before the 1980s and only small additions to the skyline have been made since then.
For the most part, Jackson is built on acidic, variably drained silt loam soil. Loess forms the topsoil in western sections, where the Loring soil series is common. The Tippo series, also a silt loam, is found in the central flood plain. Farther east, common soil series include Guyton silt loam, Providence silt loam and Smithdale fine sandy loam.
Jackson sits atop the extinct Jackson Volcano, located 2,900 feet (880 m) underground. It is the only capital city in the United States to have this feature. The buried peak of the volcano is located directly below the Mississippi Coliseum. The municipality is drained on the west by tributaries of the Big Black River and on the east by the Pearl River, which is 150 feet (46 m) higher than the Big Black near Canton. The artesian groundwater flow is not as extensive in Jackson for this reason. The first large-scale well was drilled in the city in 1896, and the city water supply has relied on surface water resources.
Jackson is located in the humid subtropical climate zone (Köppen Cfa). Rain occurs throughout the year, though the winter and spring are the wettest seasons, while September and October are usually the driest months. Snow is rare, and accumulation very seldom lasts more than a day. Average annual precipitation is 57.35 inches (1,457 mm), see climate table. Much of Jackson's rainfall occurs during thunderstorms. Thunder is heard on roughly 70 days each year. Jackson lies in a region prone to severe thunderstorms which can produce large hail, damaging winds, and tornadoes. Among the most notable tornado events was the F5 Candlestick Park tornado on March 3, 1966, which destroyed the shopping center of the same name and surrounding businesses and residential areas, killing 19 in South Jackson.
The record low temperature is −5 °F (−21 °C), set on January 27, 1940, and the record high is 107 °F (42 °C), recorded on September 6–7, 1925, July 29, 1930, and August 30, 2000.
Jackson remained a small town for much of the 19th century. Before the American Civil War, Jackson's population remained small, particularly in contrast to the river towns along the commerce-laden Mississippi River. Despite the city's status as the state capital, the 1850 census counted only 1,881 residents, excluding slaves, which were not returned separately.
By 1900 the population of Jackson was still less than 8,000. Although it expanded rapidly, during this period Meridian became Mississippi's largest city, based on trade, manufacturing, and access to transportation via railroad and highway.
In the early 20th century, Jackson had its largest rates of growth but ranked second to Meridian in Mississippi. By 1944, Jackson's population had risen to some 70,000 inhabitants, and it became the largest city in the state. For several decades, Jackson had the most thriving business districts and the largest public school system in Mississippi. It achieved its peak population in the 1980 census of more than 200,000 residents in the city. Since 1980, Jackson has declined in population due to several factors while the surrounding suburban population has increased.
According to the 2010 census, the racial and ethnic makeup of the city was predominantly Black and African American, and non-Hispanic white; in 2020, they remained the largest racial and ethnic composition for the city. This Hispanic or Latino population is the fastest growing racial and ethnic group in the city.
According to census statistics in 2000, the median income for a household in the city was $30,414, and the median income for a family was $36,003. Males had a median income of $29,166 versus $23,328 for females. The per capita income for the city was $17,116. About 19.6% of families and 23.5% of the population were below the poverty line, including 33.7% of those under age 18 and 15.7% of those age 65 or over. At the publication of the 2020 American Community Survey, the city's median household income increased to $35,070; families had a median income of $44,348, married-couple families $74,893, and non-families $22,061.
High criminal activity, particularly the homicide rate, is a major reoccurring issue in the city. In 1993, Jackson had the nation's 12th highest homicide rate among cities with more than 100,000 residents, according to the FBI. The 87 slayings in the city in 1993 gave Jackson a homicide rate of 41.9 per 100,000 residents, the FBI reported, and set a new record for the most violent deaths in one year. 1994 had higher homicides, with 91, and the record was broken again in 1995 with a total of 92.
In 2020, the city's homicide rate reached its highest in history with 79.69 homicides per 100,000 residents, with a total of 128 homicides. Of major U.S. cities, only St. Louis surpassed Jackson's homicide rate. The homicide rate in 2020 represented a significant spike after years of declining homicide rates in the early 2000s. Property crime remains much lower than in the 1990s and overall violent crime has not increased as significantly as homicide in recent years and is below the peak in 1994 as of 2020.
In 2021, a record number of homicides (155) were recorded, and at a rate of 101 per 100,000 was the highest in the United States. In late 2020, Police Chief James Davis along with the Mayor and other city leaders unveiled the virtual policing concept. After months of struggling to move the concept forward, Chief Davis began discussions with Eric B. Fox, a veteran Jackson Police Officer to return to the department. Fox returned officially in January 2022, and launched a new concept, the Real Time Command Center.
Also in 2021, the Jackson Police Department stated that the city had a serious street gang problem which is a major contributor to violent crimes. The city has had a gang presence since the 1980s but it has seemingly grown over the years. Several gangs from Chicago have settled in the city and are heavily involved in drug-selling territory wars and many other crimes.
In 2022, for the second year in a row Jackson had the highest homicide rate per capita in the United States.
In 2023, Mayor Lumumba announced the opening of the Jackson Crime Center which is a facility that houses monitoring cameras strategically placed around the city to better identify criminals so they can be held accountable for their actions. The Jackson Police Department is short-staffed so the center will help the department as they work to increase recruitment and retention.
Jackson is home to several major industries; these include electrical equipment and machinery, processed food, and primary and fabricated metal products. The surrounding area supports the agricultural development of livestock, soybeans, cotton, and poultry.
According to the city's government, Jackson's top three employers are the University of Mississippi Medical Center, Jackson Public Schools, and Nissan North America as of 2020. Other notable corporations with a large presence in the city and area include C Spire and Amazon in nearby Madison County.
The city is home to Cooperation Jackson, which is an economic development vehicle for worker-owned cooperative business. The organization has led to the creation of several businesses including lawn care provider The Green Team, organic farm Freedom Farms, print shop The Center for Community Production, and The Balagoon Center, which is a cooperative business incubator.
Jackson is home to a number of cultural and artistic attractions, including the following:
The city of Jackson and its metropolitan area are home to collegiate and semi-professional sports teams; Major League Baseball's Atlanta Braves minor affiliate, the Mississippi Braves, plays in the area. Mississippi Brilla of USL League Two also operates in the area.
In 1985, Jackson voters opted to replace the three-person mayor-commissioner system with a city council and mayor. This electoral system enables a wider representation of residents on the city council. City council members are elected from each of the city's seven wards, considered single-member districts. The mayor is elected at-large citywide.
Jackson's mayor is Chokwe Antar Lumumba (D), who was elected on July 3, 2017.
Jackson's City Council members are:
The Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) operates the Jackson Probation & Parole Office in Jackson. The MDOC Central Mississippi Correctional Facility, in unincorporated Rankin County, is located in proximity to Jackson.
The larger portion of Jackson is part of Mississippi's 2nd congressional district. U.S. Representative Bennie Gordon Thompson, a Democrat, has served since 1993. Until 2011 he was Chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security and has been the ranking member since 2011.[1]
The United States Postal Service operates the Jackson Main Post Office and several smaller post offices.
Jackson is home to the most collegiate institutions in Mississippi. Jackson State University is the largest collegiate institution in the city, fourth largest in the state, and the only doctoral-granting research institution based in its region.
Jackson Public School District (JPS) operates 60 public schools. It is one of the largest school districts in the state with about 30,000 students in thirty-eight elementary schools, thirteen middle schools, seven high schools, and two special schools. Jackson Public Schools is the only urban school district in the state.
As of 2017 the public schools have few children who are middle or upper class, as 99% of the students in JPS qualify for free or reduced school lunches. In 2017 Susan Womack, president of the Parents for Public Schools Jackson (PPSJ) from 2000 to 2012, stated that middle to upper-class families in Jackson tended to leave public school after elementary school, with parents who remained in Jackson enrolling their children in private school, and those who wished to continue enrolling their children in public schools moving to Madison County. The PPSJ decided circa the mid-2000s that it was not feasible to encourage middle and upper-class parents to put their children in JPS schools.
The district's high schools include:
While most of Jackson is in Jackson PSD, there are parts in Hinds County that are instead in Hinds County School District. This part is zoned to Terry High School in Terry. The portion of Jackson in Madison County is within the Madison County School District.
There are state-operated K-12 public schools for special purposes;
Private secondary schools include:
Some schools are in nearby municipalities:
Private primary schools include:
Jackson/Hinds Library System is the library system of Jackson.
On March 27, 2015, Jackson Mayor Tony Yarber issued a state of emergency for transportation (potholes) and water infrastructure (breaks in water mains). The quality of Jackson's water infrastructure system decreased after the severe winter weather of 2014–2015. Jackson's office estimated the cost to fix the roads and water pipes at $750 million to $1 billion.
After issuing the state of emergency, the City of Jackson filed a letter of intent to Department of Health to borrow $2.5 million to repair broken water pipes. The Jackson City Council must approve the mayor's proposal. Additionally, Mayor Yarber asked for help from both FEMA and the state Governor's office.
Calling for a state of emergency increases the likelihood that the U.S. Department of Transportation would give the city money from a "quick release" funding account.
In late August 2022, the Pearl River overflowed, flooding much of the city and contaminating the water supply. Mayor Lumumba declared a state of emergency and shut down all businesses and schools.
In 2015, 11 percent of the city of Jackson households lacked a car, which decreased to 7.6 percent in 2016. The national average was 8.7 percent in 2016. Jackson averaged 1.68 cars per household in 2016, compared to a national average of 1.8.
Jackson has an increasing number of bicycle lanes.
Jackson–Medgar Wiley Evers International Airport, the busiest commercial airport in Mississippi, is located east of city in Rankin County between Flowood and Pearl.
Jackson's Union Station serves Amtrak's daily overnight train, the City of New Orleans from Chicago to New Orleans. The intermodal station also serves Greyhound Lines intercity buses and is the primary station for Jackson's municipal buses.
The city is at the intersection of major Interstate and Federal Highways: north-south I-55, US 49, US 51, east–west I-20 and US 80.
In 2011, the United States Navy named the USS Jackson (LCS-6) in honor of the city.
In 2002, the Subway Lounge (of the Summers Hotel on the Gold Coast) was featured as the subject of the film documentary entitled Last of the Mississippi Jukes.
The popular film The Help (2011), based on the bestselling novel by the same name by Kathryn Stockett, was filmed in Jackson. The city has a two-part, self-guided tour of areas featured in the film and the book.
In the song "Uptown Funk" by Mark Ronson and featuring Bruno Mars Jackson is mentioned in the lines "Julio! Get the Stretch! Ride to Harlem; Hollywood, Jackson, Mississippi."
Get on Up, a movie released in August 2014, had some scenes filmed in Jackson, and nearby Natchez. The movie is based on the life of James Brown.
The movie Speech & Debate, an adaptation of the stage play of the same name of Broadway theatre, was filmed entirely in Jackson.
The Charlie Daniels song "Uneasy Rider" is set in Jackson. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Jackson is the capital of and the most populous city in the U.S. state of Mississippi. Along with Raymond, Jackson is one of two county seats for Hinds County. The city had a population of 153,701 at the 2020 census, a significant decline from 173,514, or 11.42%, since the 2010 census, representing the largest decline in population during the decade of any major U.S. city. Jackson is the anchor for the Jackson metropolitan statistical area, the largest metropolitan area located entirely in the state and the tenth-largest urban area in the Deep South. With a 2020 population of nearly 600,000, metropolitan Jackson is home to over one-fifth of Mississippi's population. The city sits on the Pearl River and is located in the greater Jackson Prairie region of Mississippi. Jackson is the only city in Mississippi with a population exceeding 100,000 people.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Founded in 1821 as new state capital for Mississippi, Jackson is named after General Andrew Jackson, a war hero in the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812 and subsequently the seventh U.S. president. Following the Battle of Vicksburg, which was fought near Jackson during the American Civil War in 1863, Union forces commanded by General William Tecumseh Sherman launched the siege of Jackson and set the city on fire.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "During the 1920s, Jackson surpassed Meridian to become the most populous city in the state following a speculative natural gas boom in the region. The current slogan for the city is \"The City with Soul\". It has had numerous musicians prominent in blues, gospel, folk, and jazz. The city is located in the deep south halfway between Memphis and New Orleans on Interstate 55 and Dallas and Atlanta on Interstate 20.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The city has a number of museums and cultural institutions, including the Mississippi Children's Museum, Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, Mississippi Museum of Art, Old Capital Museum, Museum of Mississippi History. Other notable locations are the Mississippi Coliseum and the Mississippi Veterans Memorial Stadium, home of the Jackson State Tigers football team.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The Jackson metropolitan statistical area is the state's second-largest metropolitan area. In 2020, the Jackson metropolitan area held a GDP of 30 billion dollars, accounting for 29% of the state's total GDP of 104.1 billion dollars.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Located on the historic Natchez Trace trade route, created by Native Americans and used by European American settlers, and on the Pearl River, the city's first European American settler was Louis LeFleur, a French-Canadian trader. The village became known as LeFleur's Bluff. During the late 18th century and early 19th century, this site had a trading post. It was connected to markets in Tennessee. Soldiers returning to Tennessee from the military campaigns near New Orleans in 1815 built a public road that connected Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana to this district. A United States treaty with the Choctaw, the Treaty of Doak's Stand in 1820, formally opened the area for non-Native American settlers.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "LeFleur's Bluff was developed when it was chosen as the site for the new state's capital city. The Mississippi General Assembly decided in 1821 that the state needed a centrally located capital (the legislature was then located in Natchez). They commissioned Thomas Hinds, James Patton, and William Lattimore to look for a suitable site. The absolute center of the state was a swamp, so the group had to widen their search.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "After surveying areas north and east of Jackson, they proceeded southwest along with the Pearl River until they reached LeFleur's Bluff in today's Hinds County. Their report to the General Assembly stated that this location had beautiful and healthful surroundings, good water, abundant timber, navigable waters, and proximity to the Natchez Trace. The Assembly passed an act on November 28, 1821, authorizing the site as the permanent seat of the government of the state of Mississippi. On the same day, it passed a resolution to instruct the Washington delegation to press Congress for a donation of public lands on the river for improved navigation to the Gulf of Mexico. One Whig politician lamented the new capital as a \"serious violation of principle\" because it was not at the absolute center of the state.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The capital was named for General Andrew Jackson, to honor his January 1815 victory at the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812. He was later elected as the seventh president of the United States.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The city of Jackson was originally planned, in April 1822, by Peter Aaron Van Dorn in a \"checkerboard\" pattern advocated by Thomas Jefferson. City blocks alternated with parks and other open spaces. Over time, many of the park squares have been developed rather than maintained as green space. The state legislature first met in Jackson on December 23, 1822. In 1839, the Mississippi Legislature passed the first state law in the U.S. to permit married women to own and administer their own property.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Jackson was connected by public road to Vicksburg and Clinton in 1826. Jackson was first connected by railroad to other cities in 1840. An 1844 map shows Jackson linked by an east–west rail line running between Vicksburg, Raymond, and Brandon. Unlike Vicksburg, Greenville, and Natchez, Jackson is not located on the Mississippi River, and it did not develop during the antebellum era as those cities did from major river commerce. The construction of railroad lines to the city sparked its growth in the decades following the American Civil War.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Despite its small population, during the Civil War, Jackson became a strategic center of manufacturing for the Confederacy. In 1863, during the military campaign which ended in the capture of Vicksburg, Union forces captured Jackson during two battles—once before the fall of Vicksburg and once after the fall of Vicksburg.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "On May 13, 1863, Union forces won the first Battle of Jackson, forcing Confederate forces to flee northward towards Canton. On May 14, Union troops under the command of William Tecumseh Sherman burned and looted key facilities in Jackson, a strategic manufacturing and railroad center for the Confederacy. After driving the Confederate forces out of Jackson, Union forces turned west and engaged the Vicksburg defenders at the Battle of Champion Hill in nearby Edwards. The Union forces began their siege of Vicksburg soon after their victory at Champion Hill. Confederate forces began to reassemble in Jackson in preparation for an attempt to break through the Union lines surrounding Vicksburg and end the siege. The Confederate forces in Jackson built defensive fortifications encircling the city while preparing to march west to Vicksburg.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Confederate forces marched out of Jackson in early July 1863 to break the siege of Vicksburg. But, unknown to them, Vicksburg had already surrendered on July 4, 1863. General Ulysses S. Grant dispatched General Sherman to meet the Confederate forces heading west from Jackson. Upon learning that Vicksburg had already surrendered, the Confederates retreated into Jackson. Union forces began the siege of Jackson, which lasted for approximately one week. Union forces encircled the city and began an artillery bombardment. One of the Union artillery emplacements has been preserved on the grounds of the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson. Another Federal position is preserved on the campus of Millsaps College. John C. Breckinridge, former United States vice president, served as one of the Confederate generals defending Jackson. On July 16, 1863, Confederate forces slipped out of Jackson during the night and retreated across the Pearl River.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Union forces completely burned the city after its capture this second time. The city was called \"Chimneyville\" because only the chimneys of houses were left standing. The northern line of Confederate defenses in Jackson during the siege was located along a road near downtown Jackson, now known as Fortification Street.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Because of the siege and following destruction, few antebellum structures have survived in Jackson. The Governor's Mansion, built in 1842, served as Sherman's headquarters and has been preserved. Another is the Old Capitol building, which served as the home of the Mississippi state legislature from 1839 to 1903. The Mississippi legislature passed the ordinance of secession from the Union there on January 9, 1861, becoming the second state to secede from the United States. The Jackson City Hall, built in 1846 for less than $8,000, also survived. It is said that Sherman, a Mason, spared it because it housed a Masonic Lodge, though a more likely reason is that it housed an army hospital.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "During Reconstruction, Republicans granted African Americans civil rights. Schools were established and African Americans held political offices. Eugene Welborne, Charles Reese, Weldon Hicks, and George Caldwell Granberry were among the legislators who represented Hinds County in the legislature. African Americans also served in local offices, as judges, and as marshalls.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Mississippi had considerable insurgent action, as whites struggled to maintain white supremacy. Jackson's appointed mayor Joseph G. Crane was stabbed to death in 1869. The assailant, Edward M. Yerger, was arrested by military authorities but, after a U.S. Supreme Court case (Ex parte Yerger), he was bonded out, moved to Baltimore and was never tried.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The economic recovery from the Civil War was slow through the start of the 20th century, but there were some developments in transportation. In 1871, the city introduced mule-drawn streetcars which ran on State Street, which were replaced by electric ones in 1899. In 1875, the Red Shirts were formed, one of the second waves of insurgent paramilitary organizations that essentially operated as \"the military arm of the Democratic Party\" to take back political power from the Republicans and to drive black people from the polls (Mississippi Plan).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Democrats regained control of the state legislature in 1876. The constitutional convention of 1890, which produced Mississippi's Constitution of 1890, was held at the capitol. This was the first of new constitutions or amendments ratified in each Southern state through 1908 that effectively disenfranchised most African Americans and many poor whites, through provisions making voter registration more difficult: such as poll taxes, residency requirements, and literacy tests. These provisions survived a Supreme Court challenge in 1898. As 20th-century Supreme Court decisions later ruled such provisions were unconstitutional, Mississippi and other Southern states rapidly devised new methods to continue disfranchisement of most black people, who comprised a majority in the state until the 1930s. Their exclusion from politics was maintained into the late 1960s.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The so-called New Capitol replaced the older structure upon its completion in 1903. Today the Old Capitol is operated as a historical museum.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Author Eudora Welty was born in Jackson in 1909, lived most of her life in the Belhaven section of the city, and died there in 2001. Her memoir of development as a writer, One Writer's Beginnings (1984), presented a picture of the city in the early 20th century. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for her novel, The Optimist's Daughter, and is best known for her novels and short stories. The main library of the Jackson/Hinds Library System was named in her honor, and her home has been designated as a National Historic Landmark.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Richard Wright, a highly acclaimed African-American author, lived in Jackson as an adolescent and young man in the 1910s and 1920s. He related his experience in his memoir Black Boy (1945). He described the harsh and largely terror-filled life most African Americans experienced in the South and Northern ghettos such as Chicago under segregation in the early 20th century.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Jackson had significant growth in the early 20th century, which produced dramatic changes in the city's skyline. Jackson's new Union Station downtown reflected the city's service by multiple rail lines, including the Illinois Central.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Across the street, the new, luxurious King Edward Hotel opened its doors in 1923, having been built according to a design by New Orleans architect William T. Nolan. It became a center for prestigious events held by Jackson society and Mississippi politicians. Nearby, the 18-story Standard Life Building, designed in 1929 by Claude Lindsley, was the largest reinforced concrete structure in the world upon its completion.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Jackson's economic growth was further stimulated in the 1930s by the discovery of natural gas fields nearby. Speculators had begun searching for oil and natural gas in Jackson beginning in 1920. The initial drilling attempts came up empty. This failure did not stop Ella Render from obtaining a lease from the state's insane asylum to begin a well on its grounds in 1924, where he found natural gas. (Render eventually lost the rights when courts determined that the asylum did not have the right to lease the state's property.) Businessmen jumped on the opportunity and dug wells in the Jackson area. The continued success of these ventures attracted further investment. By 1930, there were 14 derricks in the Jackson skyline.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Mississippi Governor Theodore Bilbo stated:",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "It is no idle dream to prophesy that the state's share [of the oil and natural gas profits] properly safe-guarded would soon pay the state's entire bonded indebtedness and even be great enough to defray all the state's expenses and make our state tax free so long as obligations are concerned.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "This enthusiasm was subdued when the first wells failed to produce oil of a sufficiently high gravity for commercial success. The barrels of oil had considerable amounts of saltwater, which lessened the quality. The governor's prediction was wrong in hindsight, but the oil and natural gas industry did provide an economic boost for the city and state. The effects of the Great Depression were mitigated by the industry's success. At its height in 1934, there were 113 producing wells in the state. The overwhelming majority were closed by 1955.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Due to provisions in the federal Rivers and Harbors Act, on October 25, 1930, city leaders met with U.S. Army engineers to ask for federal help to alleviate Jackson flooding. J.J. Halbert, city engineer, proposed a straightening and dredging of the Pearl River below Jackson.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "During Mississippi's extended Prohibition period, from the 1920s until the 1960s, illegal drinking and gambling casinos flourished on the east side of the Pearl River, in Flowood along with the original U.S. Route 80 just across from the city of Jackson. Those illegal casinos, bootleg liquor stores, and nightclubs made up the Gold Coast, a strip of mostly black-market businesses that operated for decades along Flowood Road. Although outside the law, the Gold Coast was a thriving center of nightlife and music, with many local blues musicians appearing regularly in the clubs.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The Gold Coast declined and businesses disappeared after Mississippi's prohibition laws were repealed in 1966, allowing Hinds County, including Jackson, to go \"wet\". In addition, integration drew off business from establishments that earlier had catered to African Americans, such as the Summers Hotel. When it opened in 1943 on Pearl Street, it was one of two hotels in the city that served black clients. For years its Subway Lounge was a prime performance spot for black musicians playing jazz and blues.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In another major change, in 1990 the state-approved gaming on riverboats. Numerous casinos have been developed on riverboats, mostly in Mississippi Delta towns such as Tunica Resorts, Greenville, and Vicksburg, as well as Biloxi on the Gulf Coast. Before the damage and losses due to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the state ranked second nationally in gambling revenues.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "During World War II, Hawkins Field (at that time, also known as the Jackson Army Airbase) the American 21st, 309th, and 310th Bomber Groups that were stationed at the base were re-deployed for combat. Following the German invasion of the Netherlands and the Japanese invasion of the Dutch East Indies, between 688 and 800 members of the Dutch Airforce escaped to the UK or Australia for training and, out of necessity, were eventually given permission by the United States to make use of Hawkins Field.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "From May 1942 until the end of the war, all Dutch military aircrews trained at the base and went on to serve in either the British or Australian Air Forces.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "In 1949, the poet Margaret Walker began teaching at Jackson State University, a historically black college. She taught there until 1979 and founded the university's Center for African-American Studies. Her poetry collection won a Yale Younger Poets Prize. Her second novel, Jubilee (1966), is considered a major work of African-American literature. She has influenced many younger writers.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The civil rights movement had been active for decades, particularly mounting legal challenges to Mississippi's constitution and laws that disfranchised black people. Beginning in 1960, Jackson as the state capital became the site for dramatic non-violent protests in a new phase of activism that brought in a wide variety of participants in the performance of mass demonstrations.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "In 1960, the U.S. Census Bureau reported Jackson's population as 64.3% white and 35.7% black. At the time, public facilities were segregated and Jim Crow was in effect. Efforts to desegregate Jackson facilities began when nine Tougaloo College students tried to read books in the \"white only\" public library and were arrested. Founded as a historically black college (HBCU) by the American Missionary Association after the Civil War, Tougaloo College helped organize both black and white students of the region to work together for civil rights. It created partnerships with the neighboring mostly white Millsaps College to work with student activists. It has been recognized as a site on the \"Civil Rights Trail\" by the National Park Service.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "The mass demonstrations of the 1960s were initiated with the arrival of more than 300 Freedom Riders on May 24, 1961. They were arrested in Jackson for disturbing the peace after they disembarked from their interstate buses. The interracial teams rode the buses from Washington, D.C., and sat together to demonstrate against segregation on public transportation, as the Constitution provides for unrestricted public transportation. Although the Freedom Riders had intended New Orleans as their final destination, Jackson was the farthest that any managed to travel. New participants kept joining the movement, as they intended to fill the jails in Jackson with their protest. The riders had encountered extreme violence along the way, including a bus burning and physical assaults. They attracted national media attention to the struggle for constitutional rights.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "After the Freedom Rides, students and activists of the Freedom Movement launched a series of merchant boycotts, sit-ins and protest marches, from 1961 to 1963. Businesses discriminated against black customers. For instance, at the time, department stores did not hire black salesclerks or allow black customers to use their fitting rooms to try on clothes, or lunch counters for meals while in the store, but they wanted them to shop in their stores.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "In Jackson, shortly after midnight on June 12, 1963, Medgar Evers, civil rights activist and leader of the Mississippi chapter of the NAACP, was assassinated by Byron De La Beckwith, a white supremacist associated with the White Citizens' Council. Thousands marched in Evers' funeral procession to protest the killing. Two trials at the time both resulted in hung juries. A portion of U.S. Highway 49, all of Delta Drive, a library, the central post office for the city, and Jackson–Evers International Airport were named in honor of Medgar Evers. In 1994, prosecutors Ed Peters and Bobby DeLaughter finally obtained a murder conviction in a state trial of De La Beckwith based on new evidence.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "During 1963 and 1964, civil rights organizers gathered residents for voter education and voter registration. Black people had been essentially disfranchised since 1890. In a pilot project in 1963, activists rapidly registered 80,000 voters across the state, demonstrating the desire of African Americans to vote. In 1964 they created the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as an alternative to the all-white state Democratic Party, and sent an alternate slate of candidates to the national Democratic Party convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, that year.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Segregation and the disfranchisement of African Americans gradually ended after the Civil Rights Movement gained Congressional passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. In June 1966, Jackson was the terminus of the James Meredith March, organized by James Meredith, the first African American to enroll at the University of Mississippi. The march, which began in Memphis, Tennessee, was an attempt to garner support for full implementation of civil rights in practice, following the legislation. It was accompanied by a new drive to register African Americans to vote in Mississippi. In this latter goal, it succeeded in registering between 2,500 and 3,000 black Mississippians to vote. The march ended on June 26 after Meredith, who had been wounded by a sniper's bullet earlier on the march, addressed a large rally of some 15,000 people in Jackson.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "In September 1967 a Ku Klux Klan chapter bombed the synagogue of the Beth Israel Congregation in Jackson, and in November bombed the house of its rabbi, Dr. Perry Nussbaum. He and his congregation had supported civil rights.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Gradually the old barriers came down. Since that period, both whites and African Americans in the state have had a consistently high rate of voter registration and turnout. Following the decades of the Great Migration, when more than one million black people left the rural South, since the 1930s the state has been majority white in total population. African Americans are a majority in the city of Jackson, although the metropolitan area is majority white. African Americans are also a majority in several cities and counties of the Mississippi Delta, which are included in the 2nd congressional district. The other three congressional districts are majority white.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The first successful cadaveric lung transplant was performed at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson in June 1963 by Dr. James Hardy. Hardy transplanted the cadaveric lung into a patient suffering from lung cancer. The patient survived for eighteen days before dying of kidney failure.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "In 1966 it was estimated that recurring flood damage at Jackson from the Pearl River averaged nearly a million dollars per year. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spent $6.8 million on levees and a new channel in 1966 before the project completion to prevent a flood equal to the December 1961 event plus an additional foot.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Since 1968, Jackson has been the home of Malaco Records, one of the leading record companies for gospel, blues, and soul music in the United States. In January 1973, Paul Simon recorded the songs \"Learn How to Fall\" and \"Take Me to the Mardi Gras\", found on the album There Goes Rhymin' Simon, in Jackson at the Malaco Recording Studios. Many well-known Southern artists recorded on the album, including the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section (David Hood, Jimmy Johnson, Roger Hawkins, Barry Beckett), Carson Whitsett, the Onward Brass Band from New Orleans, and others. The label has recorded many leading soul and blues artists, including Bobby Bland, ZZ Hill, Latimore, Shirley Brown, Denise LaSalle, and Tyrone Davis.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "On May 15, 1970, Jackson police killed two students and wounded twelve at Jackson State College after a protest of the Vietnam War included students' overturning and burning some cars. These killings occurred eleven days after the National Guard killed four students in an anti-war protest at Kent State University in Ohio, and were part of national social unrest. Newsweek cited the Jackson State killings in its issue of May 18 when it suggested that U.S. President Richard Nixon faced a new home front.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The influx of illegal drugs occurred nationally as smugglers used the highways, seaports, and airports of the Gulf region. The 1980s in Jackson were dominated by Mayor Dale Danks Jr. until he was unseated by lawyer and legislator J. Kane Ditto, who criticized the deficit funding and the politicized police department of the city. Federal investigations of drug trafficking at Jackson's Hawkins Field airport were a part of the Kerry Report, the 1986 U.S. Senate investigation of public corruption and foreign relations.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "As Jackson has become the medical and legal center of the state, it has attracted Jewish professionals in both fields. Since the late 20th century, it has developed the largest Jewish community in the state.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "In 1997, Harvey Johnson, Jr. was elected as Jackson's first African-American mayor. During his term, he proposed the development of a convention center to attract more business to the city. In 2004, during his second term, 66 percent of the voters passed a referendum for a tax to build the Convention Center.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Mayor Johnson was replaced by Frank Melton on July 4, 2005. Melton generated controversy through his unconventional behavior, which included acting as a law enforcement officer. A dramatic spike in crime ensued during his term, despite Melton's efforts to reduce crime. The lack of jobs contributed to crime. In 2006 a young African-American businessman, Starsky Darnell Redd, was convicted of money laundering in federal court along with his mother, other associates, and Billy Tucker, the former airport security chief.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "In 2007, Hinds County sheriff Malcolm McMillin was appointed as the new police chief in Jackson, setting a historic precedent. McMillin was both the county sheriff and city police chief until 2009, when he stepped down due to disagreements with the mayor. Mayor Frank Melton died in May 2009, and City Councilman Leslie McLemore served as acting mayor of Jackson until July 2009, when former Mayor Harvey Johnson was elected and assumed the position.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "On June 26, 2011, 49-year-old James Craig Anderson was killed in Jackson after being beaten, robbed, and run over by a group of white teenagers. The district attorney described it as a \"hate crime\", and the FBI investigated it as a civil rights violation.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "On March 18, 2013, a severe hailstorm hit the Jackson metro area. The hail caused major damage to roofs, vehicles, and building siding. Hail ranged in size from golfball to softball. There were more than 40,000 hailstorm claims of homeowner and automobile damage.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "In 2013, Jackson was named as one of the top 10 friendliest cities in the United States by CN Traveler. The capital city was tied with Natchez as Number 7. The city was noticed for friendly people, great food, and green and pretty public places.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "On July 1, 2013, Chokwe Lumumba was sworn into office as mayor of the city. After eight months in office, Lumumba died on February 25, 2014. Lumumba was a popular yet controversial figure due to his prior membership in the Republic of New Afrika, as well as being a co-founder of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Lumumba's son, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, ran for the mayoral seat following his father's death, but lost to Councillor Tony Yarber on April 22, 2014. In 2017, however, Chokwe Antar Lumumba ran for mayor again, and won. Following his victory, on June 26 he was interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, at which time he declared a commitment to make Jackson the \"Most Radical City on the Planet\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "For several years, the city water supply failed to meet federal drinking water standards and was subject to many boil water orders in 2021 and 2022. Due to deteriorating water infrastructure, some parts of the city experienced low water pressure, and in some neighborhoods residents reported untreated sewage flowing in city streets. In August 2022, Jackson lost access to water when its largest water treatment plant failed, leaving tap water untreated.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Jackson is located primarily in northeastern Hinds County, with small portions in Madison and Rankin counties. The city of Jackson also includes around 3,000 acres (12.1 km) comprising Jackson-Medgar Evers International Airport in Rankin County and a small portion of Madison County. The Pearl River forms most of the eastern border of the city. A small portion of the city containing Tougaloo College is the portion of Jackson that lies in Madison County, bounded on the west by Interstate 220 and on the east by the U.S. Route 51 and Interstate 55. In the 2010 census, only 622 of the city's residents lived in Madison County, and only 1 lived within the city limits in Rankin County. The city is bordered to the north by Ridgeland in Madison County, to the northeast by Ross Barnett Reservoir on the Pearl River, to the east by Flowood and Richland in Rankin County, to the south by Byram in Hinds County, and to the west by Clinton in Hinds County.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 113.2 square miles (293.3 km), of which 111.0 square miles (287.6 km) are land and 2.2 square miles (5.7 km), or 1.94% of the total, are water.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Downtown Jackson is situated directly on the banks of the Pearl River. The downtown district has direct connections to both Interstate 55 via Pearl Street and Pasagoula Street and Interstate 20 via State Street (US 51). Much of the downtown was constructed before the 1980s and only small additions to the skyline have been made since then.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "For the most part, Jackson is built on acidic, variably drained silt loam soil. Loess forms the topsoil in western sections, where the Loring soil series is common. The Tippo series, also a silt loam, is found in the central flood plain. Farther east, common soil series include Guyton silt loam, Providence silt loam and Smithdale fine sandy loam.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Jackson sits atop the extinct Jackson Volcano, located 2,900 feet (880 m) underground. It is the only capital city in the United States to have this feature. The buried peak of the volcano is located directly below the Mississippi Coliseum. The municipality is drained on the west by tributaries of the Big Black River and on the east by the Pearl River, which is 150 feet (46 m) higher than the Big Black near Canton. The artesian groundwater flow is not as extensive in Jackson for this reason. The first large-scale well was drilled in the city in 1896, and the city water supply has relied on surface water resources.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Jackson is located in the humid subtropical climate zone (Köppen Cfa). Rain occurs throughout the year, though the winter and spring are the wettest seasons, while September and October are usually the driest months. Snow is rare, and accumulation very seldom lasts more than a day. Average annual precipitation is 57.35 inches (1,457 mm), see climate table. Much of Jackson's rainfall occurs during thunderstorms. Thunder is heard on roughly 70 days each year. Jackson lies in a region prone to severe thunderstorms which can produce large hail, damaging winds, and tornadoes. Among the most notable tornado events was the F5 Candlestick Park tornado on March 3, 1966, which destroyed the shopping center of the same name and surrounding businesses and residential areas, killing 19 in South Jackson.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "The record low temperature is −5 °F (−21 °C), set on January 27, 1940, and the record high is 107 °F (42 °C), recorded on September 6–7, 1925, July 29, 1930, and August 30, 2000.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Jackson remained a small town for much of the 19th century. Before the American Civil War, Jackson's population remained small, particularly in contrast to the river towns along the commerce-laden Mississippi River. Despite the city's status as the state capital, the 1850 census counted only 1,881 residents, excluding slaves, which were not returned separately.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "By 1900 the population of Jackson was still less than 8,000. Although it expanded rapidly, during this period Meridian became Mississippi's largest city, based on trade, manufacturing, and access to transportation via railroad and highway.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "In the early 20th century, Jackson had its largest rates of growth but ranked second to Meridian in Mississippi. By 1944, Jackson's population had risen to some 70,000 inhabitants, and it became the largest city in the state. For several decades, Jackson had the most thriving business districts and the largest public school system in Mississippi. It achieved its peak population in the 1980 census of more than 200,000 residents in the city. Since 1980, Jackson has declined in population due to several factors while the surrounding suburban population has increased.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "According to the 2010 census, the racial and ethnic makeup of the city was predominantly Black and African American, and non-Hispanic white; in 2020, they remained the largest racial and ethnic composition for the city. This Hispanic or Latino population is the fastest growing racial and ethnic group in the city.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "According to census statistics in 2000, the median income for a household in the city was $30,414, and the median income for a family was $36,003. Males had a median income of $29,166 versus $23,328 for females. The per capita income for the city was $17,116. About 19.6% of families and 23.5% of the population were below the poverty line, including 33.7% of those under age 18 and 15.7% of those age 65 or over. At the publication of the 2020 American Community Survey, the city's median household income increased to $35,070; families had a median income of $44,348, married-couple families $74,893, and non-families $22,061.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "High criminal activity, particularly the homicide rate, is a major reoccurring issue in the city. In 1993, Jackson had the nation's 12th highest homicide rate among cities with more than 100,000 residents, according to the FBI. The 87 slayings in the city in 1993 gave Jackson a homicide rate of 41.9 per 100,000 residents, the FBI reported, and set a new record for the most violent deaths in one year. 1994 had higher homicides, with 91, and the record was broken again in 1995 with a total of 92.",
"title": "Crime"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "In 2020, the city's homicide rate reached its highest in history with 79.69 homicides per 100,000 residents, with a total of 128 homicides. Of major U.S. cities, only St. Louis surpassed Jackson's homicide rate. The homicide rate in 2020 represented a significant spike after years of declining homicide rates in the early 2000s. Property crime remains much lower than in the 1990s and overall violent crime has not increased as significantly as homicide in recent years and is below the peak in 1994 as of 2020.",
"title": "Crime"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "In 2021, a record number of homicides (155) were recorded, and at a rate of 101 per 100,000 was the highest in the United States. In late 2020, Police Chief James Davis along with the Mayor and other city leaders unveiled the virtual policing concept. After months of struggling to move the concept forward, Chief Davis began discussions with Eric B. Fox, a veteran Jackson Police Officer to return to the department. Fox returned officially in January 2022, and launched a new concept, the Real Time Command Center.",
"title": "Crime"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Also in 2021, the Jackson Police Department stated that the city had a serious street gang problem which is a major contributor to violent crimes. The city has had a gang presence since the 1980s but it has seemingly grown over the years. Several gangs from Chicago have settled in the city and are heavily involved in drug-selling territory wars and many other crimes.",
"title": "Crime"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "In 2022, for the second year in a row Jackson had the highest homicide rate per capita in the United States.",
"title": "Crime"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "In 2023, Mayor Lumumba announced the opening of the Jackson Crime Center which is a facility that houses monitoring cameras strategically placed around the city to better identify criminals so they can be held accountable for their actions. The Jackson Police Department is short-staffed so the center will help the department as they work to increase recruitment and retention.",
"title": "Crime"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Jackson is home to several major industries; these include electrical equipment and machinery, processed food, and primary and fabricated metal products. The surrounding area supports the agricultural development of livestock, soybeans, cotton, and poultry.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "According to the city's government, Jackson's top three employers are the University of Mississippi Medical Center, Jackson Public Schools, and Nissan North America as of 2020. Other notable corporations with a large presence in the city and area include C Spire and Amazon in nearby Madison County.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "The city is home to Cooperation Jackson, which is an economic development vehicle for worker-owned cooperative business. The organization has led to the creation of several businesses including lawn care provider The Green Team, organic farm Freedom Farms, print shop The Center for Community Production, and The Balagoon Center, which is a cooperative business incubator.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Jackson is home to a number of cultural and artistic attractions, including the following:",
"title": "Arts and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "The city of Jackson and its metropolitan area are home to collegiate and semi-professional sports teams; Major League Baseball's Atlanta Braves minor affiliate, the Mississippi Braves, plays in the area. Mississippi Brilla of USL League Two also operates in the area.",
"title": "Sports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "In 1985, Jackson voters opted to replace the three-person mayor-commissioner system with a city council and mayor. This electoral system enables a wider representation of residents on the city council. City council members are elected from each of the city's seven wards, considered single-member districts. The mayor is elected at-large citywide.",
"title": "Government and infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Jackson's mayor is Chokwe Antar Lumumba (D), who was elected on July 3, 2017.",
"title": "Government and infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "Jackson's City Council members are:",
"title": "Government and infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "The Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) operates the Jackson Probation & Parole Office in Jackson. The MDOC Central Mississippi Correctional Facility, in unincorporated Rankin County, is located in proximity to Jackson.",
"title": "Government and infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "The larger portion of Jackson is part of Mississippi's 2nd congressional district. U.S. Representative Bennie Gordon Thompson, a Democrat, has served since 1993. Until 2011 he was Chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security and has been the ranking member since 2011.[1]",
"title": "Government and infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "The United States Postal Service operates the Jackson Main Post Office and several smaller post offices.",
"title": "Government and infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Jackson is home to the most collegiate institutions in Mississippi. Jackson State University is the largest collegiate institution in the city, fourth largest in the state, and the only doctoral-granting research institution based in its region.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "Jackson Public School District (JPS) operates 60 public schools. It is one of the largest school districts in the state with about 30,000 students in thirty-eight elementary schools, thirteen middle schools, seven high schools, and two special schools. Jackson Public Schools is the only urban school district in the state.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "As of 2017 the public schools have few children who are middle or upper class, as 99% of the students in JPS qualify for free or reduced school lunches. In 2017 Susan Womack, president of the Parents for Public Schools Jackson (PPSJ) from 2000 to 2012, stated that middle to upper-class families in Jackson tended to leave public school after elementary school, with parents who remained in Jackson enrolling their children in private school, and those who wished to continue enrolling their children in public schools moving to Madison County. The PPSJ decided circa the mid-2000s that it was not feasible to encourage middle and upper-class parents to put their children in JPS schools.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "The district's high schools include:",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "While most of Jackson is in Jackson PSD, there are parts in Hinds County that are instead in Hinds County School District. This part is zoned to Terry High School in Terry. The portion of Jackson in Madison County is within the Madison County School District.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "There are state-operated K-12 public schools for special purposes;",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "Private secondary schools include:",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "Some schools are in nearby municipalities:",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "Private primary schools include:",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "Jackson/Hinds Library System is the library system of Jackson.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "On March 27, 2015, Jackson Mayor Tony Yarber issued a state of emergency for transportation (potholes) and water infrastructure (breaks in water mains). The quality of Jackson's water infrastructure system decreased after the severe winter weather of 2014–2015. Jackson's office estimated the cost to fix the roads and water pipes at $750 million to $1 billion.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "After issuing the state of emergency, the City of Jackson filed a letter of intent to Department of Health to borrow $2.5 million to repair broken water pipes. The Jackson City Council must approve the mayor's proposal. Additionally, Mayor Yarber asked for help from both FEMA and the state Governor's office.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "Calling for a state of emergency increases the likelihood that the U.S. Department of Transportation would give the city money from a \"quick release\" funding account.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "In late August 2022, the Pearl River overflowed, flooding much of the city and contaminating the water supply. Mayor Lumumba declared a state of emergency and shut down all businesses and schools.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "In 2015, 11 percent of the city of Jackson households lacked a car, which decreased to 7.6 percent in 2016. The national average was 8.7 percent in 2016. Jackson averaged 1.68 cars per household in 2016, compared to a national average of 1.8.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "Jackson has an increasing number of bicycle lanes.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "Jackson–Medgar Wiley Evers International Airport, the busiest commercial airport in Mississippi, is located east of city in Rankin County between Flowood and Pearl.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "Jackson's Union Station serves Amtrak's daily overnight train, the City of New Orleans from Chicago to New Orleans. The intermodal station also serves Greyhound Lines intercity buses and is the primary station for Jackson's municipal buses.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "The city is at the intersection of major Interstate and Federal Highways: north-south I-55, US 49, US 51, east–west I-20 and US 80.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "In 2011, the United States Navy named the USS Jackson (LCS-6) in honor of the city.",
"title": "In popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "In 2002, the Subway Lounge (of the Summers Hotel on the Gold Coast) was featured as the subject of the film documentary entitled Last of the Mississippi Jukes.",
"title": "In popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "The popular film The Help (2011), based on the bestselling novel by the same name by Kathryn Stockett, was filmed in Jackson. The city has a two-part, self-guided tour of areas featured in the film and the book.",
"title": "In popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "In the song \"Uptown Funk\" by Mark Ronson and featuring Bruno Mars Jackson is mentioned in the lines \"Julio! Get the Stretch! Ride to Harlem; Hollywood, Jackson, Mississippi.\"",
"title": "In popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "Get on Up, a movie released in August 2014, had some scenes filmed in Jackson, and nearby Natchez. The movie is based on the life of James Brown.",
"title": "In popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "The movie Speech & Debate, an adaptation of the stage play of the same name of Broadway theatre, was filmed entirely in Jackson.",
"title": "In popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "The Charlie Daniels song \"Uneasy Rider\" is set in Jackson.",
"title": "In popular culture"
}
]
| Jackson is the capital of and the most populous city in the U.S. state of Mississippi. Along with Raymond, Jackson is one of two county seats for Hinds County. The city had a population of 153,701 at the 2020 census, a significant decline from 173,514, or 11.42%, since the 2010 census, representing the largest decline in population during the decade of any major U.S. city. Jackson is the anchor for the Jackson metropolitan statistical area, the largest metropolitan area located entirely in the state and the tenth-largest urban area in the Deep South. With a 2020 population of nearly 600,000, metropolitan Jackson is home to over one-fifth of Mississippi's population. The city sits on the Pearl River and is located in the greater Jackson Prairie region of Mississippi. Jackson is the only city in Mississippi with a population exceeding 100,000 people. Founded in 1821 as new state capital for Mississippi, Jackson is named after General Andrew Jackson, a war hero in the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812 and subsequently the seventh U.S. president. Following the Battle of Vicksburg, which was fought near Jackson during the American Civil War in 1863, Union forces commanded by General William Tecumseh Sherman launched the siege of Jackson and set the city on fire. During the 1920s, Jackson surpassed Meridian to become the most populous city in the state following a speculative natural gas boom in the region. The current slogan for the city is "The City with Soul". It has had numerous musicians prominent in blues, gospel, folk, and jazz. The city is located in the deep south halfway between Memphis and New Orleans on Interstate 55 and Dallas and Atlanta on Interstate 20. The city has a number of museums and cultural institutions, including the Mississippi Children's Museum, Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, Mississippi Museum of Art, Old Capital Museum, Museum of Mississippi History. Other notable locations are the Mississippi Coliseum and the Mississippi Veterans Memorial Stadium, home of the Jackson State Tigers football team. The Jackson metropolitan statistical area is the state's second-largest metropolitan area. In 2020, the Jackson metropolitan area held a GDP of 30 billion dollars, accounting for 29% of the state's total GDP of 104.1 billion dollars. | 2001-10-25T18:06:04Z | 2023-12-28T22:15:02Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson,_Mississippi |
16,168 | Jackson County, Michigan | Jackson County is a county located in the U.S. state of Michigan. Its population was 160,366 as of the 2020 Census. The county seat is Jackson. The county was set off in 1829 and organized in 1832. It is named for U.S. President Andrew Jackson and considered to be one of Michigan's "Cabinet counties", named for members of Jackson's Cabinet.
Jackson County comprises the Jackson, MI Metropolitan Statistical Area.
The Jackson County Courthouse was designed by Claire Allen, a prominent southern Michigan architect. Jackson County is also home to the Michigan Whitetail Hall of Fame.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of 723 square miles (1,870 km), of which 702 square miles (1,820 km) is land and 22 square miles (57 km) (3.0%) is water.
The Grand River is Michigan's longest river. It starts in Somerset Township in Hillsdale County and Liberty Township in Jackson County. It then flows through a small part of Columbia Township, into Summit township, and then right through the Jackson city limits. It then flows through Blackman Charter Township and then Rives Township and Tompkins Township before entering Ingham County, Eaton County, Clinton County, Ionia County, Kent County, Ottawa County and into the city of Grand Haven where it empties into Lake Michigan. The river is 260 miles (420 km) long; its watershed drains an area of 5,572 miles (8,967 km) including 18 counties and 158 townships.
The Kalamazoo River is made up of the north and south branches.
The north branch starts in Jackson County in Hanover Township. It starts in Pine Hills Lake and Farewell Lake and flows through a small part of Liberty Township and then back into Hanover Township. It then flows into Spring Arbor Township and Concord Township. It then flows out of Jackson County and into Calhoun County before it goes through the town of Albion where the north branch connects with the south branch and they form to be one river.
The south branch starts in the wetlands near the town North Adams in Hillsdale County and flows through the rest of Hillsdale County. It enters Jackson County and goes through a small part of Hanover Township before reentering Hillsdale County and then reentering Jackson County where it goes through Pulaski Township. It then enters Calhoun County and connects with the northern branch when it reaches the town of Albion.
When the south branch and north branch connect to form just the Kalamazoo River, it then flows through the rest of Calhoun County. It then enters Kalamazoo County and then Allegan County. When it reaches the towns of Saugatuck and Douglas it stops and enters Lake Michigan. In total the Kalamazoo River is 166 miles (267 km) long, and its watershed drains a total of 2,020 miles (3,250 km) and drains into 8 counties.
The county government operates the county jail, maintains township roads, operates the major local courts, keeps files of deeds and mortgages, maintains vital records, administers public health regulations, and participates with the state in the provision of welfare and other social services. The county board of commissioners controls the budget but has only limited authority to make laws or ordinances. In Michigan, most local government functions – police and fire, building and zoning, tax assessment, street maintenance, etc. – are the responsibility of individual cities and townships.
(information as of February 21, 2013)
With the exceptions of 1964 and 2008, Jackson County has voted for the Republican nominee in every presidential election since 1940, and is thus considered a reliable Republican stronghold.
As of the census of 2000, there were 158,422 people, 58,168 households, and 40,833 families residing in the county. The population density was 224 people per square mile (86 people/km). There were 62,906 housing units at an average density of 89 per square mile (34/km). The racial makeup of the county was 88.54% White, 7.92% Black or African American, 0.40% Native American, 0.53% Asian, 0.04% Pacific Islander, 0.83% from other races, and 1.74% from two or more races. 2.20% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race. 24.3% were of English, 21.7% of German, 11.5% American, 9.9% Irish and 8.1% Polish ancestry according to the 2012 American Community Survey. 95.9% spoke English and 2.1% Spanish as their first language.
There were 58,168 households, out of which 33.50% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 53.80% were married couples living together, 12.00% had a female householder with no husband present, and 29.80% were non-families. 24.60% of all households were made up of individuals, and 9.60% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.55 and the average family size was 3.03.
In the county, the population was spread out, with 25.60% under the age of 18, 8.10% from 18 to 24, 30.40% from 25 to 44, 23.00% from 45 to 64, and 12.90% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 37 years. For every 100 females there were 104.20 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 103.70 males.
The median income for a household in the county was $43,171, and the median income for a family was $50,970. Males had a median income of $38,919 versus $26,448 for females. The per capita income for the county was $20,171. About 6.50% of families and 9.00% of the population were below the poverty line, including 12.40% of those under age 18 and 6.10% of those age 65 or over.
School districts include:
42°15′N 84°25′W / 42.25°N 84.42°W / 42.25; -84.42 | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Jackson County is a county located in the U.S. state of Michigan. Its population was 160,366 as of the 2020 Census. The county seat is Jackson. The county was set off in 1829 and organized in 1832. It is named for U.S. President Andrew Jackson and considered to be one of Michigan's \"Cabinet counties\", named for members of Jackson's Cabinet.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Jackson County comprises the Jackson, MI Metropolitan Statistical Area.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The Jackson County Courthouse was designed by Claire Allen, a prominent southern Michigan architect. Jackson County is also home to the Michigan Whitetail Hall of Fame.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of 723 square miles (1,870 km), of which 702 square miles (1,820 km) is land and 22 square miles (57 km) (3.0%) is water.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The Grand River is Michigan's longest river. It starts in Somerset Township in Hillsdale County and Liberty Township in Jackson County. It then flows through a small part of Columbia Township, into Summit township, and then right through the Jackson city limits. It then flows through Blackman Charter Township and then Rives Township and Tompkins Township before entering Ingham County, Eaton County, Clinton County, Ionia County, Kent County, Ottawa County and into the city of Grand Haven where it empties into Lake Michigan. The river is 260 miles (420 km) long; its watershed drains an area of 5,572 miles (8,967 km) including 18 counties and 158 townships.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The Kalamazoo River is made up of the north and south branches.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The north branch starts in Jackson County in Hanover Township. It starts in Pine Hills Lake and Farewell Lake and flows through a small part of Liberty Township and then back into Hanover Township. It then flows into Spring Arbor Township and Concord Township. It then flows out of Jackson County and into Calhoun County before it goes through the town of Albion where the north branch connects with the south branch and they form to be one river.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The south branch starts in the wetlands near the town North Adams in Hillsdale County and flows through the rest of Hillsdale County. It enters Jackson County and goes through a small part of Hanover Township before reentering Hillsdale County and then reentering Jackson County where it goes through Pulaski Township. It then enters Calhoun County and connects with the northern branch when it reaches the town of Albion.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "When the south branch and north branch connect to form just the Kalamazoo River, it then flows through the rest of Calhoun County. It then enters Kalamazoo County and then Allegan County. When it reaches the towns of Saugatuck and Douglas it stops and enters Lake Michigan. In total the Kalamazoo River is 166 miles (267 km) long, and its watershed drains a total of 2,020 miles (3,250 km) and drains into 8 counties.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The county government operates the county jail, maintains township roads, operates the major local courts, keeps files of deeds and mortgages, maintains vital records, administers public health regulations, and participates with the state in the provision of welfare and other social services. The county board of commissioners controls the budget but has only limited authority to make laws or ordinances. In Michigan, most local government functions – police and fire, building and zoning, tax assessment, street maintenance, etc. – are the responsibility of individual cities and townships.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "(information as of February 21, 2013)",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "With the exceptions of 1964 and 2008, Jackson County has voted for the Republican nominee in every presidential election since 1940, and is thus considered a reliable Republican stronghold.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "As of the census of 2000, there were 158,422 people, 58,168 households, and 40,833 families residing in the county. The population density was 224 people per square mile (86 people/km). There were 62,906 housing units at an average density of 89 per square mile (34/km). The racial makeup of the county was 88.54% White, 7.92% Black or African American, 0.40% Native American, 0.53% Asian, 0.04% Pacific Islander, 0.83% from other races, and 1.74% from two or more races. 2.20% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race. 24.3% were of English, 21.7% of German, 11.5% American, 9.9% Irish and 8.1% Polish ancestry according to the 2012 American Community Survey. 95.9% spoke English and 2.1% Spanish as their first language.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "There were 58,168 households, out of which 33.50% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 53.80% were married couples living together, 12.00% had a female householder with no husband present, and 29.80% were non-families. 24.60% of all households were made up of individuals, and 9.60% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.55 and the average family size was 3.03.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In the county, the population was spread out, with 25.60% under the age of 18, 8.10% from 18 to 24, 30.40% from 25 to 44, 23.00% from 45 to 64, and 12.90% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 37 years. For every 100 females there were 104.20 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 103.70 males.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The median income for a household in the county was $43,171, and the median income for a family was $50,970. Males had a median income of $38,919 versus $26,448 for females. The per capita income for the county was $20,171. About 6.50% of families and 9.00% of the population were below the poverty line, including 12.40% of those under age 18 and 6.10% of those age 65 or over.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "School districts include:",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "42°15′N 84°25′W / 42.25°N 84.42°W / 42.25; -84.42",
"title": "External links"
}
]
| Jackson County is a county located in the U.S. state of Michigan. Its population was 160,366 as of the 2020 Census. The county seat is Jackson. The county was set off in 1829 and organized in 1832. It is named for U.S. President Andrew Jackson and considered to be one of Michigan's "Cabinet counties", named for members of Jackson's Cabinet. Jackson County comprises the Jackson, MI Metropolitan Statistical Area. The Jackson County Courthouse was designed by Claire Allen, a prominent southern Michigan architect. Jackson County is also home to the Michigan Whitetail Hall of Fame. | 2002-02-25T15:51:15Z | 2023-09-09T02:40:29Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_County,_Michigan |
16,175 | Jennifer Lopez | Jennifer Lynn Affleck (née Lopez; born July 24, 1969), known by her maiden name and also shortened to J.Lo, is an American singer and actress. Often considered a Latin pop culture icon, Lopez is one of the most influential entertainers in the world, credited for helping propel the Latin pop movement in American music. Her most successful singles on the US Billboard Hot 100 include the number one singles "If You Had My Love", "I'm Real", "Ain't It Funny" and "All I Have".
In 1991, Lopez began appearing as a Fly Girl dancer on the sketch comedy television series In Living Color, where she remained a regular until she decided to pursue an acting career in 1993. For her first leading role in Selena (1997), she became the first Hispanic actress to earn over US$1 million for a film. She went on to star in Anaconda (1997) and Out of Sight (1998), and established herself as the highest-paid Hispanic actress in Hollywood. Lopez ventured into the music industry with her debut studio album On the 6 (1999) and later starred in the psychological horror The Cell (2000). With the simultaneous release of her second studio album J.Lo and her romantic comedy The Wedding Planner in 2001, she became the first woman to have a number-one album and film in the same week. Her 2002 release, J to tha L–O! The Remixes, became the first remix album in history to debut atop the US Billboard 200. Later that year, she released her third studio album, This Is Me... Then and starred in the film Maid in Manhattan.
After starring in Gigli (2003), a critical and commercial failure, Lopez starred in the successful romantic comedies Shall We Dance? (2004) and Monster-in-Law (2005). Her fifth studio album, Como Ama una Mujer (2007), had the highest first week sales for a debut Spanish album in the United States. Following a relatively unsuccessful period, she returned to prominence in 2011 with her appearance as a judge on American Idol and released her seventh studio album, Love?, spawning the international hit "On the Floor". From 2016 to 2018, she starred in the police drama series Shades of Blue and performed a residency show, Jennifer Lopez: All I Have, at Planet Hollywood Las Vegas. She also produced and served as a judge on World of Dance (2017–2020). In 2019, she garnered critical acclaim for her performance as a stripper in the crime drama Hustlers.
For her contributions to the recording industry, Lopez has a landmark star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and has received the Billboard Icon Award and the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award, among other honors. In 2012, Forbes ranked her the world's most powerful celebrity, and the 38th most powerful woman in the world. Time listed her among their 100 most influential people in the world in 2018. Her other ventures include beauty and clothing lines, fragrances, a production company and a charitable foundation.
Jennifer Lynn López was born on July 24, 1969, in the Bronx, a borough of New York City, and raised in its Castle Hill neighborhood. Her parents, David López and Guadalupe Rodríguez, were born in Puerto Rico and met in New York City. After serving in the army, David worked as a computer technician at Guardian Insurance Company. Guadalupe was a homemaker for the first ten years of López's life and later worked as a Tupperware salesperson and a kindergarten and gym teacher. They divorced in the 1990s after 33 years of marriage.
Lopez is a middle child; she has an older sister, Leslie, and a younger sister, Lynda. The three shared a bedroom. Lopez has described her upbringing as "strict". She was raised in a Roman Catholic family; she attended Mass every Sunday and received a Catholic education, attending Holy Family School and the all-girls Preston High School. In school, López ran track on a national level, participated in gymnastics and was on the softball team. She danced in school musicals and played a lead role in a production of Godspell.
There was "lots of music" in the typically Puerto Rican household, and López and her sisters were encouraged to sing, dance and create their own plays for family events. West Side Story made a particular impression on the young López and she wanted to be an entertainer from an early age. As a teenager, she learned flamenco, jazz and ballet at the Kips Bay Boys & Girls Club and taught dance to younger students, including Kerry Washington. After graduating from high school, she had a part-time secretarial job at a law firm and studied business at New York's Baruch College for one semester. At age 18, she enrolled as a full-time student at Manhattan's Phil Black Dance Studio, where she had already taken night classes in jazz and tap dance. Her parents were unhappy with her decision to leave college to pursue a dance career. Her mother asked her to move out of the family home and they stopped speaking for eight months. López moved to Manhattan, sleeping in the dance studio's office for the first few months.
López's first professional job came in 1989 when she spent five months touring Europe with the musical revue show Golden Musicals of Broadway. She was the only member of the chorus not to have a solo and later characterized it as a pivotal moment where she realized the importance of a "tough skin" in the entertainment business. In 1990, she danced alongside MC Hammer in an episode of Yo! MTV Raps and traveled around Japan for four months as a chorus member in Synchronicity. When she returned to the United States, she was hired as a backup dancer for New Kids on the Block's performance of "Games" at the 1991 American Music Awards. She also traveled around America with regional productions of the musicals Jesus Christ Superstar and Oklahoma! During this period, Lopez also danced in music videos including Doug E. Fresh's "Summertime", Richard Rogers' "Can't Stop Loving You", EPMD's "Rampage" and Samantha Fox's "(Hurt Me! Hurt Me!) But the Pants Stay On".
López's most high-profile job as a professional dancer was as a Fly Girl jazz-funk dancer on the sketch comedy television series In Living Color. At the New York audition, the show's choreographer, Rosie Perez, noticed that Lopez had "star quality" and "did not complain, not once" when asked to repeatedly perform the dance routine. López moved to Los Angeles in late 1991 for the job; she filmed In Living Color during the day and attended acting classes taught by Aaron Speiser at night. The head of Virgin Records considered signing The Fly Girls as a girl group to rival the Spice Girls, but the deal fell apart. After appearing as a Fly Girl in seasons three and four of In Living Color, López left to work as a backup dancer for Janet Jackson, and appeared in the music video for "That's the Way Love Goes". She was scheduled to tour with Jackson on her Janet World Tour in late 1993 but opted to pursue an acting career instead.
López's first professional acting job was a small recurring role on the television show South Central (1994). She was invited to audition for the pilot by a casting director who had seen her speak to camera during a behind-the-scenes In Living Color segment. López then acquired an agent and was cast in the CBS show Second Chances and its spin-off Hotel Malibu. She appeared in the direct-to-video drama film Lost in the Wild (1993). For her first major movie role, in Gregory Nava's 1995 drama Mi Familia, López received a nomination for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Actress. Lopez then starred in the action comedy Money Train (1995). Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times said she "mostly holds her own" with co-stars Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson, while Stephen Holden of The New York Times praised her "scene-stealing charm". In 1996, Lopez had a supporting role opposite Robin Williams in the comedy Jack. She next starred opposite Jack Nicholson in the neo-noir thriller Blood and Wine (1997). David Rooney of Variety felt López delivered in "juggling" the "smoldering and soulful sides" of the character but Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly said she was "used as a place marker rather than as a real girl."
With her casting as the singer Selena Quintanilla-Pérez in the biopic Selena (1997), López became the first Latina actress to earn $1 million. She was excited by the rare opportunity to "actually star" in a movie "in the title role" but expressed disappointment that other Latina actors were not being afforded the same opportunities. Despite having previously worked with the film's director Gregory Navq on Mi Familia, López participated in an intense auditioning process and spent time with the late singer's family in Corpus Christi, Texas before filming began. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times described it as "a star-making performance" and particularly enjoyed the onstage scenes: "She has the star presence to look convincing in front of 100,000 fans." Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times praised the "incandescent" performance. López received her first Golden Globe nomination for the performance. The director later said he asked the heads of Warner Bros. to fund an Academy Award campaign for López but was told the academy would "never nominate a Latina." Later in 1997, López starred opposite Ice Cube in the horror film Anaconda. While Joe Leydon of Variety found Anaconda "silly", he said the film deserved "a little credit" for being "the first movie of its kind to have a Latina and an African-American" as its stars. In the crime film U Turn (1997), López appeared topless in a sex scene that was added by director Oliver Stone during filming. Speaking in 2003, López said it was not something "I would have chosen to do" and that she and Stone fought over it: "It's hard being the only woman on a set ... But it actually worked in the movie."
López starred opposite George Clooney in the crime caper Out of Sight (1998), Steven Soderbergh's adaptation of the Elmore Leonard novel of the same name. Cast as a deputy federal marshal who falls for a charming criminal, López won rave reviews for her performance. Janet Maslin of The New York Times described it as her "best movie role thus far, and she brings it both seductiveness and grit; if it was hard to imagine a hard-working, pistol-packing bombshell on the page, it couldn't be easier here." Turan of the Los Angeles Times described López as "an actress who can be convincingly tough and devastatingly erotic" and said the film solidified "her position as a woman you can confidently build a film around." Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times was impressed by the "rich comic understanding" Lopez brought to the role and enjoyed the "repartee" between her and Clooney: "These two have the kind of unforced fun in their scenes together that reminds you of Bogart and Bacall." In 2021, Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian named Lopez and Clooney's partnership as one of the best examples of on-screen chemistry in cinema history. Also in 1998, Lopez provided the voice of Azteca in the animated film Antz.
López launched a music career in 1999 because, after Selena, she had missed "the excitement of the stage" and was "really feeling [her] Latin roots". Lopez's new manager Benny Medina sought to position her as "a brand name that will cross over into all media." Lopez recorded a Spanish-language demo for circulation among prospective labels. Tommy Mottola, the head of Sony Music's Work Group, signed her but suggested that she sing in English instead. Her debut album On the 6, named after the 6 Subway line which connected her childhood home in the Bronx to Manhattan, was filled with what Ed Morales of the Los Angeles Times described as "state-of-the-art dance pop ... even if Lopez's vocals are largely anonymous." The album was a success and Lopez's debut single, "If You Had My Love", topped the Billboard Hot 100, with another single, "Waiting for Tonight", reaching number eight. In 2000, Lopez and then-boyfriend Sean Combs attended the Grammy Awards, with Lopez wearing a plunging green Versace silk chiffon dress. The dress generated worldwide attention and became the most popular search query in Google's history, leading to the creation of Google Images. Lopez returned to the big screen in 2000, starring in the psychological thriller The Cell. David Edelstein of Slate remarked that the "imperious" Lopez was "trying to look waifishly expectant" while Amy Taubin of The Village Voice noted that she appeared to be engaged "in some kind of pouting competition" "in lieu of acting."
Lopez became the first woman to have a number one film and album simultaneously when, in early 2001, the romantic comedy The Wedding Planner, co-starring Matthew McConaughey, and her sophomore album J.Lo were released in the same week. In a review of The Wedding Planner, Bob Graham of the San Francisco Chronicle remarked that, while there was "no doubt of Lopez's screen poise or acting chops", she should choose comedic projects with "more bite." Jessica Winter of The Village Voice found her "bewilderingly miscast" as a "buttoned down, celibate" woman, writing that the movie "achieves the dubious but perversely impressive feat, for its 90-minute duration, of neutering Jennifer Lopez." The album J.Lo received mixed reviews. Jon Pareles of Rolling Stone was unimpressed by her "merely adequate, studio-assisted voice": "While dance pop doesn't necessarily demand great singers, Lopez is just scraping by." J.Lo ultimately became the best-selling release of her career, and included the singles "Love Don't Cost a Thing" and "I'm Real", the latter of which reached number one in the US. In other 2001 work, Lopez launched her first business venture, the clothing line J.Lo by Jennifer Lopez, and starred opposite Jim Caviezel in the romantic drama Angel Eyes. Lopez's performance was well-reviewed, with Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle describing her as "an actress who can do things other movie stars can't do. She doesn't push, just thinks, and her thoughts and emotions burn into the film."
The romantic comedy Maid in Manhattan (2002), in which Lopez starred opposite Ralph Fiennes, became the highest-grossing film of her career. Reviewing Maid in Manhattan, A. O. Scott of The New York Times enjoyed Lopez as a romantic lead and said "her greatest skill as an actress -- and the key to her brain-addling sexiness -- may be her ability to melt without cracking the hard shell of composure she wears." She starred as an abused wife seeking revenge in the thriller Enough. An overworked Lopez suffered a nervous breakdown in 2001 while filming it. Upon its release in 2002, Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times was unimpressed by the "tacky material" and was surprised to see "an actress like Jennifer Lopez" involved with the project. Nathan Rabin of The A.V. Club said "the film's idiocy works for Lopez: Every diva needs at least one camp classic on her résumé".
Lopez released two albums in 2002. The first was a remix album, J to tha L–O! The Remixes, featuring rappers Ja Rule, 50 Cent, Fat Joe and P Diddy. It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, with its lead single Ain't It Funny (Murder Remix)" reaching the top of the Billboard Hot 100. Lopez's third studio album, This Is Me... Then, was released in late 2002. Jon Caramanica of The Village Voice was unimpressed by her studio-enhanced vocals and expressed bemusement as to how the "mega-millionaire Bronx-expat public-fantasy bombshell" was "making the least interesting music on the pop charts today." Despite having the highest opening sales of Lopez's career, the album charted at number six on the Billboard 200. The album's lead single "Jenny from the Block", peaked at number three on the Billboard Hot 100 while its second single, "All I Have", reached number one. In 2002 business ventures, Lopez opened Madre's, a Los Angeles restaurant serving Latin cuisine, and released her first fragrance, Glow by JLo. It became the top-selling fragrance in the US, and Lopez ultimately released over 18 fragrances as part of a licensing deal with Coty.
Lopez became the subject of widespread media criticism in 2003 due to her public relationship with Affleck and the tabloid depiction of her as a demanding diva. The Guardian published an article exploring her "bilious" media coverage, with journalist Lawrence Donegan positing that "indefensible" misogyny and racism were to blame for her position as "the most vilified woman in modern popular culture". Lopez fired both her personal manager Benny Medina and her publicist in mid-2003; The New York Times reported that movie executives had become frustrated by having their communications with Lopez "largely filtered" through Medina.
Lopez starred opposite Affleck in the romantic comedy Gigli (2003), which was a box-office bomb and is considered one of the worst films of all time. Rex Reed of The Observer criticized the lead actors, writing that the film reminds the world how "pathetically incompetent they both are in the only two things that matter in career longevity - craft and talent." Roger Ebert agreed that the movie "doesn't quite work", but found Lopez and Affleck "appealing in their performances" and noted that they "have chemistry" together. Lopez had a minor role opposite Affleck in the film Jersey Girl (2004). Following test audiences' negative reactions to the onscreen couple, Lopez's screen time was halved. Lopez later described this as the lowest point of her career and admitted she felt "eviscerated" by the media coverage surrounding Gigli: "I lost my sense of self, questioned if I belonged in this business, thought maybe I did suck at everything. And my relationship self-destructed in front of the entire world. It was a two-year thing for me until I picked myself up again." She became the face of a Louis Vuitton advertising campaign, launched her second fashion label, Sweetface, and starred opposite Richard Gere in the romantic comedy-drama Shall We Dance?, which was a box-office success.
The marketing for the romantic comedy Monster-in-Law (2005), in which Lopez starred opposite Jane Fonda, played up her "Gigli-and-tabloid tarnished image", and it became a box office success. She released her fourth studio album, Rebirth, in early 2005. It was recorded during a period where Lopez felt "a little bit lost, trying to get my footing in a new life": "I had just gotten married [to singer Marc Anthony] ... I wasn't with Benny [Medina]." Alexis Petridis of The Guardian remarked that the album title "suggests even Lopez has realised that something is amiss with her career ... Despite the highlights, you're still left pondering the question: what happened to Jennifer Lopez?" While the album reached number two on the Billboard 200 and its lead single "Get Right" charted at number twelve on the Billboard Hot 100, the second and final single "Hold You Down" peaked at number 64. She returned the Billboard Hot 100 the following year, at number four, when she was a featured artist on "Control Myself", the lead single from LL Cool J's twelfth studio album.
Lopez's next three movie projects were box office failures. She starred alongside Robert Redford and Morgan Freeman in the drama An Unfinished Life (2005). Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times predicted that the typical review would be unkind: "It will have no respect for Jennifer Lopez, because she is going through a period right now when nobody is satisfied with anything she does ... Give Lopez your permission to be good again; she is the same actress now as when we thought her so new and fine." In 2006, she reunited with Gregory Nava, the director of both Mi Familia and Selena, to star in the crime drama Bordertown as a journalist investigating female homicides in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The film was negatively reviewed and received a direct-to-video release. David D'Arcy of Screen Daily found Lopez "unconvincing" as a journalist. In 2007, she starred opposite her then-husband Marc Anthony in the music biopic El Cantante, which told the story of Puerto Rican salsa singer Héctor Lavoe and his wife Puchi. It did not perform well at the box office and received mixed reviews from film critics. Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle considered it her "most mannered, least relaxed and least convincing performance to date". Lopez later expressed particular pride in her work in the film.
Lopez released two studio albums in 2007. Her fifth album, Como Ama una Mujer, was her first to be recorded entirely in Spanish. Chris Willman of Entertainment Weekly acknowledged that the album offered "fairly persuasive proof" that Lopez can sing, but was unimpressed by the "flaccid torch songs." It reached number 10 on the Billboard 200; the lead single "Qué Hiciste" reached number 86 on the Billboard Hot 100 while the second single "Me Haces Falta" failed to chart. Lopez's sixth studio album Brave, released later that year, was her lowest-charting album worldwide. Jonathan Bernstein of Entertainment Weekly was disappointed that Lopez had returned to "listless vocals" for her "back-to-the-dance-floor album." The album debuted at number 12 on the Billboard 200 and produced two singles, "Do It Well" and "Hold It Don't Drop It". The first peaked at number 31 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, while the latter failed to chart. While pregnant with twins, Lopez embarked upon her first ever concert tour, a show co-headlined by Anthony, in September 2007. She also created, produced and was featured in the MTV show DanceLife.
After giving birth to twins in February 2008, Lopez took a career break. Her restaurant Madre's closed permanently, as did her two fashion lines. After rehiring former manager Medina, Lopez released two songs in late 2009, "Louboutins" and "Fresh Out of the Oven". The songs were intended for her seventh studio album but failed to make an appearance on the Billboard charts, leading to her departure from Sony Music and Epic Records. Lopez's first theatrical role in three years was in the romantic comedy The Back-up Plan (2010). Manohla Dargis of The New York Times was unimpressed by the movie and described Lopez as "an appealing screen presence with a disappointing big-screen track record. That's probably not all her fault: romantic roles for women often are the provenance of the bland or the blonde."
A "big turning point" in Lopez's career came in 2011, when she joined the judging panel of the singing competition series American Idol. She accepted the job at a time when she was "not getting offered a whole bunch of movies" and the show returned her to prominence. Hannah Elliot of Forbes described it as "a remarkable comeback": "Idol humanized her. Viewers who knew only an attention-grabbing siren met a hardworking, self-made, empathetic single mother, who got emotional when contestants did well and when they failed." She returned as a judge for the eleventh season, earning a reported $20 million, and again for the thirteenth season, earning a reported $17.5 million. She became a brand ambassador for L'Oréal, Venus and Fiat, and launched the Jennifer Lopez Collection, a clothing and homeware line with Tommy Hilfiger for Kohl's.
After signing a new recording contract with Island Records, Lopez's seventh studio album, Love?, was released in early 2011. While the album itself was a moderate commercial success, the single "On the Floor" was one of the year's most successful songs. It reached number three on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming her highest-charting single as a lead artist since "All I Have". Lopez's greatest hits album, Dance Again... the Hits, was released in mid-2012 to fulfil her contractual obligations with her former label Epic Records. Lopez, who was divorcing Anthony and navigating the "breakup of a family", felt as if the album's sole single, "Dance Again", had come to her at the "perfect moment". "Dance Again" reached number 17 on the US Billboard Hot 100. Lopez launched the Dance Again World Tour, her first headlining concert tour, in mid-2012. It grossed over $1 million per show. Also that year, she launched Teeology, a luxury T-shirt brand.
Lopez returned to the big screen in 2012, starring alongside an ensemble cast in the film What to Expect When You're Expecting, which is based on the book of the same name. Lopez voiced Shira, a saber tooth tiger, in the animated film, Ice Age: Continental Drift, the fourth film in the Ice Age franchise. Also in 2012, a talent show, ¡Q'Viva! The Chosen followed Lopez, Anthony, and director-choreographer Jamie King as they travelled across 21 countries in Latin America to find new talent for a Las Vegas show. In 2013, Lopez starred alongside Jason Statham in the crime thriller Parker, in which she played Leslie. Her performance earned positive reviews, with Chicago Tribune commending the role for giving Lopez "an opportunity to be dramatic, romantic, funny, depressed, euphoric and violent. The audience stays with her all the way". Lopez became the chief creative officer of nuvoTV and founded the mobile phone retail brand Viva Móvil. She was an executive producer of the television series The Fosters.
Lopez's eighth studio album, A.K.A., was released in mid-2014 through Capitol Records, experiencing lacklustre sales, becoming her lowest-selling album in the US. The album produced three singles: "I Luh Ya Papi", featuring French Montana, "First Love", and "Booty", featuring Iggy Azalea. They reached 77, 87 and 18 respectively on the Billboard Hot 100. Also that year, Lopez released "We Are One (Ole Ola)", the official song for the 2014 FIFA World Cup along with Pitbull and Claudia Leitte. Lopez partnered with Endless Jewelry on a range of jewelry and released a book, True Love, which became a New York Times best-seller.
2015 saw the release of The Boy Next Door, an erotic thriller that Lopez both co-produced and starred in as a high school teacher who becomes involved with a student, which eventually leads to his dangerous obsession with her. The film received negative reviews from critics. Despite this, it became her most successful opening at the box office for a live action film since Monster-in-Law. Lopez had a voice role in the animated feature Home and contributed the single "Feel the Light" to the film's official soundtrack. Lopez also starred in the independent drama film Lila & Eve, alongside Viola Davis.
From 2016 to 2018, Lopez had a residency concert show, All I Have, at Planet Hollywood's Zappos Theater in Las Vegas. She performed 120 shows during the three-year run, grossing over $100 million in ticket sales. At the beginning of the residency, Lopez signed a multi-album deal with her former label Epic Records but, the failure of A.K.A. and its poor sales, she opted to release standalone singles instead including "Ain't Your Mama", "Ni Tú Ni Yo","Amor, Amor, Amor", "El Anillo" and "Dinero", featuring DJ Khaled and Cardi B. The highest charting of these were "Ain't Your Mama" and "Dinero", reaching 76 and 80 respectively on the Billboard Hot 100, while the former's music video received over 800 million views on YouTube. In collaboration with Giuseppe Zanotti, Lopez designed a capsule collection of shoes and jewelry and, with Inglot Cosmetics, launched a limited-edition makeup collection. With the release of "Ni Tú Ni Yo" and "Amor, Amor, Amor", Lopez planned to release her second spanish-language album Por Primera Vez, which was ultimately cancelled.
From 2016 to 2018, Lopez produced and starred in NBC's crime drama series Shades of Blue as Detective Harlee Santos, a single mother and police detective in New York City who goes undercover for the FBI to investigate her own squad. Starring alongside the great Ray Liotta, Lopez's performance received positive reviews. Lopez was executive producer and judge on NBC's successful series World of Dance. Lopez reprised her voice role as Shira in the animated film Ice Age: Collision Course (2016).
In 2018, Lopez was named one of Time's 100 most influential people in the world, and starred in the comedy film Second Act, directed by Peter Segal; she also produced the film, and recorded the single "Limitless" for its soundtrack. Second Act earned mixed reviews from critics, but performed well at the box office, grossing $72.3 million during its theatrical run.
Lopez starred in the film Hustlers (2019), for which she also served as an executive producer, and which grossed over US$100 million in North American box office receipts alone. Directed by Lorene Scafaria, the film is inspired by a true story, following a group of Manhattan strippers who con wealthy men. Lopez's portrayal of a veteran stripper in Hustlers garnered acclaim from critics, with some deeming it the best performance of her acting career. The film also gave Lopez her highest opening weekend at the box office for a live action film (grossing $33.2 million), and garnered her nominations for Best Supporting Actress at the Golden Globe Awards, Screen Actors Guild Awards, Critics' Choice Movie Awards and Independent Spirit Awards, but snubbed of a nomination at the Academy Awards. The success of Hustlers has been regarded by various media outlets as a comeback as an actress for Lopez. She was announced as the global face of the Coach brand and launched a collection of sunglasses with the brand Quay Australia. Also in September 2019, Lopez modeled an updated version of her Green Versace dress at Milan Fashion Week; her appearance generated $31.8 million in total media impact value. She also became executive producer of the two television series, Good Trouble and Thanks a Million.
In 2019, Lopez embarked on an international concert tour, It's My Party, to celebrate her 50th birthday; the tour grossed an estimated $54.7 million from thirty-eight shows. In February 2020, Lopez co-headlined the Super Bowl LIV halftime show in Miami, Florida alongside Shakira; the performance included an appearance by her child Emme Muñiz. The performance was widely praised and is currently the most-watched Super Bowl halftime show to date. In June 2020, she appeared in YouTube Originals's special, Dear Class of 2020, which featured a virtual commencement event and highlighted the George Floyd protests. By the end of the year, Lopez headlined the 2021 Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest special on ABC. In January 2021, she performed at the 2021 inauguration of President Joe Biden in Washington, D.C., where she sang "This Land Is Your Land" and "America the Beautiful", while also reciting the last phrase of the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish. She also released a number of singles between 2019 and 2021, including: "Medicine" featuring French Montana, "Pa' Ti + Lonely" with Maluma and "Cambia el Paso" with Rauw Alejandro. In January 2021, Lopez launched her skincare line, JLo Beauty.
In mid-2021, Lopez signed a multi-year deal with Netflix to produce a range of films and television shows through her own Nuyorican Productions. Lopez co-produced and starred opposite Owen Wilson and Maluma in the romantic comedy Marry Me, which was filmed in late 2019 and released in February 2022. The film grossed over $50 million at the box office while becoming the most-streamed day-and-date film on Peacock, and received generally mixed reviews from critics. Lopez also released a soundtrack for the film, with Maluma, which generated the singles "On My Way" and "Marry Me"; the former won the 2023 MTV Movie & TV Award for Best Song. The soundtrack received mixed reviews. In March 2022, Lopez was appointed as the chief "entertainment and lifestyle" officer of cruise line, Virgin Voyages. Later that month, she performed "On My Way" and her 2005 single "Get Right" in connection to her receiving the Icon Award at the 2022 iHeartRadio Music Awards; her performance featured Billy Porter and some of the queens from RuPaul's Drag Race. Her next project was the documentary Jennifer Lopez: Halftime (2022), which focuses on Lopez's life following the release of Hustlers and in preparation for her 2020 Super Bowl performance. The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in June 2022 and was released on Netflix shortly after; it garnered positive reviews from film critics. In September, Lopez was announced as the global ambassador of Italian lingerie label Intimissimi. The following month, Jimmy Fallon and Lopez released a children's book, Con Pollo: A Bilingual Playtime Adventure, which became a New York Times best-seller.
Lopez co-produced and starred opposite Josh Duhamel and Jennifer Coolidge in the action-comedy Shotgun Wedding, filmed in the Dominican Republic; it was released on Amazon Prime Video on January 27, 2023. In March, she announced a collaboration between her lifestyle brand J.Lo by Jennifer Lopez and fashion retailer Revolve. A footwear line, JLO Jennifer Lopez, was released as three collections in March, May and June; it consisted of kitten heels, sandals, boots, stilettos and platforms. In April, she launched her own spritz brand, Delola. Lopez led and co-produced the action thriller feature The Mother, directed by Niki Caro. Filmed in Canada and Gran Canaria, it was released on Netflix in May 2023. In September 2023, she entered a "recording and publishing" partnership with BMG Rights Management, in conjunction with her Nuyorican Productions. Lopez and Intimissimi released a collaborative capsule collection of lingerie titled after her upcoming ninth studio album in October.
Lopez's ninth studio album This Is Me... Now, a follow-up and "sister album" to This Is Me... Then (2002), will be released by Nuyorican and BMG on February 16, 2024. A musical short film directed by Dave Meyers, produced by Nuyorican, and distributed by Amazon MGM Studios will be released as a visual companion to the album on Prime Video on the same day. Her first studio album in nearly a decade, Lopez described it as an "emotional, spiritual, and psychological journey" of the past two decades; she stated that her reunion and marriage to former ex Ben Affleck—who is also a co-writer for the film—inspired her to write honest music. The record was previously slated for a summer 2023 release, and was announced on the 20th anniversary of This Is Me... Then. The album's lead single, "Can't Get Enough" will be released on January 10, 2024.
Lopez filmed the sci-fi thriller Atlas from September to November 2022 in L.A. and New Zealand, her third project under her Netflix deal. She will star alongside Jharrel Jerome in the biographical wrestling drama Unstoppable, produced by Ben Affleck and based on the life of wrestler Anthony Robles. Production began in May 2023 but was put on hold till the end of the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike in September. Lopez has also committed to lead and co-produce Netflix's film adaptation of the bestselling novel, The Cipher. She has several projects in the works as a producer.
Lopez was in a nearly decade-long relationship with David Cruz, her high school boyfriend, until the mid-1990s. She would later say of Cruz, "You get lucky, you have a first love like that." She was married to Cuban waiter Ojani Noa from February 1997 to January 1998. In subsequent court cases, Noa was prevented from publishing a book about their marriage and from using private honeymoon footage of Lopez in a documentary. Lopez was in an on again–off again relationship with record producer and rapper Sean Combs (then known as "Puff Daddy") from 1999 to early 2001. On the night of December 27, 1999, Lopez and Combs were arrested and charged with criminal possession of a weapon and possession of stolen property, after leaving the scene of a shooting at a Times Square nightclub. Charges against Lopez were dropped within an hour while Combs was acquitted of all charges at trial in early 2001. They broke up shortly thereafter. Lopez later said that, while she had "cared very much" about Combs, their "crazy, tumultuous" relationship "was always something I knew would end." She was married to Cris Judd, her former backup dancer, from September 2001 to January 2003.
Before her divorce with Judd was finalized, Lopez was in a relationship with actor and filmmaker Ben Affleck from mid-2002 to early 2004. Although they had crossed paths several times before (including at the 70th Academy Awards and at the premiere of Armageddon, both in 1998), the first major meeting was on the set of Gigli (2003) in December 2001. They later worked together on the music video for "Jenny from the Block" and the film Jersey Girl (2004). Her album This Is Me... Then was dedicated to and inspired by Affleck. Their relationship was extensively publicized. Tabloids referred to the couple as "Bennifer", a portmanteau Vanity Fair described as "the first of that sort of tabloid branding". They became engaged in November 2002, but their planned wedding on September 14, 2003, was postponed with four days' notice because of "excessive media attention". They ended their engagement in January 2004. Years later, Lopez said Affleck's discomfort with media scrutiny was one reason for their split and described it as her "first real heartbreak": "I think different time, different thing, who knows what could've happened, but there was a genuine love there."
Lopez was married to singer Marc Anthony from June 2004 to June 2014; they had previously worked together and dated for a few months in the late 1990s. Their wedding took place five months after the end of her relationship with Affleck. During their marriage, they collaborated on music and performed together, as well as co-starring in El Cantante (2006). Lopez gave birth to fraternal twins, a boy and a girl, on Long Island in February 2008. People paid a reported US$6 million for the first photographs of the twins, making them the most expensive celebrity pictures ever taken at the time. In 2009, Anthony and Lopez purchased a stake in the Miami Dolphins. The couple announced their separation in July 2011. Anthony filed for divorce in April 2012 and it was finalized in June 2014. Lopez retained primary physical custody of the two children. Lopez occasionally performs with her daughter.
Lopez had an on again-off again relationship relationship with her former backup dancer Casper Smart from October 2011 to August 2016. She dated New York Yankees baseball player Alex Rodriguez from February 2017 to early 2021. They became engaged in March 2019 but postponed their wedding twice due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In response to tabloid speculation about the state of their relationship, they released a statement in March 2021, saying they were "working through some things". They announced the end of their relationship in April 2021.
In April 2021, Lopez and Affleck were reported to be dating again, with Lopez publicly confirming their rekindled relationship that July. In the years after their breakup, they had remained in contact and spoken highly of each other in the press. Both Affleck and Lopez have spoken of the gift of a second chance with each other since reuniting. On April 8, 2022, Lopez announced their second engagement, 20 years after the first proposal. They were married in Las Vegas on July 16, 2022. The following month, they held a wedding celebration for family and friends.
Following the September 11 attacks, Lopez was heavily involved in charitable activities. Joining various other artists, she was featured on charitable singles such as "What's Going On" and "El Ultimo Adios (The Last Goodbye)", which benefited people affected by the tragedy. One dollar from each ticket sold at Lopez and Anthony's co-headlining North American concert tour, which grossed an estimated $10 million, was donated to Run for Something Better—a charitable organization supporting physical fitness programs for children. In February 2007, Lopez was honored with the Artists for Amnesty prize by the human rights organization Amnesty International, for her work in the film Bordertown, which shed light on the hundreds of feminicides in Ciudad Juárez. Lopez described it as "one of the world's most shocking and disturbing, underreported crimes against humanity".
Since early in her life, Lopez has supported children; her album Rebirth (2005) is dedicated to Paige Peterson, an eleven-year-old cancer patient whom Lopez befriended during visits to the Children's Hospital Los Angeles. Peterson died in November 2004. Lopez stated that "[she doesn't] like to do [her] charity work in public. That's not what you do it for." Having had plans to create a charitable foundation for years, she eventually launched the Lopez Family Foundation (originally known as the Maribel Foundation) alongside her sister, Lynda, in 2009. The nonprofit organization seeks to increase the availability of healthcare for underprivileged women and children, offering a telemedicine program supported by a partnership with the Children's Hospital Los Angeles. The foundation has led to the expansion of medical facilities in Panama and Puerto Rico, and created the Center for a Healthy Childhood at the Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx.
In December 2012, Lopez held a charity drive that would affect her three favorite charities: the Gloria Wise Boys and Girls Club, the Children's Hospital of Los Angeles as well as the American Red Cross, mainly benefiting victims of Hurricane Sandy, which devastated parts of her hometown, New York City. In May 2015, she became the first national celebrity spokesperson for the Children's Miracle Network Hospitals and the BC Children's Hospital Foundation (BCCHF), appearing in a campaign entitled "Put Your Money Where the Miracles Are". That September, Lopez was announced as the first Global Advocate for Girls and Women at the United Nations Foundation. This role sees her mobilizing action to address challenges faced by girls and women around the world, including maternal health care programs, education and violence against women. In September 2017, following Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Maria, Lopez announced that she would be donating $1 million from the proceeds of her Las Vegas residency to humanitarian aid for Puerto Rico. Along with ex-husband Marc Anthony, she launched a humanitarian relief campaign entitled Somos Una Voz (English: We Are One Voice), an effort supported by various celebrities to rush supplies to areas affected by Hurricane Maria. Lopez and Anthony presented a subsequent concert and telethon for disaster relief, "One Voice: Somos Live!", which raised over $35 million. She was also among various artists featured on Lin-Manuel Miranda's charity single "Almost Like Praying" which benefits Puerto Rico.
As of 2021, Lopez continues to regularly donate and support charities. In September 2021, she launched her own philanthropic organization, Limitless Labs, that supports and empowers Latina entrepreneurs and business owners. Lopez announced a partnership between the venture and the 10,000 Small Businesses initiative. In June 2022, Lopez partnered with nonprofit Grameen America as a national ambassador to financially empower women-led Latina businesses: "She'll join the organization [...] in concert with her own Limitless Labs, which aims to support Latina-owned small businesses". Lopez and the organization explained their collective goal: to "empower Latina entrepreneurs across 50 U.S. cities with $14 billion in business capital and 6 million hours of financial education and training by 2030."
Lopez has performed at charity concerts throughout her career. In 2022, Lopez headlined the Los Angeles Dodgers Foundation's star-studded 6th Annual Blue Diamond Gala. The event raised a record-breaking $3.6 million to support LADF in their mission to improve education, health care, homelessness, and social justice for all Angelenos.
Lopez is a supporter of the Democratic Party, and has a long history of backing Democratic candidates for public office. Lopez is also an avid supporter of LGBT rights, and has raised millions of dollars for HIV/AIDS research. In June 2013, amfAR presented Lopez with its humanitarian award for her philanthropic work. That September, she was awarded the Ally for Equality award presented by the Human Rights Campaign, for her support of the LGBT community. The following year, she received the GLAAD Vanguard Award. In July 2016, Lopez released a single entitled "Love Make the World Go Round", a collaboration with Lin-Manuel Miranda, which benefits victims of the Orlando nightclub shooting. She was also featured on the song "Hands" along with numerous other artists, also benefiting those affected by the Orlando shooting. Among numerous other artists, Lopez signed an open letter from Billboard magazine to the United States Congress in 2016, which demanded action on gun control.
Lopez endorsed President Barack Obama in his 2012 presidential campaign, speaking in television advertisements and attending a fundraising event for Obama in Paris. She endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016, headlining a free concert in Florida in support of her that October. In June 2020, Lopez attended a Black Lives Matter movement protest in Los Angeles, in connection with the broader George Floyd protests. Lopez has also been an active advocate for the Time's Up movement. She endorsed President Joe Biden in his 2020 presidential campaign and also performed at his 2021 inauguration in Washington, D.C. In January 2022, she became one of the Co-Chairs for Michelle Obama's When We All Vote.
Lopez has cited Madonna as her "first big musical influence", explaining "It was all about Madonna for me. She inspired me to want to sing, to dance, to work hard." Other "big influences in [her] life" include Tina Turner, Whitney Houston, James Brown, and Michael Jackson. Growing up, she was influenced by Latin music styles ranging from salsa to bachata, and artists including Celia Cruz and Tito Puente. It was the 1979 hip hop song "Rapper's Delight" by The Sugarhill Gang that she said changed her life. She was also "hugely inspired in her youth" by Rita Moreno's performance in the 1961 musical film West Side Story, noting that she "was Puerto Rican" like herself at a time when that was rare in Hollywood. Speaking of musicals being an essential influence, she has said that, "musicals were a part of the tapestry of my childhood," and crediting her mom, saying: "My mom was also the mom who got me into musicals and introduced me to all kinds of music. I am an entertainer because of my mom." Another major influence on Lopez is Barbra Streisand, stating that, "watching her career over the years, watching her sing and act and direct, was very inspiring to me." Lopez has cited Janet Jackson as a major inspiration for her own dance and videos, stating that she "probably started dancing" because of Jackson's music video for "The Pleasure Principle". She has said that she also looks to the careers of Cher and Diana Ross, and has been influenced by younger artists such as Lady Gaga.
According to author Ed Morales in The Latin Beat: The Rhythms And Roots Of Latin Music From Bossa Nova To Salsa And Beyond (2003), Lopez's music explores the "romantic innocence" of Latin music, while strongly identifying with hip hop. Her debut album On the 6 fuses the influence of Latin music with R&B and hip hop, which Lopez described as Latin soul. To the contrary, Morales described it as "state-of-the-art dance pop". Dee Lockett, writing for the Chicago Tribune, stated that songs such as "Waiting for Tonight" made Lopez "arguably the leading artist in the dance-pop movement at the time". While primarily sung in English, she speaks in Spanish and asserts her Latin heritage throughout the album, which is apparent in the song "Let's Get Loud". She has also recorded bilingual songs, including the Latin pop song "Cariño", for her second album J.Lo. A departure from her previous albums, This Is Me... Then blends 1970s soul with "streetwise" hip hop.
Described as autobiographical, much of Lopez's music has centered around the "ups and downs" of love. The lyrical content of This Is Me... Then is largely focused on her relationship with Ben Affleck, with the song "Dear Ben" being described as the album's "glowing centerpiece". The two Ben inspired songs "I'm Glad" and "Baby I Love U!" becoming even more meaningful to the Bennifer story with time. Her first full-length Spanish-language album, Como Ama una Mujer features introspective lyrics about romance, heartache and self-loathing. When explaining her seventh studio album Love?, Lopez stated: "There's still so much to learn and that's why the question mark." Other recurrent themes in Lopez's music have included her upbringing in the Bronx and women's empowerment.
Some critics have considered Lopez's voice to be limited, and overshadowed by the production of her music, while remaining "radio-friendly". Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone remarked: "Instead of strained vocal pyrotechnics, Lopez sticks to the understated R&B murmur of a round-the-way superstar who doesn't need to belt because she knows you're already paying attention ... She makes a little va-va and a whole lot of voom go a long way." Meanwhile, AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine called her voice "slight" and wrote: "Lopez was never, ever about singing; she was about style". Entertainment Weekly criticized her vocal performance for lacking the trademark "husky-voiced voluptuousness" she has in her films. J. D. Considine of The Baltimore Sun regards Lopez as having a "breathy" stylistic range, but lacking personality.
Considered one of dance's "greatest success stories", Refinery29 ranked Lopez at number two on "11 Of Pop's Most Iconic Dancers" in 2015. Lopez felt an emotional connection to dance since her youth, when she specialized in ballet, jazz and flamenco. Her career commenced on the variety television sketch comedy series In Living Color, where she was a part of an ethnically diverse dance group known as the Fly Girls. Since beginning her music career, Lopez has become known for her body-emphasizing music videos, which often include dance routines. CNN's Holly Thomas noted that "Lopez's years of professional dance experience gave her a captivating, commanding presence in her videos." Some of these videos have been the subject of controversy, including "Jenny from the Block", "Dance Again" and "Booty". Her provocatively choreographed music video for "If You Had My Love" allowed Lopez to become a dominant figure on MTV networks worldwide. Madeline Roth of MTV wrote: "Her diverse videography encompasses some of the most memorable visuals of the 21st century", with Rolling Stone writer Brittany Spanos observing that her "dancing skills and ability to toy with her own celebrity have made her videos an important part of the new millennium's pop canon".
On stage, Lopez is recognized for her showmanship and sex appeal, and often includes costumes such as bodysuits as part of her performance. Author Priscilla Peña Ovalle stated in Dance and the Hollywood Latina: Race, Sex and Stardom (2011) that Lopez was one of the Latin stars who "used dance to gain agency as working performers with mainstream careers, yet many of their roles paradoxically racialized and sexualized their bodies". Troy Patterson of Entertainment Weekly also observed that she used her body for emphasis on stage, "She turned herself out as the fly girl hyperversion of postfeminist power, flaunting her control by toying with the threat of excess. In consequence, her star went supernova." Her signature movements include "clock-wise pivoting with salsa hip circles and sequential torso undulations". While being noted to lip sync in the early stages of career, Lopez's Dance Again World Tour was praised for showcasing live vocals and choreography synchronously. In a review of her Las Vegas residency All I Have, Los Angeles Times writer Nolan Feeney remarked that her dancing is "undoubtedly the centerpiece of the show".
Lopez's provocative stage performances have also drawn scrutiny at times. In May 2013, her performance on the finale of the television series Britain's Got Talent was deemed inappropriate for family-friendly television, and drew viewer complaints to Ofcom. Following her controversial performance at the musical festival Mawazine in 2015, Moroccan Prime Minister Abdelilah Benkirane called it "indecent" and "disgraceful", while an education group claimed that she "disturbed public order and tarnished women's honor and respect".
Writing of Lopez's image, Andrew Barker of Variety observed: "Despite a carefully cultivated image as an imperious pop empress in ludicrously expensive outfits, her signature hits bear the titles 'I'm Real' and 'Jenny From the Block'. She managed the perilous transition from actress to music star without ever seeming to pick either as a primary gig. She established herself as an oft-provocative sex symbol while her demeanor made it abundantly clear that she's not asking you to come hither." In 2002, Lynette Holloway of The New York Times described Lopez as overexposed. She wrote: "Forgive yourself if you are seeing Jennifer Lopez in your sleep. She is everywhere." Holloway noted her image to be "a dash of ghetto fabulousness" and "middle-class respectability" for mass appeal. Entertainment Weekly observed a change in her public profile upon joining American Idol in 2011, writing: "Gone was her old cut-a-bitch swagger; J. Lo 2.0 is an all-embracing, Oprahfied earth madre." Television presenter Ray Martin describes her as a "showbiz phenomenon".
Lopez is widely celebrated for her callipygian figure. She has been credited with influencing a change in mainstream female body image. In Latin Sensations (2001), Herón Marquez wrote: "Because she wasn't rail thin, Lopez had broken the mold and allowed millions of women to feel good about their bodies. Suddenly, it was okay for women to have hips, curves, and a big backside." Vanity Fair described her buttocks as "in and of themselves, a cultural icon". Details magazine named Lopez the "Sexiest Woman of the Year" in 1998, and she topped FHM's "100 Sexiest Women in the World" list twice. In 2011, she was named "The Most Beautiful Woman" by People. The following year, VH1 ranked her the fourth on their list of "100 Sexiest Artists", while Vibe magazine named her the most "lustable" celebrity of the past twenty years. In 2014, Lopez stated, "There's this funny notion in America that you can't be a mom and be sexy (...) It's the craziest thing I've ever heard... The truth is that women can be sexy until the day they die." In Jennifer Lopez: Halftime (2022) she further said: "I think, sometimes, as women, we think: 'if I'm too sexy I won't be taken seriously'; we're supposed to be celebrating women in every sense of who they are – smart, strong, sensual. You cannot just cancel out different parts of who you are. They can all coexist and be very authentic and real."
Lopez has been a tabloid fixture and has admitted to having a "less-than-perfect" public image. The media has drawn comparisons between Lopez and actress Elizabeth Taylor, due to her numerous failed relationships, and Lopez has been dubbed a "modern-day Liz Taylor" by the media. Lynn Hirschberg of W compared her glamorous public persona to that of Taylor. Her style was described by Billboard's Lauren Savage as "scantily clad". Lopez herself has said that she likes to "look to the women who epitomize old Hollywood glamour, like Rita Hayworth," Ava Gardner and Marilyn Monroe for inspiration to her own style, but because she "grew up in the Bronx," her style has "a more urban, hip-hop influence" as well. Her sense of style continues to be a big part of her public image.
She has received a bad reputation as being a demanding "diva", something which she denies: "I've always been fascinated by how much more well-behaved we have to be than men." Adding that, "I got a moniker of being 'the diva,' which I never felt I deserved — which I don't deserve — because I've always been a hard worker, on time, doing what I'm supposed to do, and getting that label because you reach a certain amount of success." In 2003, The Observer remarked that Lopez was "the woman immortalised in a million headlines as 'Hollywood's most demanding diva' ... Lopez must wonder what heinous crime she has committed to become the most vilified woman in modern popular culture." Actor and filmmaker Ben Affleck has observed the reason for her reputation as having something to do with racism and sexism: "People were so fucking mean about her; sexist, racist, ugly vicious shit was written about her in ways that if you wrote it now, you would literally be fired for saying some of the things you said."
Lopez is regarded as the most influential Latin entertainer of all time, credited with breaking ethnic barriers in the entertainment industry. In 1999, Lopez said the "responsibility" of being a role model for the Latin community initially "kind of scared me because you don't want to let anybody down and you don't want to do anything wrong ... I've always wanted to be the best that I can be and I think that's more what they look to, y'know, 'She's up there. She's doing it. She's from the same place we are." In 1999, The Record newspaper observed that she was responsible for the introduction of a Latina presence in the film industry, which was a "whites-only preserve" for much of its history. Described as a "multidimensional artist who had turned into a financial powerhouse", Lopez became the highest-paid actress of Hispanic descent in history. Miriam Jiménez Román stated in The Afro-Latin Reader: History and Culture in the United States (2009) that "[she] was able to traverse the difficult racial boundaries". In 2012, business magazine Forbes suggested that Lopez "may be the most powerful entertainer on the planet", and named her "the world's most powerful Latino celebrity".
Upon launching her music career in the late 1990s, Lopez contributed to the "Latin explosion" occurring in entertainment at the time. Writing for The Recording Academy, Brian Haack described her as the "breakout female star" of the Latin pop movement in American music. She was featured on the cover of the first issue of Latina magazine in 1996, with editor Galina Espinoza stating in 2011 that there is "no recounting of modern Latina history without Jennifer". Around the time her career began to burgeon, the emphasis on Lopez's curvaceous figure grew; scholar Sean Redmond wrote that this was a sign of her role and social power in the cultural changes occurring in the United States. In August 2005, Time listed Lopez as one of the most influential Hispanics in America, remarking: "Why? Because over a decade ago, she was an anonymous background dancer on the second-rated sketch-comedy show. Today she's known by two syllables." In February 2007, People en Español named her the most influential Hispanic entertainer. In 2014, scientists named a species of aquatic mite found in Puerto Rico, Litarachna lopezae, after Lopez.
Lopez is considered a global icon, and is often described as a triple threat performer. VH1 ranked her at number 15 on their list of 200 Greatest Pop Culture Icons, number 16 on 100 Greatest Women In Music, and number 21 on 50 Greatest Women of the Video Era. Lopez has been cited as an influence or inspiration by a range of entertainers, including Jessica Alba, Adrienne Bailon, Kat DeLuna, Mike Doughty, Fifth Harmony, Becky G, Selena Gomez, Ryan Guzman, Kelly Key, Q'orianka Kilcher, Demi Lovato, Normani, Rita Ora, Pitbull, Ivy Queen, Francia Raisa, Naya Rivera, Bebe Rexha, Rosa Salazar, Gwen Stefani, Taylor Swift, Stooshe, and Kerry Washington.
In 2019, the Council of Fashion Designers of America presented her with its Fashion Icon Award for her "long-standing and global impact on fashion". The Green Versace "Jungle Dress" that Lopez wore at the 42nd Annual Grammy Awards in 2000 was voted the fifth most iconic red carpet dress of all time in a poll run by The Daily Telegraph. The images of Lopez wearing the dress became the most popular search query of all time at that point, and subsequently led to the creation of Google's image search. Her style has influenced a range of celebrities, including Kelly Rowland, Kim Kardashian, and Jennifer Love Hewitt. Her record-breaking fragrance line has become the most successful celebrity line in the world, with sales exceeding $2 billion as of 2012. Her first fragrance, Glow by JLo, has been credited with influencing the rise of celebrity fragrances in the 2000s, with perfume critic Chandler Burr stating: "Elizabeth Taylor was one of the first [to have her own scent], but Glow kicked the whole thing into overdrive." Following the success of Lopez's appointment as a judge on American Idol in 2010, a trend of networks hiring "big names" for judging panels on reality shows ensued. The Hollywood Reporter branded this "The J.Lo Effect".
In Tok Pisin, a language spoken in Papua New Guinea, the term palopa is used to describe non-heteronormative people whose identities may correlate with western definitions of homosexual men or trans women; its etymology is derived from the name Jennifer Lopez.
As of 2022, Lopez has sold more than 80 million records worldwide and her films have grossed a cumulative total of US$3.1 billion. She remains the only female entertainer to have a number one album and film simultaneously in the United States. With her second studio album J.Lo (2001), Lopez became the first female solo recording artist under Epic Records to achieve a number one album in the United States since its inception in 1953. Her album J to tha L-O! The Remixes was acknowledged by the Guinness World Records as the first number one remix album in the United States. In 2010, Lopez was honored by the World Music Awards with the Legend Award for her contribution to the arts. Lopez's return to prominence the following year with her single "On the Floor"—among the best-selling singles of all time, and its music video recognized as the "Highest Viewed Female Music Video of All Time" by Guinness World Records in 2012—is regarded as one of the greatest musical comebacks in history. In 2013, she was presented with the prestigious landmark 2,500th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her musical contributions, and Univision presented her with the World Icon Award in its Premios Juventud. In 2014, she became the first female recipient of the Billboard Icon Award. Billboard magazine ranked her as the ninth greatest dance club artist of all time in 2016. In 2017, she was awarded the Telemundo Star Award. In 2018, Lopez received the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award at the 2018 MTV Video Music Awards, making her the first Latin performer to claim the prize since its introduction in 1984. In 2022, she became the first person of Latin descent to receive the MTV Generation Award at the MTV Movie & TV Awards. She is also the first and only person in history to receive both the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award and MTV Movie & TV Awards' Generation Award for her accomplishments in music, film and television.
Films starred
Lopez has written a memoir and co-written one children's book so far.
Headlining tours
Co-headlining tours
Residencies | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Jennifer Lynn Affleck (née Lopez; born July 24, 1969), known by her maiden name and also shortened to J.Lo, is an American singer and actress. Often considered a Latin pop culture icon, Lopez is one of the most influential entertainers in the world, credited for helping propel the Latin pop movement in American music. Her most successful singles on the US Billboard Hot 100 include the number one singles \"If You Had My Love\", \"I'm Real\", \"Ain't It Funny\" and \"All I Have\".",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "In 1991, Lopez began appearing as a Fly Girl dancer on the sketch comedy television series In Living Color, where she remained a regular until she decided to pursue an acting career in 1993. For her first leading role in Selena (1997), she became the first Hispanic actress to earn over US$1 million for a film. She went on to star in Anaconda (1997) and Out of Sight (1998), and established herself as the highest-paid Hispanic actress in Hollywood. Lopez ventured into the music industry with her debut studio album On the 6 (1999) and later starred in the psychological horror The Cell (2000). With the simultaneous release of her second studio album J.Lo and her romantic comedy The Wedding Planner in 2001, she became the first woman to have a number-one album and film in the same week. Her 2002 release, J to tha L–O! The Remixes, became the first remix album in history to debut atop the US Billboard 200. Later that year, she released her third studio album, This Is Me... Then and starred in the film Maid in Manhattan.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "After starring in Gigli (2003), a critical and commercial failure, Lopez starred in the successful romantic comedies Shall We Dance? (2004) and Monster-in-Law (2005). Her fifth studio album, Como Ama una Mujer (2007), had the highest first week sales for a debut Spanish album in the United States. Following a relatively unsuccessful period, she returned to prominence in 2011 with her appearance as a judge on American Idol and released her seventh studio album, Love?, spawning the international hit \"On the Floor\". From 2016 to 2018, she starred in the police drama series Shades of Blue and performed a residency show, Jennifer Lopez: All I Have, at Planet Hollywood Las Vegas. She also produced and served as a judge on World of Dance (2017–2020). In 2019, she garnered critical acclaim for her performance as a stripper in the crime drama Hustlers.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "For her contributions to the recording industry, Lopez has a landmark star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and has received the Billboard Icon Award and the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award, among other honors. In 2012, Forbes ranked her the world's most powerful celebrity, and the 38th most powerful woman in the world. Time listed her among their 100 most influential people in the world in 2018. Her other ventures include beauty and clothing lines, fragrances, a production company and a charitable foundation.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Jennifer Lynn López was born on July 24, 1969, in the Bronx, a borough of New York City, and raised in its Castle Hill neighborhood. Her parents, David López and Guadalupe Rodríguez, were born in Puerto Rico and met in New York City. After serving in the army, David worked as a computer technician at Guardian Insurance Company. Guadalupe was a homemaker for the first ten years of López's life and later worked as a Tupperware salesperson and a kindergarten and gym teacher. They divorced in the 1990s after 33 years of marriage.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Lopez is a middle child; she has an older sister, Leslie, and a younger sister, Lynda. The three shared a bedroom. Lopez has described her upbringing as \"strict\". She was raised in a Roman Catholic family; she attended Mass every Sunday and received a Catholic education, attending Holy Family School and the all-girls Preston High School. In school, López ran track on a national level, participated in gymnastics and was on the softball team. She danced in school musicals and played a lead role in a production of Godspell.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "There was \"lots of music\" in the typically Puerto Rican household, and López and her sisters were encouraged to sing, dance and create their own plays for family events. West Side Story made a particular impression on the young López and she wanted to be an entertainer from an early age. As a teenager, she learned flamenco, jazz and ballet at the Kips Bay Boys & Girls Club and taught dance to younger students, including Kerry Washington. After graduating from high school, she had a part-time secretarial job at a law firm and studied business at New York's Baruch College for one semester. At age 18, she enrolled as a full-time student at Manhattan's Phil Black Dance Studio, where she had already taken night classes in jazz and tap dance. Her parents were unhappy with her decision to leave college to pursue a dance career. Her mother asked her to move out of the family home and they stopped speaking for eight months. López moved to Manhattan, sleeping in the dance studio's office for the first few months.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "López's first professional job came in 1989 when she spent five months touring Europe with the musical revue show Golden Musicals of Broadway. She was the only member of the chorus not to have a solo and later characterized it as a pivotal moment where she realized the importance of a \"tough skin\" in the entertainment business. In 1990, she danced alongside MC Hammer in an episode of Yo! MTV Raps and traveled around Japan for four months as a chorus member in Synchronicity. When she returned to the United States, she was hired as a backup dancer for New Kids on the Block's performance of \"Games\" at the 1991 American Music Awards. She also traveled around America with regional productions of the musicals Jesus Christ Superstar and Oklahoma! During this period, Lopez also danced in music videos including Doug E. Fresh's \"Summertime\", Richard Rogers' \"Can't Stop Loving You\", EPMD's \"Rampage\" and Samantha Fox's \"(Hurt Me! Hurt Me!) But the Pants Stay On\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "López's most high-profile job as a professional dancer was as a Fly Girl jazz-funk dancer on the sketch comedy television series In Living Color. At the New York audition, the show's choreographer, Rosie Perez, noticed that Lopez had \"star quality\" and \"did not complain, not once\" when asked to repeatedly perform the dance routine. López moved to Los Angeles in late 1991 for the job; she filmed In Living Color during the day and attended acting classes taught by Aaron Speiser at night. The head of Virgin Records considered signing The Fly Girls as a girl group to rival the Spice Girls, but the deal fell apart. After appearing as a Fly Girl in seasons three and four of In Living Color, López left to work as a backup dancer for Janet Jackson, and appeared in the music video for \"That's the Way Love Goes\". She was scheduled to tour with Jackson on her Janet World Tour in late 1993 but opted to pursue an acting career instead.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "López's first professional acting job was a small recurring role on the television show South Central (1994). She was invited to audition for the pilot by a casting director who had seen her speak to camera during a behind-the-scenes In Living Color segment. López then acquired an agent and was cast in the CBS show Second Chances and its spin-off Hotel Malibu. She appeared in the direct-to-video drama film Lost in the Wild (1993). For her first major movie role, in Gregory Nava's 1995 drama Mi Familia, López received a nomination for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Actress. Lopez then starred in the action comedy Money Train (1995). Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times said she \"mostly holds her own\" with co-stars Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson, while Stephen Holden of The New York Times praised her \"scene-stealing charm\". In 1996, Lopez had a supporting role opposite Robin Williams in the comedy Jack. She next starred opposite Jack Nicholson in the neo-noir thriller Blood and Wine (1997). David Rooney of Variety felt López delivered in \"juggling\" the \"smoldering and soulful sides\" of the character but Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly said she was \"used as a place marker rather than as a real girl.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "With her casting as the singer Selena Quintanilla-Pérez in the biopic Selena (1997), López became the first Latina actress to earn $1 million. She was excited by the rare opportunity to \"actually star\" in a movie \"in the title role\" but expressed disappointment that other Latina actors were not being afforded the same opportunities. Despite having previously worked with the film's director Gregory Navq on Mi Familia, López participated in an intense auditioning process and spent time with the late singer's family in Corpus Christi, Texas before filming began. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times described it as \"a star-making performance\" and particularly enjoyed the onstage scenes: \"She has the star presence to look convincing in front of 100,000 fans.\" Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times praised the \"incandescent\" performance. López received her first Golden Globe nomination for the performance. The director later said he asked the heads of Warner Bros. to fund an Academy Award campaign for López but was told the academy would \"never nominate a Latina.\" Later in 1997, López starred opposite Ice Cube in the horror film Anaconda. While Joe Leydon of Variety found Anaconda \"silly\", he said the film deserved \"a little credit\" for being \"the first movie of its kind to have a Latina and an African-American\" as its stars. In the crime film U Turn (1997), López appeared topless in a sex scene that was added by director Oliver Stone during filming. Speaking in 2003, López said it was not something \"I would have chosen to do\" and that she and Stone fought over it: \"It's hard being the only woman on a set ... But it actually worked in the movie.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "López starred opposite George Clooney in the crime caper Out of Sight (1998), Steven Soderbergh's adaptation of the Elmore Leonard novel of the same name. Cast as a deputy federal marshal who falls for a charming criminal, López won rave reviews for her performance. Janet Maslin of The New York Times described it as her \"best movie role thus far, and she brings it both seductiveness and grit; if it was hard to imagine a hard-working, pistol-packing bombshell on the page, it couldn't be easier here.\" Turan of the Los Angeles Times described López as \"an actress who can be convincingly tough and devastatingly erotic\" and said the film solidified \"her position as a woman you can confidently build a film around.\" Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times was impressed by the \"rich comic understanding\" Lopez brought to the role and enjoyed the \"repartee\" between her and Clooney: \"These two have the kind of unforced fun in their scenes together that reminds you of Bogart and Bacall.\" In 2021, Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian named Lopez and Clooney's partnership as one of the best examples of on-screen chemistry in cinema history. Also in 1998, Lopez provided the voice of Azteca in the animated film Antz.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "López launched a music career in 1999 because, after Selena, she had missed \"the excitement of the stage\" and was \"really feeling [her] Latin roots\". Lopez's new manager Benny Medina sought to position her as \"a brand name that will cross over into all media.\" Lopez recorded a Spanish-language demo for circulation among prospective labels. Tommy Mottola, the head of Sony Music's Work Group, signed her but suggested that she sing in English instead. Her debut album On the 6, named after the 6 Subway line which connected her childhood home in the Bronx to Manhattan, was filled with what Ed Morales of the Los Angeles Times described as \"state-of-the-art dance pop ... even if Lopez's vocals are largely anonymous.\" The album was a success and Lopez's debut single, \"If You Had My Love\", topped the Billboard Hot 100, with another single, \"Waiting for Tonight\", reaching number eight. In 2000, Lopez and then-boyfriend Sean Combs attended the Grammy Awards, with Lopez wearing a plunging green Versace silk chiffon dress. The dress generated worldwide attention and became the most popular search query in Google's history, leading to the creation of Google Images. Lopez returned to the big screen in 2000, starring in the psychological thriller The Cell. David Edelstein of Slate remarked that the \"imperious\" Lopez was \"trying to look waifishly expectant\" while Amy Taubin of The Village Voice noted that she appeared to be engaged \"in some kind of pouting competition\" \"in lieu of acting.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Lopez became the first woman to have a number one film and album simultaneously when, in early 2001, the romantic comedy The Wedding Planner, co-starring Matthew McConaughey, and her sophomore album J.Lo were released in the same week. In a review of The Wedding Planner, Bob Graham of the San Francisco Chronicle remarked that, while there was \"no doubt of Lopez's screen poise or acting chops\", she should choose comedic projects with \"more bite.\" Jessica Winter of The Village Voice found her \"bewilderingly miscast\" as a \"buttoned down, celibate\" woman, writing that the movie \"achieves the dubious but perversely impressive feat, for its 90-minute duration, of neutering Jennifer Lopez.\" The album J.Lo received mixed reviews. Jon Pareles of Rolling Stone was unimpressed by her \"merely adequate, studio-assisted voice\": \"While dance pop doesn't necessarily demand great singers, Lopez is just scraping by.\" J.Lo ultimately became the best-selling release of her career, and included the singles \"Love Don't Cost a Thing\" and \"I'm Real\", the latter of which reached number one in the US. In other 2001 work, Lopez launched her first business venture, the clothing line J.Lo by Jennifer Lopez, and starred opposite Jim Caviezel in the romantic drama Angel Eyes. Lopez's performance was well-reviewed, with Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle describing her as \"an actress who can do things other movie stars can't do. She doesn't push, just thinks, and her thoughts and emotions burn into the film.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The romantic comedy Maid in Manhattan (2002), in which Lopez starred opposite Ralph Fiennes, became the highest-grossing film of her career. Reviewing Maid in Manhattan, A. O. Scott of The New York Times enjoyed Lopez as a romantic lead and said \"her greatest skill as an actress -- and the key to her brain-addling sexiness -- may be her ability to melt without cracking the hard shell of composure she wears.\" She starred as an abused wife seeking revenge in the thriller Enough. An overworked Lopez suffered a nervous breakdown in 2001 while filming it. Upon its release in 2002, Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times was unimpressed by the \"tacky material\" and was surprised to see \"an actress like Jennifer Lopez\" involved with the project. Nathan Rabin of The A.V. Club said \"the film's idiocy works for Lopez: Every diva needs at least one camp classic on her résumé\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Lopez released two albums in 2002. The first was a remix album, J to tha L–O! The Remixes, featuring rappers Ja Rule, 50 Cent, Fat Joe and P Diddy. It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, with its lead single Ain't It Funny (Murder Remix)\" reaching the top of the Billboard Hot 100. Lopez's third studio album, This Is Me... Then, was released in late 2002. Jon Caramanica of The Village Voice was unimpressed by her studio-enhanced vocals and expressed bemusement as to how the \"mega-millionaire Bronx-expat public-fantasy bombshell\" was \"making the least interesting music on the pop charts today.\" Despite having the highest opening sales of Lopez's career, the album charted at number six on the Billboard 200. The album's lead single \"Jenny from the Block\", peaked at number three on the Billboard Hot 100 while its second single, \"All I Have\", reached number one. In 2002 business ventures, Lopez opened Madre's, a Los Angeles restaurant serving Latin cuisine, and released her first fragrance, Glow by JLo. It became the top-selling fragrance in the US, and Lopez ultimately released over 18 fragrances as part of a licensing deal with Coty.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Lopez became the subject of widespread media criticism in 2003 due to her public relationship with Affleck and the tabloid depiction of her as a demanding diva. The Guardian published an article exploring her \"bilious\" media coverage, with journalist Lawrence Donegan positing that \"indefensible\" misogyny and racism were to blame for her position as \"the most vilified woman in modern popular culture\". Lopez fired both her personal manager Benny Medina and her publicist in mid-2003; The New York Times reported that movie executives had become frustrated by having their communications with Lopez \"largely filtered\" through Medina.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Lopez starred opposite Affleck in the romantic comedy Gigli (2003), which was a box-office bomb and is considered one of the worst films of all time. Rex Reed of The Observer criticized the lead actors, writing that the film reminds the world how \"pathetically incompetent they both are in the only two things that matter in career longevity - craft and talent.\" Roger Ebert agreed that the movie \"doesn't quite work\", but found Lopez and Affleck \"appealing in their performances\" and noted that they \"have chemistry\" together. Lopez had a minor role opposite Affleck in the film Jersey Girl (2004). Following test audiences' negative reactions to the onscreen couple, Lopez's screen time was halved. Lopez later described this as the lowest point of her career and admitted she felt \"eviscerated\" by the media coverage surrounding Gigli: \"I lost my sense of self, questioned if I belonged in this business, thought maybe I did suck at everything. And my relationship self-destructed in front of the entire world. It was a two-year thing for me until I picked myself up again.\" She became the face of a Louis Vuitton advertising campaign, launched her second fashion label, Sweetface, and starred opposite Richard Gere in the romantic comedy-drama Shall We Dance?, which was a box-office success.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The marketing for the romantic comedy Monster-in-Law (2005), in which Lopez starred opposite Jane Fonda, played up her \"Gigli-and-tabloid tarnished image\", and it became a box office success. She released her fourth studio album, Rebirth, in early 2005. It was recorded during a period where Lopez felt \"a little bit lost, trying to get my footing in a new life\": \"I had just gotten married [to singer Marc Anthony] ... I wasn't with Benny [Medina].\" Alexis Petridis of The Guardian remarked that the album title \"suggests even Lopez has realised that something is amiss with her career ... Despite the highlights, you're still left pondering the question: what happened to Jennifer Lopez?\" While the album reached number two on the Billboard 200 and its lead single \"Get Right\" charted at number twelve on the Billboard Hot 100, the second and final single \"Hold You Down\" peaked at number 64. She returned the Billboard Hot 100 the following year, at number four, when she was a featured artist on \"Control Myself\", the lead single from LL Cool J's twelfth studio album.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Lopez's next three movie projects were box office failures. She starred alongside Robert Redford and Morgan Freeman in the drama An Unfinished Life (2005). Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times predicted that the typical review would be unkind: \"It will have no respect for Jennifer Lopez, because she is going through a period right now when nobody is satisfied with anything she does ... Give Lopez your permission to be good again; she is the same actress now as when we thought her so new and fine.\" In 2006, she reunited with Gregory Nava, the director of both Mi Familia and Selena, to star in the crime drama Bordertown as a journalist investigating female homicides in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The film was negatively reviewed and received a direct-to-video release. David D'Arcy of Screen Daily found Lopez \"unconvincing\" as a journalist. In 2007, she starred opposite her then-husband Marc Anthony in the music biopic El Cantante, which told the story of Puerto Rican salsa singer Héctor Lavoe and his wife Puchi. It did not perform well at the box office and received mixed reviews from film critics. Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle considered it her \"most mannered, least relaxed and least convincing performance to date\". Lopez later expressed particular pride in her work in the film.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Lopez released two studio albums in 2007. Her fifth album, Como Ama una Mujer, was her first to be recorded entirely in Spanish. Chris Willman of Entertainment Weekly acknowledged that the album offered \"fairly persuasive proof\" that Lopez can sing, but was unimpressed by the \"flaccid torch songs.\" It reached number 10 on the Billboard 200; the lead single \"Qué Hiciste\" reached number 86 on the Billboard Hot 100 while the second single \"Me Haces Falta\" failed to chart. Lopez's sixth studio album Brave, released later that year, was her lowest-charting album worldwide. Jonathan Bernstein of Entertainment Weekly was disappointed that Lopez had returned to \"listless vocals\" for her \"back-to-the-dance-floor album.\" The album debuted at number 12 on the Billboard 200 and produced two singles, \"Do It Well\" and \"Hold It Don't Drop It\". The first peaked at number 31 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, while the latter failed to chart. While pregnant with twins, Lopez embarked upon her first ever concert tour, a show co-headlined by Anthony, in September 2007. She also created, produced and was featured in the MTV show DanceLife.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "After giving birth to twins in February 2008, Lopez took a career break. Her restaurant Madre's closed permanently, as did her two fashion lines. After rehiring former manager Medina, Lopez released two songs in late 2009, \"Louboutins\" and \"Fresh Out of the Oven\". The songs were intended for her seventh studio album but failed to make an appearance on the Billboard charts, leading to her departure from Sony Music and Epic Records. Lopez's first theatrical role in three years was in the romantic comedy The Back-up Plan (2010). Manohla Dargis of The New York Times was unimpressed by the movie and described Lopez as \"an appealing screen presence with a disappointing big-screen track record. That's probably not all her fault: romantic roles for women often are the provenance of the bland or the blonde.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "A \"big turning point\" in Lopez's career came in 2011, when she joined the judging panel of the singing competition series American Idol. She accepted the job at a time when she was \"not getting offered a whole bunch of movies\" and the show returned her to prominence. Hannah Elliot of Forbes described it as \"a remarkable comeback\": \"Idol humanized her. Viewers who knew only an attention-grabbing siren met a hardworking, self-made, empathetic single mother, who got emotional when contestants did well and when they failed.\" She returned as a judge for the eleventh season, earning a reported $20 million, and again for the thirteenth season, earning a reported $17.5 million. She became a brand ambassador for L'Oréal, Venus and Fiat, and launched the Jennifer Lopez Collection, a clothing and homeware line with Tommy Hilfiger for Kohl's.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "After signing a new recording contract with Island Records, Lopez's seventh studio album, Love?, was released in early 2011. While the album itself was a moderate commercial success, the single \"On the Floor\" was one of the year's most successful songs. It reached number three on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming her highest-charting single as a lead artist since \"All I Have\". Lopez's greatest hits album, Dance Again... the Hits, was released in mid-2012 to fulfil her contractual obligations with her former label Epic Records. Lopez, who was divorcing Anthony and navigating the \"breakup of a family\", felt as if the album's sole single, \"Dance Again\", had come to her at the \"perfect moment\". \"Dance Again\" reached number 17 on the US Billboard Hot 100. Lopez launched the Dance Again World Tour, her first headlining concert tour, in mid-2012. It grossed over $1 million per show. Also that year, she launched Teeology, a luxury T-shirt brand.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Lopez returned to the big screen in 2012, starring alongside an ensemble cast in the film What to Expect When You're Expecting, which is based on the book of the same name. Lopez voiced Shira, a saber tooth tiger, in the animated film, Ice Age: Continental Drift, the fourth film in the Ice Age franchise. Also in 2012, a talent show, ¡Q'Viva! The Chosen followed Lopez, Anthony, and director-choreographer Jamie King as they travelled across 21 countries in Latin America to find new talent for a Las Vegas show. In 2013, Lopez starred alongside Jason Statham in the crime thriller Parker, in which she played Leslie. Her performance earned positive reviews, with Chicago Tribune commending the role for giving Lopez \"an opportunity to be dramatic, romantic, funny, depressed, euphoric and violent. The audience stays with her all the way\". Lopez became the chief creative officer of nuvoTV and founded the mobile phone retail brand Viva Móvil. She was an executive producer of the television series The Fosters.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Lopez's eighth studio album, A.K.A., was released in mid-2014 through Capitol Records, experiencing lacklustre sales, becoming her lowest-selling album in the US. The album produced three singles: \"I Luh Ya Papi\", featuring French Montana, \"First Love\", and \"Booty\", featuring Iggy Azalea. They reached 77, 87 and 18 respectively on the Billboard Hot 100. Also that year, Lopez released \"We Are One (Ole Ola)\", the official song for the 2014 FIFA World Cup along with Pitbull and Claudia Leitte. Lopez partnered with Endless Jewelry on a range of jewelry and released a book, True Love, which became a New York Times best-seller.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "2015 saw the release of The Boy Next Door, an erotic thriller that Lopez both co-produced and starred in as a high school teacher who becomes involved with a student, which eventually leads to his dangerous obsession with her. The film received negative reviews from critics. Despite this, it became her most successful opening at the box office for a live action film since Monster-in-Law. Lopez had a voice role in the animated feature Home and contributed the single \"Feel the Light\" to the film's official soundtrack. Lopez also starred in the independent drama film Lila & Eve, alongside Viola Davis.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "From 2016 to 2018, Lopez had a residency concert show, All I Have, at Planet Hollywood's Zappos Theater in Las Vegas. She performed 120 shows during the three-year run, grossing over $100 million in ticket sales. At the beginning of the residency, Lopez signed a multi-album deal with her former label Epic Records but, the failure of A.K.A. and its poor sales, she opted to release standalone singles instead including \"Ain't Your Mama\", \"Ni Tú Ni Yo\",\"Amor, Amor, Amor\", \"El Anillo\" and \"Dinero\", featuring DJ Khaled and Cardi B. The highest charting of these were \"Ain't Your Mama\" and \"Dinero\", reaching 76 and 80 respectively on the Billboard Hot 100, while the former's music video received over 800 million views on YouTube. In collaboration with Giuseppe Zanotti, Lopez designed a capsule collection of shoes and jewelry and, with Inglot Cosmetics, launched a limited-edition makeup collection. With the release of \"Ni Tú Ni Yo\" and \"Amor, Amor, Amor\", Lopez planned to release her second spanish-language album Por Primera Vez, which was ultimately cancelled.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "From 2016 to 2018, Lopez produced and starred in NBC's crime drama series Shades of Blue as Detective Harlee Santos, a single mother and police detective in New York City who goes undercover for the FBI to investigate her own squad. Starring alongside the great Ray Liotta, Lopez's performance received positive reviews. Lopez was executive producer and judge on NBC's successful series World of Dance. Lopez reprised her voice role as Shira in the animated film Ice Age: Collision Course (2016).",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In 2018, Lopez was named one of Time's 100 most influential people in the world, and starred in the comedy film Second Act, directed by Peter Segal; she also produced the film, and recorded the single \"Limitless\" for its soundtrack. Second Act earned mixed reviews from critics, but performed well at the box office, grossing $72.3 million during its theatrical run.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Lopez starred in the film Hustlers (2019), for which she also served as an executive producer, and which grossed over US$100 million in North American box office receipts alone. Directed by Lorene Scafaria, the film is inspired by a true story, following a group of Manhattan strippers who con wealthy men. Lopez's portrayal of a veteran stripper in Hustlers garnered acclaim from critics, with some deeming it the best performance of her acting career. The film also gave Lopez her highest opening weekend at the box office for a live action film (grossing $33.2 million), and garnered her nominations for Best Supporting Actress at the Golden Globe Awards, Screen Actors Guild Awards, Critics' Choice Movie Awards and Independent Spirit Awards, but snubbed of a nomination at the Academy Awards. The success of Hustlers has been regarded by various media outlets as a comeback as an actress for Lopez. She was announced as the global face of the Coach brand and launched a collection of sunglasses with the brand Quay Australia. Also in September 2019, Lopez modeled an updated version of her Green Versace dress at Milan Fashion Week; her appearance generated $31.8 million in total media impact value. She also became executive producer of the two television series, Good Trouble and Thanks a Million.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In 2019, Lopez embarked on an international concert tour, It's My Party, to celebrate her 50th birthday; the tour grossed an estimated $54.7 million from thirty-eight shows. In February 2020, Lopez co-headlined the Super Bowl LIV halftime show in Miami, Florida alongside Shakira; the performance included an appearance by her child Emme Muñiz. The performance was widely praised and is currently the most-watched Super Bowl halftime show to date. In June 2020, she appeared in YouTube Originals's special, Dear Class of 2020, which featured a virtual commencement event and highlighted the George Floyd protests. By the end of the year, Lopez headlined the 2021 Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest special on ABC. In January 2021, she performed at the 2021 inauguration of President Joe Biden in Washington, D.C., where she sang \"This Land Is Your Land\" and \"America the Beautiful\", while also reciting the last phrase of the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish. She also released a number of singles between 2019 and 2021, including: \"Medicine\" featuring French Montana, \"Pa' Ti + Lonely\" with Maluma and \"Cambia el Paso\" with Rauw Alejandro. In January 2021, Lopez launched her skincare line, JLo Beauty.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In mid-2021, Lopez signed a multi-year deal with Netflix to produce a range of films and television shows through her own Nuyorican Productions. Lopez co-produced and starred opposite Owen Wilson and Maluma in the romantic comedy Marry Me, which was filmed in late 2019 and released in February 2022. The film grossed over $50 million at the box office while becoming the most-streamed day-and-date film on Peacock, and received generally mixed reviews from critics. Lopez also released a soundtrack for the film, with Maluma, which generated the singles \"On My Way\" and \"Marry Me\"; the former won the 2023 MTV Movie & TV Award for Best Song. The soundtrack received mixed reviews. In March 2022, Lopez was appointed as the chief \"entertainment and lifestyle\" officer of cruise line, Virgin Voyages. Later that month, she performed \"On My Way\" and her 2005 single \"Get Right\" in connection to her receiving the Icon Award at the 2022 iHeartRadio Music Awards; her performance featured Billy Porter and some of the queens from RuPaul's Drag Race. Her next project was the documentary Jennifer Lopez: Halftime (2022), which focuses on Lopez's life following the release of Hustlers and in preparation for her 2020 Super Bowl performance. The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in June 2022 and was released on Netflix shortly after; it garnered positive reviews from film critics. In September, Lopez was announced as the global ambassador of Italian lingerie label Intimissimi. The following month, Jimmy Fallon and Lopez released a children's book, Con Pollo: A Bilingual Playtime Adventure, which became a New York Times best-seller.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Lopez co-produced and starred opposite Josh Duhamel and Jennifer Coolidge in the action-comedy Shotgun Wedding, filmed in the Dominican Republic; it was released on Amazon Prime Video on January 27, 2023. In March, she announced a collaboration between her lifestyle brand J.Lo by Jennifer Lopez and fashion retailer Revolve. A footwear line, JLO Jennifer Lopez, was released as three collections in March, May and June; it consisted of kitten heels, sandals, boots, stilettos and platforms. In April, she launched her own spritz brand, Delola. Lopez led and co-produced the action thriller feature The Mother, directed by Niki Caro. Filmed in Canada and Gran Canaria, it was released on Netflix in May 2023. In September 2023, she entered a \"recording and publishing\" partnership with BMG Rights Management, in conjunction with her Nuyorican Productions. Lopez and Intimissimi released a collaborative capsule collection of lingerie titled after her upcoming ninth studio album in October.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Lopez's ninth studio album This Is Me... Now, a follow-up and \"sister album\" to This Is Me... Then (2002), will be released by Nuyorican and BMG on February 16, 2024. A musical short film directed by Dave Meyers, produced by Nuyorican, and distributed by Amazon MGM Studios will be released as a visual companion to the album on Prime Video on the same day. Her first studio album in nearly a decade, Lopez described it as an \"emotional, spiritual, and psychological journey\" of the past two decades; she stated that her reunion and marriage to former ex Ben Affleck—who is also a co-writer for the film—inspired her to write honest music. The record was previously slated for a summer 2023 release, and was announced on the 20th anniversary of This Is Me... Then. The album's lead single, \"Can't Get Enough\" will be released on January 10, 2024.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Lopez filmed the sci-fi thriller Atlas from September to November 2022 in L.A. and New Zealand, her third project under her Netflix deal. She will star alongside Jharrel Jerome in the biographical wrestling drama Unstoppable, produced by Ben Affleck and based on the life of wrestler Anthony Robles. Production began in May 2023 but was put on hold till the end of the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike in September. Lopez has also committed to lead and co-produce Netflix's film adaptation of the bestselling novel, The Cipher. She has several projects in the works as a producer.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Lopez was in a nearly decade-long relationship with David Cruz, her high school boyfriend, until the mid-1990s. She would later say of Cruz, \"You get lucky, you have a first love like that.\" She was married to Cuban waiter Ojani Noa from February 1997 to January 1998. In subsequent court cases, Noa was prevented from publishing a book about their marriage and from using private honeymoon footage of Lopez in a documentary. Lopez was in an on again–off again relationship with record producer and rapper Sean Combs (then known as \"Puff Daddy\") from 1999 to early 2001. On the night of December 27, 1999, Lopez and Combs were arrested and charged with criminal possession of a weapon and possession of stolen property, after leaving the scene of a shooting at a Times Square nightclub. Charges against Lopez were dropped within an hour while Combs was acquitted of all charges at trial in early 2001. They broke up shortly thereafter. Lopez later said that, while she had \"cared very much\" about Combs, their \"crazy, tumultuous\" relationship \"was always something I knew would end.\" She was married to Cris Judd, her former backup dancer, from September 2001 to January 2003.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Before her divorce with Judd was finalized, Lopez was in a relationship with actor and filmmaker Ben Affleck from mid-2002 to early 2004. Although they had crossed paths several times before (including at the 70th Academy Awards and at the premiere of Armageddon, both in 1998), the first major meeting was on the set of Gigli (2003) in December 2001. They later worked together on the music video for \"Jenny from the Block\" and the film Jersey Girl (2004). Her album This Is Me... Then was dedicated to and inspired by Affleck. Their relationship was extensively publicized. Tabloids referred to the couple as \"Bennifer\", a portmanteau Vanity Fair described as \"the first of that sort of tabloid branding\". They became engaged in November 2002, but their planned wedding on September 14, 2003, was postponed with four days' notice because of \"excessive media attention\". They ended their engagement in January 2004. Years later, Lopez said Affleck's discomfort with media scrutiny was one reason for their split and described it as her \"first real heartbreak\": \"I think different time, different thing, who knows what could've happened, but there was a genuine love there.\"",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Lopez was married to singer Marc Anthony from June 2004 to June 2014; they had previously worked together and dated for a few months in the late 1990s. Their wedding took place five months after the end of her relationship with Affleck. During their marriage, they collaborated on music and performed together, as well as co-starring in El Cantante (2006). Lopez gave birth to fraternal twins, a boy and a girl, on Long Island in February 2008. People paid a reported US$6 million for the first photographs of the twins, making them the most expensive celebrity pictures ever taken at the time. In 2009, Anthony and Lopez purchased a stake in the Miami Dolphins. The couple announced their separation in July 2011. Anthony filed for divorce in April 2012 and it was finalized in June 2014. Lopez retained primary physical custody of the two children. Lopez occasionally performs with her daughter.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Lopez had an on again-off again relationship relationship with her former backup dancer Casper Smart from October 2011 to August 2016. She dated New York Yankees baseball player Alex Rodriguez from February 2017 to early 2021. They became engaged in March 2019 but postponed their wedding twice due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In response to tabloid speculation about the state of their relationship, they released a statement in March 2021, saying they were \"working through some things\". They announced the end of their relationship in April 2021.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "In April 2021, Lopez and Affleck were reported to be dating again, with Lopez publicly confirming their rekindled relationship that July. In the years after their breakup, they had remained in contact and spoken highly of each other in the press. Both Affleck and Lopez have spoken of the gift of a second chance with each other since reuniting. On April 8, 2022, Lopez announced their second engagement, 20 years after the first proposal. They were married in Las Vegas on July 16, 2022. The following month, they held a wedding celebration for family and friends.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Following the September 11 attacks, Lopez was heavily involved in charitable activities. Joining various other artists, she was featured on charitable singles such as \"What's Going On\" and \"El Ultimo Adios (The Last Goodbye)\", which benefited people affected by the tragedy. One dollar from each ticket sold at Lopez and Anthony's co-headlining North American concert tour, which grossed an estimated $10 million, was donated to Run for Something Better—a charitable organization supporting physical fitness programs for children. In February 2007, Lopez was honored with the Artists for Amnesty prize by the human rights organization Amnesty International, for her work in the film Bordertown, which shed light on the hundreds of feminicides in Ciudad Juárez. Lopez described it as \"one of the world's most shocking and disturbing, underreported crimes against humanity\".",
"title": "Philanthropy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Since early in her life, Lopez has supported children; her album Rebirth (2005) is dedicated to Paige Peterson, an eleven-year-old cancer patient whom Lopez befriended during visits to the Children's Hospital Los Angeles. Peterson died in November 2004. Lopez stated that \"[she doesn't] like to do [her] charity work in public. That's not what you do it for.\" Having had plans to create a charitable foundation for years, she eventually launched the Lopez Family Foundation (originally known as the Maribel Foundation) alongside her sister, Lynda, in 2009. The nonprofit organization seeks to increase the availability of healthcare for underprivileged women and children, offering a telemedicine program supported by a partnership with the Children's Hospital Los Angeles. The foundation has led to the expansion of medical facilities in Panama and Puerto Rico, and created the Center for a Healthy Childhood at the Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx.",
"title": "Philanthropy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "In December 2012, Lopez held a charity drive that would affect her three favorite charities: the Gloria Wise Boys and Girls Club, the Children's Hospital of Los Angeles as well as the American Red Cross, mainly benefiting victims of Hurricane Sandy, which devastated parts of her hometown, New York City. In May 2015, she became the first national celebrity spokesperson for the Children's Miracle Network Hospitals and the BC Children's Hospital Foundation (BCCHF), appearing in a campaign entitled \"Put Your Money Where the Miracles Are\". That September, Lopez was announced as the first Global Advocate for Girls and Women at the United Nations Foundation. This role sees her mobilizing action to address challenges faced by girls and women around the world, including maternal health care programs, education and violence against women. In September 2017, following Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Maria, Lopez announced that she would be donating $1 million from the proceeds of her Las Vegas residency to humanitarian aid for Puerto Rico. Along with ex-husband Marc Anthony, she launched a humanitarian relief campaign entitled Somos Una Voz (English: We Are One Voice), an effort supported by various celebrities to rush supplies to areas affected by Hurricane Maria. Lopez and Anthony presented a subsequent concert and telethon for disaster relief, \"One Voice: Somos Live!\", which raised over $35 million. She was also among various artists featured on Lin-Manuel Miranda's charity single \"Almost Like Praying\" which benefits Puerto Rico.",
"title": "Philanthropy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "As of 2021, Lopez continues to regularly donate and support charities. In September 2021, she launched her own philanthropic organization, Limitless Labs, that supports and empowers Latina entrepreneurs and business owners. Lopez announced a partnership between the venture and the 10,000 Small Businesses initiative. In June 2022, Lopez partnered with nonprofit Grameen America as a national ambassador to financially empower women-led Latina businesses: \"She'll join the organization [...] in concert with her own Limitless Labs, which aims to support Latina-owned small businesses\". Lopez and the organization explained their collective goal: to \"empower Latina entrepreneurs across 50 U.S. cities with $14 billion in business capital and 6 million hours of financial education and training by 2030.\"",
"title": "Philanthropy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Lopez has performed at charity concerts throughout her career. In 2022, Lopez headlined the Los Angeles Dodgers Foundation's star-studded 6th Annual Blue Diamond Gala. The event raised a record-breaking $3.6 million to support LADF in their mission to improve education, health care, homelessness, and social justice for all Angelenos.",
"title": "Philanthropy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Lopez is a supporter of the Democratic Party, and has a long history of backing Democratic candidates for public office. Lopez is also an avid supporter of LGBT rights, and has raised millions of dollars for HIV/AIDS research. In June 2013, amfAR presented Lopez with its humanitarian award for her philanthropic work. That September, she was awarded the Ally for Equality award presented by the Human Rights Campaign, for her support of the LGBT community. The following year, she received the GLAAD Vanguard Award. In July 2016, Lopez released a single entitled \"Love Make the World Go Round\", a collaboration with Lin-Manuel Miranda, which benefits victims of the Orlando nightclub shooting. She was also featured on the song \"Hands\" along with numerous other artists, also benefiting those affected by the Orlando shooting. Among numerous other artists, Lopez signed an open letter from Billboard magazine to the United States Congress in 2016, which demanded action on gun control.",
"title": "Political views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Lopez endorsed President Barack Obama in his 2012 presidential campaign, speaking in television advertisements and attending a fundraising event for Obama in Paris. She endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016, headlining a free concert in Florida in support of her that October. In June 2020, Lopez attended a Black Lives Matter movement protest in Los Angeles, in connection with the broader George Floyd protests. Lopez has also been an active advocate for the Time's Up movement. She endorsed President Joe Biden in his 2020 presidential campaign and also performed at his 2021 inauguration in Washington, D.C. In January 2022, she became one of the Co-Chairs for Michelle Obama's When We All Vote.",
"title": "Political views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Lopez has cited Madonna as her \"first big musical influence\", explaining \"It was all about Madonna for me. She inspired me to want to sing, to dance, to work hard.\" Other \"big influences in [her] life\" include Tina Turner, Whitney Houston, James Brown, and Michael Jackson. Growing up, she was influenced by Latin music styles ranging from salsa to bachata, and artists including Celia Cruz and Tito Puente. It was the 1979 hip hop song \"Rapper's Delight\" by The Sugarhill Gang that she said changed her life. She was also \"hugely inspired in her youth\" by Rita Moreno's performance in the 1961 musical film West Side Story, noting that she \"was Puerto Rican\" like herself at a time when that was rare in Hollywood. Speaking of musicals being an essential influence, she has said that, \"musicals were a part of the tapestry of my childhood,\" and crediting her mom, saying: \"My mom was also the mom who got me into musicals and introduced me to all kinds of music. I am an entertainer because of my mom.\" Another major influence on Lopez is Barbra Streisand, stating that, \"watching her career over the years, watching her sing and act and direct, was very inspiring to me.\" Lopez has cited Janet Jackson as a major inspiration for her own dance and videos, stating that she \"probably started dancing\" because of Jackson's music video for \"The Pleasure Principle\". She has said that she also looks to the careers of Cher and Diana Ross, and has been influenced by younger artists such as Lady Gaga.",
"title": "Artistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "According to author Ed Morales in The Latin Beat: The Rhythms And Roots Of Latin Music From Bossa Nova To Salsa And Beyond (2003), Lopez's music explores the \"romantic innocence\" of Latin music, while strongly identifying with hip hop. Her debut album On the 6 fuses the influence of Latin music with R&B and hip hop, which Lopez described as Latin soul. To the contrary, Morales described it as \"state-of-the-art dance pop\". Dee Lockett, writing for the Chicago Tribune, stated that songs such as \"Waiting for Tonight\" made Lopez \"arguably the leading artist in the dance-pop movement at the time\". While primarily sung in English, she speaks in Spanish and asserts her Latin heritage throughout the album, which is apparent in the song \"Let's Get Loud\". She has also recorded bilingual songs, including the Latin pop song \"Cariño\", for her second album J.Lo. A departure from her previous albums, This Is Me... Then blends 1970s soul with \"streetwise\" hip hop.",
"title": "Artistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Described as autobiographical, much of Lopez's music has centered around the \"ups and downs\" of love. The lyrical content of This Is Me... Then is largely focused on her relationship with Ben Affleck, with the song \"Dear Ben\" being described as the album's \"glowing centerpiece\". The two Ben inspired songs \"I'm Glad\" and \"Baby I Love U!\" becoming even more meaningful to the Bennifer story with time. Her first full-length Spanish-language album, Como Ama una Mujer features introspective lyrics about romance, heartache and self-loathing. When explaining her seventh studio album Love?, Lopez stated: \"There's still so much to learn and that's why the question mark.\" Other recurrent themes in Lopez's music have included her upbringing in the Bronx and women's empowerment.",
"title": "Artistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Some critics have considered Lopez's voice to be limited, and overshadowed by the production of her music, while remaining \"radio-friendly\". Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone remarked: \"Instead of strained vocal pyrotechnics, Lopez sticks to the understated R&B murmur of a round-the-way superstar who doesn't need to belt because she knows you're already paying attention ... She makes a little va-va and a whole lot of voom go a long way.\" Meanwhile, AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine called her voice \"slight\" and wrote: \"Lopez was never, ever about singing; she was about style\". Entertainment Weekly criticized her vocal performance for lacking the trademark \"husky-voiced voluptuousness\" she has in her films. J. D. Considine of The Baltimore Sun regards Lopez as having a \"breathy\" stylistic range, but lacking personality.",
"title": "Artistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Considered one of dance's \"greatest success stories\", Refinery29 ranked Lopez at number two on \"11 Of Pop's Most Iconic Dancers\" in 2015. Lopez felt an emotional connection to dance since her youth, when she specialized in ballet, jazz and flamenco. Her career commenced on the variety television sketch comedy series In Living Color, where she was a part of an ethnically diverse dance group known as the Fly Girls. Since beginning her music career, Lopez has become known for her body-emphasizing music videos, which often include dance routines. CNN's Holly Thomas noted that \"Lopez's years of professional dance experience gave her a captivating, commanding presence in her videos.\" Some of these videos have been the subject of controversy, including \"Jenny from the Block\", \"Dance Again\" and \"Booty\". Her provocatively choreographed music video for \"If You Had My Love\" allowed Lopez to become a dominant figure on MTV networks worldwide. Madeline Roth of MTV wrote: \"Her diverse videography encompasses some of the most memorable visuals of the 21st century\", with Rolling Stone writer Brittany Spanos observing that her \"dancing skills and ability to toy with her own celebrity have made her videos an important part of the new millennium's pop canon\".",
"title": "Artistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "On stage, Lopez is recognized for her showmanship and sex appeal, and often includes costumes such as bodysuits as part of her performance. Author Priscilla Peña Ovalle stated in Dance and the Hollywood Latina: Race, Sex and Stardom (2011) that Lopez was one of the Latin stars who \"used dance to gain agency as working performers with mainstream careers, yet many of their roles paradoxically racialized and sexualized their bodies\". Troy Patterson of Entertainment Weekly also observed that she used her body for emphasis on stage, \"She turned herself out as the fly girl hyperversion of postfeminist power, flaunting her control by toying with the threat of excess. In consequence, her star went supernova.\" Her signature movements include \"clock-wise pivoting with salsa hip circles and sequential torso undulations\". While being noted to lip sync in the early stages of career, Lopez's Dance Again World Tour was praised for showcasing live vocals and choreography synchronously. In a review of her Las Vegas residency All I Have, Los Angeles Times writer Nolan Feeney remarked that her dancing is \"undoubtedly the centerpiece of the show\".",
"title": "Artistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Lopez's provocative stage performances have also drawn scrutiny at times. In May 2013, her performance on the finale of the television series Britain's Got Talent was deemed inappropriate for family-friendly television, and drew viewer complaints to Ofcom. Following her controversial performance at the musical festival Mawazine in 2015, Moroccan Prime Minister Abdelilah Benkirane called it \"indecent\" and \"disgraceful\", while an education group claimed that she \"disturbed public order and tarnished women's honor and respect\".",
"title": "Artistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Writing of Lopez's image, Andrew Barker of Variety observed: \"Despite a carefully cultivated image as an imperious pop empress in ludicrously expensive outfits, her signature hits bear the titles 'I'm Real' and 'Jenny From the Block'. She managed the perilous transition from actress to music star without ever seeming to pick either as a primary gig. She established herself as an oft-provocative sex symbol while her demeanor made it abundantly clear that she's not asking you to come hither.\" In 2002, Lynette Holloway of The New York Times described Lopez as overexposed. She wrote: \"Forgive yourself if you are seeing Jennifer Lopez in your sleep. She is everywhere.\" Holloway noted her image to be \"a dash of ghetto fabulousness\" and \"middle-class respectability\" for mass appeal. Entertainment Weekly observed a change in her public profile upon joining American Idol in 2011, writing: \"Gone was her old cut-a-bitch swagger; J. Lo 2.0 is an all-embracing, Oprahfied earth madre.\" Television presenter Ray Martin describes her as a \"showbiz phenomenon\".",
"title": "Public image"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Lopez is widely celebrated for her callipygian figure. She has been credited with influencing a change in mainstream female body image. In Latin Sensations (2001), Herón Marquez wrote: \"Because she wasn't rail thin, Lopez had broken the mold and allowed millions of women to feel good about their bodies. Suddenly, it was okay for women to have hips, curves, and a big backside.\" Vanity Fair described her buttocks as \"in and of themselves, a cultural icon\". Details magazine named Lopez the \"Sexiest Woman of the Year\" in 1998, and she topped FHM's \"100 Sexiest Women in the World\" list twice. In 2011, she was named \"The Most Beautiful Woman\" by People. The following year, VH1 ranked her the fourth on their list of \"100 Sexiest Artists\", while Vibe magazine named her the most \"lustable\" celebrity of the past twenty years. In 2014, Lopez stated, \"There's this funny notion in America that you can't be a mom and be sexy (...) It's the craziest thing I've ever heard... The truth is that women can be sexy until the day they die.\" In Jennifer Lopez: Halftime (2022) she further said: \"I think, sometimes, as women, we think: 'if I'm too sexy I won't be taken seriously'; we're supposed to be celebrating women in every sense of who they are – smart, strong, sensual. You cannot just cancel out different parts of who you are. They can all coexist and be very authentic and real.\"",
"title": "Public image"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Lopez has been a tabloid fixture and has admitted to having a \"less-than-perfect\" public image. The media has drawn comparisons between Lopez and actress Elizabeth Taylor, due to her numerous failed relationships, and Lopez has been dubbed a \"modern-day Liz Taylor\" by the media. Lynn Hirschberg of W compared her glamorous public persona to that of Taylor. Her style was described by Billboard's Lauren Savage as \"scantily clad\". Lopez herself has said that she likes to \"look to the women who epitomize old Hollywood glamour, like Rita Hayworth,\" Ava Gardner and Marilyn Monroe for inspiration to her own style, but because she \"grew up in the Bronx,\" her style has \"a more urban, hip-hop influence\" as well. Her sense of style continues to be a big part of her public image.",
"title": "Public image"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "She has received a bad reputation as being a demanding \"diva\", something which she denies: \"I've always been fascinated by how much more well-behaved we have to be than men.\" Adding that, \"I got a moniker of being 'the diva,' which I never felt I deserved — which I don't deserve — because I've always been a hard worker, on time, doing what I'm supposed to do, and getting that label because you reach a certain amount of success.\" In 2003, The Observer remarked that Lopez was \"the woman immortalised in a million headlines as 'Hollywood's most demanding diva' ... Lopez must wonder what heinous crime she has committed to become the most vilified woman in modern popular culture.\" Actor and filmmaker Ben Affleck has observed the reason for her reputation as having something to do with racism and sexism: \"People were so fucking mean about her; sexist, racist, ugly vicious shit was written about her in ways that if you wrote it now, you would literally be fired for saying some of the things you said.\"",
"title": "Public image"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Lopez is regarded as the most influential Latin entertainer of all time, credited with breaking ethnic barriers in the entertainment industry. In 1999, Lopez said the \"responsibility\" of being a role model for the Latin community initially \"kind of scared me because you don't want to let anybody down and you don't want to do anything wrong ... I've always wanted to be the best that I can be and I think that's more what they look to, y'know, 'She's up there. She's doing it. She's from the same place we are.\" In 1999, The Record newspaper observed that she was responsible for the introduction of a Latina presence in the film industry, which was a \"whites-only preserve\" for much of its history. Described as a \"multidimensional artist who had turned into a financial powerhouse\", Lopez became the highest-paid actress of Hispanic descent in history. Miriam Jiménez Román stated in The Afro-Latin Reader: History and Culture in the United States (2009) that \"[she] was able to traverse the difficult racial boundaries\". In 2012, business magazine Forbes suggested that Lopez \"may be the most powerful entertainer on the planet\", and named her \"the world's most powerful Latino celebrity\".",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Upon launching her music career in the late 1990s, Lopez contributed to the \"Latin explosion\" occurring in entertainment at the time. Writing for The Recording Academy, Brian Haack described her as the \"breakout female star\" of the Latin pop movement in American music. She was featured on the cover of the first issue of Latina magazine in 1996, with editor Galina Espinoza stating in 2011 that there is \"no recounting of modern Latina history without Jennifer\". Around the time her career began to burgeon, the emphasis on Lopez's curvaceous figure grew; scholar Sean Redmond wrote that this was a sign of her role and social power in the cultural changes occurring in the United States. In August 2005, Time listed Lopez as one of the most influential Hispanics in America, remarking: \"Why? Because over a decade ago, she was an anonymous background dancer on the second-rated sketch-comedy show. Today she's known by two syllables.\" In February 2007, People en Español named her the most influential Hispanic entertainer. In 2014, scientists named a species of aquatic mite found in Puerto Rico, Litarachna lopezae, after Lopez.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Lopez is considered a global icon, and is often described as a triple threat performer. VH1 ranked her at number 15 on their list of 200 Greatest Pop Culture Icons, number 16 on 100 Greatest Women In Music, and number 21 on 50 Greatest Women of the Video Era. Lopez has been cited as an influence or inspiration by a range of entertainers, including Jessica Alba, Adrienne Bailon, Kat DeLuna, Mike Doughty, Fifth Harmony, Becky G, Selena Gomez, Ryan Guzman, Kelly Key, Q'orianka Kilcher, Demi Lovato, Normani, Rita Ora, Pitbull, Ivy Queen, Francia Raisa, Naya Rivera, Bebe Rexha, Rosa Salazar, Gwen Stefani, Taylor Swift, Stooshe, and Kerry Washington.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "In 2019, the Council of Fashion Designers of America presented her with its Fashion Icon Award for her \"long-standing and global impact on fashion\". The Green Versace \"Jungle Dress\" that Lopez wore at the 42nd Annual Grammy Awards in 2000 was voted the fifth most iconic red carpet dress of all time in a poll run by The Daily Telegraph. The images of Lopez wearing the dress became the most popular search query of all time at that point, and subsequently led to the creation of Google's image search. Her style has influenced a range of celebrities, including Kelly Rowland, Kim Kardashian, and Jennifer Love Hewitt. Her record-breaking fragrance line has become the most successful celebrity line in the world, with sales exceeding $2 billion as of 2012. Her first fragrance, Glow by JLo, has been credited with influencing the rise of celebrity fragrances in the 2000s, with perfume critic Chandler Burr stating: \"Elizabeth Taylor was one of the first [to have her own scent], but Glow kicked the whole thing into overdrive.\" Following the success of Lopez's appointment as a judge on American Idol in 2010, a trend of networks hiring \"big names\" for judging panels on reality shows ensued. The Hollywood Reporter branded this \"The J.Lo Effect\".",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "In Tok Pisin, a language spoken in Papua New Guinea, the term palopa is used to describe non-heteronormative people whose identities may correlate with western definitions of homosexual men or trans women; its etymology is derived from the name Jennifer Lopez.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "As of 2022, Lopez has sold more than 80 million records worldwide and her films have grossed a cumulative total of US$3.1 billion. She remains the only female entertainer to have a number one album and film simultaneously in the United States. With her second studio album J.Lo (2001), Lopez became the first female solo recording artist under Epic Records to achieve a number one album in the United States since its inception in 1953. Her album J to tha L-O! The Remixes was acknowledged by the Guinness World Records as the first number one remix album in the United States. In 2010, Lopez was honored by the World Music Awards with the Legend Award for her contribution to the arts. Lopez's return to prominence the following year with her single \"On the Floor\"—among the best-selling singles of all time, and its music video recognized as the \"Highest Viewed Female Music Video of All Time\" by Guinness World Records in 2012—is regarded as one of the greatest musical comebacks in history. In 2013, she was presented with the prestigious landmark 2,500th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her musical contributions, and Univision presented her with the World Icon Award in its Premios Juventud. In 2014, she became the first female recipient of the Billboard Icon Award. Billboard magazine ranked her as the ninth greatest dance club artist of all time in 2016. In 2017, she was awarded the Telemundo Star Award. In 2018, Lopez received the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award at the 2018 MTV Video Music Awards, making her the first Latin performer to claim the prize since its introduction in 1984. In 2022, she became the first person of Latin descent to receive the MTV Generation Award at the MTV Movie & TV Awards. She is also the first and only person in history to receive both the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award and MTV Movie & TV Awards' Generation Award for her accomplishments in music, film and television.",
"title": "Achievements"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Films starred",
"title": "Filmography"
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{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Lopez has written a memoir and co-written one children's book so far.",
"title": "Bibliography"
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"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Headlining tours",
"title": "Tours and residencies"
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"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Co-headlining tours",
"title": "Tours and residencies"
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"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Residencies",
"title": "Tours and residencies"
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| Jennifer Lynn Affleck, known by her maiden name and also shortened to J.Lo, is an American singer and actress. Often considered a Latin pop culture icon, Lopez is one of the most influential entertainers in the world, credited for helping propel the Latin pop movement in American music. Her most successful singles on the US Billboard Hot 100 include the number one singles "If You Had My Love", "I'm Real", "Ain't It Funny" and "All I Have". In 1991, Lopez began appearing as a Fly Girl dancer on the sketch comedy television series In Living Color, where she remained a regular until she decided to pursue an acting career in 1993. For her first leading role in Selena (1997), she became the first Hispanic actress to earn over US$1 million for a film. She went on to star in Anaconda (1997) and Out of Sight (1998), and established herself as the highest-paid Hispanic actress in Hollywood. Lopez ventured into the music industry with her debut studio album On the 6 (1999) and later starred in the psychological horror The Cell (2000). With the simultaneous release of her second studio album J.Lo and her romantic comedy The Wedding Planner in 2001, she became the first woman to have a number-one album and film in the same week. Her 2002 release, J to tha L–O! The Remixes, became the first remix album in history to debut atop the US Billboard 200. Later that year, she released her third studio album, This Is Me... Then and starred in the film Maid in Manhattan. After starring in Gigli (2003), a critical and commercial failure, Lopez starred in the successful romantic comedies Shall We Dance? (2004) and Monster-in-Law (2005). Her fifth studio album, Como Ama una Mujer (2007), had the highest first week sales for a debut Spanish album in the United States. Following a relatively unsuccessful period, she returned to prominence in 2011 with her appearance as a judge on American Idol and released her seventh studio album, Love?, spawning the international hit "On the Floor". From 2016 to 2018, she starred in the police drama series Shades of Blue and performed a residency show, Jennifer Lopez: All I Have, at Planet Hollywood Las Vegas. She also produced and served as a judge on World of Dance (2017–2020). In 2019, she garnered critical acclaim for her performance as a stripper in the crime drama Hustlers. For her contributions to the recording industry, Lopez has a landmark star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and has received the Billboard Icon Award and the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award, among other honors. In 2012, Forbes ranked her the world's most powerful celebrity, and the 38th most powerful woman in the world. Time listed her among their 100 most influential people in the world in 2018. Her other ventures include beauty and clothing lines, fragrances, a production company and a charitable foundation. | 2001-10-23T20:51:32Z | 2023-12-22T03:41:45Z | [
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16,179 | July 21 | July 21 is the 202nd day of the year (203rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 163 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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"text": "July 21 is the 202nd day of the year (203rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 163 days remain until the end of the year.",
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| July 21 is the 202nd day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 163 days remain until the end of the year. | 2001-10-03T18:28:45Z | 2023-12-05T00:47:26Z | [
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16,181 | July 23 | July 23 is the 204th day of the year (205th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 161 days remain until the end of the year. | [
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"text": "July 23 is the 204th day of the year (205th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 161 days remain until the end of the year.",
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| July 23 is the 204th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 161 days remain until the end of the year. | 2001-10-03T19:14:57Z | 2023-12-03T21:11:52Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_23 |
16,182 | Jock Taylor | Jock Taylor (9 March 1954 – 15 August 1982) was a Scottish World Champion motorcycle sidecar racer.
John Robert (Jock) Taylor was born in Pencaitland, East Lothian, and entered his first sidecar race at the age of 19, as the passenger to Kenny Andrews (1974). The following year he took part in his first race as a driver. Taylor died in Finland as a consequence of a racing incident in 1982.
Taylor was the Scottish Sidecar Champion with passenger Lewis Ward in 1977. He won races at East Fortune near Haddington, Beveridge Park in Kirkcaldy and at Knockhill near Dunfermline as well events in England with some success. In 1978 he decided to tackle the odd Grand Prix race and the British Championships and parted company with Ward and teamed up with a new passenger from nearby Haddington called Jimmy Neil. It took some time for the new partnership to gel but by the end of the season they were regularly winning races in England. In 1979 Taylor acquired a Seymaz hub steering type outfit and found it not to his liking after two accidents that left Jimmy Neil with a fractured wrist and caused the death of stand-in passenger Dave Powell at Oulton Park in a high-speed crash. With Neil still injured, Taylor used veteran passenger Jimmy Law for the German GP at Hockenheim on his old Windle framed Yamaha where they finished fifth. Although Neil returned at Assen in Holland, it was when he teamed up with former Swedish 125 cc rider Benga Johansson that Taylor took his first Grand Prix victory at the Swedish TT at Karlskoga shortly after. There were further successes towards the end of 1979 in Britain where he finished runner-up in the British Championship behind Dick Greasley. In 1980, Taylor and Benga Johansson won 4 Grand Prix races, and finished on the podium in all seven events they finished. He won the British Championship and won the Isle of Man Sidecar B race to win the Sidecar TT overall. In 1981 he retained his British title and he went on to become a four-time TT race winner. In 1982 Taylor and Johansson raised the sidecar lap record at the Isle of Man TT to 108.29 mph (ca. 175 km/h), a lap record which stood for 7 years.
In the 1982 Finnish Grand Prix, held in Imatra under very wet conditions, Taylor and Johansson's bike aquaplane and slid off the road and collided with a telephone pole along the closed public road course that was used once a year for the Finnish GP. The emergency services were removing him from the wreckage when a second sidecar team slid off into them. Taylor was sadly killed in the second accident. He was buried in the local cemetery at Pencaitland, and a memorial to him has been erected in the village in December 2006. A memorial also stands in Beveridge Park, Kirkcaldy, overlooking Railway Bend on the old motorcycle racing circuit. Jock Taylor has also a memorial in Imatra, near the paddock of Finnish championship racetrack.
Jock's World championship, and TT 108.29 mph lap record-winning sidecar was bought by friend and fellow competitor Jack Muldoon from Jock's sponsor Dennis Trollope. Jack rescued Jock's outfit from the 5-man consortium who were supposed to restore the bike to its original condition and display it in a museum in Alford, Aberdeenshire. That never happened in the four years that it lay up in Alford in bits in a shed.
Jack Muldoon and family bought Jock's bike in March 2012 and started the restoration work immediately. The sidecar was completely stripped to a bare chassis, with months spent with emery cleaning and polishing the chassis. Due to the 26 years it lay at Donington in the museum and then 4 years up in Aberdeen, the chassis and all components were covered in rust and everything was seized: every component on the bike had to be stripped and cleaned, all bearings in all parts of the chassis were replaced, and the engine was completely rebuilt. It was done with the help of Bill Howarth and Dennis Trollope for all the Yamaha TZ700 parts required in the engine rebuild; Terry Windle, Stuart Mellor, Lockheed, HEL Performance Brake Pipes, Paul Drake Koni Shockers, Yolst Silkoline Oils. By August the restoration was 90% complete – it was the first time in 30 years that the TZ700 engine had run, and it was paraded at the Jock Taylor Memorial race weekend at East Fortune near Edinburgh in August 2012, a few miles from where Jock was born and brought up.
In the year following his death an annual end of season race was established at Knockhill called the Jock Taylor Trophy and it has always attracted the very best crews. Every year sidecar racers travel from all over the UK to race in what has become a prestigious race. In 2012, the race was held at East Fortune where Taylor started his racing career nearly 40 years ago. | [
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"text": "Jock Taylor (9 March 1954 – 15 August 1982) was a Scottish World Champion motorcycle sidecar racer.",
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"title": ""
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"text": "Taylor was the Scottish Sidecar Champion with passenger Lewis Ward in 1977. He won races at East Fortune near Haddington, Beveridge Park in Kirkcaldy and at Knockhill near Dunfermline as well events in England with some success. In 1978 he decided to tackle the odd Grand Prix race and the British Championships and parted company with Ward and teamed up with a new passenger from nearby Haddington called Jimmy Neil. It took some time for the new partnership to gel but by the end of the season they were regularly winning races in England. In 1979 Taylor acquired a Seymaz hub steering type outfit and found it not to his liking after two accidents that left Jimmy Neil with a fractured wrist and caused the death of stand-in passenger Dave Powell at Oulton Park in a high-speed crash. With Neil still injured, Taylor used veteran passenger Jimmy Law for the German GP at Hockenheim on his old Windle framed Yamaha where they finished fifth. Although Neil returned at Assen in Holland, it was when he teamed up with former Swedish 125 cc rider Benga Johansson that Taylor took his first Grand Prix victory at the Swedish TT at Karlskoga shortly after. There were further successes towards the end of 1979 in Britain where he finished runner-up in the British Championship behind Dick Greasley. In 1980, Taylor and Benga Johansson won 4 Grand Prix races, and finished on the podium in all seven events they finished. He won the British Championship and won the Isle of Man Sidecar B race to win the Sidecar TT overall. In 1981 he retained his British title and he went on to become a four-time TT race winner. In 1982 Taylor and Johansson raised the sidecar lap record at the Isle of Man TT to 108.29 mph (ca. 175 km/h), a lap record which stood for 7 years.",
"title": "Racing career"
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"text": "In the 1982 Finnish Grand Prix, held in Imatra under very wet conditions, Taylor and Johansson's bike aquaplane and slid off the road and collided with a telephone pole along the closed public road course that was used once a year for the Finnish GP. The emergency services were removing him from the wreckage when a second sidecar team slid off into them. Taylor was sadly killed in the second accident. He was buried in the local cemetery at Pencaitland, and a memorial to him has been erected in the village in December 2006. A memorial also stands in Beveridge Park, Kirkcaldy, overlooking Railway Bend on the old motorcycle racing circuit. Jock Taylor has also a memorial in Imatra, near the paddock of Finnish championship racetrack.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Jock's World championship, and TT 108.29 mph lap record-winning sidecar was bought by friend and fellow competitor Jack Muldoon from Jock's sponsor Dennis Trollope. Jack rescued Jock's outfit from the 5-man consortium who were supposed to restore the bike to its original condition and display it in a museum in Alford, Aberdeenshire. That never happened in the four years that it lay up in Alford in bits in a shed.",
"title": "Restoration"
},
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"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Jack Muldoon and family bought Jock's bike in March 2012 and started the restoration work immediately. The sidecar was completely stripped to a bare chassis, with months spent with emery cleaning and polishing the chassis. Due to the 26 years it lay at Donington in the museum and then 4 years up in Aberdeen, the chassis and all components were covered in rust and everything was seized: every component on the bike had to be stripped and cleaned, all bearings in all parts of the chassis were replaced, and the engine was completely rebuilt. It was done with the help of Bill Howarth and Dennis Trollope for all the Yamaha TZ700 parts required in the engine rebuild; Terry Windle, Stuart Mellor, Lockheed, HEL Performance Brake Pipes, Paul Drake Koni Shockers, Yolst Silkoline Oils. By August the restoration was 90% complete – it was the first time in 30 years that the TZ700 engine had run, and it was paraded at the Jock Taylor Memorial race weekend at East Fortune near Edinburgh in August 2012, a few miles from where Jock was born and brought up.",
"title": "Restoration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In the year following his death an annual end of season race was established at Knockhill called the Jock Taylor Trophy and it has always attracted the very best crews. Every year sidecar racers travel from all over the UK to race in what has become a prestigious race. In 2012, the race was held at East Fortune where Taylor started his racing career nearly 40 years ago.",
"title": "Annual Jock Taylor Memorial Race"
}
]
| Jock Taylor was a Scottish World Champion motorcycle sidecar racer. John Robert (Jock) Taylor was born in Pencaitland, East Lothian, and entered his first sidecar race at the age of 19, as the passenger to Kenny Andrews (1974). The following year he took part in his first race as a driver. Taylor died in Finland as a consequence of a racing incident in 1982. | 2023-03-08T12:02:27Z | [
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|
16,186 | Jewish views on homosexuality | The subject of homosexuality and Judaism dates back to the Torah. The book of Vayikra (Leviticus) is traditionally regarded as classifying sexual intercourse between males as a to'eivah (something abhorred or detested) that can be subject to capital punishment by the current Sanhedrin under halakha (Jewish law).
The issue has been a subject of contention within modern Jewish denominations, and has led to debate and division. Traditionally, Judaism has seen that homosexual male intercourse, and not homosexuality in-and-of-itself, as contrary to Judaism, and this opinion is often still maintained by Orthodox Judaism.
Conservative Judaism's Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, which until December 2006 held the same position as Orthodoxy, has since issued multiple opinions under its philosophy of pluralism; one opinion continues to follow the Orthodox position while another opinion substantially liberalizes the view of homosexual sex and relationships (while continuing to regard certain sexual acts as prohibited).
Theologically liberal branches such as Reconstructionist, Humanistic, and Reform Judaism have all openly accepted homosexuality, homosexual intercourse, and same-sex marriage.
The Book of Leviticus refers to male homosexual sexual practices twice (JPS translation):
Several commentators believe that the verses specifically condemn the practice of sodomy (i.e. anal intercourse between two males). Rabbinic thought supports this view, condemning homosexuality as an example of "unnatural intercourse" compared to the "natural intercourse" between non-related men and women. Intercourse in both scenarios only occur if penetration exists.
Deuteronomy 23:18 tells followers: "None of the daughters of Israel shall be a kedeshah, nor shall any of the sons of Israel be a Kadesh." This has been interpreted as prohibiting the "sons of Israel" from serving as a homosexual temple prostitute in a pagan cult.
The laws of negiah prohibit affectionate touch between an unmarried man and woman (except close relatives), because this touch is considered "approaching" a forbidden relationship. As gay male sex is included in the category of arayot along with other sexual prohibitions, the prohibition of negiah would seem to also apply between two gay men. Nevertheless, some sources raise the possibility that the law may be more lenient for two men than for a man and a woman. The consensus seems to be that touch between gay men which involves sexual desire is rabbinically forbidden, while touch which does not involve sexual desire is permitted.
Another issue is the prohibition of yichud (seclusion of two individuals together in a manner that would allow them to have sex). The Talmud records a debate over whether yichud applies to any two men. Maimonides, Tur, and Shulchan Aruch rule leniently, that yichud of two men is permitted, because "Jews are not suspected of homosexual sex". Nevertheless, the Shulchan Aruch recommended to avoid such yichud, "in these generations where promiscuous people are common" (possibly a reference to the use of Köçek dancer-prostitutes in the Ottoman Empire at the time). However, this recommendation was not repeated by later authorities.
Based on the above precedents that yichud can apply to two men in a circumstance where homosexual behavior is a concern, a modern halakhic authority rules that two men cannot be alone together if both of them are homosexual. Opinions also exist that the prohibition only applies to two men who are in a relationship with each other, or that there is no technical prohibition at all if they are confident they can avoid forbidden touch (but they should still avoid sharing a bedroom).
Like many similar commandments, the stated punishment for willful violation was the death penalty, though minors under 13 years of age were exempt from this, as from any other penalty. However, even in Biblical times, it was very difficult to get a conviction that would lead to this prescribed punishment. The Jewish Oral Law states that capital punishment would be applicable only if two men were caught in the act of anal sex, if there were two witnesses to the act, if the men involved were warned that they committed a capital offense, and the two men—or the willing party, in case of rape—subsequently acknowledged the warning but continued to engage in the prohibited act anyway. In fact, there is no account of capital punishment, in regards to this law, in Jewish history.
Rabbinic tradition understands the Torah's system of capital punishment to not be in effect for the past approximately 2,000 years, in the absence of a Sanhedrin and Temple. The relative absence of anti-homosexual prosecutions is also attributed to the Jewish belief that homosexuality did not exist in the community.
Classical rabbinic Jewish sources do not specifically mention that homosexual attraction is inherently sinful. In fact, the mental and emotional feelings two men experience when they engage in intimate relations are not condemned. However, they are condemned if intercourse, commonly interpreted as penetrative sex, occurs. If he does teshuva (repentance), i. e., he ceases his forbidden actions, regrets what he has done, apologizes to God, and makes a binding resolution never to repeat those actions, he is seen to be forgiven by God.
Although lesbianism is not explicitly prohibited in the Hebrew Bible, sexual liaisons between women are forbidden by Orthodox rabbinical literature. The Talmud discusses tribadism (women rubbing genitals together, or "nashim mesolelot") without explicitly prohibiting it; the main concern was whether or not this activity removed their status as a virgin, making them ineligible to marry a member of the priesthood. However, the Sifra condemned marriage between two women, considering it within the category of licentious foreign behavior which is forbidden to Jews. Following this lead, later halakhic codes prohibited tribadism on the same grounds. The penalty for lesbian acts was flagellation, rather than the death penalty. Two reasons that explain the latter include lesbianism not being explicitly prohibited in the Torah and the belief that it did not constitute intercourse.
The Babylonian Talmud is one of the few ancient religious texts that makes reference to same-sex marriage: "Ulla said: Non-Jews [litt. Bnei Noach, the progeny of Noah] accepted upon themselves thirty mitzvot [divinely ordered laws], but they only abide by three of them: The first one is that they do not write marriage documents for male couples, the second one is that they don't sell dead [human] meat by the pound in stores, and the third one is that they respect the Torah.'"
Sifra states: "'Like the deeds of the land of Egypt where you dwelt, you shall not do' - What would they do? A man would marry a man, a woman would marry a woman..."
Nonetheless, some contemporary scholars believe that same-sex marriage is theoretically permissible because kiddushin sanctifies the relationship between the spouses rather than the "sexual intimacies" they commit. The permissibility of same-sex marriage is also compared to the permissibility of marriage between a divorcee and a male descendant of a kohen (priest). The latter is accepted by adherents of Conservative Judaism because they believe the ethical components of Judaism, exemplified by justice and compassion, trump the legal components.
Reasons suggested by the rabbis for the prohibition on gay male sex include the following:
While a variety of views regarding homosexuality as an inclination or status exist within the Orthodox Jewish community, Orthodox Judaism generally prohibits homosexual conduct. While there is some disagreement about which male homosexual acts come under core prohibitions, the majority of Orthodox Judaism puts male-male anal sex in the category of yehareg ve'al ya'avor, "die rather than transgress", the small category of Biblically-prohibited acts (also including murder, idolatry, adultery, and incest) which an Orthodox Jew is obligated under the laws of Self-sacrifice under Jewish Law to die rather than do. According to the Talmud, homosexual acts are forbidden between non-Jews as well, and this is included among the sexual restrictions of the Noachide laws. The archetypal model in Judaism is marital heterosexuality with fornication, celibacy, adultery, homosexuality, incest and bestiality seen to be part of a continuous prism of wrong.
In a speech given in 1986, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, discussed "individuals who express an inclination towards a particular form of physical relationship in which the libidinal gratification is sought with members of one's own gender". He wrote that "society and government must be to offer a helping hand to those who are afflicted with this problem".
In a 2008 open letter distributed to Orthodox community leaders, the Hod organization appealed to the Orthodox community to recognize them as part of the religious society. Up to 2013, 163 Orthodox rabbis from Israel and abroad signed this statement, including Yuval Cherlow, Binyamin Lau, Haim Navon, Daniel Sperber, Eliezer Melamed, Shai Piron, and Yehuda Gilad. In 2010, TorahWeb.org published a brief position statement entitled "Torah View on Homosexuality", co-authored by Rav Hershel Schachter, Rav Mordechai Willig, Rav Michael Rosensweig, and Rav Mayer Twersky.
On July 22, 2010, a "Statement of Principles on the Place of Jews with a Homosexual Orientation in Our Community" was released. It was written primarily by Nathaniel Helfgot, Aryeh Klapper, and Yitzchak Blau. Signatories include more than a hundred rabbis and laypeople. Some of the statement's more notable supporters are Rabbi Marc Angel, co-founder of The Rabbinic Fellowship; Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, founder of Lincoln Square Synagogue, Efrat, and Ohr Torah Stone Institutions; and Rabbi Avi Weiss, head of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, founder of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah and Yeshivat Maharat, and co-founder of The Rabbinic Fellowship.
An edict signed by dozens of Israeli Orthodox rabbis and published in 2016 by the Israeli Modern Orthodox rabbinic group Beit Hillel, a group which promotes inclusiveness in Orthodox Judaism, stated, in part, "According to the Torah and halacha, the [same-sex sexual] acts are forbidden, but not the proclivities, and therefore, people with same-sex tendencies, men and women, have no invalidation in halacha or tradition. They are obligated by the commandments of the Torah, they can fulfill a [ritual] obligation on behalf of the public, and carry out all of the community functions just like any member." It also stated, in part, "Just as it [is] inconceivable to mock someone for being physically, behaviorally, or mentally different, so too those with same-sex tendencies should not be mocked. On the contrary, those around them—family and community—should show special feeling for them, and apply to them the Torah commandment of 'Love thy neighbor as thyself' and to be diligent in avoiding the prohibition of insulting another."
Rabbi Dr. Immanuel Jakobovits describes the traditional opinion on homosexuality as follows: "Jewish law [...] rejects the view that homosexuality is to be regarded merely as a disease or as morally neutral... Jewish law holds that no hedonistic ethic, even if called "love", can justify the morality of homosexuality any more than it can legitimize adultery or incest, however genuinely such acts may be performed out of love and by mutual consent." Rabbi Norman Lamm argued that some (although not all) homosexuals should be viewed as diseased and in need of compassion and treatment, rather than willful rebels who should be ostracized. He distinguishes between six varieties of homosexuals, including "genuine homosexuals" who have "strong preferential erotic feelings for members of the same sex", "transitory" and "situational" homosexuals who would prefer heterosexual intercourse but are denied it or seek gain in homosexuality, and heterosexuals who are merely curious.
When Steven Greenberg, who received Orthodox rabbinic ordination, publicly announced in 1999 that he was homosexual, there was a significant response from rabbis of all denominations reported in the Jewish newspapers. Rabbi Moshe Tendler, a leading rabbi at Yeshiva University, stated, "It is very sad that an individual who attended our yeshiva sunk to the depths of what we consider a depraved society." As Greenberg has a rabbinic ordination from the Orthodox rabbinical seminary of Yeshiva University (RIETS), he is generally described as the first openly gay Orthodox Jewish rabbi. However, some Orthodox Jews, including many rabbis, dispute his being an Orthodox rabbi.
Orthodox Israeli rabbi Ron Yosef became in 2009 the first Israeli Orthodox Rabbi to come out, by appearing in Uvda [he] ("Fact"), Israel's leading investigative television program, in an episode regarding conversion therapies in Israel. Yosef remains in his position as a pulpit Rabbi. Yosef testified that his Yemenite congregation did not accept him being a homosexual very easily and it took them a while to accept it. Yosef received death threats in the year leading up to the 2009 Tel Aviv gay centre shooting. In 2013, he stated he is in a relationship with a man. Yosef has stated his approach to the issue of homosexuality in Judaism as follows: "It is clear to me that lying with another man is forbidden, and our starting point is commitment to halacha and Torah. The goal is not to seek permission. But you need to give us a shoulder and support."
In 2019 Daniel Atwood became the first openly gay Orthodox person to be ordained as a rabbi; he was ordained by the rabbi Daniel Landes, in Jerusalem. In October 2023, The Forward reported about Shua Brick, “experts say that Brick is the first openly gay rabbi to serve on the clergy of an Orthodox synagogue in the U.S.”, explaining that Brick “runs the youth program, leads Torah study for adults, and fills in when the senior rabbi is out of town” at Beth Jacob Congregation in Oakland, California, where he started coming out as gay to members of the congregation over a year prior to October 2023. He was ordained by Yeshiva University.
JONAH was a Jewish ex-gay organization that focuses on "prevention, intervention, and healing of the underlying issues causing same-sex attractions". In 2012, four former clients of JONAH sued the organization for fraud, claiming that it sold them therapies that were ineffective and counterproductive. Soon after in that same year, the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA), a professional association of more than 1,000 Orthodox rabbis around the world, sent an open email to its members that it no longer supported conversion therapy generally, or JONAH specifically. In 2015, a New Jersey jury found JONAH guilty of consumer fraud for promising to be able to change its clients' sexual urges and determined its commercial practices to be unconscionable. As part of the sentence, JONAH was required to cease all operations, but continues to operate under the name JIFGA as of 2018.
Jiří Mordechai Langer, who studied in the Hasidic community of Belz, arrived in the land of Israel in 1940. "His reconciliation of homosexuality and Judaism involved ...a homosexual Jewish theology; ...a sociology of Jewish homosexuality in Hasidism".
The late UK Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote the foreword to Rabbi Chaim Rapoport's book Judaism and Homosexuality: An Authentic Orthodox View. In the foreword, Rabbi Sacks has written: "Compassion, sympathy, empathy, understanding - these are essential elements of Judaism. They are what homosexual Jews who care about Judaism need from us today."
Modern Orthodox leader Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein is reported to have said that the intensity of Orthodox community's condemnation of homosexuality goes beyond what its status as a religious transgression warrants, and that he feels toward homosexual people "criticism, disapproval, but tempered with an element of sympathy". Rabbi Steven Greenberg, for example, argues that there are many sins considered to be abominations in the Torah, homosexual men are disproportionately censured. While some Modern Orthodox congregations may still invite a person up for an aliyah who is known not to keep kosher, the same is not always true of a man known to engage in same-sex sexual activity.
In both the United States and in Israel several groups have sprung up in the last few years that seek to support those who identify as both Orthodox and homosexual; support Orthodox parents of LGBT children; and promote understanding of homosexuality within Orthodox communities and among Orthodox rabbis. These include an umbrella organization called Eshel, the Gay and Lesbian Yeshiva Day School Alumni Association, the women's group OrthoDykes, the youth group JQYouth, the American-Israeli group headquartered in Jerusalem Bat Kol and the Israeli group Hod ("Majesty"). In 2012, Hod held an advertising campaign against conversion therapies and for self-acceptance of the religious homosexual community in Israel. Online blogs and support groups have enabled many to find other Orthodox LGBT people with whom to share the conflict between Orthodox religious and social norms and LGBT self-identification.
Orthodox Rabbis Shmuley Boteach and Zev Farber have questioned the opposition of Orthodox groups to government recognition of same-sex civil marriages (or in Boteach's case, to state-sanctioned civil unions), arguing that although Judaism does not condone homosexuality, governments should not enforce any particular religion's view of marriage, and that conferring civil benefits to committed homosexual couples should be viewed as promoting family values.
In October 2010, Boteach wrote an op-ed column in The Wall Street Journal on homosexuality, arguing that he does not deny that there is a biblical prohibition on male same-sex relationships and a commandment for men and women to marry and have children. Still, he understands those in context. "There are 613 commandments in the Torah... So when Jewish gay couples tell me they have never been attracted to members of the opposite sex and are desperate alone, I tell them "You have 611 commandments left. That should keep you busy. Now, go create a kosher home ... you are His beloved children." Five years later he wrote that he believed in the equality of all of God's children, and has seen too much homophobia in his life. He believes that the biggest threat to marriage does not come from gay marriage, but heterosexual divorce, which he says afflicts half of marriages. He opposes government involvement at all in recognizing marriage, but supports state-sanctioned "civil unions" for all. Open Orthodox Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz declared that the Jewish values of justice, equality, and dignity lead him to support the cause of gay rights and advocate for same-sex civil marriage.
In November 2016, dozens of LGBT activists protested in Jerusalem against comments reportedly made by the city's chief rabbi Rabbi Shlomo Amar, who reportedly told an Israeli newspaper that gay people were an "abomination", and homosexuality a "cult".
In 2017, the Senior Rabbi of the Spanish & Portuguese Sephardi Community Joseph Dweck gave a class describing "the entire revolution of feminism and even homosexuality in our society ... is a fantastic development for humanity". These words were condemned by Rabbi Aaron Bassous as "false and misguided ... corrupt from beginning to end". This affair caused Dweck to step down from the Sephardic Beth Din but not as a communal leader.
In 2019, Rabbi Daniel Landes wrote, "Leviticus 18:22 ... has not been erased from the Torah. But that biblical commandment does not give us license to ignore or abuse the significant number of carefully observant Jews who are LGBTQ."
Film documentaries made about Orthodox homosexuals in recent years include Trembling Before G-d, Keep Not Silent, and Say Amen.
As a matter of both Jewish law and institutional policy, Conservative ("Masorti") Judaism has wrestled with homosexuality issues since the 1980s.
Conservative Jewish writer Herschell Matt initially argued that homosexuals may be excused because Judaism does recognise 'constraint' as a valid excuse to disobey the law. However, Matt later shifted to outright support for homosexuality, viewing it as part of the natural order. Conservative Rabbi Robert Kirshchner states that Jews have historically adapted their laws to new circumstances, indicating accommodation for homosexuality.
In Conservative Judaism, the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards (CJLS) of the Rabbinical Assembly makes the movement's decisions concerning Jewish law. In 1992, the CJLS action affirmed its traditional prohibition on homosexual conduct, blessing same-sex unions, and ordaining openly gay/lesbian/bisexual clergy. However, these prohibitions grew increasingly controversial within the Conservative movement.
In 2006, the CJLS shifted its position and paved the way for significant changes regarding the Conservative movement's policies toward homosexuality. On December 6, 2006, The CJLS adopted three distinct responsa reflecting very different approaches to the subject. One responsum substantially liberalized Conservative Judaism's approach including lifting most (but not all) classical prohibitions on homosexual conduct and permitted the blessing of homosexual unions and the ordination of openly gay/lesbian/bisexual clergy. Two others completely retained traditional prohibitions. Under the rules of the Conservative movement, the adoption of multiple opinions permits individual Conservative rabbis, congregations, and rabbinical schools to select which opinion to accept, and hence to choose individually whether to maintain a traditional prohibition on homosexual conduct or to permit openly gay/lesbian/bisexual unions and clergy.
The liberalizing responsum, adopted as a majority opinion by 13 of 25 votes, was authored by Rabbis Elliot N. Dorff, Daniel Nevins, and Avram Reisner. It lifted most restrictions on homosexual conduct and opened the way to the ordination of openly gay/lesbian/bisexual rabbis and cantors and acceptance of homosexual unions, but stopped short of religiously recognizing same-sex marriage. The responsum invoked the Talmudic principle of kavod habriyot, which the authors translated as "human dignity", as authority for this approach. The responsum maintained a prohibition on male-male anal sex, which it described as the sole Biblically prohibited homosexual act. This act remains a yehareg ve'al ya'avor ("die rather than transgress" offense) under the decision.
Two traditionalist responsa were adopted. A responsum by Rabbi Joel Roth, adopted as a majority opinion by 13 votes, reaffirmed a general complete prohibition on homosexual conduct. A second responsum by Rabbi Leonard Levy, adopted as a minority opinion by 6 votes, delineated ways in which to ensure that gays and lesbians would be accorded human dignity and a respected place in Conservative communities and institutions while maintaining the authority of the traditional prohibitions against same-sex sexual activity.
The Committee rejected the third paper by Gordon Tucker which would have lifted all restrictions on homosexual sexual practices.
The consequences of the decision have been mixed. On the one hand, four members of the Committee—Rabbis Joel Roth, Leonard Levy, Mayer Rabinowitz, and Joseph Prouser—resigned from the CJLS following adoption of the change. On the other hand, the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies of the University of Judaism (now the American Jewish University) in Los Angeles had previously stated that it will immediately begin admitting gay/lesbian/bisexual students as soon as the law committee passes a policy that sanctions such ordination. On March 26, 2007, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York followed suit and began accepting openly gay/lesbian/bisexual candidates for admission for their Rabbinical program.
In June 2012, the American branch of Conservative Judaism formally approved same-sex marriage ceremonies in a 13–0 vote. In 2021, two Conservative Rabbis became the first known example of two Rabbis of the same sex marrying each other.
Although the American example was initially an outlier in the global Conservative movement, it is now the case that "all Masorti seminaries, except for the one in Argentina, now accept openly gay students". Since 2014 in the United Kingdom the Masorti movement offers a Shutafut ("partnership") ceremony to same-gender couples wishing to marry in a Conservative religious ceremony. The Shutafut contains many of the iconic elements of a traditional Jewish wedding service - the chupah, the seven blessings, the wine, the glass breaking, but without the symbolic act of acquisition in a traditional Jewish wedding.
In Israel, the head of the Masorti's Vaad Halakha (equivalent to the CJLS), Rabbi David Golinkin, wrote to the CJLS protesting its reconsideration of the traditional ban on homosexual conduct. Despite the contention within the Israeli movement however in the same year, Israel's Schechter Rabbinical Seminary sanctioned the training of openly gay Rabbis.
Hungary's Neolog movement - distinct from but seen as a fraternal counterpart and in some ways spiritual ancestor of the modern Masorti movement - has been more divided. Although not embracing and providing for same-gender marriage or full inclusion in Jewish life, Mazsihisz, the main representative umbrella body for Neolog Judaism, has affirmed its opposition to exclusion by homophobia and in 2013 dismissed the director of its youth movement for making comments about excluding gay people from all religious life for their sexual orientation. In 2021 the President of Mazsihisz was made to apologise for signing a Joint Declaration of the Churches on the Holiness of Marriage that held "the sanctification of the woman-man relationship by marriage is the foundation of human dignity". His critics included Mazsihisz's Chief Rabbi and earlier that same year the movement made a statement widely seen as condemning new Hungarian laws limiting the exposure of children to content referencing homosexuality.
Rabbi Bradley Artson, Dean of the Rabbinic School at American Jewish University, claims to have studied every reference he could find to homosexual activity mentioned in ancient Greek and Latin writers. Every citation he found described an encounter between males where one party, the master, physically abused another, the slave. Rabbi Artson could not find a single example where one partner was not subservient to the other. "Homosexual relationships today", Rabbi Artson says, "should not be compared to the ancient world. I know too many homosexual individuals, including close friends and relatives, who are committed to one another in loving long-term monogamous relationships. I know too many same-sex couples that are loving parents raising good descent [sic] ethical children. Who's to say their family relationships are less sanctified in the eyes of God than mine is with my wife and our children?"
The Reform Judaism movement, the largest branch of Judaism in North America, has rejected the traditional view of Jewish Law on homosexuality and bisexuality. As such, they do not prohibit the ordination of openly gay, lesbian, and bisexual people as rabbis and cantors. They view Levitical laws as sometimes seen to be referring to prostitution, making it a stand against Jews adopting the idolatrous fertility cults and practices of the neighbouring Canaanite nations, rather than a blanket condemnation of same-sex intercourse, homosexuality, or bisexuality. Reform authorities consider that, in light of what is seen as current scientific evidence about the nature of homosexuality and bisexuality as inborn sexual orientations, a new interpretation of the law is required.
In 1972, Beth Chayim Chadashim, the world's first explicitly-gay-and-lesbian-centered synagogue recognized by the Reform Jewish community, was established in West Los Angeles, resulting in a slew of non-Orthodox congregations being established along similar lines. Beth Chayim Chadashim now focuses on the entire LGBT community, rather than just gays and lesbians.
In 1977, the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), which is the Union for Reform Judaism's principal body, adopted a resolution calling for legislation decriminalizing homosexual acts between consenting adults, and calling for an end to discrimination against gays and lesbians. The resolution called on Reform Jewish organizations to develop programs to implement this stand.
Reform rabbi Lionel Blue was the first British rabbi to publicly declare himself as gay, which he did in 1980.
In the late 1980s, the primary seminary of the Reform movement, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, changed its admission requirements to allow openly gay and lesbian people to join the student body.
In 1990, the Union for Reform Judaism announced a national policy declaring lesbian and gay Jews to be full and equal members of the religious community. Also in 1990, the CCAR officially endorsed a report of their own Ad Hoc Committee on Homosexuality and the Rabbinate. This position paper urged that "all rabbis, regardless of sexual orientation, be accorded the opportunity to fulfill the sacred vocation that they have chosen". The committee endorsed the view that "all Jews are religiously equal, regardless of their sexual orientation".
In 1995, Reform Rabbi Margaret Wenig's essay "Truly Welcoming Lesbian and Gay Jews" was published in The Jewish Condition: Essays on Contemporary Judaism Honoring [Reform] Rabbi Alexander M. Schindler; it was the first published argument to the Jewish community on behalf of civil marriage for gay couples.
In 1996, the CCAR passed a resolution approving the same-sex civil marriage. However, this same resolution made a distinction between civil marriages and religious marriages; this resolution thus stated:
In 1998, an ad hoc CCAR committee on Human Sexuality issued its majority report (11 to 1, 1 abstention) which stated that the holiness within a Jewish marriage "may be present in committed same-gender relationships between two Jews and that these relationships can serve as the foundation of stable Jewish families, thus adding strength to the Jewish community". The report called for the CCAR to support rabbis in officiating at same-sex marriages. Also in 1998, the Responsa Committee of the CCAR issued a lengthy teshuvah (rabbinical opinion) that offered detailed argumentation in support of both sides of the question whether a rabbi may officiate at a commitment ceremony for a same-sex couple.
In March 2000, the CCAR issued a new resolution stating that "We do hereby resolve that the relationship of a Jewish, same-gender couple is worthy of affirmation through appropriate Jewish ritual and further resolve, that we recognize the diversity of opinions within our ranks on this issue. We support the decision of those who choose to officiate at rituals of union for same-sex couples, and we support the decision of those who do not."
Also in 2000, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion established the Institute for Judaism, Sexual Orientation & Gender Identity to "educate HUC-JIR students on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender issues to help them challenge and eliminate homophobia and heterosexism; and to learn tools to be able to transform the communities they encounter into ones that are inclusive and welcoming of LGBT Jews". It is the first and only institute of its kind in the Jewish world.
In 2003, the Union for Reform Judaism retroactively applied its pro-rights policy on gays and lesbians to the bisexual and transgender communities, issuing a resolution titled, "Support for the Inclusion and Acceptance of the Transgender and Bisexual Communities".
Also in 2003, Women of Reform Judaism issued a statement describing their support for human and civil rights and the struggles of the bisexual and transgender communities, and saying, "Women of Reform Judaism accordingly: Calls for civil rights protections from all forms of discrimination against bisexual and transgender individuals; Urges that such legislation allows transgender individuals to be seen under the law as the gender by which they identify; and Calls upon sisterhoods to hold informative programs about the transgender and bisexual communities."
In 2009, Siddur Sha'ar Zahav, a prayer book written to address the lives and needs of LGBTQ as well as heterosexual and cisgender Jews, was published.
In 2014, the CCAR joined a lawsuit challenging North Carolina's ban on same-sex marriage, which is America's first faith-based challenge to same-sex marriage bans.
In 2015, Rabbi Denise Eger became the first openly gay president of the CCAR.
Also in 2015, the High Holy Days Reform Jewish prayer book Mishkan HaNefesh was released; it is intended as a companion to Mishkan T'filah. Mishkan HaNefesh can be translated as "sanctuary of the soul". It replaces a line from the Reform movement's earlier prayerbook, "Gates of Repentance", that mentioned the joy of a bride and groom specifically, with the line "rejoicing with couples under the chuppah [wedding canopy]", and adds a third, non-gendered option to the way worshippers are called to the Torah, offering "mibeit", Hebrew for "from the house of", in addition to the traditional "son of" or "daughter of". The Mishkan HaNefesh includes several sets of translations for the traditional prayers. Psalm 23 includes the familiar "traditional" translation, an adaptation that is considered "gender-sensitive" but remains faithful to the traditional version, a feminist adaption from Phyllis Appell Bass, and the fourth was published in 1978 by a contemporary rabbi.
The Reconstructionist movement sees homosexuality and bisexuality as normal expressions of sexuality and welcomes gays, bisexuals, and lesbians into Reconstructionist communities to participate fully in every aspect of community life. Since 1985, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College has admitted openly gay, bisexual, and lesbian candidates to their rabbinical and cantorial programs. In 1993, a movement Commission issued: Homosexuality and Judaism: The Reconstructionist Position. The Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association (RRA) encourages its members to officiate at same-sex marriages/commitment ceremonies, though the RRA does not require its members to officiate at them. In 2007, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association elected as president Rabbi Toba Spitzer, the first openly LGBT person chosen to head a rabbinical association in the United States. In 2011 Sandra Lawson became the first openly homosexual African-American and first African-American admitted to the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College; she was ordained in June 2018, which made her the first openly homosexual, female, black rabbi in the world. In 2013, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association elected as president Rabbi Jason Klein, the first openly gay man chosen to head a national rabbinical association of one of the major Jewish denominations in the United States. Also in 2013, Rabbi Deborah Waxman was elected as the president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. As the President, she is believed to be the first woman and first lesbian to lead a Jewish congregational union, and the first female rabbi and first lesbian to lead a Jewish seminary; the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College is both a congregational union and a seminary.
Jewish Renewal is a recent movement in Judaism which endeavors to reinvigorate modern Judaism with Kabbalistic, Hasidic, musical and meditative practices; it describes itself as "a worldwide, transdenominational movement grounded in Judaism's prophetic and mystical traditions". The Jewish Renewal movement ordains people of all sexual orientations as rabbis and cantors. In 2005, Eli Cohen became the first openly gay rabbi ordained by the Jewish Renewal Movement, followed by Chaya Gusfield and Rabbi Lori Klein in 2006, who became the two first openly lesbian rabbis ordained by the Jewish Renewal movement. In 2007, Jalda Rebling, born in Amsterdam and now living in Germany, became the first openly lesbian cantor ordained by the Jewish Renewal movement. In 2011, the bisexual rights activist Debra Kolodny was ordained as a rabbi by the Jewish Renewal movement and hired as the rabbi for congregation P'nai Or of Portland. The Statement of Principles of ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal (and OHALAH and the Rabbinic Pastors Association) states in part, "We welcome and recognize the sanctity of every individual regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. We recognize respectful and mutual expressions of adult human sexuality as potentially sacred expressions of love, and therefore, we strive to welcome a variety of constellations of intimate relationships and family forms including gay, lesbian, and heterosexual relationships as well as people choosing to be single."
Humanistic Judaism is a movement in Judaism that offers a non-theistic alternative in contemporary Jewish life. In 2004, the Society for Humanistic Judaism issued a resolution supporting "the legal recognition of marriage and divorce between adults of the same sex", and affirming "the value of marriage between any two committed adults with the sense of obligations, responsibilities, and consequences thereof". In 2010 they pledged to speak out against homophobic bullying. The Association of Humanistic Rabbis has also issued a pro-LGBT statement titled "In Support of Diverse Sexualities and Gender Identities". It was adopted in 2003 and issued in 2004.
Jewish LGBT rights advocates and sympathetic clergy have created various institutions within Jewish life to accommodate gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender parishioners. Beth Chayim Chadashim, established in 1972 in West Los Angeles, was the world's first explicitly-gay-and-lesbian-centered synagogue recognized by the Reform Jewish community, resulting in a slew of non-Orthodox congregations being established along similar lines, including Congregation Beit Simchat Torah in New York City, Bet Mishpachah in Washington, D.C., and Congregation Or Chadash in Chicago. Beth Chayim Chadashim now focuses on the entire LGBT community, rather than just gays and lesbians.
LGBT-inclusive services and ceremonies specific to Jewish religious culture have also been created, ranging from LGBT-affirmative haggadot for Passover to a "Stonewall Shabbat Seder".
In October 2012 Rainbow Jews, an oral history project showcasing the lives of Jewish bisexual, lesbian, gay, and transgender people in the United Kingdom from the 1950s until the present, was launched. It is the United Kingdom's first archive of Jewish bisexual, lesbian, gay, and transgender history.
The ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives has, among other things, the Twice Blessed Collection, circa 1966-2000; this collection "consists of materials documenting the Jewish lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender experience, circa 1966-2000, collected by the Jewish Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Archives, founded and operated by Johnny Abush".
Recent research by the sociocultural psychologist, Chana Etengoff, has highlighted the therapeutic benefits of LGBTQ petitions to religious leaders, including meaning-making, social action, agency and empowerment.
Research References: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The subject of homosexuality and Judaism dates back to the Torah. The book of Vayikra (Leviticus) is traditionally regarded as classifying sexual intercourse between males as a to'eivah (something abhorred or detested) that can be subject to capital punishment by the current Sanhedrin under halakha (Jewish law).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The issue has been a subject of contention within modern Jewish denominations, and has led to debate and division. Traditionally, Judaism has seen that homosexual male intercourse, and not homosexuality in-and-of-itself, as contrary to Judaism, and this opinion is often still maintained by Orthodox Judaism.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Conservative Judaism's Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, which until December 2006 held the same position as Orthodoxy, has since issued multiple opinions under its philosophy of pluralism; one opinion continues to follow the Orthodox position while another opinion substantially liberalizes the view of homosexual sex and relationships (while continuing to regard certain sexual acts as prohibited).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Theologically liberal branches such as Reconstructionist, Humanistic, and Reform Judaism have all openly accepted homosexuality, homosexual intercourse, and same-sex marriage.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The Book of Leviticus refers to male homosexual sexual practices twice (JPS translation):",
"title": "Homosexuality in the Hebrew Bible"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Several commentators believe that the verses specifically condemn the practice of sodomy (i.e. anal intercourse between two males). Rabbinic thought supports this view, condemning homosexuality as an example of \"unnatural intercourse\" compared to the \"natural intercourse\" between non-related men and women. Intercourse in both scenarios only occur if penetration exists.",
"title": "Homosexuality in the Hebrew Bible"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Deuteronomy 23:18 tells followers: \"None of the daughters of Israel shall be a kedeshah, nor shall any of the sons of Israel be a Kadesh.\" This has been interpreted as prohibiting the \"sons of Israel\" from serving as a homosexual temple prostitute in a pagan cult.",
"title": "Homosexuality in the Hebrew Bible"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The laws of negiah prohibit affectionate touch between an unmarried man and woman (except close relatives), because this touch is considered \"approaching\" a forbidden relationship. As gay male sex is included in the category of arayot along with other sexual prohibitions, the prohibition of negiah would seem to also apply between two gay men. Nevertheless, some sources raise the possibility that the law may be more lenient for two men than for a man and a woman. The consensus seems to be that touch between gay men which involves sexual desire is rabbinically forbidden, while touch which does not involve sexual desire is permitted.",
"title": "Rabbinic Jewish application and interpretation of these verses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Another issue is the prohibition of yichud (seclusion of two individuals together in a manner that would allow them to have sex). The Talmud records a debate over whether yichud applies to any two men. Maimonides, Tur, and Shulchan Aruch rule leniently, that yichud of two men is permitted, because \"Jews are not suspected of homosexual sex\". Nevertheless, the Shulchan Aruch recommended to avoid such yichud, \"in these generations where promiscuous people are common\" (possibly a reference to the use of Köçek dancer-prostitutes in the Ottoman Empire at the time). However, this recommendation was not repeated by later authorities.",
"title": "Rabbinic Jewish application and interpretation of these verses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Based on the above precedents that yichud can apply to two men in a circumstance where homosexual behavior is a concern, a modern halakhic authority rules that two men cannot be alone together if both of them are homosexual. Opinions also exist that the prohibition only applies to two men who are in a relationship with each other, or that there is no technical prohibition at all if they are confident they can avoid forbidden touch (but they should still avoid sharing a bedroom).",
"title": "Rabbinic Jewish application and interpretation of these verses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Like many similar commandments, the stated punishment for willful violation was the death penalty, though minors under 13 years of age were exempt from this, as from any other penalty. However, even in Biblical times, it was very difficult to get a conviction that would lead to this prescribed punishment. The Jewish Oral Law states that capital punishment would be applicable only if two men were caught in the act of anal sex, if there were two witnesses to the act, if the men involved were warned that they committed a capital offense, and the two men—or the willing party, in case of rape—subsequently acknowledged the warning but continued to engage in the prohibited act anyway. In fact, there is no account of capital punishment, in regards to this law, in Jewish history.",
"title": "Rabbinic Jewish application and interpretation of these verses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Rabbinic tradition understands the Torah's system of capital punishment to not be in effect for the past approximately 2,000 years, in the absence of a Sanhedrin and Temple. The relative absence of anti-homosexual prosecutions is also attributed to the Jewish belief that homosexuality did not exist in the community.",
"title": "Rabbinic Jewish application and interpretation of these verses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Classical rabbinic Jewish sources do not specifically mention that homosexual attraction is inherently sinful. In fact, the mental and emotional feelings two men experience when they engage in intimate relations are not condemned. However, they are condemned if intercourse, commonly interpreted as penetrative sex, occurs. If he does teshuva (repentance), i. e., he ceases his forbidden actions, regrets what he has done, apologizes to God, and makes a binding resolution never to repeat those actions, he is seen to be forgiven by God.",
"title": "Rabbinic Jewish application and interpretation of these verses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Although lesbianism is not explicitly prohibited in the Hebrew Bible, sexual liaisons between women are forbidden by Orthodox rabbinical literature. The Talmud discusses tribadism (women rubbing genitals together, or \"nashim mesolelot\") without explicitly prohibiting it; the main concern was whether or not this activity removed their status as a virgin, making them ineligible to marry a member of the priesthood. However, the Sifra condemned marriage between two women, considering it within the category of licentious foreign behavior which is forbidden to Jews. Following this lead, later halakhic codes prohibited tribadism on the same grounds. The penalty for lesbian acts was flagellation, rather than the death penalty. Two reasons that explain the latter include lesbianism not being explicitly prohibited in the Torah and the belief that it did not constitute intercourse.",
"title": "Rabbinic Jewish application and interpretation of these verses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The Babylonian Talmud is one of the few ancient religious texts that makes reference to same-sex marriage: \"Ulla said: Non-Jews [litt. Bnei Noach, the progeny of Noah] accepted upon themselves thirty mitzvot [divinely ordered laws], but they only abide by three of them: The first one is that they do not write marriage documents for male couples, the second one is that they don't sell dead [human] meat by the pound in stores, and the third one is that they respect the Torah.'\"",
"title": "Rabbinic Jewish application and interpretation of these verses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Sifra states: \"'Like the deeds of the land of Egypt where you dwelt, you shall not do' - What would they do? A man would marry a man, a woman would marry a woman...\"",
"title": "Rabbinic Jewish application and interpretation of these verses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Nonetheless, some contemporary scholars believe that same-sex marriage is theoretically permissible because kiddushin sanctifies the relationship between the spouses rather than the \"sexual intimacies\" they commit. The permissibility of same-sex marriage is also compared to the permissibility of marriage between a divorcee and a male descendant of a kohen (priest). The latter is accepted by adherents of Conservative Judaism because they believe the ethical components of Judaism, exemplified by justice and compassion, trump the legal components.",
"title": "Rabbinic Jewish application and interpretation of these verses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Reasons suggested by the rabbis for the prohibition on gay male sex include the following:",
"title": "Rabbinic Jewish application and interpretation of these verses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "While a variety of views regarding homosexuality as an inclination or status exist within the Orthodox Jewish community, Orthodox Judaism generally prohibits homosexual conduct. While there is some disagreement about which male homosexual acts come under core prohibitions, the majority of Orthodox Judaism puts male-male anal sex in the category of yehareg ve'al ya'avor, \"die rather than transgress\", the small category of Biblically-prohibited acts (also including murder, idolatry, adultery, and incest) which an Orthodox Jew is obligated under the laws of Self-sacrifice under Jewish Law to die rather than do. According to the Talmud, homosexual acts are forbidden between non-Jews as well, and this is included among the sexual restrictions of the Noachide laws. The archetypal model in Judaism is marital heterosexuality with fornication, celibacy, adultery, homosexuality, incest and bestiality seen to be part of a continuous prism of wrong.",
"title": "Orthodox Jewish views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In a speech given in 1986, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, discussed \"individuals who express an inclination towards a particular form of physical relationship in which the libidinal gratification is sought with members of one's own gender\". He wrote that \"society and government must be to offer a helping hand to those who are afflicted with this problem\".",
"title": "Orthodox Jewish views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In a 2008 open letter distributed to Orthodox community leaders, the Hod organization appealed to the Orthodox community to recognize them as part of the religious society. Up to 2013, 163 Orthodox rabbis from Israel and abroad signed this statement, including Yuval Cherlow, Binyamin Lau, Haim Navon, Daniel Sperber, Eliezer Melamed, Shai Piron, and Yehuda Gilad. In 2010, TorahWeb.org published a brief position statement entitled \"Torah View on Homosexuality\", co-authored by Rav Hershel Schachter, Rav Mordechai Willig, Rav Michael Rosensweig, and Rav Mayer Twersky.",
"title": "Orthodox Jewish views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "On July 22, 2010, a \"Statement of Principles on the Place of Jews with a Homosexual Orientation in Our Community\" was released. It was written primarily by Nathaniel Helfgot, Aryeh Klapper, and Yitzchak Blau. Signatories include more than a hundred rabbis and laypeople. Some of the statement's more notable supporters are Rabbi Marc Angel, co-founder of The Rabbinic Fellowship; Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, founder of Lincoln Square Synagogue, Efrat, and Ohr Torah Stone Institutions; and Rabbi Avi Weiss, head of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, founder of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah and Yeshivat Maharat, and co-founder of The Rabbinic Fellowship.",
"title": "Orthodox Jewish views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "An edict signed by dozens of Israeli Orthodox rabbis and published in 2016 by the Israeli Modern Orthodox rabbinic group Beit Hillel, a group which promotes inclusiveness in Orthodox Judaism, stated, in part, \"According to the Torah and halacha, the [same-sex sexual] acts are forbidden, but not the proclivities, and therefore, people with same-sex tendencies, men and women, have no invalidation in halacha or tradition. They are obligated by the commandments of the Torah, they can fulfill a [ritual] obligation on behalf of the public, and carry out all of the community functions just like any member.\" It also stated, in part, \"Just as it [is] inconceivable to mock someone for being physically, behaviorally, or mentally different, so too those with same-sex tendencies should not be mocked. On the contrary, those around them—family and community—should show special feeling for them, and apply to them the Torah commandment of 'Love thy neighbor as thyself' and to be diligent in avoiding the prohibition of insulting another.\"",
"title": "Orthodox Jewish views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Rabbi Dr. Immanuel Jakobovits describes the traditional opinion on homosexuality as follows: \"Jewish law [...] rejects the view that homosexuality is to be regarded merely as a disease or as morally neutral... Jewish law holds that no hedonistic ethic, even if called \"love\", can justify the morality of homosexuality any more than it can legitimize adultery or incest, however genuinely such acts may be performed out of love and by mutual consent.\" Rabbi Norman Lamm argued that some (although not all) homosexuals should be viewed as diseased and in need of compassion and treatment, rather than willful rebels who should be ostracized. He distinguishes between six varieties of homosexuals, including \"genuine homosexuals\" who have \"strong preferential erotic feelings for members of the same sex\", \"transitory\" and \"situational\" homosexuals who would prefer heterosexual intercourse but are denied it or seek gain in homosexuality, and heterosexuals who are merely curious.",
"title": "Orthodox Jewish views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "When Steven Greenberg, who received Orthodox rabbinic ordination, publicly announced in 1999 that he was homosexual, there was a significant response from rabbis of all denominations reported in the Jewish newspapers. Rabbi Moshe Tendler, a leading rabbi at Yeshiva University, stated, \"It is very sad that an individual who attended our yeshiva sunk to the depths of what we consider a depraved society.\" As Greenberg has a rabbinic ordination from the Orthodox rabbinical seminary of Yeshiva University (RIETS), he is generally described as the first openly gay Orthodox Jewish rabbi. However, some Orthodox Jews, including many rabbis, dispute his being an Orthodox rabbi.",
"title": "Orthodox Jewish views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Orthodox Israeli rabbi Ron Yosef became in 2009 the first Israeli Orthodox Rabbi to come out, by appearing in Uvda [he] (\"Fact\"), Israel's leading investigative television program, in an episode regarding conversion therapies in Israel. Yosef remains in his position as a pulpit Rabbi. Yosef testified that his Yemenite congregation did not accept him being a homosexual very easily and it took them a while to accept it. Yosef received death threats in the year leading up to the 2009 Tel Aviv gay centre shooting. In 2013, he stated he is in a relationship with a man. Yosef has stated his approach to the issue of homosexuality in Judaism as follows: \"It is clear to me that lying with another man is forbidden, and our starting point is commitment to halacha and Torah. The goal is not to seek permission. But you need to give us a shoulder and support.\"",
"title": "Orthodox Jewish views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In 2019 Daniel Atwood became the first openly gay Orthodox person to be ordained as a rabbi; he was ordained by the rabbi Daniel Landes, in Jerusalem. In October 2023, The Forward reported about Shua Brick, “experts say that Brick is the first openly gay rabbi to serve on the clergy of an Orthodox synagogue in the U.S.”, explaining that Brick “runs the youth program, leads Torah study for adults, and fills in when the senior rabbi is out of town” at Beth Jacob Congregation in Oakland, California, where he started coming out as gay to members of the congregation over a year prior to October 2023. He was ordained by Yeshiva University.",
"title": "Orthodox Jewish views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "JONAH was a Jewish ex-gay organization that focuses on \"prevention, intervention, and healing of the underlying issues causing same-sex attractions\". In 2012, four former clients of JONAH sued the organization for fraud, claiming that it sold them therapies that were ineffective and counterproductive. Soon after in that same year, the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA), a professional association of more than 1,000 Orthodox rabbis around the world, sent an open email to its members that it no longer supported conversion therapy generally, or JONAH specifically. In 2015, a New Jersey jury found JONAH guilty of consumer fraud for promising to be able to change its clients' sexual urges and determined its commercial practices to be unconscionable. As part of the sentence, JONAH was required to cease all operations, but continues to operate under the name JIFGA as of 2018.",
"title": "Orthodox Jewish views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Jiří Mordechai Langer, who studied in the Hasidic community of Belz, arrived in the land of Israel in 1940. \"His reconciliation of homosexuality and Judaism involved ...a homosexual Jewish theology; ...a sociology of Jewish homosexuality in Hasidism\".",
"title": "Orthodox Jewish views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The late UK Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote the foreword to Rabbi Chaim Rapoport's book Judaism and Homosexuality: An Authentic Orthodox View. In the foreword, Rabbi Sacks has written: \"Compassion, sympathy, empathy, understanding - these are essential elements of Judaism. They are what homosexual Jews who care about Judaism need from us today.\"",
"title": "Orthodox Jewish views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Modern Orthodox leader Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein is reported to have said that the intensity of Orthodox community's condemnation of homosexuality goes beyond what its status as a religious transgression warrants, and that he feels toward homosexual people \"criticism, disapproval, but tempered with an element of sympathy\". Rabbi Steven Greenberg, for example, argues that there are many sins considered to be abominations in the Torah, homosexual men are disproportionately censured. While some Modern Orthodox congregations may still invite a person up for an aliyah who is known not to keep kosher, the same is not always true of a man known to engage in same-sex sexual activity.",
"title": "Orthodox Jewish views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In both the United States and in Israel several groups have sprung up in the last few years that seek to support those who identify as both Orthodox and homosexual; support Orthodox parents of LGBT children; and promote understanding of homosexuality within Orthodox communities and among Orthodox rabbis. These include an umbrella organization called Eshel, the Gay and Lesbian Yeshiva Day School Alumni Association, the women's group OrthoDykes, the youth group JQYouth, the American-Israeli group headquartered in Jerusalem Bat Kol and the Israeli group Hod (\"Majesty\"). In 2012, Hod held an advertising campaign against conversion therapies and for self-acceptance of the religious homosexual community in Israel. Online blogs and support groups have enabled many to find other Orthodox LGBT people with whom to share the conflict between Orthodox religious and social norms and LGBT self-identification.",
"title": "Orthodox Jewish views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Orthodox Rabbis Shmuley Boteach and Zev Farber have questioned the opposition of Orthodox groups to government recognition of same-sex civil marriages (or in Boteach's case, to state-sanctioned civil unions), arguing that although Judaism does not condone homosexuality, governments should not enforce any particular religion's view of marriage, and that conferring civil benefits to committed homosexual couples should be viewed as promoting family values.",
"title": "Orthodox Jewish views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "In October 2010, Boteach wrote an op-ed column in The Wall Street Journal on homosexuality, arguing that he does not deny that there is a biblical prohibition on male same-sex relationships and a commandment for men and women to marry and have children. Still, he understands those in context. \"There are 613 commandments in the Torah... So when Jewish gay couples tell me they have never been attracted to members of the opposite sex and are desperate alone, I tell them \"You have 611 commandments left. That should keep you busy. Now, go create a kosher home ... you are His beloved children.\" Five years later he wrote that he believed in the equality of all of God's children, and has seen too much homophobia in his life. He believes that the biggest threat to marriage does not come from gay marriage, but heterosexual divorce, which he says afflicts half of marriages. He opposes government involvement at all in recognizing marriage, but supports state-sanctioned \"civil unions\" for all. Open Orthodox Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz declared that the Jewish values of justice, equality, and dignity lead him to support the cause of gay rights and advocate for same-sex civil marriage.",
"title": "Orthodox Jewish views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In November 2016, dozens of LGBT activists protested in Jerusalem against comments reportedly made by the city's chief rabbi Rabbi Shlomo Amar, who reportedly told an Israeli newspaper that gay people were an \"abomination\", and homosexuality a \"cult\".",
"title": "Orthodox Jewish views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "In 2017, the Senior Rabbi of the Spanish & Portuguese Sephardi Community Joseph Dweck gave a class describing \"the entire revolution of feminism and even homosexuality in our society ... is a fantastic development for humanity\". These words were condemned by Rabbi Aaron Bassous as \"false and misguided ... corrupt from beginning to end\". This affair caused Dweck to step down from the Sephardic Beth Din but not as a communal leader.",
"title": "Orthodox Jewish views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In 2019, Rabbi Daniel Landes wrote, \"Leviticus 18:22 ... has not been erased from the Torah. But that biblical commandment does not give us license to ignore or abuse the significant number of carefully observant Jews who are LGBTQ.\"",
"title": "Orthodox Jewish views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Film documentaries made about Orthodox homosexuals in recent years include Trembling Before G-d, Keep Not Silent, and Say Amen.",
"title": "Orthodox Jewish views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "As a matter of both Jewish law and institutional policy, Conservative (\"Masorti\") Judaism has wrestled with homosexuality issues since the 1980s.",
"title": "Conservative Judaism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Conservative Jewish writer Herschell Matt initially argued that homosexuals may be excused because Judaism does recognise 'constraint' as a valid excuse to disobey the law. However, Matt later shifted to outright support for homosexuality, viewing it as part of the natural order. Conservative Rabbi Robert Kirshchner states that Jews have historically adapted their laws to new circumstances, indicating accommodation for homosexuality.",
"title": "Conservative Judaism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "In Conservative Judaism, the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards (CJLS) of the Rabbinical Assembly makes the movement's decisions concerning Jewish law. In 1992, the CJLS action affirmed its traditional prohibition on homosexual conduct, blessing same-sex unions, and ordaining openly gay/lesbian/bisexual clergy. However, these prohibitions grew increasingly controversial within the Conservative movement.",
"title": "Conservative Judaism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "In 2006, the CJLS shifted its position and paved the way for significant changes regarding the Conservative movement's policies toward homosexuality. On December 6, 2006, The CJLS adopted three distinct responsa reflecting very different approaches to the subject. One responsum substantially liberalized Conservative Judaism's approach including lifting most (but not all) classical prohibitions on homosexual conduct and permitted the blessing of homosexual unions and the ordination of openly gay/lesbian/bisexual clergy. Two others completely retained traditional prohibitions. Under the rules of the Conservative movement, the adoption of multiple opinions permits individual Conservative rabbis, congregations, and rabbinical schools to select which opinion to accept, and hence to choose individually whether to maintain a traditional prohibition on homosexual conduct or to permit openly gay/lesbian/bisexual unions and clergy.",
"title": "Conservative Judaism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The liberalizing responsum, adopted as a majority opinion by 13 of 25 votes, was authored by Rabbis Elliot N. Dorff, Daniel Nevins, and Avram Reisner. It lifted most restrictions on homosexual conduct and opened the way to the ordination of openly gay/lesbian/bisexual rabbis and cantors and acceptance of homosexual unions, but stopped short of religiously recognizing same-sex marriage. The responsum invoked the Talmudic principle of kavod habriyot, which the authors translated as \"human dignity\", as authority for this approach. The responsum maintained a prohibition on male-male anal sex, which it described as the sole Biblically prohibited homosexual act. This act remains a yehareg ve'al ya'avor (\"die rather than transgress\" offense) under the decision.",
"title": "Conservative Judaism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Two traditionalist responsa were adopted. A responsum by Rabbi Joel Roth, adopted as a majority opinion by 13 votes, reaffirmed a general complete prohibition on homosexual conduct. A second responsum by Rabbi Leonard Levy, adopted as a minority opinion by 6 votes, delineated ways in which to ensure that gays and lesbians would be accorded human dignity and a respected place in Conservative communities and institutions while maintaining the authority of the traditional prohibitions against same-sex sexual activity.",
"title": "Conservative Judaism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The Committee rejected the third paper by Gordon Tucker which would have lifted all restrictions on homosexual sexual practices.",
"title": "Conservative Judaism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The consequences of the decision have been mixed. On the one hand, four members of the Committee—Rabbis Joel Roth, Leonard Levy, Mayer Rabinowitz, and Joseph Prouser—resigned from the CJLS following adoption of the change. On the other hand, the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies of the University of Judaism (now the American Jewish University) in Los Angeles had previously stated that it will immediately begin admitting gay/lesbian/bisexual students as soon as the law committee passes a policy that sanctions such ordination. On March 26, 2007, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York followed suit and began accepting openly gay/lesbian/bisexual candidates for admission for their Rabbinical program.",
"title": "Conservative Judaism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "In June 2012, the American branch of Conservative Judaism formally approved same-sex marriage ceremonies in a 13–0 vote. In 2021, two Conservative Rabbis became the first known example of two Rabbis of the same sex marrying each other.",
"title": "Conservative Judaism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Although the American example was initially an outlier in the global Conservative movement, it is now the case that \"all Masorti seminaries, except for the one in Argentina, now accept openly gay students\". Since 2014 in the United Kingdom the Masorti movement offers a Shutafut (\"partnership\") ceremony to same-gender couples wishing to marry in a Conservative religious ceremony. The Shutafut contains many of the iconic elements of a traditional Jewish wedding service - the chupah, the seven blessings, the wine, the glass breaking, but without the symbolic act of acquisition in a traditional Jewish wedding.",
"title": "Conservative Judaism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "In Israel, the head of the Masorti's Vaad Halakha (equivalent to the CJLS), Rabbi David Golinkin, wrote to the CJLS protesting its reconsideration of the traditional ban on homosexual conduct. Despite the contention within the Israeli movement however in the same year, Israel's Schechter Rabbinical Seminary sanctioned the training of openly gay Rabbis.",
"title": "Conservative Judaism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Hungary's Neolog movement - distinct from but seen as a fraternal counterpart and in some ways spiritual ancestor of the modern Masorti movement - has been more divided. Although not embracing and providing for same-gender marriage or full inclusion in Jewish life, Mazsihisz, the main representative umbrella body for Neolog Judaism, has affirmed its opposition to exclusion by homophobia and in 2013 dismissed the director of its youth movement for making comments about excluding gay people from all religious life for their sexual orientation. In 2021 the President of Mazsihisz was made to apologise for signing a Joint Declaration of the Churches on the Holiness of Marriage that held \"the sanctification of the woman-man relationship by marriage is the foundation of human dignity\". His critics included Mazsihisz's Chief Rabbi and earlier that same year the movement made a statement widely seen as condemning new Hungarian laws limiting the exposure of children to content referencing homosexuality.",
"title": "Conservative Judaism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Rabbi Bradley Artson, Dean of the Rabbinic School at American Jewish University, claims to have studied every reference he could find to homosexual activity mentioned in ancient Greek and Latin writers. Every citation he found described an encounter between males where one party, the master, physically abused another, the slave. Rabbi Artson could not find a single example where one partner was not subservient to the other. \"Homosexual relationships today\", Rabbi Artson says, \"should not be compared to the ancient world. I know too many homosexual individuals, including close friends and relatives, who are committed to one another in loving long-term monogamous relationships. I know too many same-sex couples that are loving parents raising good descent [sic] ethical children. Who's to say their family relationships are less sanctified in the eyes of God than mine is with my wife and our children?\"",
"title": "Conservative Judaism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "The Reform Judaism movement, the largest branch of Judaism in North America, has rejected the traditional view of Jewish Law on homosexuality and bisexuality. As such, they do not prohibit the ordination of openly gay, lesbian, and bisexual people as rabbis and cantors. They view Levitical laws as sometimes seen to be referring to prostitution, making it a stand against Jews adopting the idolatrous fertility cults and practices of the neighbouring Canaanite nations, rather than a blanket condemnation of same-sex intercourse, homosexuality, or bisexuality. Reform authorities consider that, in light of what is seen as current scientific evidence about the nature of homosexuality and bisexuality as inborn sexual orientations, a new interpretation of the law is required.",
"title": "Reform Judaism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "In 1972, Beth Chayim Chadashim, the world's first explicitly-gay-and-lesbian-centered synagogue recognized by the Reform Jewish community, was established in West Los Angeles, resulting in a slew of non-Orthodox congregations being established along similar lines. Beth Chayim Chadashim now focuses on the entire LGBT community, rather than just gays and lesbians.",
"title": "Reform Judaism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "In 1977, the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), which is the Union for Reform Judaism's principal body, adopted a resolution calling for legislation decriminalizing homosexual acts between consenting adults, and calling for an end to discrimination against gays and lesbians. The resolution called on Reform Jewish organizations to develop programs to implement this stand.",
"title": "Reform Judaism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Reform rabbi Lionel Blue was the first British rabbi to publicly declare himself as gay, which he did in 1980.",
"title": "Reform Judaism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "In the late 1980s, the primary seminary of the Reform movement, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, changed its admission requirements to allow openly gay and lesbian people to join the student body.",
"title": "Reform Judaism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "In 1990, the Union for Reform Judaism announced a national policy declaring lesbian and gay Jews to be full and equal members of the religious community. Also in 1990, the CCAR officially endorsed a report of their own Ad Hoc Committee on Homosexuality and the Rabbinate. This position paper urged that \"all rabbis, regardless of sexual orientation, be accorded the opportunity to fulfill the sacred vocation that they have chosen\". The committee endorsed the view that \"all Jews are religiously equal, regardless of their sexual orientation\".",
"title": "Reform Judaism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "In 1995, Reform Rabbi Margaret Wenig's essay \"Truly Welcoming Lesbian and Gay Jews\" was published in The Jewish Condition: Essays on Contemporary Judaism Honoring [Reform] Rabbi Alexander M. Schindler; it was the first published argument to the Jewish community on behalf of civil marriage for gay couples.",
"title": "Reform Judaism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "In 1996, the CCAR passed a resolution approving the same-sex civil marriage. However, this same resolution made a distinction between civil marriages and religious marriages; this resolution thus stated:",
"title": "Reform Judaism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "In 1998, an ad hoc CCAR committee on Human Sexuality issued its majority report (11 to 1, 1 abstention) which stated that the holiness within a Jewish marriage \"may be present in committed same-gender relationships between two Jews and that these relationships can serve as the foundation of stable Jewish families, thus adding strength to the Jewish community\". The report called for the CCAR to support rabbis in officiating at same-sex marriages. Also in 1998, the Responsa Committee of the CCAR issued a lengthy teshuvah (rabbinical opinion) that offered detailed argumentation in support of both sides of the question whether a rabbi may officiate at a commitment ceremony for a same-sex couple.",
"title": "Reform Judaism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "In March 2000, the CCAR issued a new resolution stating that \"We do hereby resolve that the relationship of a Jewish, same-gender couple is worthy of affirmation through appropriate Jewish ritual and further resolve, that we recognize the diversity of opinions within our ranks on this issue. We support the decision of those who choose to officiate at rituals of union for same-sex couples, and we support the decision of those who do not.\"",
"title": "Reform Judaism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Also in 2000, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion established the Institute for Judaism, Sexual Orientation & Gender Identity to \"educate HUC-JIR students on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender issues to help them challenge and eliminate homophobia and heterosexism; and to learn tools to be able to transform the communities they encounter into ones that are inclusive and welcoming of LGBT Jews\". It is the first and only institute of its kind in the Jewish world.",
"title": "Reform Judaism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "In 2003, the Union for Reform Judaism retroactively applied its pro-rights policy on gays and lesbians to the bisexual and transgender communities, issuing a resolution titled, \"Support for the Inclusion and Acceptance of the Transgender and Bisexual Communities\".",
"title": "Reform Judaism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Also in 2003, Women of Reform Judaism issued a statement describing their support for human and civil rights and the struggles of the bisexual and transgender communities, and saying, \"Women of Reform Judaism accordingly: Calls for civil rights protections from all forms of discrimination against bisexual and transgender individuals; Urges that such legislation allows transgender individuals to be seen under the law as the gender by which they identify; and Calls upon sisterhoods to hold informative programs about the transgender and bisexual communities.\"",
"title": "Reform Judaism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "In 2009, Siddur Sha'ar Zahav, a prayer book written to address the lives and needs of LGBTQ as well as heterosexual and cisgender Jews, was published.",
"title": "Reform Judaism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "In 2014, the CCAR joined a lawsuit challenging North Carolina's ban on same-sex marriage, which is America's first faith-based challenge to same-sex marriage bans.",
"title": "Reform Judaism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "In 2015, Rabbi Denise Eger became the first openly gay president of the CCAR.",
"title": "Reform Judaism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Also in 2015, the High Holy Days Reform Jewish prayer book Mishkan HaNefesh was released; it is intended as a companion to Mishkan T'filah. Mishkan HaNefesh can be translated as \"sanctuary of the soul\". It replaces a line from the Reform movement's earlier prayerbook, \"Gates of Repentance\", that mentioned the joy of a bride and groom specifically, with the line \"rejoicing with couples under the chuppah [wedding canopy]\", and adds a third, non-gendered option to the way worshippers are called to the Torah, offering \"mibeit\", Hebrew for \"from the house of\", in addition to the traditional \"son of\" or \"daughter of\". The Mishkan HaNefesh includes several sets of translations for the traditional prayers. Psalm 23 includes the familiar \"traditional\" translation, an adaptation that is considered \"gender-sensitive\" but remains faithful to the traditional version, a feminist adaption from Phyllis Appell Bass, and the fourth was published in 1978 by a contemporary rabbi.",
"title": "Reform Judaism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "The Reconstructionist movement sees homosexuality and bisexuality as normal expressions of sexuality and welcomes gays, bisexuals, and lesbians into Reconstructionist communities to participate fully in every aspect of community life. Since 1985, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College has admitted openly gay, bisexual, and lesbian candidates to their rabbinical and cantorial programs. In 1993, a movement Commission issued: Homosexuality and Judaism: The Reconstructionist Position. The Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association (RRA) encourages its members to officiate at same-sex marriages/commitment ceremonies, though the RRA does not require its members to officiate at them. In 2007, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association elected as president Rabbi Toba Spitzer, the first openly LGBT person chosen to head a rabbinical association in the United States. In 2011 Sandra Lawson became the first openly homosexual African-American and first African-American admitted to the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College; she was ordained in June 2018, which made her the first openly homosexual, female, black rabbi in the world. In 2013, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association elected as president Rabbi Jason Klein, the first openly gay man chosen to head a national rabbinical association of one of the major Jewish denominations in the United States. Also in 2013, Rabbi Deborah Waxman was elected as the president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. As the President, she is believed to be the first woman and first lesbian to lead a Jewish congregational union, and the first female rabbi and first lesbian to lead a Jewish seminary; the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College is both a congregational union and a seminary.",
"title": "Reconstructionist Judaism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Jewish Renewal is a recent movement in Judaism which endeavors to reinvigorate modern Judaism with Kabbalistic, Hasidic, musical and meditative practices; it describes itself as \"a worldwide, transdenominational movement grounded in Judaism's prophetic and mystical traditions\". The Jewish Renewal movement ordains people of all sexual orientations as rabbis and cantors. In 2005, Eli Cohen became the first openly gay rabbi ordained by the Jewish Renewal Movement, followed by Chaya Gusfield and Rabbi Lori Klein in 2006, who became the two first openly lesbian rabbis ordained by the Jewish Renewal movement. In 2007, Jalda Rebling, born in Amsterdam and now living in Germany, became the first openly lesbian cantor ordained by the Jewish Renewal movement. In 2011, the bisexual rights activist Debra Kolodny was ordained as a rabbi by the Jewish Renewal movement and hired as the rabbi for congregation P'nai Or of Portland. The Statement of Principles of ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal (and OHALAH and the Rabbinic Pastors Association) states in part, \"We welcome and recognize the sanctity of every individual regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. We recognize respectful and mutual expressions of adult human sexuality as potentially sacred expressions of love, and therefore, we strive to welcome a variety of constellations of intimate relationships and family forms including gay, lesbian, and heterosexual relationships as well as people choosing to be single.\"",
"title": "Jewish Renewal"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Humanistic Judaism is a movement in Judaism that offers a non-theistic alternative in contemporary Jewish life. In 2004, the Society for Humanistic Judaism issued a resolution supporting \"the legal recognition of marriage and divorce between adults of the same sex\", and affirming \"the value of marriage between any two committed adults with the sense of obligations, responsibilities, and consequences thereof\". In 2010 they pledged to speak out against homophobic bullying. The Association of Humanistic Rabbis has also issued a pro-LGBT statement titled \"In Support of Diverse Sexualities and Gender Identities\". It was adopted in 2003 and issued in 2004.",
"title": "Humanistic Judaism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Jewish LGBT rights advocates and sympathetic clergy have created various institutions within Jewish life to accommodate gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender parishioners. Beth Chayim Chadashim, established in 1972 in West Los Angeles, was the world's first explicitly-gay-and-lesbian-centered synagogue recognized by the Reform Jewish community, resulting in a slew of non-Orthodox congregations being established along similar lines, including Congregation Beit Simchat Torah in New York City, Bet Mishpachah in Washington, D.C., and Congregation Or Chadash in Chicago. Beth Chayim Chadashim now focuses on the entire LGBT community, rather than just gays and lesbians.",
"title": "LGBT-affirmative activities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "LGBT-inclusive services and ceremonies specific to Jewish religious culture have also been created, ranging from LGBT-affirmative haggadot for Passover to a \"Stonewall Shabbat Seder\".",
"title": "LGBT-affirmative activities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "In October 2012 Rainbow Jews, an oral history project showcasing the lives of Jewish bisexual, lesbian, gay, and transgender people in the United Kingdom from the 1950s until the present, was launched. It is the United Kingdom's first archive of Jewish bisexual, lesbian, gay, and transgender history.",
"title": "LGBT-affirmative activities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "The ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives has, among other things, the Twice Blessed Collection, circa 1966-2000; this collection \"consists of materials documenting the Jewish lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender experience, circa 1966-2000, collected by the Jewish Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Archives, founded and operated by Johnny Abush\".",
"title": "LGBT-affirmative activities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Recent research by the sociocultural psychologist, Chana Etengoff, has highlighted the therapeutic benefits of LGBTQ petitions to religious leaders, including meaning-making, social action, agency and empowerment.",
"title": "LGBT-affirmative activities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Research References:",
"title": "Further reading"
}
]
| The subject of homosexuality and Judaism dates back to the Torah. The book of Vayikra (Leviticus) is traditionally regarded as classifying sexual intercourse between males as a to'eivah that can be subject to capital punishment by the current Sanhedrin under halakha. The issue has been a subject of contention within modern Jewish denominations, and has led to debate and division. Traditionally, Judaism has seen that homosexual male intercourse, and not homosexuality in-and-of-itself, as contrary to Judaism, and this opinion is often still maintained by Orthodox Judaism. Conservative Judaism's Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, which until December 2006 held the same position as Orthodoxy, has since issued multiple opinions under its philosophy of pluralism; one opinion continues to follow the Orthodox position while another opinion substantially liberalizes the view of homosexual sex and relationships. Theologically liberal branches such as Reconstructionist, Humanistic, and Reform Judaism have all openly accepted homosexuality, homosexual intercourse, and same-sex marriage. | 2001-10-05T13:19:02Z | 2023-12-13T21:23:10Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_views_on_homosexuality |
16,187 | John Dewey | John Dewey (/ˈduːi/; October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer. He was one of the most prominent American scholars in the first half of the twentieth century.
The overriding theme of Dewey's works was his profound belief in democracy, be it in politics, education, or communication and journalism. As Dewey himself stated in 1888, while still at the University of Michigan, "Democracy and the one, ultimate, ethical ideal of humanity are to my mind synonymous." Dewey considered two fundamental elements—schools and civil society—to be major topics needing attention and reconstruction to encourage experimental intelligence and plurality. He asserted that complete democracy was to be obtained not just by extending voting rights but also by ensuring that there exists a fully formed public opinion, accomplished by communication among citizens, experts and politicians.
Dewey was one of the primary figures associated with the philosophy of pragmatism and is considered one of the founding thinkers of functional psychology. His paper "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology", published in 1896, is regarded as the first major work in the (Chicago) functionalist school of psychology. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Dewey as the 93rd-most-cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Dewey was also a major educational reformer for the 20th century. A well-known public intellectual, he was a major voice of progressive education and liberalism. While a professor at the University of Chicago, he founded the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where he was able to apply and test his progressive ideas on pedagogical method. Although Dewey is known best for his publications about education, he also wrote about many other topics, including epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, art, logic, social theory, and ethics.
John Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, to a family of modest means. He was one of four boys born to Archibald Sprague Dewey and Lucina Artemisia Rich Dewey. Their first son was also named John, but he died in an accident on January 17, 1859. The second John Dewey was born October 20, 1859, forty weeks after the death of his older brother. Like his older, surviving brother, Davis Rich Dewey, he attended the University of Vermont, where he was initiated into Delta Psi, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1879.
A significant professor of Dewey's at the University of Vermont was Henry Augustus Pearson Torrey (H. A. P. Torrey), the son-in-law and nephew of former University of Vermont president Joseph Torrey. Dewey studied privately with Torrey between his graduation from Vermont and his enrollment at Johns Hopkins University.
After two years as a high-school teacher in Oil City, Pennsylvania, and one year as an elementary school teacher in the small town of Charlotte, Vermont, Dewey decided that he was unsuited for teaching primary or secondary school. After studying with George Sylvester Morris, Charles Sanders Peirce, Herbert Baxter Adams, and G. Stanley Hall, Dewey received his Ph.D. from the School of Arts & Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. In 1884, he accepted a faculty position at the University of Michigan (1884–88 and 1889–94) with the help of George Sylvester Morris. His unpublished and now lost dissertation was titled "The Psychology of Kant".
In 1894 Dewey joined the newly founded University of Chicago (1894–1904) where he developed his belief in Rational Empiricism, becoming associated with the newly emerging Pragmatic philosophy. His time at the University of Chicago resulted in four essays collectively entitled Thought and its Subject-Matter, which was published with collected works from his colleagues at Chicago under the collective title Studies in Logical Theory (1904).
During that time Dewey also initiated the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where he was able to actualize the pedagogical beliefs that provided material for his first major work on education, The School and Society (1899). Disagreements with the administration ultimately caused his resignation from the university, and soon thereafter he relocated near the East Coast. In 1899, Dewey was elected president of the American Psychological Association (A.P.A.). From 1904 until his retirement in 1930 he was professor of philosophy at Teachers College at Columbia University and influenced Carl Rogers.
In 1905 he became president of the American Philosophical Association. He was a longtime member of the American Federation of Teachers. Along with the historians Charles A. Beard and James Harvey Robinson, and the economist Thorstein Veblen, Dewey is one of the founders of The New School.
Dewey published more than 700 articles in 140 journals, and approximately 40 books. His most significant writings were "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology" (1896), a critique of a standard psychological concept and the basis of all his further work; Democracy and Education (1916), his celebrated work on progressive education; Human Nature and Conduct (1922), a study of the function of habit in human behavior; The Public and its Problems (1927), a defense of democracy written in response to Walter Lippmann's The Phantom Public (1925); Experience and Nature (1925), Dewey's most "metaphysical" statement; Impressions of Soviet Russia and the Revolutionary World (1929), a glowing travelogue from the nascent USSR.
Art as Experience (1934), was Dewey's major work on aesthetics; A Common Faith (1934), a humanistic study of religion originally delivered as the Dwight H. Terry Lectureship at Yale; Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938), a statement of Dewey's unusual conception of logic; Freedom and Culture (1939), a political work examining the roots of fascism; and Knowing and the Known (1949), a book written in conjunction with Arthur F. Bentley that systematically outlines the concept of trans-action, which is central to his other works (see Transactionalism).
While each of these works focuses on one particular philosophical theme, Dewey included his major themes in Experience and Nature. However, dissatisfied with the response to the first (1925) edition, for the second (1929) edition he rewrote the first chapter and added a Preface in which he stated that the book presented what we would now call a new (Kuhnian) paradigm: 'I have not striven in this volume for a reconciliation between the new and the old' [E&N:4] . and he asserts Kuhnian incommensurability:
'To many the associating of the two words ['experience' and 'nature'] will seem like talking of a round square' but 'I know of no route by which dialectical argument can answer such objections. They arise from association with words and cannot be dealt with argumentatively'. The following can be interpreted now as describing a Kuhnian conversion process: 'One can only hope in the course of the whole discussion to disclose the [new] meanings which are attached to "experience" and "nature," and thus insensibly produce, if one is fortunate, a change in the significations previously attached to them' [all E&N:10].
Reflecting his immense influence on 20th-century thought, Hilda Neatby wrote "Dewey has been to our age what Aristotle was to the later Middle Ages, not a philosopher, but the philosopher."
In 1919, Dewey and his wife traveled to Japan on sabbatical leave. Though Dewey and his wife were well received by the people of Japan during this trip, Dewey was also critical of the nation's governing system and claimed that the nation's path towards democracy was "ambitious but weak in many respects in which her competitors are strong". He also warned that "the real test has not yet come. But if the nominally democratic world should go back on the professions so profusely uttered during war days, the shock will be enormous, and bureaucracy and militarism might come back."
During his trip to Japan, Dewey was invited by Peking University to visit China, probably at the behest of his former students, Hu Shih and Chiang Monlin. Dewey and his wife Alice arrived in Shanghai on April 30, 1919, just days before student demonstrators took to the streets of Peking to protest the decision of the Allies in Paris to cede the German-held territories in Shandong province to Japan. Their demonstrations on May Fourth excited and energized Dewey, and he ended up staying in China for two years, leaving in July 1921.
In these two years, Dewey gave nearly 200 lectures to Chinese audiences and wrote nearly monthly articles for Americans in The New Republic and other magazines. Well aware of both Japanese expansionism into China and the attraction of Bolshevism to some Chinese, Dewey advocated that Americans support China's transformation and that Chinese base this transformation in education and social reforms, not revolution. Hundreds and sometimes thousands of people attended the lectures, which were interpreted by Hu Shih. For these audiences, Dewey represented "Mr. Democracy" and "Mr. Science," the two personifications which they thought of representing modern values and hailed him as "the American Confucius". His lectures were lost at the time but have been rediscovered and published in 2015.
Zhixin Su states:
Dewey urged the Chinese to not import any Western educational model. He recommended to educators such as Tao Xingzhi, that they use pragmatism to devise their own model school system at the national level. However, the national government was weak, and the provinces largely controlled by warlords, so his suggestions were praised at the national level but not implemented. However, there were a few implementations locally. Dewey's ideas did have influence in Hong Kong, and in Taiwan after the nationalist government fled there. In most of China, Confucian scholars controlled the local educational system before 1949 and they simply ignored Dewey and Western ideas. In Marxist and Maoist China, Dewey's ideas were systematically denounced.
Dewey and his daughter Jane went to South Africa in July 1934, at the invitation of the World Conference of New Education Fellowship in Cape Town and Johannesburg, where he delivered several talks. The conference was opened by the South African Minister of Education Jan Hofmeyr, and Deputy Prime Minister Jan Smuts. Other speakers at the conference included Max Eiselen and Hendrik Verwoerd, who would later become prime minister of the Nationalist government that introduced apartheid.
Dewey's expenses were paid by the Carnegie Foundation. He also traveled to Durban, Pretoria and Victoria Falls in what was then Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and looked at schools, talked to pupils, and gave lectures to the administrators and teachers. In August 1934, Dewey accepted an honorary degree from the University of the Witwatersrand. The white-only governments rejected Dewey's ideas as too secular. However black people and their white supporters were more receptive.
Dewey married Alice Chipman in 1886 shortly after Chipman graduated with her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. The two had six children: Frederick Archibald Dewey, Evelyn Riggs Dewey, Morris (who died young), Gordon Chipman Dewey, Lucy Alice Chipman Dewey, and Jane Mary Dewey. Alice Chipman died in 1927 at the age of 68; weakened by a case of malaria contracted during a trip to Turkey in 1924 and a heart attack during a trip to Mexico City in 1926, she died from cerebral thrombosis on July 13, 1927. Dewey married Estelle Roberta Lowitz Grant, "a longtime friend and companion for several years before their marriage" on December 11, 1946. At Roberta's behest, the couple adopted two siblings, Lewis (changed to John Jr.) and Shirley.
Dewey's interests and writings included many topics, and according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "a substantial part of his published output consisted of commentary on current domestic and international politics, and public statements on behalf of many causes. (He is probably the only philosopher in this encyclopedia to have published both on the Treaty of Versailles and on the value of displaying art in post offices.)"
In 1917, Dewey met F. M. Alexander in New York City and later wrote introductions to Alexander's Man's Supreme Inheritance (1918), Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual (1923) and The Use of the Self (1932). Alexander's influence is referenced in "Human Nature and Conduct" and "Experience and Nature." As well as his contacts with people mentioned elsewhere in the article, he also maintained correspondence with Henri Bergson, William M. Brown, Martin Buber, George S. Counts, William Rainey Harper, Sidney Hook, and George Santayana.
John Dewey died of pneumonia on June 1, 1952, at his home in New York City after years of ill-health and was cremated the next day.
At the University of Michigan, Dewey published his first two books, Psychology (1887), and Leibniz's New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding (1888), both of which expressed Dewey's early commitment to British neo-Hegelianism. In Psychology, Dewey attempted a synthesis between idealism and experimental science.
While still professor of philosophy at Michigan, Dewey and his junior colleagues, James Hayden Tufts and George Herbert Mead, together with his student James Rowland Angell, all influenced strongly by the recent publication of William James' Principles of Psychology (1890), began to reformulate psychology, emphasizing the social environment on the activity of mind and behavior rather than the physiological psychology of Wilhelm Wundt and his followers.
By 1894, Dewey had joined Tufts, with whom he would later write Ethics (1908) at the recently founded University of Chicago and invited Mead and Angell to follow him, the four men forming the basis of the so-called "Chicago group" of psychology.
Their new style of psychology, later dubbed functional psychology, had a practical emphasis on action and application. In Dewey's article "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology" which appeared in Psychological Review in 1896, he reasons against the traditional stimulus-response understanding of the reflex arc in favor of a "circular" account in which what serves as "stimulus" and what as "response" depends on how one considers the situation and defends the unitary nature of the sensory motor circuit. While he does not deny the existence of stimulus, sensation, and response, he disagreed that they were separate, juxtaposed events happening like links in a chain. He developed the idea that there is a coordination by which the stimulation is enriched by the results of previous experiences. The response is modulated by sensorial experience.
Dewey was elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1899.
Dewey also expressed interest in work in the psychology of visual perception performed by Dartmouth research professor Adelbert Ames Jr. He had great trouble with listening, however, because it is known Dewey could not distinguish musical pitches—in other words was an amusic.
Dewey's educational theories were presented in My Pedagogic Creed (1897), The Primary-Education Fetich (1898), The School and Society (1900), The Child and the Curriculum (1902), Democracy and Education (1916), Schools of To-morrow (1915) with Evelyn Dewey, and Experience and Education (1938). Several themes recur throughout these writings. Dewey continually argues that education and learning are social and interactive processes, and thus the school itself is a social institution through which social reform can and should take place. In addition, he believed that students thrive in an environment where they are allowed to experience and interact with the curriculum, and all students should have the opportunity to take part in their own learning.
The ideas of democracy and social reform are continually discussed in Dewey's writings on education. Dewey makes a strong case for the importance of education not only as a place to gain content knowledge, but also as a place to learn how to live. In his eyes, the purpose of education should not revolve around the acquisition of a pre-determined set of skills, but rather the realization of one's full potential and the ability to use those skills for the greater good. He notes that "to prepare him for the future life means to give him command of himself; it means so to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities" (My Pedagogic Creed, Dewey, 1897).
In addition to helping students realize their full potential, Dewey goes on to acknowledge that education and schooling are instrumental in creating social change and reform. He notes that "education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction".
In addition to his ideas regarding what education is and what effect it should have on society, Dewey also had specific notions regarding how education should take place within the classroom. In The Child and the Curriculum (1902), Dewey discusses two major conflicting schools of thought regarding educational pedagogy. The first is centered on the curriculum and focuses almost solely on the subject matter to be taught. Dewey argues that the major flaw in this methodology is the inactivity of the student; within this particular framework, "the child is simply the immature being who is to be matured; he is the superficial being who is to be deepened" (1902, p. 13). He argues that in order for education to be most effective, content must be presented in a way that allows the student to relate the information to prior experiences, thus deepening the connection with this new knowledge.
At the same time, Dewey was alarmed by many of the "child-centered" excesses of educational-school pedagogues who claimed to be his followers, and he argued that too much reliance on the child could be equally detrimental to the learning process. In this second school of thought, "we must take our stand with the child and our departure from him. It is he and not the subject-matter which determines both quality and quantity of learning" (Dewey, 1902, pp. 13–14). According to Dewey, the potential flaw in this line of thinking is that it minimizes the importance of the content as well as the role of the teacher.
In order to rectify this dilemma, Dewey advocated an educational structure that strikes a balance between delivering knowledge while also taking into account the interests and experiences of the student. He notes that "the child and the curriculum are simply two limits which define a single process. Just as two points define a straight line, so the present standpoint of the child and the facts and truths of studies define instruction" (Dewey, 1902, p. 16).
It is through this reasoning that Dewey became one of the most famous proponents of hands-on learning or experiential education, which is related to, but not synonymous with experiential learning. He argued that "if knowledge comes from the impressions made upon us by natural objects, it is impossible to procure knowledge without the use of objects which impress the mind" (Dewey, 1916/2009, pp. 217–18). Dewey's ideas went on to influence many other influential experiential models and advocates. Problem-Based Learning (PBL), for example, a method used widely in education today, incorporates Dewey's ideas pertaining to learning through active inquiry.
Dewey not only re-imagined the way that the learning process should take place, but also the role that the teacher should play within that process. Throughout the history of American schooling, education's purpose has been to train students for work by providing the student with a limited set of skills and information to do a particular job. The works of John Dewey provide the most prolific examples of how this limited vocational view of education has been applied to both the K–12 public education system and to the teacher training schools that attempted to quickly produce proficient and practical teachers with a limited set of instructional and discipline-specific skills needed to meet the needs of the employer and demands of the workforce.
In The School and Society (Dewey, 1899) and Democracy of Education (Dewey, 1916), Dewey claims that rather than preparing citizens for ethical participation in society, schools cultivate passive pupils via insistence upon mastery of facts and disciplining of bodies. Rather than preparing students to be reflective, autonomous and ethical beings capable of arriving at social truths through critical and intersubjective discourse, schools prepare students for docile compliance with authoritarian work and political structures, discourage the pursuit of individual and communal inquiry, and perceive higher learning as a monopoly of the institution of education (Dewey, 1899; 1916).
For Dewey and his philosophical followers, education stifles individual autonomy when learners are taught that knowledge is transmitted in one direction, from the expert to the learner. Dewey not only re-imagined the way that the learning process should take place, but also the role that the teacher should play within that process. For Dewey, "The thing needful is improvement of education, not simply by turning out teachers who can do better the things that are not necessary to do, but rather by changing the conception of what constitutes education" (Dewey, 1904, p. 18).
Dewey's qualifications for teaching—a natural love for working with young children, a natural propensity to inquire about the subjects, methods and other social issues related to the profession, and a desire to share this acquired knowledge with others—are not a set of outwardly displayed mechanical skills. Rather, they may be viewed as internalized principles or habits which "work automatically, unconsciously" (Dewey, 1904, p. 15). Turning to Dewey's essays and public addresses regarding the teaching profession, followed by his analysis of the teacher as a person and a professional, as well as his beliefs regarding the responsibilities of teacher education programs to cultivate the attributes addressed, teacher educators can begin to reimagine the successful classroom teacher Dewey envisioned.
For many, education's purpose is to train students for work by providing the student with a limited set of skills and information to do a particular job. As Dewey notes, this limited vocational view is also applied to teacher training schools who attempt to quickly produce proficient and practical teachers with a limited set of instructional and discipline skills needed to meet the needs of the employer and demands of the workforce (Dewey, 1904). For Dewey, the school and the classroom teacher, as a workforce and provider of social service, have a unique responsibility to produce psychological and social goods that will lead to both present and future social progress.
As Dewey notes, "The business of the teacher is to produce a higher standard of intelligence in the community, and the object of the public school system is to make as large as possible the number of those who possess this intelligence. Skill, the ability to act wisely and effectively in a great variety of occupations and situations, is a sign and a criterion of the degree of civilization that a society has reached. It is the business of teachers to help in producing the many kinds of skills needed in contemporary life. If teachers are up to their work, they also aid in the production of character."(Dewey, TAP, 2010, pp. 241–42).
According to Dewey, the emphasis is placed on producing these attributes in children for use in their contemporary life because it is "impossible to foretell definitely just what civilization will be twenty years from now" (Dewey, MPC, 2010, p. 25). However, although Dewey is steadfast in his beliefs that education serves an immediate purpose (Dewey, DRT, 2010; Dewey, MPC, 2010; Dewey, TTP, 2010), he is not ignorant of the impact imparting these qualities of intelligence, skill, and character on young children in their present life will have on the future society. While addressing the state of educative and economic affairs during a 1935 radio broadcast, Dewey linked the ensuing economic depression to a "lack of sufficient production of intelligence, skill, and character" (Dewey, TAP, 2010, p. 242) of the nation's workforce.
As Dewey notes, there is a lack of these goods in the present society and teachers have a responsibility to create them in their students, who, we can assume, will grow into the adults who will ultimately go on to participate in whatever industrial or economic civilization awaits them. According to Dewey, the profession of the classroom teacher is to produce the intelligence, skill, and character within each student so that the democratic community is composed of citizens who can think, do and act intelligently and morally.
Dewey believed that successful classroom teacher possesses a passion for knowledge and intellectual curiosity in the materials and methods they teach. For Dewey, this propensity is an inherent curiosity and love for learning that differs from one's ability to acquire, recite and reproduce textbook knowledge. "No one," according to Dewey, "can be really successful in performing the duties and meeting these demands [of teaching] who does not retain [her] intellectual curiosity intact throughout [her] entire career" (Dewey, APT, 2010, p. 34).
According to Dewey, it is not that the "teacher ought to strive to be a high-class scholar in all the subjects he or she has to teach," rather, "a teacher ought to have an unusual love and aptitude in some one subject: history, mathematics, literature, science, a fine art, or whatever" (Dewey, APT, 2010, p. 35). The classroom teacher does not have to be a scholar in all subjects; rather, genuine love in one will elicit a feel for genuine information and insight in all subjects taught.
In addition to this propensity for study into the subjects taught, the classroom teacher "is possessed by a recognition of the responsibility for the constant study of school room work, the constant study of children, of methods, of subject matter in its various adaptations to pupils" (Dewey, PST, 2010, p. 37). For Dewey, this desire for the lifelong pursuit of learning is inherent in other professions (e.g., the architectural, legal and medical fields; Dewey, 1904 & Dewey, PST, 2010), and has particular importance for the field of teaching. As Dewey notes, "this further study is not a sideline but something which fits directly into the demands and opportunities of the vocation" (Dewey, APT, 2010, p. 34).
According to Dewey, this propensity and passion for intellectual growth in the profession must be accompanied by a natural desire to communicate one's knowledge with others. "There are scholars who have [the knowledge] in a marked degree but who lack enthusiasm for imparting it. To the 'natural born' teacher learning is incomplete unless it is shared" (Dewey, APT, 2010, p. 35). For Dewey, it is not enough for the classroom teacher to be a lifelong learner of the techniques and subject-matter of education; she must aspire to share what she knows with others in her learning community.
The best indicator of teacher quality, according to Dewey, is the ability to watch and respond to the movement of the mind with keen awareness of the signs and quality of the responses his or her students exhibit with regard to the subject-matter presented (Dewey, APT, 2010; Dewey, 1904). As Dewey notes, "I have often been asked how it was that some teachers who have never studied the art of teaching are still extraordinarily good teachers. The explanation is simple. They have a quick, sure and unflagging sympathy with the operations and process of the minds they are in contact with. Their own minds move in harmony with those of others, appreciating their difficulties, entering into their problems, sharing their intellectual victories" (Dewey, APT, 2010, p. 36).
Such a teacher is genuinely aware of the complexities of this mind-to-mind transfer, and she has the intellectual fortitude to identify the successes and failures of this process, as well as how to appropriately reproduce or correct it in the future.
As a result of the direct influence teachers have in shaping the mental, moral and spiritual lives of children during their most formative years, Dewey holds the profession of teaching in high esteem, often equating its social value to that of the ministry and to parenting (Dewey, APT, 2010; Dewey, DRT, 2010; Dewey, MPC, 2010; Dewey, PST, 2010; Dewey, TTC, 2010; Dewey, TTP, 2010). Perhaps the most important attributes, according to Dewey, are those personal inherent qualities that the teacher brings to the classroom. As Dewey notes, "no amount of learning or even of acquired pedagogical skill makes up for the deficiency" (Dewey, TLS, p. 25) of the personal traits needed to be most successful in the profession.
According to Dewey, the successful classroom teacher occupies an indispensable passion for promoting the intellectual growth of young children. In addition, they know that their career, in comparison to other professions, entails stressful situations, long hours, and limited financial reward; all of which have the potential to overcome their genuine love and sympathy for their students.
For Dewey, "One of the most depressing phases of the vocation is the number of careworn teachers one sees, with anxiety depicted on the lines of their faces, reflected in their strained high pitched voices and sharp manners. While contact with the young is a privilege for some temperaments, it is a tax on others and a tax which they do not bear up under very well. And in some schools, there are too many pupils to a teacher, too many subjects to teach, and adjustments to pupils are made in a mechanical rather than a human way. Human nature reacts against such unnatural conditions" (Dewey, APT, 2010, p. 35).
It is essential, according to Dewey, that the classroom teacher has the mental propensity to overcome the demands and stressors placed on them because the students can sense when their teacher is not genuinely invested in promoting their learning (Dewey, PST, 2010). Such negative demeanors, according to Dewey, prevent children from pursuing their own propensities for learning and intellectual growth. It can therefore be assumed that if teachers want their students to engage with the educational process and employ their natural curiosities for knowledge, teachers must be aware of how their reactions to young children and the stresses of teaching influence this process.
Dewey's passions for teaching—a natural love for working with young children, a natural propensity to inquire about the subjects, methods and other social issues related to the profession, and a desire to share this acquired knowledge with others—are not a set of outwardly displayed mechanical skills. Rather, they may be viewed as internalized principles or habits which "work automatically, unconsciously" (Dewey, 1904, p. 15). According to Dewey, teacher-education programs must turn away from focusing on producing proficient practitioners because such practical skills related to instruction and discipline (e.g., creating and delivering lesson plans, classroom management, implementation of an assortment of content-specific methods) can be learned over time during their everyday schoolwork with their students (Dewey, PST, 2010).
As Dewey notes, "The teacher who leaves the professional school with power in managing a class of children may appear to superior advantage the first day, the first week, the first month, or even the first year, as compared with some other teacher who has a much more vital command of the psychology, logic and ethics of development. But later 'progress' may consist only in perfecting and refining skill already possessed. Such persons seem to know how to teach, but they are not students of teaching. Even though they go on studying books of pedagogy, reading teachers' journals, attending teachers' institutes, etc., yet the root of the matter is not in them, unless they continue to be students of subject-matter, and students of mind-activity. Unless a teacher is such a student, he may continue to improve in the mechanics of school management, but he cannot grow as a teacher, an inspirer and director of soul-life" (Dewey, 1904, p. 15).
For Dewey, teacher education should focus not on producing persons who know how to teach as soon as they leave the program; rather, teacher education should be concerned with producing professional students of education who have the propensity to inquire about the subjects they teach, the methods used, and the activity of the mind as it gives and receives knowledge. According to Dewey, such a student is not superficially engaging with these materials, rather, the professional student of education has a genuine passion to inquire about the subjects of education, knowing that doing so ultimately leads to acquisitions of the skills related to teaching. Such students of education aspire for the intellectual growth within the profession that can only be achieved by immersing oneself in the lifelong pursuit of the intelligence, skills and character Dewey linked to the profession.
As Dewey notes, other professional fields, such as law and medicine cultivate a professional spirit in their fields to constantly study their work, their methods of their work, and a perpetual need for intellectual growth and concern for issues related to their profession. Teacher education, as a profession, has these same obligations (Dewey, 1904; Dewey, PST, 2010).
As Dewey notes, "An intellectual responsibility has got to be distributed to every human being who is concerned in carrying out the work in question, and to attempt to concentrate intellectual responsibility for a work that has to be done, with their brains and their hearts, by hundreds or thousands of people in a dozen or so at the top, no matter how wise and skillful they are, is not to concentrate responsibility—it is to diffuse irresponsibility" (Dewey, PST, 2010, p. 39). For Dewey, the professional spirit of teacher education requires of its students a constant study of school room work, constant study of children, of methods, of subject matter in its various adaptations to pupils. Such study will lead to professional enlightenment with regard to the daily operations of classroom teaching.
As well as his very active and direct involvement in setting up educational institutions such as the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools (1896) and The New School for Social Research (1919), many of Dewey's ideas influenced the founding of Bennington College and Goddard College in Vermont, where he served on the board of trustees. Dewey's works and philosophy also held great influence in the creation of the short-lived Black Mountain College in North Carolina, an experimental college focused on interdisciplinary study, and whose faculty included Buckminster Fuller, Willem de Kooning, Charles Olson, Franz Kline, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and Paul Goodman, among others. Black Mountain College was the locus of the "Black Mountain Poets" a group of avant-garde poets closely linked with the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance.
Dewey's definition of "public," as described in The Public and its Problems, has profound implications for the significance of journalism in society. As suggested by the title of the book, his concern was of the transactional relationship between publics and problems. Also implicit in its name, public journalism seeks to orient communication away from elite, corporate hegemony toward a civic public sphere. "The 'public' of public journalists is Dewey's public."
Dewey gives a concrete definition to the formation of a public. Publics are spontaneous groups of citizens who share the indirect effects of a particular action. Anyone affected by the indirect consequences of a specific action will automatically share a common interest in controlling those consequences, i.e., solving a common problem.Since every action generates unintended consequences, publics continuously emerge, overlap, and disintegrate.
In The Public and its Problems, Dewey presents a rebuttal to Walter Lippmann's treatise on the role of journalism in democracy. Lippmann's model was a basic transmission model in which journalists took information given to them by experts and elites, repackaged that information in simple terms, and transmitted the information to the public, whose role was to react emotionally to the news. In his model, Lippmann supposed that the public was incapable of thought or action, and that all thought and action should be left to the experts and elites.
Dewey refutes this model by assuming that politics is the work and duty of each individual in the course of his daily routine. The knowledge needed to be involved in politics, in this model, was to be generated by the interaction of citizens, elites, experts, through the mediation and facilitation of journalism. In this model, not just the government is accountable, but the citizens, experts, and other actors as well.
Dewey also said that journalism should conform to this ideal by changing its emphasis from actions or happenings (choosing a winner of a given situation) to alternatives, choices, consequences, and conditions, in order to foster conversation and improve the generation of knowledge. Journalism would not just produce a static product that told what had already happened, but the news would be in a constant state of evolution as the public added value by generating knowledge. The "audience" would end, to be replaced by citizens and collaborators who would essentially be users, doing more with the news than simply reading it. Concerning his effort to change journalism, he wrote in The Public and Its Problems: "Till the Great Society is converted in to a Great Community, the Public will remain in eclipse. Communication can alone create a great community" (Dewey, p. 142).
Dewey believed that communication creates a great community, and citizens who participate actively with public life contribute to that community. "The clear consciousness of a communal life, in all its implications, constitutes the idea of democracy." (The Public and its Problems, p. 149). This Great Community can only occur with "free and full intercommunication." (p. 211) Communication can be understood as journalism.
Dewey sees paradox in contemporary logical theory. Proximate subject matter garners general agreement and advancement, while the ultimate subject matter of logic generates unremitting controversy. In other words, he challenges confident logicians to answer the question of the truth of logical operators. Do they function merely as abstractions (e.g., pure mathematics) or do they connect in some essential way with their objects, and therefore alter or bring them to light?
Logical positivism also figured in Dewey's thought. About the movement he wrote that it "eschews the use of 'propositions' and 'terms', substituting 'sentences' and 'words'." ("General Theory of Propositions", in Logic: The Theory of Inquiry) He welcomes this changing of referents "in as far as it fixes attention upon the symbolic structure and content of propositions." However, he registers a small complaint against the use of "sentence" and "words" in that without careful interpretation the act or process of transposition "narrows unduly the scope of symbols and language, since it is not customary to treat gestures and diagrams (maps, blueprints, etc.) as words or sentences." In other words, sentences and words, considered in isolation, do not disclose intent, which may be inferred or "adjudged only by means of context."
Yet Dewey was not entirely opposed to modern logical trends; indeed, the deficiencies in traditional logic he expressed hope for the trends to solve occupies the whole first part of same book. Concerning traditional logic, he states there:
Aristotelian logic, which still passes current nominally, is a logic based upon the idea that qualitative objects are existential in the fullest sense. To retain logical principles based on this conception along with the acceptance of theories of existence and knowledge based on an opposite conception is not, to say the least, conductive to clearness—a consideration that has a good deal to do with existing dualism between traditional and the newer relational logics.
Louis Menand argues in The Metaphysical Club that Jane Addams had been critical of Dewey's emphasis on antagonism in the context of a discussion of the Pullman Strike of 1894. In a later letter to his wife, Dewey confessed that Addams' argument was:
... the most magnificent exhibition of intellectual & moral faith I ever saw. She converted me internally, but not really, I fear. ... When you think that Miss Addams does not think this as a philosophy, but believes it in all her senses & muscles—Great God ... I guess I'll have to give it [all] up & start over again.
He went on to add:
I can see that I have always been interpreting dialectic wrong end up, the unity as the reconciliation of opposites, instead of the opposites as the unity in its growth, and thus translated the physical tension into a moral thing ... I don't know as I give the reality of this at all, ... it seems so natural & commonplace now, but I never had anything take hold of me so.
In a letter to Addams, clearly influenced by his conversation with her, Dewey wrote:
Not only is actual antagonizing bad, but the assumption that there is or may be antagonism is bad—in fact, the real first antagonism always comes back to the assumption.
Art as Experience (1934) is Dewey's major writing on aesthetics.
It is, in accordance with his place in the Pragmatist tradition that emphasizes community, a study of the individual art object as embedded in (and inextricable from) the experiences of a local culture. In the original illustrated edition, Dewey drew on the modern art and world cultures collection assembled by Albert C. Barnes at the Barnes Foundation, whose own ideas on the application of art to one's way of life was influenced by Dewey's writing. Dewey made art through writing poetry, but he considered himself deeply unmusical: one of his students described Dewey as "allergic to music." Barnes was particularly influenced by Democracy and Education (1916) and then attended Dewey's seminar on political philosophy at Columbia University in the fall semester of 1918.
Dewey founded the University of Chicago laboratory school, supported educational organizations, and supported settlement houses especially Jane Addams' Hull House.John Dewey and Jane Addams influenced each other's expansive theory of democracy.
Through his work at the Hull House serving on its first board of trustees, Dewey was not only an activist for the cause but also a partner working to serve the large immigrant community of Chicago and women's suffrage. Dewey experienced the lack of children's education while contributing in the classroom at the Hull House. There he also experienced the lack of education and skills of immigrant women. Stengel argues:
Addams is unquestionably a maker of democratic community and pragmatic education; Dewey is just as unquestionably a reflector. Through her work at Hull House, Addams discerned the shape of democracy as a mode of associated living and uncovered the outlines of an experimental approach to knowledge and understanding; Dewey analyzed and classified the social, psychological and educational processes Addams lived.
His leading views on democracy included:
First, Dewey believed that democracy is an ethical ideal rather than merely a political arrangement. Second, he considered participation, not representation, the essence of democracy. Third, he insisted on the harmony between democracy and the scientific method: ever-expanding and self-critical communities of inquiry, operating on pragmatic principles and constantly revising their beliefs in light of new evidence, provided Dewey with a model for democratic decision making ... Finally, Dewey called for extending democracy, conceived as an ethical project, from politics to industry and society.
This helped to shape his understanding of human action and the unity of human experience.
Dewey believed that a woman's place in society was determined by her environment and not just her biology. On women he says, "You think too much of women in terms of sex. Think of them as human individuals for a while, dropping out the sex qualification, and you won't be so sure of some of your generalizations about what they should and shouldn't do". John Dewey's support helped to increase the support and popularity of Jane Addams' Hull House and other settlement houses as well. With growing support, involvement of the community grew as well as the support for the women's suffrage movement.
As commonly argued by Dewey's greatest critics, he was not able to come up with strategies in order to fulfill his ideas that would lead to a successful democracy, educational system, and a successful women's suffrage movement. While knowing that traditional beliefs, customs, and practices needed to be examined in order to find out what worked and what needed improved upon, it was never done in a systematic way. "Dewey became increasingly aware of the obstacles presented by entrenched power and alert to the intricacy of the problems facing modern cultures". With the complex of society at the time, Dewey was criticized for his lack of effort in fixing the problems.
With respect to technological developments in a democracy:
Persons do not become a society by living in physical proximity any more than a man ceases to be socially influenced by being so many feet or miles removed from others.
His work on democracy influenced B.R. Ambedkar, one of his students, who later served as a Law and Justice Minister of India.
Historians have examined his religious beliefs. Biographer Steven Clark Rockefeller traced Dewey's democratic convictions to his childhood attendance at the Congregational Church, with its strong proclamation of social ideals and the Social Gospel. Historian Edward A. White suggested in Science and Religion in American Thought (1952) that Dewey's work led to the 20th-century rift between religion and science.
Dewey went through an "evangelical" development as a child. As an adult he was negative, or at most neutral, about theology in education. He instead took a meliorist position with the goal of scientific humanism and educational and social reform without recourse to religion.
As an atheist and a secular humanist in his later life, Dewey participated with a variety of humanistic activities from the 1930s into the 1950s, which included sitting on the advisory board of Charles Francis Potter's First Humanist Society of New York (1929); being one of the original 34 signatories of the first Humanist Manifesto (1933) and being elected an honorary member of the Humanist Press Association (1936).
His opinion of humanism is summarized in his own words from an article titled "What Humanism Means to Me", published in the June 1930 edition of Thinker 2:
What Humanism means to me is an expansion, not a contraction, of human life, an expansion in which nature and the science of nature are made the willing servants of human good.
Dewey sometimes referred to his philosophy as instrumentalism rather than pragmatism and would have recognized the similarity of these two schools to the newer school named consequentialism. In some phrases introducing a book he wrote later in life meant to help forestay a wandering kind of criticism of the work based on the controversies due to the differences in the schools that he sometimes invoked, he defined at the same time with precise brevity the criterion of validity common to these three schools, which lack agreed-upon definitions:
But in the proper interpretation of "pragmatic," namely the function of consequences as necessary tests of the validity of propositions, provided these consequences are operationally instituted and are such as to resolve the specific problem evoking the operations, the text that follows is thoroughly pragmatic.
His concern for precise definition led him to detailed analysis of careless word usage, reported in Knowing and the Known in 1949.
The terminology problem in the fields of epistemology and logic is partially due, according to Dewey and Bentley, to inefficient and imprecise use of words and concepts that reflect three historic levels of organization and presentation. In the order of chronological appearance, these are:
A series of characterizations of Transactions indicate the wide range of considerations involved.
While Dewey was at the University of Chicago, his letters to his wife Alice and his colleague Jane Addams reveal that he closely followed the 1894 Pullman Strike, in which the employees of the Pullman Palace Car Factory in Chicago decided to go on strike after industrialist George Pullman refused to lower rents in his company town after cutting his workers' wages by nearly 30 percent. On May 11, 1894, the strike became official, later gaining the support of the members of the American Railway Union, whose leader Eugene V. Debs called for a nationwide boycott of all trains including Pullman sleeping cars.
Considering most trains had Pullman cars, the main 24 lines out of Chicago were halted and the mail was stopped as the workers destroyed trains all over the United States. President Grover Cleveland used the mail as a justification to send in the National Guard, and ARU leader Eugene Debs was arrested.
Dewey wrote to Alice: "The only wonder is that when the 'higher classes' – damn them – take such views there aren't more downright socialists. [...] [T]hat a representative journal of the upper classes – damn them again – can take the attitude of that harper's weekly", referring to headlines such as "Monopoly" and "Repress the Rebellion", which claimed, in Dewey's words, to support the sensational belief that Debs was a "criminal" inspiring hate and violence in the equally "criminal" working classes. He concluded: "It shows what it is to be a higher class. And I fear Chicago Univ. is a capitalistic institution – that is, it too belongs to the higher classes".
Dewey was an advocate of US participation in the First World War. For this he was criticised by Randolph Bourne, a former student whose essay "Twilight of Idols", was published in the literary journal Seven Arts in October 1917. Bourne criticised Dewey's instrumental pragmatist philosophy.
As a major advocate of academic freedom, in 1935 Dewey, together with Albert Einstein and Alvin Johnson, became a member of the United States section of the International League for Academic Freedom, and in 1940, together with Horace M Kallen, edited a series of articles related to the Bertrand Russell Case.
He directed the famous Dewey Commission held in Mexico in 1937, which cleared Leon Trotsky of the charges made against him by Joseph Stalin, and marched for women's rights, among many other causes.
In 1939, Dewey was elected President of the League for Industrial Democracy, an organization with the goal of educating college students about the labor movement. The Student Branch of the L.I.D. would later become Students for a Democratic Society.
As well as defending the independence of teachers and opposing a communist takeover of the New York Teachers' Union, Dewey was involved in the organization that eventually became the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, sitting as an executive on the NAACP's early executive board. He was an avid supporter of Henry George's proposal for taxing land values. Of George, he wrote, "No man, no graduate of a higher educational institution, has a right to regard himself as an educated man in social thought unless he has some first-hand acquaintance with the theoretical contribution of this great American thinker." As honorary president of the Henry George School of Social Science, he wrote a letter to Henry Ford urging him to support the school.
Besides publishing prolifically himself, Dewey also sat on the boards of scientific publications such as Sociometry (advisory board, 1942) and Journal of Social Psychology (editorial board, 1942), as well as having posts at other publications such as New Leader (contributing editor, 1949).
The following publications by John Dewey are referenced or mentioned in this article. A more complete list of his publications may be found at List of publications by John Dewey.
See also
Dewey's Complete Writings is available in four multi-volume sets (38 volumes in all) from Southern Illinois University Press:
The Collected Works of John Dewey: 1882–1953, The Correspondence of John Dewey 1871–1952, and The Lectures of John Dewey are available online via monographic purchase to academic institutions and via subscription to individuals, and also in TEI format for university servers in the Past Masters series. (The CD-ROM has been discontinued.) | [
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"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "John Dewey (/ˈduːi/; October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer. He was one of the most prominent American scholars in the first half of the twentieth century.",
"title": ""
},
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"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The overriding theme of Dewey's works was his profound belief in democracy, be it in politics, education, or communication and journalism. As Dewey himself stated in 1888, while still at the University of Michigan, \"Democracy and the one, ultimate, ethical ideal of humanity are to my mind synonymous.\" Dewey considered two fundamental elements—schools and civil society—to be major topics needing attention and reconstruction to encourage experimental intelligence and plurality. He asserted that complete democracy was to be obtained not just by extending voting rights but also by ensuring that there exists a fully formed public opinion, accomplished by communication among citizens, experts and politicians.",
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"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Dewey was one of the primary figures associated with the philosophy of pragmatism and is considered one of the founding thinkers of functional psychology. His paper \"The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology\", published in 1896, is regarded as the first major work in the (Chicago) functionalist school of psychology. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Dewey as the 93rd-most-cited psychologist of the 20th century.",
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},
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"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Dewey was also a major educational reformer for the 20th century. A well-known public intellectual, he was a major voice of progressive education and liberalism. While a professor at the University of Chicago, he founded the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where he was able to apply and test his progressive ideas on pedagogical method. Although Dewey is known best for his publications about education, he also wrote about many other topics, including epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, art, logic, social theory, and ethics.",
"title": ""
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"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "John Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, to a family of modest means. He was one of four boys born to Archibald Sprague Dewey and Lucina Artemisia Rich Dewey. Their first son was also named John, but he died in an accident on January 17, 1859. The second John Dewey was born October 20, 1859, forty weeks after the death of his older brother. Like his older, surviving brother, Davis Rich Dewey, he attended the University of Vermont, where he was initiated into Delta Psi, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1879.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "A significant professor of Dewey's at the University of Vermont was Henry Augustus Pearson Torrey (H. A. P. Torrey), the son-in-law and nephew of former University of Vermont president Joseph Torrey. Dewey studied privately with Torrey between his graduation from Vermont and his enrollment at Johns Hopkins University.",
"title": "Life"
},
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"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "After two years as a high-school teacher in Oil City, Pennsylvania, and one year as an elementary school teacher in the small town of Charlotte, Vermont, Dewey decided that he was unsuited for teaching primary or secondary school. After studying with George Sylvester Morris, Charles Sanders Peirce, Herbert Baxter Adams, and G. Stanley Hall, Dewey received his Ph.D. from the School of Arts & Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. In 1884, he accepted a faculty position at the University of Michigan (1884–88 and 1889–94) with the help of George Sylvester Morris. His unpublished and now lost dissertation was titled \"The Psychology of Kant\".",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In 1894 Dewey joined the newly founded University of Chicago (1894–1904) where he developed his belief in Rational Empiricism, becoming associated with the newly emerging Pragmatic philosophy. His time at the University of Chicago resulted in four essays collectively entitled Thought and its Subject-Matter, which was published with collected works from his colleagues at Chicago under the collective title Studies in Logical Theory (1904).",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "During that time Dewey also initiated the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where he was able to actualize the pedagogical beliefs that provided material for his first major work on education, The School and Society (1899). Disagreements with the administration ultimately caused his resignation from the university, and soon thereafter he relocated near the East Coast. In 1899, Dewey was elected president of the American Psychological Association (A.P.A.). From 1904 until his retirement in 1930 he was professor of philosophy at Teachers College at Columbia University and influenced Carl Rogers.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In 1905 he became president of the American Philosophical Association. He was a longtime member of the American Federation of Teachers. Along with the historians Charles A. Beard and James Harvey Robinson, and the economist Thorstein Veblen, Dewey is one of the founders of The New School.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Dewey published more than 700 articles in 140 journals, and approximately 40 books. His most significant writings were \"The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology\" (1896), a critique of a standard psychological concept and the basis of all his further work; Democracy and Education (1916), his celebrated work on progressive education; Human Nature and Conduct (1922), a study of the function of habit in human behavior; The Public and its Problems (1927), a defense of democracy written in response to Walter Lippmann's The Phantom Public (1925); Experience and Nature (1925), Dewey's most \"metaphysical\" statement; Impressions of Soviet Russia and the Revolutionary World (1929), a glowing travelogue from the nascent USSR.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Art as Experience (1934), was Dewey's major work on aesthetics; A Common Faith (1934), a humanistic study of religion originally delivered as the Dwight H. Terry Lectureship at Yale; Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938), a statement of Dewey's unusual conception of logic; Freedom and Culture (1939), a political work examining the roots of fascism; and Knowing and the Known (1949), a book written in conjunction with Arthur F. Bentley that systematically outlines the concept of trans-action, which is central to his other works (see Transactionalism).",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "While each of these works focuses on one particular philosophical theme, Dewey included his major themes in Experience and Nature. However, dissatisfied with the response to the first (1925) edition, for the second (1929) edition he rewrote the first chapter and added a Preface in which he stated that the book presented what we would now call a new (Kuhnian) paradigm: 'I have not striven in this volume for a reconciliation between the new and the old' [E&N:4] . and he asserts Kuhnian incommensurability:",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "'To many the associating of the two words ['experience' and 'nature'] will seem like talking of a round square' but 'I know of no route by which dialectical argument can answer such objections. They arise from association with words and cannot be dealt with argumentatively'. The following can be interpreted now as describing a Kuhnian conversion process: 'One can only hope in the course of the whole discussion to disclose the [new] meanings which are attached to \"experience\" and \"nature,\" and thus insensibly produce, if one is fortunate, a change in the significations previously attached to them' [all E&N:10].",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Reflecting his immense influence on 20th-century thought, Hilda Neatby wrote \"Dewey has been to our age what Aristotle was to the later Middle Ages, not a philosopher, but the philosopher.\"",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In 1919, Dewey and his wife traveled to Japan on sabbatical leave. Though Dewey and his wife were well received by the people of Japan during this trip, Dewey was also critical of the nation's governing system and claimed that the nation's path towards democracy was \"ambitious but weak in many respects in which her competitors are strong\". He also warned that \"the real test has not yet come. But if the nominally democratic world should go back on the professions so profusely uttered during war days, the shock will be enormous, and bureaucracy and militarism might come back.\"",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "During his trip to Japan, Dewey was invited by Peking University to visit China, probably at the behest of his former students, Hu Shih and Chiang Monlin. Dewey and his wife Alice arrived in Shanghai on April 30, 1919, just days before student demonstrators took to the streets of Peking to protest the decision of the Allies in Paris to cede the German-held territories in Shandong province to Japan. Their demonstrations on May Fourth excited and energized Dewey, and he ended up staying in China for two years, leaving in July 1921.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In these two years, Dewey gave nearly 200 lectures to Chinese audiences and wrote nearly monthly articles for Americans in The New Republic and other magazines. Well aware of both Japanese expansionism into China and the attraction of Bolshevism to some Chinese, Dewey advocated that Americans support China's transformation and that Chinese base this transformation in education and social reforms, not revolution. Hundreds and sometimes thousands of people attended the lectures, which were interpreted by Hu Shih. For these audiences, Dewey represented \"Mr. Democracy\" and \"Mr. Science,\" the two personifications which they thought of representing modern values and hailed him as \"the American Confucius\". His lectures were lost at the time but have been rediscovered and published in 2015.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Zhixin Su states:",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Dewey urged the Chinese to not import any Western educational model. He recommended to educators such as Tao Xingzhi, that they use pragmatism to devise their own model school system at the national level. However, the national government was weak, and the provinces largely controlled by warlords, so his suggestions were praised at the national level but not implemented. However, there were a few implementations locally. Dewey's ideas did have influence in Hong Kong, and in Taiwan after the nationalist government fled there. In most of China, Confucian scholars controlled the local educational system before 1949 and they simply ignored Dewey and Western ideas. In Marxist and Maoist China, Dewey's ideas were systematically denounced.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Dewey and his daughter Jane went to South Africa in July 1934, at the invitation of the World Conference of New Education Fellowship in Cape Town and Johannesburg, where he delivered several talks. The conference was opened by the South African Minister of Education Jan Hofmeyr, and Deputy Prime Minister Jan Smuts. Other speakers at the conference included Max Eiselen and Hendrik Verwoerd, who would later become prime minister of the Nationalist government that introduced apartheid.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Dewey's expenses were paid by the Carnegie Foundation. He also traveled to Durban, Pretoria and Victoria Falls in what was then Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and looked at schools, talked to pupils, and gave lectures to the administrators and teachers. In August 1934, Dewey accepted an honorary degree from the University of the Witwatersrand. The white-only governments rejected Dewey's ideas as too secular. However black people and their white supporters were more receptive.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Dewey married Alice Chipman in 1886 shortly after Chipman graduated with her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. The two had six children: Frederick Archibald Dewey, Evelyn Riggs Dewey, Morris (who died young), Gordon Chipman Dewey, Lucy Alice Chipman Dewey, and Jane Mary Dewey. Alice Chipman died in 1927 at the age of 68; weakened by a case of malaria contracted during a trip to Turkey in 1924 and a heart attack during a trip to Mexico City in 1926, she died from cerebral thrombosis on July 13, 1927. Dewey married Estelle Roberta Lowitz Grant, \"a longtime friend and companion for several years before their marriage\" on December 11, 1946. At Roberta's behest, the couple adopted two siblings, Lewis (changed to John Jr.) and Shirley.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Dewey's interests and writings included many topics, and according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, \"a substantial part of his published output consisted of commentary on current domestic and international politics, and public statements on behalf of many causes. (He is probably the only philosopher in this encyclopedia to have published both on the Treaty of Versailles and on the value of displaying art in post offices.)\"",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In 1917, Dewey met F. M. Alexander in New York City and later wrote introductions to Alexander's Man's Supreme Inheritance (1918), Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual (1923) and The Use of the Self (1932). Alexander's influence is referenced in \"Human Nature and Conduct\" and \"Experience and Nature.\" As well as his contacts with people mentioned elsewhere in the article, he also maintained correspondence with Henri Bergson, William M. Brown, Martin Buber, George S. Counts, William Rainey Harper, Sidney Hook, and George Santayana.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "John Dewey died of pneumonia on June 1, 1952, at his home in New York City after years of ill-health and was cremated the next day.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "At the University of Michigan, Dewey published his first two books, Psychology (1887), and Leibniz's New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding (1888), both of which expressed Dewey's early commitment to British neo-Hegelianism. In Psychology, Dewey attempted a synthesis between idealism and experimental science.",
"title": "Functional psychology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "While still professor of philosophy at Michigan, Dewey and his junior colleagues, James Hayden Tufts and George Herbert Mead, together with his student James Rowland Angell, all influenced strongly by the recent publication of William James' Principles of Psychology (1890), began to reformulate psychology, emphasizing the social environment on the activity of mind and behavior rather than the physiological psychology of Wilhelm Wundt and his followers.",
"title": "Functional psychology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "By 1894, Dewey had joined Tufts, with whom he would later write Ethics (1908) at the recently founded University of Chicago and invited Mead and Angell to follow him, the four men forming the basis of the so-called \"Chicago group\" of psychology.",
"title": "Functional psychology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Their new style of psychology, later dubbed functional psychology, had a practical emphasis on action and application. In Dewey's article \"The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology\" which appeared in Psychological Review in 1896, he reasons against the traditional stimulus-response understanding of the reflex arc in favor of a \"circular\" account in which what serves as \"stimulus\" and what as \"response\" depends on how one considers the situation and defends the unitary nature of the sensory motor circuit. While he does not deny the existence of stimulus, sensation, and response, he disagreed that they were separate, juxtaposed events happening like links in a chain. He developed the idea that there is a coordination by which the stimulation is enriched by the results of previous experiences. The response is modulated by sensorial experience.",
"title": "Functional psychology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Dewey was elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1899.",
"title": "Functional psychology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Dewey also expressed interest in work in the psychology of visual perception performed by Dartmouth research professor Adelbert Ames Jr. He had great trouble with listening, however, because it is known Dewey could not distinguish musical pitches—in other words was an amusic.",
"title": "Functional psychology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Dewey's educational theories were presented in My Pedagogic Creed (1897), The Primary-Education Fetich (1898), The School and Society (1900), The Child and the Curriculum (1902), Democracy and Education (1916), Schools of To-morrow (1915) with Evelyn Dewey, and Experience and Education (1938). Several themes recur throughout these writings. Dewey continually argues that education and learning are social and interactive processes, and thus the school itself is a social institution through which social reform can and should take place. In addition, he believed that students thrive in an environment where they are allowed to experience and interact with the curriculum, and all students should have the opportunity to take part in their own learning.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The ideas of democracy and social reform are continually discussed in Dewey's writings on education. Dewey makes a strong case for the importance of education not only as a place to gain content knowledge, but also as a place to learn how to live. In his eyes, the purpose of education should not revolve around the acquisition of a pre-determined set of skills, but rather the realization of one's full potential and the ability to use those skills for the greater good. He notes that \"to prepare him for the future life means to give him command of himself; it means so to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities\" (My Pedagogic Creed, Dewey, 1897).",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In addition to helping students realize their full potential, Dewey goes on to acknowledge that education and schooling are instrumental in creating social change and reform. He notes that \"education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction\".",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "In addition to his ideas regarding what education is and what effect it should have on society, Dewey also had specific notions regarding how education should take place within the classroom. In The Child and the Curriculum (1902), Dewey discusses two major conflicting schools of thought regarding educational pedagogy. The first is centered on the curriculum and focuses almost solely on the subject matter to be taught. Dewey argues that the major flaw in this methodology is the inactivity of the student; within this particular framework, \"the child is simply the immature being who is to be matured; he is the superficial being who is to be deepened\" (1902, p. 13). He argues that in order for education to be most effective, content must be presented in a way that allows the student to relate the information to prior experiences, thus deepening the connection with this new knowledge.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "At the same time, Dewey was alarmed by many of the \"child-centered\" excesses of educational-school pedagogues who claimed to be his followers, and he argued that too much reliance on the child could be equally detrimental to the learning process. In this second school of thought, \"we must take our stand with the child and our departure from him. It is he and not the subject-matter which determines both quality and quantity of learning\" (Dewey, 1902, pp. 13–14). According to Dewey, the potential flaw in this line of thinking is that it minimizes the importance of the content as well as the role of the teacher.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "In order to rectify this dilemma, Dewey advocated an educational structure that strikes a balance between delivering knowledge while also taking into account the interests and experiences of the student. He notes that \"the child and the curriculum are simply two limits which define a single process. Just as two points define a straight line, so the present standpoint of the child and the facts and truths of studies define instruction\" (Dewey, 1902, p. 16).",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "It is through this reasoning that Dewey became one of the most famous proponents of hands-on learning or experiential education, which is related to, but not synonymous with experiential learning. He argued that \"if knowledge comes from the impressions made upon us by natural objects, it is impossible to procure knowledge without the use of objects which impress the mind\" (Dewey, 1916/2009, pp. 217–18). Dewey's ideas went on to influence many other influential experiential models and advocates. Problem-Based Learning (PBL), for example, a method used widely in education today, incorporates Dewey's ideas pertaining to learning through active inquiry.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Dewey not only re-imagined the way that the learning process should take place, but also the role that the teacher should play within that process. Throughout the history of American schooling, education's purpose has been to train students for work by providing the student with a limited set of skills and information to do a particular job. The works of John Dewey provide the most prolific examples of how this limited vocational view of education has been applied to both the K–12 public education system and to the teacher training schools that attempted to quickly produce proficient and practical teachers with a limited set of instructional and discipline-specific skills needed to meet the needs of the employer and demands of the workforce.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "In The School and Society (Dewey, 1899) and Democracy of Education (Dewey, 1916), Dewey claims that rather than preparing citizens for ethical participation in society, schools cultivate passive pupils via insistence upon mastery of facts and disciplining of bodies. Rather than preparing students to be reflective, autonomous and ethical beings capable of arriving at social truths through critical and intersubjective discourse, schools prepare students for docile compliance with authoritarian work and political structures, discourage the pursuit of individual and communal inquiry, and perceive higher learning as a monopoly of the institution of education (Dewey, 1899; 1916).",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "For Dewey and his philosophical followers, education stifles individual autonomy when learners are taught that knowledge is transmitted in one direction, from the expert to the learner. Dewey not only re-imagined the way that the learning process should take place, but also the role that the teacher should play within that process. For Dewey, \"The thing needful is improvement of education, not simply by turning out teachers who can do better the things that are not necessary to do, but rather by changing the conception of what constitutes education\" (Dewey, 1904, p. 18).",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Dewey's qualifications for teaching—a natural love for working with young children, a natural propensity to inquire about the subjects, methods and other social issues related to the profession, and a desire to share this acquired knowledge with others—are not a set of outwardly displayed mechanical skills. Rather, they may be viewed as internalized principles or habits which \"work automatically, unconsciously\" (Dewey, 1904, p. 15). Turning to Dewey's essays and public addresses regarding the teaching profession, followed by his analysis of the teacher as a person and a professional, as well as his beliefs regarding the responsibilities of teacher education programs to cultivate the attributes addressed, teacher educators can begin to reimagine the successful classroom teacher Dewey envisioned.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "For many, education's purpose is to train students for work by providing the student with a limited set of skills and information to do a particular job. As Dewey notes, this limited vocational view is also applied to teacher training schools who attempt to quickly produce proficient and practical teachers with a limited set of instructional and discipline skills needed to meet the needs of the employer and demands of the workforce (Dewey, 1904). For Dewey, the school and the classroom teacher, as a workforce and provider of social service, have a unique responsibility to produce psychological and social goods that will lead to both present and future social progress.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "As Dewey notes, \"The business of the teacher is to produce a higher standard of intelligence in the community, and the object of the public school system is to make as large as possible the number of those who possess this intelligence. Skill, the ability to act wisely and effectively in a great variety of occupations and situations, is a sign and a criterion of the degree of civilization that a society has reached. It is the business of teachers to help in producing the many kinds of skills needed in contemporary life. If teachers are up to their work, they also aid in the production of character.\"(Dewey, TAP, 2010, pp. 241–42).",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "According to Dewey, the emphasis is placed on producing these attributes in children for use in their contemporary life because it is \"impossible to foretell definitely just what civilization will be twenty years from now\" (Dewey, MPC, 2010, p. 25). However, although Dewey is steadfast in his beliefs that education serves an immediate purpose (Dewey, DRT, 2010; Dewey, MPC, 2010; Dewey, TTP, 2010), he is not ignorant of the impact imparting these qualities of intelligence, skill, and character on young children in their present life will have on the future society. While addressing the state of educative and economic affairs during a 1935 radio broadcast, Dewey linked the ensuing economic depression to a \"lack of sufficient production of intelligence, skill, and character\" (Dewey, TAP, 2010, p. 242) of the nation's workforce.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "As Dewey notes, there is a lack of these goods in the present society and teachers have a responsibility to create them in their students, who, we can assume, will grow into the adults who will ultimately go on to participate in whatever industrial or economic civilization awaits them. According to Dewey, the profession of the classroom teacher is to produce the intelligence, skill, and character within each student so that the democratic community is composed of citizens who can think, do and act intelligently and morally.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Dewey believed that successful classroom teacher possesses a passion for knowledge and intellectual curiosity in the materials and methods they teach. For Dewey, this propensity is an inherent curiosity and love for learning that differs from one's ability to acquire, recite and reproduce textbook knowledge. \"No one,\" according to Dewey, \"can be really successful in performing the duties and meeting these demands [of teaching] who does not retain [her] intellectual curiosity intact throughout [her] entire career\" (Dewey, APT, 2010, p. 34).",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "According to Dewey, it is not that the \"teacher ought to strive to be a high-class scholar in all the subjects he or she has to teach,\" rather, \"a teacher ought to have an unusual love and aptitude in some one subject: history, mathematics, literature, science, a fine art, or whatever\" (Dewey, APT, 2010, p. 35). The classroom teacher does not have to be a scholar in all subjects; rather, genuine love in one will elicit a feel for genuine information and insight in all subjects taught.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "In addition to this propensity for study into the subjects taught, the classroom teacher \"is possessed by a recognition of the responsibility for the constant study of school room work, the constant study of children, of methods, of subject matter in its various adaptations to pupils\" (Dewey, PST, 2010, p. 37). For Dewey, this desire for the lifelong pursuit of learning is inherent in other professions (e.g., the architectural, legal and medical fields; Dewey, 1904 & Dewey, PST, 2010), and has particular importance for the field of teaching. As Dewey notes, \"this further study is not a sideline but something which fits directly into the demands and opportunities of the vocation\" (Dewey, APT, 2010, p. 34).",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "According to Dewey, this propensity and passion for intellectual growth in the profession must be accompanied by a natural desire to communicate one's knowledge with others. \"There are scholars who have [the knowledge] in a marked degree but who lack enthusiasm for imparting it. To the 'natural born' teacher learning is incomplete unless it is shared\" (Dewey, APT, 2010, p. 35). For Dewey, it is not enough for the classroom teacher to be a lifelong learner of the techniques and subject-matter of education; she must aspire to share what she knows with others in her learning community.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "The best indicator of teacher quality, according to Dewey, is the ability to watch and respond to the movement of the mind with keen awareness of the signs and quality of the responses his or her students exhibit with regard to the subject-matter presented (Dewey, APT, 2010; Dewey, 1904). As Dewey notes, \"I have often been asked how it was that some teachers who have never studied the art of teaching are still extraordinarily good teachers. The explanation is simple. They have a quick, sure and unflagging sympathy with the operations and process of the minds they are in contact with. Their own minds move in harmony with those of others, appreciating their difficulties, entering into their problems, sharing their intellectual victories\" (Dewey, APT, 2010, p. 36).",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Such a teacher is genuinely aware of the complexities of this mind-to-mind transfer, and she has the intellectual fortitude to identify the successes and failures of this process, as well as how to appropriately reproduce or correct it in the future.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "As a result of the direct influence teachers have in shaping the mental, moral and spiritual lives of children during their most formative years, Dewey holds the profession of teaching in high esteem, often equating its social value to that of the ministry and to parenting (Dewey, APT, 2010; Dewey, DRT, 2010; Dewey, MPC, 2010; Dewey, PST, 2010; Dewey, TTC, 2010; Dewey, TTP, 2010). Perhaps the most important attributes, according to Dewey, are those personal inherent qualities that the teacher brings to the classroom. As Dewey notes, \"no amount of learning or even of acquired pedagogical skill makes up for the deficiency\" (Dewey, TLS, p. 25) of the personal traits needed to be most successful in the profession.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "According to Dewey, the successful classroom teacher occupies an indispensable passion for promoting the intellectual growth of young children. In addition, they know that their career, in comparison to other professions, entails stressful situations, long hours, and limited financial reward; all of which have the potential to overcome their genuine love and sympathy for their students.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "For Dewey, \"One of the most depressing phases of the vocation is the number of careworn teachers one sees, with anxiety depicted on the lines of their faces, reflected in their strained high pitched voices and sharp manners. While contact with the young is a privilege for some temperaments, it is a tax on others and a tax which they do not bear up under very well. And in some schools, there are too many pupils to a teacher, too many subjects to teach, and adjustments to pupils are made in a mechanical rather than a human way. Human nature reacts against such unnatural conditions\" (Dewey, APT, 2010, p. 35).",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "It is essential, according to Dewey, that the classroom teacher has the mental propensity to overcome the demands and stressors placed on them because the students can sense when their teacher is not genuinely invested in promoting their learning (Dewey, PST, 2010). Such negative demeanors, according to Dewey, prevent children from pursuing their own propensities for learning and intellectual growth. It can therefore be assumed that if teachers want their students to engage with the educational process and employ their natural curiosities for knowledge, teachers must be aware of how their reactions to young children and the stresses of teaching influence this process.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Dewey's passions for teaching—a natural love for working with young children, a natural propensity to inquire about the subjects, methods and other social issues related to the profession, and a desire to share this acquired knowledge with others—are not a set of outwardly displayed mechanical skills. Rather, they may be viewed as internalized principles or habits which \"work automatically, unconsciously\" (Dewey, 1904, p. 15). According to Dewey, teacher-education programs must turn away from focusing on producing proficient practitioners because such practical skills related to instruction and discipline (e.g., creating and delivering lesson plans, classroom management, implementation of an assortment of content-specific methods) can be learned over time during their everyday schoolwork with their students (Dewey, PST, 2010).",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "As Dewey notes, \"The teacher who leaves the professional school with power in managing a class of children may appear to superior advantage the first day, the first week, the first month, or even the first year, as compared with some other teacher who has a much more vital command of the psychology, logic and ethics of development. But later 'progress' may consist only in perfecting and refining skill already possessed. Such persons seem to know how to teach, but they are not students of teaching. Even though they go on studying books of pedagogy, reading teachers' journals, attending teachers' institutes, etc., yet the root of the matter is not in them, unless they continue to be students of subject-matter, and students of mind-activity. Unless a teacher is such a student, he may continue to improve in the mechanics of school management, but he cannot grow as a teacher, an inspirer and director of soul-life\" (Dewey, 1904, p. 15).",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "For Dewey, teacher education should focus not on producing persons who know how to teach as soon as they leave the program; rather, teacher education should be concerned with producing professional students of education who have the propensity to inquire about the subjects they teach, the methods used, and the activity of the mind as it gives and receives knowledge. According to Dewey, such a student is not superficially engaging with these materials, rather, the professional student of education has a genuine passion to inquire about the subjects of education, knowing that doing so ultimately leads to acquisitions of the skills related to teaching. Such students of education aspire for the intellectual growth within the profession that can only be achieved by immersing oneself in the lifelong pursuit of the intelligence, skills and character Dewey linked to the profession.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "As Dewey notes, other professional fields, such as law and medicine cultivate a professional spirit in their fields to constantly study their work, their methods of their work, and a perpetual need for intellectual growth and concern for issues related to their profession. Teacher education, as a profession, has these same obligations (Dewey, 1904; Dewey, PST, 2010).",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "As Dewey notes, \"An intellectual responsibility has got to be distributed to every human being who is concerned in carrying out the work in question, and to attempt to concentrate intellectual responsibility for a work that has to be done, with their brains and their hearts, by hundreds or thousands of people in a dozen or so at the top, no matter how wise and skillful they are, is not to concentrate responsibility—it is to diffuse irresponsibility\" (Dewey, PST, 2010, p. 39). For Dewey, the professional spirit of teacher education requires of its students a constant study of school room work, constant study of children, of methods, of subject matter in its various adaptations to pupils. Such study will lead to professional enlightenment with regard to the daily operations of classroom teaching.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "As well as his very active and direct involvement in setting up educational institutions such as the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools (1896) and The New School for Social Research (1919), many of Dewey's ideas influenced the founding of Bennington College and Goddard College in Vermont, where he served on the board of trustees. Dewey's works and philosophy also held great influence in the creation of the short-lived Black Mountain College in North Carolina, an experimental college focused on interdisciplinary study, and whose faculty included Buckminster Fuller, Willem de Kooning, Charles Olson, Franz Kline, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and Paul Goodman, among others. Black Mountain College was the locus of the \"Black Mountain Poets\" a group of avant-garde poets closely linked with the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Dewey's definition of \"public,\" as described in The Public and its Problems, has profound implications for the significance of journalism in society. As suggested by the title of the book, his concern was of the transactional relationship between publics and problems. Also implicit in its name, public journalism seeks to orient communication away from elite, corporate hegemony toward a civic public sphere. \"The 'public' of public journalists is Dewey's public.\"",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Dewey gives a concrete definition to the formation of a public. Publics are spontaneous groups of citizens who share the indirect effects of a particular action. Anyone affected by the indirect consequences of a specific action will automatically share a common interest in controlling those consequences, i.e., solving a common problem.Since every action generates unintended consequences, publics continuously emerge, overlap, and disintegrate.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "In The Public and its Problems, Dewey presents a rebuttal to Walter Lippmann's treatise on the role of journalism in democracy. Lippmann's model was a basic transmission model in which journalists took information given to them by experts and elites, repackaged that information in simple terms, and transmitted the information to the public, whose role was to react emotionally to the news. In his model, Lippmann supposed that the public was incapable of thought or action, and that all thought and action should be left to the experts and elites.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Dewey refutes this model by assuming that politics is the work and duty of each individual in the course of his daily routine. The knowledge needed to be involved in politics, in this model, was to be generated by the interaction of citizens, elites, experts, through the mediation and facilitation of journalism. In this model, not just the government is accountable, but the citizens, experts, and other actors as well.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Dewey also said that journalism should conform to this ideal by changing its emphasis from actions or happenings (choosing a winner of a given situation) to alternatives, choices, consequences, and conditions, in order to foster conversation and improve the generation of knowledge. Journalism would not just produce a static product that told what had already happened, but the news would be in a constant state of evolution as the public added value by generating knowledge. The \"audience\" would end, to be replaced by citizens and collaborators who would essentially be users, doing more with the news than simply reading it. Concerning his effort to change journalism, he wrote in The Public and Its Problems: \"Till the Great Society is converted in to a Great Community, the Public will remain in eclipse. Communication can alone create a great community\" (Dewey, p. 142).",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Dewey believed that communication creates a great community, and citizens who participate actively with public life contribute to that community. \"The clear consciousness of a communal life, in all its implications, constitutes the idea of democracy.\" (The Public and its Problems, p. 149). This Great Community can only occur with \"free and full intercommunication.\" (p. 211) Communication can be understood as journalism.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Dewey sees paradox in contemporary logical theory. Proximate subject matter garners general agreement and advancement, while the ultimate subject matter of logic generates unremitting controversy. In other words, he challenges confident logicians to answer the question of the truth of logical operators. Do they function merely as abstractions (e.g., pure mathematics) or do they connect in some essential way with their objects, and therefore alter or bring them to light?",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Logical positivism also figured in Dewey's thought. About the movement he wrote that it \"eschews the use of 'propositions' and 'terms', substituting 'sentences' and 'words'.\" (\"General Theory of Propositions\", in Logic: The Theory of Inquiry) He welcomes this changing of referents \"in as far as it fixes attention upon the symbolic structure and content of propositions.\" However, he registers a small complaint against the use of \"sentence\" and \"words\" in that without careful interpretation the act or process of transposition \"narrows unduly the scope of symbols and language, since it is not customary to treat gestures and diagrams (maps, blueprints, etc.) as words or sentences.\" In other words, sentences and words, considered in isolation, do not disclose intent, which may be inferred or \"adjudged only by means of context.\"",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Yet Dewey was not entirely opposed to modern logical trends; indeed, the deficiencies in traditional logic he expressed hope for the trends to solve occupies the whole first part of same book. Concerning traditional logic, he states there:",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Aristotelian logic, which still passes current nominally, is a logic based upon the idea that qualitative objects are existential in the fullest sense. To retain logical principles based on this conception along with the acceptance of theories of existence and knowledge based on an opposite conception is not, to say the least, conductive to clearness—a consideration that has a good deal to do with existing dualism between traditional and the newer relational logics.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Louis Menand argues in The Metaphysical Club that Jane Addams had been critical of Dewey's emphasis on antagonism in the context of a discussion of the Pullman Strike of 1894. In a later letter to his wife, Dewey confessed that Addams' argument was:",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "... the most magnificent exhibition of intellectual & moral faith I ever saw. She converted me internally, but not really, I fear. ... When you think that Miss Addams does not think this as a philosophy, but believes it in all her senses & muscles—Great God ... I guess I'll have to give it [all] up & start over again.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "He went on to add:",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "I can see that I have always been interpreting dialectic wrong end up, the unity as the reconciliation of opposites, instead of the opposites as the unity in its growth, and thus translated the physical tension into a moral thing ... I don't know as I give the reality of this at all, ... it seems so natural & commonplace now, but I never had anything take hold of me so.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "In a letter to Addams, clearly influenced by his conversation with her, Dewey wrote:",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Not only is actual antagonizing bad, but the assumption that there is or may be antagonism is bad—in fact, the real first antagonism always comes back to the assumption.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Art as Experience (1934) is Dewey's major writing on aesthetics.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "It is, in accordance with his place in the Pragmatist tradition that emphasizes community, a study of the individual art object as embedded in (and inextricable from) the experiences of a local culture. In the original illustrated edition, Dewey drew on the modern art and world cultures collection assembled by Albert C. Barnes at the Barnes Foundation, whose own ideas on the application of art to one's way of life was influenced by Dewey's writing. Dewey made art through writing poetry, but he considered himself deeply unmusical: one of his students described Dewey as \"allergic to music.\" Barnes was particularly influenced by Democracy and Education (1916) and then attended Dewey's seminar on political philosophy at Columbia University in the fall semester of 1918.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Dewey founded the University of Chicago laboratory school, supported educational organizations, and supported settlement houses especially Jane Addams' Hull House.John Dewey and Jane Addams influenced each other's expansive theory of democracy.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Through his work at the Hull House serving on its first board of trustees, Dewey was not only an activist for the cause but also a partner working to serve the large immigrant community of Chicago and women's suffrage. Dewey experienced the lack of children's education while contributing in the classroom at the Hull House. There he also experienced the lack of education and skills of immigrant women. Stengel argues:",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Addams is unquestionably a maker of democratic community and pragmatic education; Dewey is just as unquestionably a reflector. Through her work at Hull House, Addams discerned the shape of democracy as a mode of associated living and uncovered the outlines of an experimental approach to knowledge and understanding; Dewey analyzed and classified the social, psychological and educational processes Addams lived.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "His leading views on democracy included:",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "First, Dewey believed that democracy is an ethical ideal rather than merely a political arrangement. Second, he considered participation, not representation, the essence of democracy. Third, he insisted on the harmony between democracy and the scientific method: ever-expanding and self-critical communities of inquiry, operating on pragmatic principles and constantly revising their beliefs in light of new evidence, provided Dewey with a model for democratic decision making ... Finally, Dewey called for extending democracy, conceived as an ethical project, from politics to industry and society.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "This helped to shape his understanding of human action and the unity of human experience.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "Dewey believed that a woman's place in society was determined by her environment and not just her biology. On women he says, \"You think too much of women in terms of sex. Think of them as human individuals for a while, dropping out the sex qualification, and you won't be so sure of some of your generalizations about what they should and shouldn't do\". John Dewey's support helped to increase the support and popularity of Jane Addams' Hull House and other settlement houses as well. With growing support, involvement of the community grew as well as the support for the women's suffrage movement.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "As commonly argued by Dewey's greatest critics, he was not able to come up with strategies in order to fulfill his ideas that would lead to a successful democracy, educational system, and a successful women's suffrage movement. While knowing that traditional beliefs, customs, and practices needed to be examined in order to find out what worked and what needed improved upon, it was never done in a systematic way. \"Dewey became increasingly aware of the obstacles presented by entrenched power and alert to the intricacy of the problems facing modern cultures\". With the complex of society at the time, Dewey was criticized for his lack of effort in fixing the problems.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "With respect to technological developments in a democracy:",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "Persons do not become a society by living in physical proximity any more than a man ceases to be socially influenced by being so many feet or miles removed from others.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "His work on democracy influenced B.R. Ambedkar, one of his students, who later served as a Law and Justice Minister of India.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Historians have examined his religious beliefs. Biographer Steven Clark Rockefeller traced Dewey's democratic convictions to his childhood attendance at the Congregational Church, with its strong proclamation of social ideals and the Social Gospel. Historian Edward A. White suggested in Science and Religion in American Thought (1952) that Dewey's work led to the 20th-century rift between religion and science.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "Dewey went through an \"evangelical\" development as a child. As an adult he was negative, or at most neutral, about theology in education. He instead took a meliorist position with the goal of scientific humanism and educational and social reform without recourse to religion.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "As an atheist and a secular humanist in his later life, Dewey participated with a variety of humanistic activities from the 1930s into the 1950s, which included sitting on the advisory board of Charles Francis Potter's First Humanist Society of New York (1929); being one of the original 34 signatories of the first Humanist Manifesto (1933) and being elected an honorary member of the Humanist Press Association (1936).",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "His opinion of humanism is summarized in his own words from an article titled \"What Humanism Means to Me\", published in the June 1930 edition of Thinker 2:",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "What Humanism means to me is an expansion, not a contraction, of human life, an expansion in which nature and the science of nature are made the willing servants of human good.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "Dewey sometimes referred to his philosophy as instrumentalism rather than pragmatism and would have recognized the similarity of these two schools to the newer school named consequentialism. In some phrases introducing a book he wrote later in life meant to help forestay a wandering kind of criticism of the work based on the controversies due to the differences in the schools that he sometimes invoked, he defined at the same time with precise brevity the criterion of validity common to these three schools, which lack agreed-upon definitions:",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "But in the proper interpretation of \"pragmatic,\" namely the function of consequences as necessary tests of the validity of propositions, provided these consequences are operationally instituted and are such as to resolve the specific problem evoking the operations, the text that follows is thoroughly pragmatic.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "His concern for precise definition led him to detailed analysis of careless word usage, reported in Knowing and the Known in 1949.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "The terminology problem in the fields of epistemology and logic is partially due, according to Dewey and Bentley, to inefficient and imprecise use of words and concepts that reflect three historic levels of organization and presentation. In the order of chronological appearance, these are:",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "A series of characterizations of Transactions indicate the wide range of considerations involved.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "While Dewey was at the University of Chicago, his letters to his wife Alice and his colleague Jane Addams reveal that he closely followed the 1894 Pullman Strike, in which the employees of the Pullman Palace Car Factory in Chicago decided to go on strike after industrialist George Pullman refused to lower rents in his company town after cutting his workers' wages by nearly 30 percent. On May 11, 1894, the strike became official, later gaining the support of the members of the American Railway Union, whose leader Eugene V. Debs called for a nationwide boycott of all trains including Pullman sleeping cars.",
"title": "Social and political activism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "Considering most trains had Pullman cars, the main 24 lines out of Chicago were halted and the mail was stopped as the workers destroyed trains all over the United States. President Grover Cleveland used the mail as a justification to send in the National Guard, and ARU leader Eugene Debs was arrested.",
"title": "Social and political activism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "Dewey wrote to Alice: \"The only wonder is that when the 'higher classes' – damn them – take such views there aren't more downright socialists. [...] [T]hat a representative journal of the upper classes – damn them again – can take the attitude of that harper's weekly\", referring to headlines such as \"Monopoly\" and \"Repress the Rebellion\", which claimed, in Dewey's words, to support the sensational belief that Debs was a \"criminal\" inspiring hate and violence in the equally \"criminal\" working classes. He concluded: \"It shows what it is to be a higher class. And I fear Chicago Univ. is a capitalistic institution – that is, it too belongs to the higher classes\".",
"title": "Social and political activism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "Dewey was an advocate of US participation in the First World War. For this he was criticised by Randolph Bourne, a former student whose essay \"Twilight of Idols\", was published in the literary journal Seven Arts in October 1917. Bourne criticised Dewey's instrumental pragmatist philosophy.",
"title": "Social and political activism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "As a major advocate of academic freedom, in 1935 Dewey, together with Albert Einstein and Alvin Johnson, became a member of the United States section of the International League for Academic Freedom, and in 1940, together with Horace M Kallen, edited a series of articles related to the Bertrand Russell Case.",
"title": "Social and political activism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "He directed the famous Dewey Commission held in Mexico in 1937, which cleared Leon Trotsky of the charges made against him by Joseph Stalin, and marched for women's rights, among many other causes.",
"title": "Social and political activism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "In 1939, Dewey was elected President of the League for Industrial Democracy, an organization with the goal of educating college students about the labor movement. The Student Branch of the L.I.D. would later become Students for a Democratic Society.",
"title": "Social and political activism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "As well as defending the independence of teachers and opposing a communist takeover of the New York Teachers' Union, Dewey was involved in the organization that eventually became the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, sitting as an executive on the NAACP's early executive board. He was an avid supporter of Henry George's proposal for taxing land values. Of George, he wrote, \"No man, no graduate of a higher educational institution, has a right to regard himself as an educated man in social thought unless he has some first-hand acquaintance with the theoretical contribution of this great American thinker.\" As honorary president of the Henry George School of Social Science, he wrote a letter to Henry Ford urging him to support the school.",
"title": "Social and political activism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "Besides publishing prolifically himself, Dewey also sat on the boards of scientific publications such as Sociometry (advisory board, 1942) and Journal of Social Psychology (editorial board, 1942), as well as having posts at other publications such as New Leader (contributing editor, 1949).",
"title": "Publications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "The following publications by John Dewey are referenced or mentioned in this article. A more complete list of his publications may be found at List of publications by John Dewey.",
"title": "Publications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "See also",
"title": "Publications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "Dewey's Complete Writings is available in four multi-volume sets (38 volumes in all) from Southern Illinois University Press:",
"title": "Publications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "The Collected Works of John Dewey: 1882–1953, The Correspondence of John Dewey 1871–1952, and The Lectures of John Dewey are available online via monographic purchase to academic institutions and via subscription to individuals, and also in TEI format for university servers in the Past Masters series. (The CD-ROM has been discontinued.)",
"title": "Publications"
}
]
| John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer. He was one of the most prominent American scholars in the first half of the twentieth century. The overriding theme of Dewey's works was his profound belief in democracy, be it in politics, education, or communication and journalism. As Dewey himself stated in 1888, while still at the University of Michigan, "Democracy and the one, ultimate, ethical ideal of humanity are to my mind synonymous." Dewey considered two fundamental elements—schools and civil society—to be major topics needing attention and reconstruction to encourage experimental intelligence and plurality. He asserted that complete democracy was to be obtained not just by extending voting rights but also by ensuring that there exists a fully formed public opinion, accomplished by communication among citizens, experts and politicians. Dewey was one of the primary figures associated with the philosophy of pragmatism and is considered one of the founding thinkers of functional psychology. His paper "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology", published in 1896, is regarded as the first major work in the (Chicago) functionalist school of psychology. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Dewey as the 93rd-most-cited psychologist of the 20th century. Dewey was also a major educational reformer for the 20th century. A well-known public intellectual, he was a major voice of progressive education and liberalism. While a professor at the University of Chicago, he founded the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where he was able to apply and test his progressive ideas on pedagogical method. Although Dewey is known best for his publications about education, he also wrote about many other topics, including epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, art, logic, social theory, and ethics. | 2001-10-05T21:12:26Z | 2023-12-29T12:31:14Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey |
16,188 | Jackal | Jackals are medium-sized canids native to Africa and Eurasia. While the word "jackal" has historically been used for many canines of the subtribe canina, in modern use it most commonly refers to three species: the closely related black-backed jackal (Lupulella mesomelas) and side-striped jackal (Lupulella adusta) of sub-Saharan Africa, and the golden jackal (Canis aureus) of south-central Europe and Asia. The African golden wolf (Canis lupaster) was also formerly considered as a jackal.
While they do not form a monophyletic clade, all jackals are opportunistic omnivores, predators of small to medium-sized animals and proficient scavengers. Their long legs and curved canine teeth are adapted for hunting small mammals, birds, and reptiles, and their large feet and fused leg bones give them a physique well-suited for long-distance running, capable of maintaining speeds of 16 km/h (10 mph) for extended periods of time. Jackals are crepuscular, most active at dawn and dusk.
Their most common social unit is a monogamous pair, which defends its territory from other pairs by vigorously chasing intruders and marking landmarks around the territory with their urine and feces. The territory may be large enough to hold some young adults, which stay with their parents until they establish their own territories. Jackals may occasionally assemble in small packs, for example, to scavenge a carcass, but they normally hunt either alone or in pairs.
The English word "jackal" dates back to 1600 and derives from the French chacal, from Turkish çakal, derived from the Persian شغال shoghāl, which is in turn derived from the Sanskrit शृगाल śṛgāla meaning "the howler".
Similarities between jackals and coyotes led Lorenz Oken, in the third volume of his Lehrbuch der Naturgeschichte (1815), to place these species into a new separate genus, Thos, named after the classical Greek word θώς "jackal", but his theory had little immediate impact on taxonomy at the time. Angel Cabrera, in his 1932 monograph on the mammals of Morocco, questioned whether or not the presence of a cingulum on the upper molars of the jackals and its corresponding absence in the rest of Canis could justify a subdivision of that genus. In practice, Cabrera chose the undivided-genus alternative and referred to the jackals as Canis instead of Thos.
Oken's Thos theory was revived in 1914 by Edmund Heller, who embraced the separate genus theory. Heller's names and the designations he gave to various jackal species and subspecies live on in current taxonomy, although the genus has been changed from Thos to Canis.
The wolf-like canids are a group of large carnivores that are genetically closely related because they all have 78 chromosomes. The group includes genus Canis, Cuon, and Lycaon. The members are the dog (C. lupus familiaris), gray wolf (C. lupus), coyote (C. latrans), golden jackal (C. aureus), Ethiopian wolf (C. simensis), black-backed jackal (C. mesomelas), side-striped jackal (C. adustus), dhole (Cuon alpinus), and African wild dog (Lycaon pictus). The latest recognized member is the African wolf (C. lupaster), which was once thought to be an African branch of the golden jackal. As they possess 78 chromosomes, all members of the genus Canis are karyologically indistinguishable from each other, and from the dhole and the African hunting dog. The two African jackals are shown to be the most basal members of this clade, indicating the clade's origin from Africa. Canis arnensis arrived in Mediterranean Europe 1.9 million years ago and is probably the ancestor of modern jackals.
The paraphyletic nature of Canis with respect to Lycaon and Cuon has led to suggestions that the two African jackals should be assigned to different genera, Schaeffia for the side-striped jackal and Lupulella for the black-backed jackal or Lupulella for both.
The intermediate size and shape of the Ethiopian wolf has at times led it to be regarded as a jackal, thus it has also been called the "red jackal" or the "Simien jackal".
Like foxes and coyotes, jackals are often depicted as clever sorcerers in the myths and legends of their regions. They are mentioned roughly 14 times in the Bible. It is frequently used as a literary device to illustrate desolation, loneliness, and abandonment, with reference to its habit of living in the ruins of former cities and other areas abandoned by humans. It is called "wild dog" in several translations of the Bible. In the King James Bible, Isaiah 13:21 refers to 'doleful creatures', which some commentators suggest are either jackals or hyenas.
In the Indian Panchatantra stories, the jackal is mentioned as wily and wise. In Bengali tantrik tradition, they represent the goddess Kali. It is said she appears as jackals when meat is offered to her.
The Serer religion and creation myth posits jackals were among the first animals created by Roog, the supreme deity of the Serer people. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Jackals are medium-sized canids native to Africa and Eurasia. While the word \"jackal\" has historically been used for many canines of the subtribe canina, in modern use it most commonly refers to three species: the closely related black-backed jackal (Lupulella mesomelas) and side-striped jackal (Lupulella adusta) of sub-Saharan Africa, and the golden jackal (Canis aureus) of south-central Europe and Asia. The African golden wolf (Canis lupaster) was also formerly considered as a jackal.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "While they do not form a monophyletic clade, all jackals are opportunistic omnivores, predators of small to medium-sized animals and proficient scavengers. Their long legs and curved canine teeth are adapted for hunting small mammals, birds, and reptiles, and their large feet and fused leg bones give them a physique well-suited for long-distance running, capable of maintaining speeds of 16 km/h (10 mph) for extended periods of time. Jackals are crepuscular, most active at dawn and dusk.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Their most common social unit is a monogamous pair, which defends its territory from other pairs by vigorously chasing intruders and marking landmarks around the territory with their urine and feces. The territory may be large enough to hold some young adults, which stay with their parents until they establish their own territories. Jackals may occasionally assemble in small packs, for example, to scavenge a carcass, but they normally hunt either alone or in pairs.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The English word \"jackal\" dates back to 1600 and derives from the French chacal, from Turkish çakal, derived from the Persian شغال shoghāl, which is in turn derived from the Sanskrit शृगाल śṛgāla meaning \"the howler\".",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Similarities between jackals and coyotes led Lorenz Oken, in the third volume of his Lehrbuch der Naturgeschichte (1815), to place these species into a new separate genus, Thos, named after the classical Greek word θώς \"jackal\", but his theory had little immediate impact on taxonomy at the time. Angel Cabrera, in his 1932 monograph on the mammals of Morocco, questioned whether or not the presence of a cingulum on the upper molars of the jackals and its corresponding absence in the rest of Canis could justify a subdivision of that genus. In practice, Cabrera chose the undivided-genus alternative and referred to the jackals as Canis instead of Thos.",
"title": "Taxonomy and relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Oken's Thos theory was revived in 1914 by Edmund Heller, who embraced the separate genus theory. Heller's names and the designations he gave to various jackal species and subspecies live on in current taxonomy, although the genus has been changed from Thos to Canis.",
"title": "Taxonomy and relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The wolf-like canids are a group of large carnivores that are genetically closely related because they all have 78 chromosomes. The group includes genus Canis, Cuon, and Lycaon. The members are the dog (C. lupus familiaris), gray wolf (C. lupus), coyote (C. latrans), golden jackal (C. aureus), Ethiopian wolf (C. simensis), black-backed jackal (C. mesomelas), side-striped jackal (C. adustus), dhole (Cuon alpinus), and African wild dog (Lycaon pictus). The latest recognized member is the African wolf (C. lupaster), which was once thought to be an African branch of the golden jackal. As they possess 78 chromosomes, all members of the genus Canis are karyologically indistinguishable from each other, and from the dhole and the African hunting dog. The two African jackals are shown to be the most basal members of this clade, indicating the clade's origin from Africa. Canis arnensis arrived in Mediterranean Europe 1.9 million years ago and is probably the ancestor of modern jackals.",
"title": "Taxonomy and relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The paraphyletic nature of Canis with respect to Lycaon and Cuon has led to suggestions that the two African jackals should be assigned to different genera, Schaeffia for the side-striped jackal and Lupulella for the black-backed jackal or Lupulella for both.",
"title": "Taxonomy and relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The intermediate size and shape of the Ethiopian wolf has at times led it to be regarded as a jackal, thus it has also been called the \"red jackal\" or the \"Simien jackal\".",
"title": "Taxonomy and relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Like foxes and coyotes, jackals are often depicted as clever sorcerers in the myths and legends of their regions. They are mentioned roughly 14 times in the Bible. It is frequently used as a literary device to illustrate desolation, loneliness, and abandonment, with reference to its habit of living in the ruins of former cities and other areas abandoned by humans. It is called \"wild dog\" in several translations of the Bible. In the King James Bible, Isaiah 13:21 refers to 'doleful creatures', which some commentators suggest are either jackals or hyenas.",
"title": "Folklore and literature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In the Indian Panchatantra stories, the jackal is mentioned as wily and wise. In Bengali tantrik tradition, they represent the goddess Kali. It is said she appears as jackals when meat is offered to her.",
"title": "Folklore and literature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The Serer religion and creation myth posits jackals were among the first animals created by Roog, the supreme deity of the Serer people.",
"title": "Folklore and literature"
}
]
| Jackals are medium-sized canids native to Africa and Eurasia. While the word "jackal" has historically been used for many canines of the subtribe canina, in modern use it most commonly refers to three species: the closely related black-backed jackal and side-striped jackal of sub-Saharan Africa, and the golden jackal of south-central Europe and Asia. The African golden wolf was also formerly considered as a jackal. While they do not form a monophyletic clade, all jackals are opportunistic omnivores, predators of small to medium-sized animals and proficient scavengers. Their long legs and curved canine teeth are adapted for hunting small mammals, birds, and reptiles, and their large feet and fused leg bones give them a physique well-suited for long-distance running, capable of maintaining speeds of 16 km/h (10 mph) for extended periods of time. Jackals are crepuscular, most active at dawn and dusk. Their most common social unit is a monogamous pair, which defends its territory from other pairs by vigorously chasing intruders and marking landmarks around the territory with their urine and feces. The territory may be large enough to hold some young adults, which stay with their parents until they establish their own territories. Jackals may occasionally assemble in small packs, for example, to scavenge a carcass, but they normally hunt either alone or in pairs. | 2001-10-06T11:28:29Z | 2023-11-02T11:14:22Z | [
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16,190 | Jumping the broom | Jumping the broom (or jumping the besom) is a phrase and custom relating to a wedding ceremony in which the couple jumps over a broom. It is most widespread among African Americans and Black Canadians, popularized during the 1970s by the novel and miniseries Roots, and originated in mid-19th-century antebellum slavery in the United States. The custom is also attested in Irish weddings.
Possibly based on an 18th-century idiomatic synonym for a sham marriage (a marriage of doubtful validity), it was popularized with the introduction of civil marriage in Britain by the Marriage Act 1836. The expression may also derive from the custom of jumping over a besom ("broom" refers to the plant from which the household implement is made) associated with the Romanichal Travellers of the United Kingdom, especially those in Wales.
References to "broomstick marriages" emerged in England during the mid-to-late 18th century to describe a wedding ceremony of doubtful validity. The earliest use of the phrase is in the 1764 English edition of a French work. The French text, describing an elopement, refers to the runaway couple hastily embarking on "un mariage sur la croix de l'épée" (literally "marriage on the cross of the sword"); this was freely translated as "performed the marriage ceremony by leaping over a broomstick".
A 1774 use in the Westminster Magazine also describes an elopement. A man brought his underage fiancée to France and discovered that it was as difficult to arrange a legal marriage there as in England, but declined a suggestion that a French sexton might simply read the marriage service before the couple because "He had no inclination for a Broomstick-marriage". In 1789, the rumoured clandestine marriage between the Prince Regent and Maria Fitzherbert is cited in a satirical song in The Times: "Their way to consummation was by hopping o'er a broom, sir".
Despite these allusions, research by legal historian Rebecca Probert of Warwick University has failed to find evidence of an actual contemporary practice of jumping over a broomstick as a sign of informal union. Probert says that the word broomstick was used in the mid-18th century in several contexts to mean "something ersatz, or lacking the authority its true equivalent might possess"; because the expression broomstick marriage (a sham marriage) was in circulation, folk etymology led to a belief that people once signified an irregular marriage by jumping over a broom. American historian Tyler D. Parry, however, contests the claim that no part of the British custom involved jumping. In his book, Jumping the Broom: The Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual, Parry writes that African Americans and British Americans had a number of cultural exchanges during the 18th and 19th centuries. He describes correlations between the ceremonies of enslaved African Americans and those of the rural British, saying that it is not coincidental that two groups separated by an ocean used similar matrimonial forms revolving around a broomstick. If British practitioners never used a physical leap, Parry wonders how European-Americans and enslaved African Americans in the American South and rural North America learned about the custom.
Later examples of the term broomstick marriage were used in Britain, with the similar implication that the ceremony did not create a legally-binding union. This meaning survived into the early 19th century; during an 1824 case in London about the legal validity of a marriage ceremony consisting of the groom placing a ring on the bride's finger before witnesses, a court official said that the ceremony "amounted to nothing more than a broomstick marriage, which the parties had it in their power to dissolve at will."
The Marriage Act 1836, which introduced civil marriage, was contemptuously called the "Broomstick Marriage Act" by those who felt that a marriage outside the Anglican church did not deserve legal recognition. The phrase began to refer to non-marital unions; a man interviewed in Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor said, "I never had a wife, but I have had two or three broomstick matches, though they never turned out happy." Tinkers reportedly had a similar marriage custom, "jumping the budget", with the bride and groom jumping over a string or other symbolic obstacle.
Charles Dickens' novel, Great Expectations (first published in serial form in All the Year Round from 1 December 1860 to August 1861), contains a reference in chapter 48 to a couple's marriage "over the broomstick." The ceremony is not described, but the reference indicates that readers would have recognized this as an informal (not legally valid) agreement.
Although it has been assumed that "jumping (or, sometimes, 'walking') over the broom" always indicated an irregular or non-church union in England (as in the expressions "Married over the besom" and "living over the brush"), examples of the phrase exist in the context of legal religious and civil weddings. Other sources cite stepping over a broom as a test of chastity, and putting out a broom was said to be a sign "that the housewife's place is vacant" as a way of advertising for a wife. The phrase was also used colloquially in the US and Canada as a synonym for getting married legally.
Romani couples in Wales would elope, when they would "jump the broom", or jump over a branch of flowering common broom or a besom made of broom. Welsh Kale and Romanichals in England and Scotland practiced the ritual into the 1900s. According to Alan Dundes (1996), the custom originated among the Welsh Kale and English Romanichals.
C.W. Sullivan III (1997) replied to Dundes that the custom originated among the Welsh people, and was known as a priodas coes ysgub ("besom wedding"). Sullivan's source is Welsh folklorist Gwenith Gwynn (also known as W. Rhys Jones), who assumed that the custom had existed on the basis of conversations with elderly Welsh people during the 1920s (none of whom, however, had seen it). One said, "It must have disappeared before I was born, and I am seventy-three". Gwynn's dating of the custom to the 18th century rested on the assumption that it must have disappeared before the elderly interviewees were born, and on his misreading of the Llansantffraid Glyn Ceiriog parish baptismal register.
Local variations of the custom developed in portions of England and Wales. Instead of placing the broom on the ground and jumping together, the broom was placed at an angle by the doorway; the groom jumped first, followed by the bride. In southwest England, Wales and the border areas between Scotland and England, "[while some] couples ... agreed to marry verbally, without exchanging legal contracts[,] ... [o]thers jumped over broomsticks placed across their thresholds to officialize their union and create new households"; this indicated that contract-less weddings and jumping a broomstick were different kinds of marriage.
In some African-American and Black-Canadian communities, couples end their wedding ceremony by jumping over a broomstick together or separately. The practice is documented as a marriage ceremony for enslaved people in the Southern United States during the 1840s and 1850s, who were often not permitted to marry legally. Its revival in 20th-century African-American and Black-Canadian culture is due to the novel and miniseries Roots (1976, 1977). Alan Dundes (1996) notes how "a custom which slaves were forced to observe by their white masters has been revived a century later by African Americans as a treasured tradition".
It has been speculated that the custom may have originated in West Africa. Although there is no direct evidence of this, Dundes cites a Ghanaian custom of waving brooms over the heads of newlyweds and their parents. Among southern Africans – who were largely not a part of the Atlantic slave trade – it represented a wife's commitment (or willingness) to clean the courtyard of her new home. Historian Tyler D. Parry, in Jumping the Broom: The Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual, considers the Ghanaian connection weak; the ritual used by enslaved people has many more similarities to the custom in the British Isles. Parry writes that despite the racial animus which characterized the US South during the nineteenth century, poor white Southerners (many of whom were descendants of people who had irregular forms of matrimony in Britain) and enslaved African Americans had more cultural exchange than is commonly acknowledged.
Slaveholders had a dilemma about committed relationships between enslaved people. Although family stability might be desirable to keep enslaved people tractable and pacified, legal marriage was not; marriage gave a couple rights over each other which conflicted with slaveholderer claims. Most marriages between enslaved black people were not legally recognized during the American slavery era; marriage was a legal civil contract, and civil contracts required the consent of free persons. In the absence of legal recognition, the enslaved community developed its own methods of distinguishing committed unions from casual ones. The ceremonial jumping of the broom was an open declaration of settling down in a marriage relationship. Jumping the broom was done before witnesses as a public, ceremonial announcement that a couple chose to become as nearly married as was then allowed. There are records of African Americans jumping the broom in slave narratives. An ex-slave from Georgia, George Eason, said how enslaved people jumped the broom to get married.
Jumping the broom fell out of practice when Black people were free to marry legally. The practice survived in some communities, and the phrase "jumping the broom" was synonymous with "getting married" even if the couple did not literally do so. After its smaller-scale continuity in rural areas of the United States (in Black and white communities), the custom was revivied among African Americans after the publication of Alex Haley's Roots. Danita Rountree Green describes the African-American custom during the early 1990s in her book, Broom Jumping: A Celebration of Love (1992).
American singer-songwriter Brenda Lee released the rockabilly song "Let's Jump the Broomstick" on Decca Records in 1959. Via its association with Wales and the association of the broom with witches, the custom has been adopted by some Wiccans. Jumping the Broom, a film starring Paula Patton and Laz Alonso and directed by Salim Akil, was released on 6 May 2011.
In the 1977 TV miniseries Roots, Kunta Kinte/"Toby" (John Amos as the adult Kunta Kinte) had a marriage ceremony in which he and Belle (Madge Sinclair) jumped the broom. It also appears in episode two of the 2016 miniseries remake, when Kunta Kinte questions its African origins. An engaged couple jumps a broom in the 2016 film, The Birth of a Nation. Lance (Morris Chestnut) and Mia (Monica Calhoun) jump over the broom after they get married in The Best Man (1999).
In "R & B", an episode of This Is Us, Randal and Beth jump the broom while walking down the aisle after their wedding ceremony in a flashback. In "Things We Said Today", an episode of Grey's Anatomy, Miranda Bailey and Ben Warren jump over a broom at the end of their wedding ceremony. Amani and Woody jump the broom at the end of their wedding in a 2020 episode of Married at First Sight. In the first act of August Wilson's play, The Piano Lesson, Doaker says: "See that? That's when him and Mama Berniece got married. They called it jumping the broom. That's how you got married in them days." Jarette and Iyanna jump the broom at the end of their wedding in a 2022 episode of Love Is Blind. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Jumping the broom (or jumping the besom) is a phrase and custom relating to a wedding ceremony in which the couple jumps over a broom. It is most widespread among African Americans and Black Canadians, popularized during the 1970s by the novel and miniseries Roots, and originated in mid-19th-century antebellum slavery in the United States. The custom is also attested in Irish weddings.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Possibly based on an 18th-century idiomatic synonym for a sham marriage (a marriage of doubtful validity), it was popularized with the introduction of civil marriage in Britain by the Marriage Act 1836. The expression may also derive from the custom of jumping over a besom (\"broom\" refers to the plant from which the household implement is made) associated with the Romanichal Travellers of the United Kingdom, especially those in Wales.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "References to \"broomstick marriages\" emerged in England during the mid-to-late 18th century to describe a wedding ceremony of doubtful validity. The earliest use of the phrase is in the 1764 English edition of a French work. The French text, describing an elopement, refers to the runaway couple hastily embarking on \"un mariage sur la croix de l'épée\" (literally \"marriage on the cross of the sword\"); this was freely translated as \"performed the marriage ceremony by leaping over a broomstick\".",
"title": "Euphemism for irregular marriage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "A 1774 use in the Westminster Magazine also describes an elopement. A man brought his underage fiancée to France and discovered that it was as difficult to arrange a legal marriage there as in England, but declined a suggestion that a French sexton might simply read the marriage service before the couple because \"He had no inclination for a Broomstick-marriage\". In 1789, the rumoured clandestine marriage between the Prince Regent and Maria Fitzherbert is cited in a satirical song in The Times: \"Their way to consummation was by hopping o'er a broom, sir\".",
"title": "Euphemism for irregular marriage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Despite these allusions, research by legal historian Rebecca Probert of Warwick University has failed to find evidence of an actual contemporary practice of jumping over a broomstick as a sign of informal union. Probert says that the word broomstick was used in the mid-18th century in several contexts to mean \"something ersatz, or lacking the authority its true equivalent might possess\"; because the expression broomstick marriage (a sham marriage) was in circulation, folk etymology led to a belief that people once signified an irregular marriage by jumping over a broom. American historian Tyler D. Parry, however, contests the claim that no part of the British custom involved jumping. In his book, Jumping the Broom: The Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual, Parry writes that African Americans and British Americans had a number of cultural exchanges during the 18th and 19th centuries. He describes correlations between the ceremonies of enslaved African Americans and those of the rural British, saying that it is not coincidental that two groups separated by an ocean used similar matrimonial forms revolving around a broomstick. If British practitioners never used a physical leap, Parry wonders how European-Americans and enslaved African Americans in the American South and rural North America learned about the custom.",
"title": "Euphemism for irregular marriage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Later examples of the term broomstick marriage were used in Britain, with the similar implication that the ceremony did not create a legally-binding union. This meaning survived into the early 19th century; during an 1824 case in London about the legal validity of a marriage ceremony consisting of the groom placing a ring on the bride's finger before witnesses, a court official said that the ceremony \"amounted to nothing more than a broomstick marriage, which the parties had it in their power to dissolve at will.\"",
"title": "Euphemism for irregular marriage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The Marriage Act 1836, which introduced civil marriage, was contemptuously called the \"Broomstick Marriage Act\" by those who felt that a marriage outside the Anglican church did not deserve legal recognition. The phrase began to refer to non-marital unions; a man interviewed in Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor said, \"I never had a wife, but I have had two or three broomstick matches, though they never turned out happy.\" Tinkers reportedly had a similar marriage custom, \"jumping the budget\", with the bride and groom jumping over a string or other symbolic obstacle.",
"title": "Euphemism for irregular marriage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Charles Dickens' novel, Great Expectations (first published in serial form in All the Year Round from 1 December 1860 to August 1861), contains a reference in chapter 48 to a couple's marriage \"over the broomstick.\" The ceremony is not described, but the reference indicates that readers would have recognized this as an informal (not legally valid) agreement.",
"title": "Euphemism for irregular marriage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Although it has been assumed that \"jumping (or, sometimes, 'walking') over the broom\" always indicated an irregular or non-church union in England (as in the expressions \"Married over the besom\" and \"living over the brush\"), examples of the phrase exist in the context of legal religious and civil weddings. Other sources cite stepping over a broom as a test of chastity, and putting out a broom was said to be a sign \"that the housewife's place is vacant\" as a way of advertising for a wife. The phrase was also used colloquially in the US and Canada as a synonym for getting married legally.",
"title": "Euphemism for irregular marriage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Romani couples in Wales would elope, when they would \"jump the broom\", or jump over a branch of flowering common broom or a besom made of broom. Welsh Kale and Romanichals in England and Scotland practiced the ritual into the 1900s. According to Alan Dundes (1996), the custom originated among the Welsh Kale and English Romanichals.",
"title": "British Romani customs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "C.W. Sullivan III (1997) replied to Dundes that the custom originated among the Welsh people, and was known as a priodas coes ysgub (\"besom wedding\"). Sullivan's source is Welsh folklorist Gwenith Gwynn (also known as W. Rhys Jones), who assumed that the custom had existed on the basis of conversations with elderly Welsh people during the 1920s (none of whom, however, had seen it). One said, \"It must have disappeared before I was born, and I am seventy-three\". Gwynn's dating of the custom to the 18th century rested on the assumption that it must have disappeared before the elderly interviewees were born, and on his misreading of the Llansantffraid Glyn Ceiriog parish baptismal register.",
"title": "British Romani customs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Local variations of the custom developed in portions of England and Wales. Instead of placing the broom on the ground and jumping together, the broom was placed at an angle by the doorway; the groom jumped first, followed by the bride. In southwest England, Wales and the border areas between Scotland and England, \"[while some] couples ... agreed to marry verbally, without exchanging legal contracts[,] ... [o]thers jumped over broomsticks placed across their thresholds to officialize their union and create new households\"; this indicated that contract-less weddings and jumping a broomstick were different kinds of marriage.",
"title": "British Romani customs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In some African-American and Black-Canadian communities, couples end their wedding ceremony by jumping over a broomstick together or separately. The practice is documented as a marriage ceremony for enslaved people in the Southern United States during the 1840s and 1850s, who were often not permitted to marry legally. Its revival in 20th-century African-American and Black-Canadian culture is due to the novel and miniseries Roots (1976, 1977). Alan Dundes (1996) notes how \"a custom which slaves were forced to observe by their white masters has been revived a century later by African Americans as a treasured tradition\".",
"title": "African-American and Black-Canadian custom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "It has been speculated that the custom may have originated in West Africa. Although there is no direct evidence of this, Dundes cites a Ghanaian custom of waving brooms over the heads of newlyweds and their parents. Among southern Africans – who were largely not a part of the Atlantic slave trade – it represented a wife's commitment (or willingness) to clean the courtyard of her new home. Historian Tyler D. Parry, in Jumping the Broom: The Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual, considers the Ghanaian connection weak; the ritual used by enslaved people has many more similarities to the custom in the British Isles. Parry writes that despite the racial animus which characterized the US South during the nineteenth century, poor white Southerners (many of whom were descendants of people who had irregular forms of matrimony in Britain) and enslaved African Americans had more cultural exchange than is commonly acknowledged.",
"title": "African-American and Black-Canadian custom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Slaveholders had a dilemma about committed relationships between enslaved people. Although family stability might be desirable to keep enslaved people tractable and pacified, legal marriage was not; marriage gave a couple rights over each other which conflicted with slaveholderer claims. Most marriages between enslaved black people were not legally recognized during the American slavery era; marriage was a legal civil contract, and civil contracts required the consent of free persons. In the absence of legal recognition, the enslaved community developed its own methods of distinguishing committed unions from casual ones. The ceremonial jumping of the broom was an open declaration of settling down in a marriage relationship. Jumping the broom was done before witnesses as a public, ceremonial announcement that a couple chose to become as nearly married as was then allowed. There are records of African Americans jumping the broom in slave narratives. An ex-slave from Georgia, George Eason, said how enslaved people jumped the broom to get married.",
"title": "African-American and Black-Canadian custom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Jumping the broom fell out of practice when Black people were free to marry legally. The practice survived in some communities, and the phrase \"jumping the broom\" was synonymous with \"getting married\" even if the couple did not literally do so. After its smaller-scale continuity in rural areas of the United States (in Black and white communities), the custom was revivied among African Americans after the publication of Alex Haley's Roots. Danita Rountree Green describes the African-American custom during the early 1990s in her book, Broom Jumping: A Celebration of Love (1992).",
"title": "African-American and Black-Canadian custom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "American singer-songwriter Brenda Lee released the rockabilly song \"Let's Jump the Broomstick\" on Decca Records in 1959. Via its association with Wales and the association of the broom with witches, the custom has been adopted by some Wiccans. Jumping the Broom, a film starring Paula Patton and Laz Alonso and directed by Salim Akil, was released on 6 May 2011.",
"title": "In popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In the 1977 TV miniseries Roots, Kunta Kinte/\"Toby\" (John Amos as the adult Kunta Kinte) had a marriage ceremony in which he and Belle (Madge Sinclair) jumped the broom. It also appears in episode two of the 2016 miniseries remake, when Kunta Kinte questions its African origins. An engaged couple jumps a broom in the 2016 film, The Birth of a Nation. Lance (Morris Chestnut) and Mia (Monica Calhoun) jump over the broom after they get married in The Best Man (1999).",
"title": "In popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In \"R & B\", an episode of This Is Us, Randal and Beth jump the broom while walking down the aisle after their wedding ceremony in a flashback. In \"Things We Said Today\", an episode of Grey's Anatomy, Miranda Bailey and Ben Warren jump over a broom at the end of their wedding ceremony. Amani and Woody jump the broom at the end of their wedding in a 2020 episode of Married at First Sight. In the first act of August Wilson's play, The Piano Lesson, Doaker says: \"See that? That's when him and Mama Berniece got married. They called it jumping the broom. That's how you got married in them days.\" Jarette and Iyanna jump the broom at the end of their wedding in a 2022 episode of Love Is Blind.",
"title": "In popular culture"
}
]
| Jumping the broom is a phrase and custom relating to a wedding ceremony in which the couple jumps over a broom. It is most widespread among African Americans and Black Canadians, popularized during the 1970s by the novel and miniseries Roots, and originated in mid-19th-century antebellum slavery in the United States. The custom is also attested in Irish weddings. Possibly based on an 18th-century idiomatic synonym for a sham marriage, it was popularized with the introduction of civil marriage in Britain by the Marriage Act 1836. The expression may also derive from the custom of jumping over a besom associated with the Romanichal Travellers of the United Kingdom, especially those in Wales. | 2001-10-08T03:25:10Z | 2023-12-18T15:09:18Z | [
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16,191 | January 13 | January 13 is the 13th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 352 days remain until the end of the year (353 in leap years). | [
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"text": "January 13 is the 13th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 352 days remain until the end of the year (353 in leap years).",
"title": ""
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| January 13 is the 13th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 352 days remain until the end of the year. | 2001-10-15T15:01:14Z | 2023-11-29T20:22:26Z | [
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16,192 | January 14 | January 14 is the 14th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 351 days remain until the end of the year (352 in leap years).
In the 20th and 21st centuries the Julian calendar is 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar, thus January 14 is sometimes celebrated as New Year's Day (Old New Year) by religious groups who use the Julian calendar. | [
{
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"text": "January 14 is the 14th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 351 days remain until the end of the year (352 in leap years).",
"title": ""
},
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"text": "In the 20th and 21st centuries the Julian calendar is 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar, thus January 14 is sometimes celebrated as New Year's Day (Old New Year) by religious groups who use the Julian calendar.",
"title": "Notes"
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| January 14 is the 14th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 351 days remain until the end of the year. | 2001-10-10T14:02:29Z | 2023-12-30T07:29:59Z | [
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16,193 | Jackie Robinson | Jack Roosevelt Robinson (January 31, 1919 – October 24, 1972) was an American professional baseball player who became the first African American to play in Major League Baseball (MLB) in the modern era. Robinson broke the color line when he started at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947. The Dodgers signing Robinson heralded the end of racial segregation in professional baseball that had relegated black players to the Negro leagues since the 1880s. Robinson was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962.
During his 10-year MLB career, Robinson won the inaugural Rookie of the Year Award in 1947, was an All-Star for six consecutive seasons from 1949 through 1954, and won the National League (NL) Most Valuable Player Award in 1949—the first black player so honored. Robinson played in six World Series and contributed to the Dodgers' 1955 World Series championship.
In 1997, Major League Baseball retired his uniform No. 42 across all major league teams; he was the first professional athlete in any sport to be so honored. MLB also adopted a new annual tradition, "Jackie Robinson Day", for the first time on April 15, 2004, on which every player on every team wears No. 42.
Robinson's character, his use of nonviolence, and his talent challenged the traditional basis of segregation that had then marked many other aspects of American life. He influenced the culture of and contributed significantly to the civil rights movement. Robinson also was the first black television analyst in MLB and the first black vice president of a major American corporation, Chock full o'Nuts. In the 1960s, he helped establish the Freedom National Bank, an African-American-owned financial institution based in Harlem, New York. After his death in 1972, Robinson was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal and Presidential Medal of Freedom in recognition of his achievements on and off the field.
Jack Roosevelt Robinson was born on January 31, 1919, into a family of sharecroppers in Cairo, Georgia. He was the youngest of five children born to Mallie (née McGriff) and Jerry Robinson, after siblings Edgar, Frank, Matthew (nicknamed "Mack"), and Willa Mae. His middle name honored former President Theodore Roosevelt, who died 25 days before Robinson was born. After Robinson's father left the family in 1920, they moved to Pasadena, California.
The extended Robinson family established itself on a residential plot containing two small houses at 121 Pepper Street in Pasadena. Robinson's mother worked various odd jobs to support the family. Growing up in relative poverty in an otherwise affluent community, Robinson and his minority friends were excluded from many recreational opportunities. As a result, Robinson joined a neighborhood gang, but his friend Carl Anderson persuaded him to abandon it.
In 1935, Robinson graduated from Washington Junior High School and enrolled at John Muir Technical High School. Recognizing his athletic talents, Robinson's older brothers, Frank and Mack (himself an accomplished track and field athlete and silver medalist behind Jesse Owens in the 200 meters at the Berlin 1936 Summer Olympics) inspired Jackie to pursue his interest in sports.
At Muir Tech, Robinson played numerous sports at the varsity level and lettered in four of them: football, basketball, track and field, and baseball. He played shortstop and catcher on the baseball team, quarterback on the football team, and guard on the basketball team. With the track and field squad, he won awards in the broad jump. He was also a member of the tennis team.
In 1936, Robinson won the junior boys singles championship in the annual Pacific Coast Negro Tennis Tournament and earned a place on the Pomona annual baseball tournament all-star team, which included future Hall of Famers Ted Williams and Bob Lemon. In late January 1937, the Pasadena Star-News newspaper reported that Robinson "for two years has been the outstanding athlete at Muir, starring in football, basketball, track, baseball, and tennis."
After Muir, Robinson attended Pasadena Junior College (PJC), where he continued his athletic career by participating in basketball, football, baseball, and track. On the football team, he played quarterback and safety. He was a shortstop and leadoff hitter for the baseball team, and he broke an American junior college broad-jump record held by his brother Mack with a jump of 25 ft. 6+1⁄2 in. on May 7, 1938. As at Muir High School, most of Jackie's teammates were white. While playing football at PJC, Robinson suffered a fractured ankle, complications from which would eventually delay his deployment status while in the military. In 1938, he was elected to the All-Southland Junior College Team for baseball and selected as the region's Most Valuable Player.
That year, Robinson was one of 10 students named to the school's Order of the Mast and Dagger (Omicron Mu Delta), awarded to students performing "outstanding service to the school and whose scholastic and citizenship record is worthy of recognition." Also while at PJC, he was elected to the Lancers, a student-run police organization responsible for patrolling various school activities.
An incident at PJC illustrated Robinson's impatience with authority figures he perceived as racist—a character trait that would resurface repeatedly in his life. On January 25, 1938, he was arrested after vocally disputing the detention of a black friend by police. Robinson received a two-year suspended sentence, but the incident—along with other rumored run-ins between Robinson and police—gave Robinson a reputation for combativeness in the face of racial antagonism. While at PJC, he was motivated by a preacher (the Rev. Karl Downs) to attend church on a regular basis, and Downs became a confidant for Robinson, a Christian. Toward the end of his PJC tenure, Frank Robinson (to whom Robinson felt closest among his three brothers) was killed in a motorcycle accident. The event motivated Jackie to pursue his athletic career at the nearby University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he could remain closer to Frank's family.
After graduating from PJC in spring 1939, Robinson enrolled at UCLA, where he became the school's first athlete to win varsity letters in four sports: baseball, basketball, football, and track.
He was one of four black players on the Bruins' 1939 football team; the others were Woody Strode, Kenny Washington, and Ray Bartlett. Washington, Strode, and Robinson made up three of the team's four backfield players. At a time when only a few black students played mainstream college football, this made UCLA college football's most integrated team. They went undefeated with four ties at 6–0–4. Robinson finished the season with 12.2 yards per attempt on 42 carries, which is the school football record for highest rushing yards per carry in a season as of 2022. Robinson also led the NCAA in punt return average in the 1939 and 1940 seasons.
In track and field, Robinson won the 1940 NCAA championship in the long jump at 24 ft 10+1⁄4 in (7.58 m). Baseball was Robinson's "worst sport" at UCLA; he hit .097 in his only season, although in his first game he went 4-for-4 and twice stole home.
While a senior at UCLA, Robinson met his future wife, Rachel Isum (b.1922), a UCLA freshman who was familiar with Robinson's athletic career at PJC. He played football as a senior, but the 1940 Bruins won only one game. In the spring, Robinson left college just shy of graduation, despite the reservations of his mother and Isum. He took a job as an assistant athletic director with the government's National Youth Administration (NYA) in Atascadero, California.
After the government ceased NYA operations, Robinson traveled to Honolulu in the fall of 1941 to play football for the semi-professional, racially integrated Honolulu Bears. After a short season, Robinson returned to California in December 1941 to pursue a career as running back for the Los Angeles Bulldogs of the Pacific Coast Football League. By that time, however, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had taken place, which drew the United States into World War II and ended Robinson's nascent football career.
In 1942, Robinson was drafted and assigned to a segregated Army cavalry unit at Fort Riley (in Kansas). Having the requisite qualifications, Robinson and several other black soldiers applied for admission to an Officer Candidate School (OCS) then located at Fort Riley.
Although the Army's initial July 1941 guidelines for OCS had been drafted as race-neutral, few black applicants were admitted into OCS until after subsequent directives by Army leadership. The applications of Robinson and his colleagues were delayed for several months. After protests by heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis (then stationed at Fort Riley) and with the help of Truman Gibson (then an assistant civilian aide to the Secretary of War), the men were accepted into OCS. The experience led to a personal friendship between Robinson and Louis. Upon finishing OCS, Robinson was commissioned as a second lieutenant in January 1943. Shortly afterward, Robinson and Isum were formally engaged.
After receiving his commission, Robinson was reassigned to Fort Hood, Texas, where he joined the 761st "Black Panthers" Tank Battalion. While at Fort Hood, Robinson often used his weekend leave to visit the Rev. Karl Downs, President of Sam Huston College (now Huston–Tillotson University) in nearby Austin, Texas; in California, Downs had been Robinson's pastor at Scott United Methodist Church while Robinson attended PJC.
An event on July 6, 1944, derailed Robinson's military career. While awaiting results of hospital tests on the ankle he had injured in junior college, Robinson boarded an Army bus with a fellow officer's wife; although the Army had commissioned its own unsegregated bus line, the bus driver ordered Robinson to move to the back of the bus. Robinson refused. The driver backed down, but after reaching the end of the line, summoned the military police, who took Robinson into custody. When Robinson later confronted the investigating duty officer about racist questioning by the officer and his assistant, the officer recommended Robinson be court-martialed.
After Robinson's commander in the 761st, Paul L. Bates, refused to authorize the legal action, Robinson was summarily transferred to the 758th Battalion—where the commander quickly consented to charge Robinson with multiple offenses, including, among other charges, public drunkenness, even though Robinson did not drink.
By the time of the court-martial in August 1944, the charges against Robinson had been reduced to two counts of insubordination during questioning. Robinson was acquitted by an all-white panel of nine officers.
Although his former unit, the 761st Tank Battalion, became the first black tank unit to see combat in World War II, Robinson's court-martial proceedings prohibited him from being deployed overseas, and he was never in combat.
After his acquittal, he was transferred to Camp Breckinridge, Kentucky, where he served as a coach for army athletics until receiving an honorable discharge in November 1944. While there, Robinson met a former player for the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro American League, who encouraged Robinson to write the Monarchs and ask for a tryout. Robinson took the former player's advice and wrote to Monarchs co-owner Thomas Baird.
After his discharge, Robinson briefly returned to his old football club, the Los Angeles Bulldogs. Robinson then accepted an offer from his old friend and pastor Rev. Karl Downs to be the athletic director at Samuel Huston College in Austin, then of the Southwestern Athletic Conference. The job included coaching the school's basketball team for the 1944–45 season. As it was a fledgling program, few students tried out for the basketball team, and Robinson even resorted to inserting himself into the lineup for exhibition games. Although his teams were outmatched by opponents, Robinson was respected as a disciplinarian coach, and drew the admiration of, among others, Langston University basketball player Marques Haynes, a future member of the Harlem Globetrotters.
In early 1945, while Robinson was at Sam Huston College, the Kansas City Monarchs sent him a written offer to play professional baseball in the Negro leagues. Robinson accepted a contract for $400 per month. Although he played well for the Monarchs, Robinson was frustrated with the experience. He had grown used to a structured playing environment in college, and the Negro leagues' disorganization and embrace of gambling interests appalled him. The hectic travel schedule also placed a burden on his relationship with Isum, with whom he could now communicate only by letter. In all, Robinson played 47 games at shortstop for the Monarchs, hitting .387 with five home runs, and registering 13 stolen bases. He also appeared in the 1945 East–West All-Star Game, going hitless in five at-bats.
During the season, Robinson pursued potential major league interests. No black man had played in the major leagues since Moses Fleetwood Walker in 1884, but the Boston Red Sox nevertheless held a tryout at Fenway Park for Robinson and other black players on April 16. The tryout, however, was a farce chiefly designed to assuage the desegregationist sensibilities of powerful Boston City Councilman Isadore H. Y. Muchnick. Even with the stands limited to management, Robinson was subjected to racial epithets. He left the tryout humiliated, and more than 14 years later, in July 1959, the Red Sox became the final major league team to integrate its roster.
Other teams, however, had more serious interest in signing a black ballplayer. In the mid-1940s, Branch Rickey, club president and general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, began to scout the Negro leagues for a possible addition to the Dodgers' roster. Rickey selected Robinson from a list of promising black players and interviewed him for possible assignment to Brooklyn's International League farm club, the Montreal Royals. Rickey was especially interested in making sure his eventual signee could withstand the inevitable racial abuse that would be directed at him. In a famous three-hour exchange on August 28, 1945, Rickey asked Robinson if he could face the racial animus without taking the bait and reacting angrily—a concern given Robinson's prior arguments with law enforcement officials at PJC and in the military. Robinson was aghast: "Are you looking for a Negro who is afraid to fight back?" Rickey replied that he needed a Negro player "with guts enough not to fight back." After obtaining a commitment from Robinson to "turn the other cheek" to racial antagonism, Rickey agreed to sign him to a contract for $600 a month, equal to $9,753 today. Rickey did not offer compensation to the Monarchs, instead believing all Negro league players were free agents due to the contracts not containing a reserve clause. Among those with whom Rickey discussed prospects was Wendell Smith, writer for the black weekly Pittsburgh Courier, who, according to Cleveland Indians owner and team president Bill Veeck, "influenced Rickey to take Jack Robinson, for which he's never completely gotten credit."
Although he required Robinson to keep the arrangement a secret for the time being, Rickey committed to formally signing Robinson before November 1, 1945. On October 23, it was publicly announced that Robinson would be assigned to the Royals for the 1946 season. On the same day, with representatives of the Royals and Dodgers present, Robinson formally signed his contract with the Royals. In what was later referred to as "The Noble Experiment", Robinson was the first black baseball player in the International League since the 1880s. He was not necessarily the best player in the Negro leagues, and black talents Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson were upset when Robinson was selected first. Larry Doby, who broke the color line in the American League the same year as Robinson, said, "One of the things that was disappointing and disheartening to a lot of the black players at the time was that Jack was not the best player. The best was Josh Gibson. I think that's one of the reasons why Josh died so early—he was heartbroken."
Rickey's offer allowed Robinson to leave behind the Monarchs and their grueling bus rides, and he went home to Pasadena. That September, he signed with Chet Brewer's Kansas City Royals, a post-season barnstorming team in the California Winter League. Later that off-season, he briefly toured South America with another barnstorming team, while his fiancée Isum pursued nursing opportunities in New York City. On February 10, 1946, Robinson and Isum were married by their old friend, the Rev. Karl Downs.
In 1946, Robinson arrived at Daytona Beach, Florida, for spring training with the Montreal Royals of the Class AAA International League. Clay Hopper, the manager of the Royals, asked Rickey to assign Robinson to any other Dodger affiliate, but Rickey refused.
Robinson's presence was controversial in racially segregated Florida. He was not allowed to stay with his white teammates at the team hotel, and instead lodged at the home of Joe and Dufferin Harris, a politically active African American couple who introduced the Robinsons to civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune. Since the Dodgers organization did not own a spring training facility, scheduling was subject to the whim of area localities, several of which turned down any event involving Robinson or Johnny Wright, another black player whom Rickey had signed to the Dodgers' organization in January. In Sanford, Florida, the police chief threatened to cancel games if Robinson and Wright did not cease training activities there; as a result, Robinson was sent back to Daytona Beach. In Jacksonville, the stadium was padlocked shut without warning on game day, by order of the city's Parks and Public Property director. In DeLand, a scheduled day game was postponed, ostensibly because of issues with the stadium's electrical lighting.
After much lobbying of local officials by Rickey himself, the Royals were allowed to host a game involving Robinson in Daytona Beach. Robinson made his Royals debut at Daytona Beach's City Island Ballpark on March 17, 1946, in an exhibition game against the team's parent club, the Dodgers. Robinson thus became the first black player to openly play for a minor league team against a major league team since the de facto baseball color line had been implemented in the 1880s.
Later in spring training, after some less-than-stellar performances, Robinson was shifted from shortstop to second base, allowing him to make shorter throws to first base. Robinson's performance soon rebounded. On April 18, 1946, Roosevelt Stadium hosted the Jersey City Giants' season opener against the Montreal Royals, marking the professional debut of the Royals' Jackie Robinson and the first time the color barrier had been broken in a game between two minor league clubs. Pitching against Robinson was Warren Sandel who had played against him when they both lived in California. During Robinson's first at bat, the Jersey City catcher, Dick Bouknight, demanded that Sandel throw at Robinson, but Sandel refused. Although Sandel induced Robinson to ground out at his first at bat, Robinson ended up with four hits in his five at bats; his first hit was a three-run home run in the game's third inning. He also scored four runs, drove in three, and stole two bases in the Royals' 14–1 victory. Robinson proceeded to lead the International League that season with a .349 batting average and .985 fielding percentage, and he was named the league's Most Valuable Player. Although he often faced hostility while on road trips (the Royals were forced to cancel a Southern exhibition tour, for example), the Montreal fan base enthusiastically supported Robinson. Whether fans supported or opposed it, Robinson's presence on the field was a boon to attendance; more than one million people went to games involving Robinson in 1946, an astounding figure by International League standards. In the fall of 1946, following the baseball season, Robinson returned home to California and briefly played professional basketball for the short-lived Los Angeles Red Devils.
In 1947, the Dodgers called Robinson up to the major leagues six days before the start of the season. With Eddie Stanky entrenched at second base for the Dodgers, Robinson played his initial major league season as a first baseman. Robinson made his debut as a Dodger wearing uniform number 42 on April 11, 1947, in a preseason exhibition game against the New York Yankees at Ebbets Field with 24,237 in attendance. On April 15, Robinson made his major league debut at the relatively advanced age of 28 at Ebbets Field before a crowd of 26,623 spectators, more than 14,000 of whom were black. Although he failed to get a base hit, he walked and scored a run in the Dodgers' 5–3 victory. Robinson became the first player since 1884 to openly break the major league baseball color line. Black fans began flocking to see the Dodgers when they came to town, abandoning their Negro league teams.
Robinson's promotion met a generally positive, although mixed, reception among newspapers and white major league players. However, racial tension existed in the Dodger clubhouse. Some Dodger players insinuated they would sit out rather than play alongside Robinson. The brewing mutiny ended when Dodgers management took a stand for Robinson. Manager Leo Durocher informed the team, "I do not care if the guy is yellow or black, or if he has stripes like a fuckin' zebra. I'm the manager of this team, and I say he plays. What's more, I say he can make us all rich. And if any of you cannot use the money, I will see that you are all traded."
Robinson was also derided by opposing teams. According to a press report, the St. Louis Cardinals threatened to strike if Robinson played and spread the walkout across the entire National League. Existence of the plot was said to have been leaked by the Cardinals' team physician, Robert Hyland, to a friend, the New York Herald Tribune's Rutherford "Rud" Rennie. The reporter, concerned about protecting Hyland's anonymity and job, in turn leaked it to his Tribune colleague and editor, Stanley Woodward, whose own subsequent reporting with other sources protected Hyland. The Woodward article made national headlines. After it was published, National League President Ford Frick and Baseball Commissioner Happy Chandler let it be known that any striking players would be suspended. "You will find that the friends that you think you have in the press box will not support you, that you will be outcasts," Frick was quoted as saying. "I do not care if half the league strikes. Those who do it will encounter quick retribution. All will be suspended and I don't care if it wrecks the National League for five years. This is the United States of America and one citizen has as much right to play as another." Woodward's article received the E. P. Dutton Award in 1947 for Best Sports Reporting. The Cardinals players denied that they were planning to strike, and Woodward later told author Roger Kahn that Frick was his true source; writer Warren Corbett said that Frick's speech "never happened". Regardless, the report led to Robinson receiving increased support from the sports media. Even The Sporting News, a publication that had backed the color line, came out against the idea of a strike.
Robinson nonetheless became the target of rough physical play by opponents (particularly the Cardinals). At one time, he received a seven-inch gash in his leg from Enos Slaughter. On April 22, 1947, during a game between the Dodgers and the Philadelphia Phillies, Phillies players and manager Ben Chapman called Robinson a "nigger" from their dugout and yelled that he should "go back to the cotton fields". Rickey later recalled that Chapman "did more than anybody to unite the Dodgers. When he poured out that string of unconscionable abuse, he solidified and united thirty men."
However, Robinson received significant encouragement from several major league players. Robinson named Lee "Jeep" Handley, who played for the Phillies at the time, as the first opposing player to wish him well. Dodgers teammate Pee Wee Reese once came to Robinson's defense with the famous line, "You can hate a man for many reasons. Color is not one of them." In 1947 or 1948, Reese is said to have put his arm around Robinson in response to fans who shouted racial slurs at Robinson before a game in Boston or Cincinnati. A statue by sculptor William Behrends, unveiled at KeySpan Park on November 1, 2005, depicts Reese with his arm around Robinson. Jewish baseball star Hank Greenberg, who had to deal with ethnic epithets during his career, also encouraged Robinson. Following an incident where Greenberg collided with Robinson at first base, he "whispered a few words into Robinson's ear", which Robinson later characterized as "words of encouragement". Greenberg had advised him to overcome his critics by defeating them in games. Robinson also talked frequently with Larry Doby, who endured his own hardships since becoming the first black player in the American League with the Cleveland Indians, as the two spoke to each other via telephone throughout the season.
Robinson finished the season having played in 151 games for the Dodgers, with a batting average of .297, an on-base percentage of .383, and a .427 slugging percentage. He had 175 hits (scoring 125 runs) including 31 doubles, 5 triples, and 12 home runs, driving in 48 runs for the year. Robinson led the league in sacrifice hits, with 28, and in stolen bases, with 29. His cumulative performance earned him the inaugural Major League Baseball Rookie of the Year Award (separate National and American League Rookie of the Year honors were not awarded until 1949).
That year, the Brooklyn Dodgers won the National League pennant and went on to face the Yankees in the 1947 World Series. Robinson became the first black player to play in the World Series. He appeared in all seven games, with the Dodgers ultimately losing in Game 7.
Following Stanky's trade to the Boston Braves in March 1948, Robinson took over second base, where he logged a .980 fielding percentage that year (second in the National League at the position, fractionally behind Stanky). Robinson had a batting average of .296 and 22 stolen bases for the season. In a 12–7 win against the St. Louis Cardinals on August 29, 1948, he hit for the cycle—a home run, a triple, a double, and a single in the same game. The Dodgers briefly moved into first place in the National League in late August 1948, but they ultimately finished third as the Braves went on to win the pennant and lose to the Cleveland Indians in the World Series.
Racial pressure on Robinson eased in 1948 when a number of other black players entered the major leagues. Larry Doby (who broke the color barrier in the American League on July 5, 1947, just 11 weeks after Robinson) and Satchel Paige played for the Cleveland Indians, and the Dodgers had three other black players besides Robinson. In February 1948, he signed a $12,500 contract (equal to $152,251 today) with the Dodgers; while a significant amount, this was less than Robinson made in the off-season from a vaudeville tour, where he answered pre-set baseball questions and a speaking tour of the South. Between the tours, he underwent surgery on his right ankle. Because of his off-season activities, Robinson reported to training camp 30 pounds (14 kg) overweight. He lost the weight during training camp, but dieting left him weak at the plate. In 1948, Wendell Smith's book, Jackie Robinson: My Own Story, was released.
In the spring of 1949, Robinson turned to Hall of Famer George Sisler, working as an advisor to the Dodgers, for batting help. At Sisler's suggestion, Robinson spent hours at a batting tee, learning to hit the ball to right field. Sisler taught Robinson to anticipate a fastball, on the theory that it is easier to subsequently adjust to a slower curveball. Robinson also noted that "Sisler showed me how to stop lunging, how to check my swing until the last fraction of a second". The tutelage helped Robinson raise his batting average from .296 in 1948 to .342 in 1949. In addition to his improved batting average, Robinson stole 37 bases that season, was second place in the league for both doubles and triples, and registered 124 runs batted in with 122 runs scored. For the performance Robinson earned the Most Valuable Player Award for the National League. Baseball fans also voted Robinson as the starting second baseman for the 1949 All-Star Game — the first All-Star Game to include black players.
That year, a song about Robinson by Buddy Johnson, "Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?", reached number 13 on the charts; Count Basie recorded a famous version. Ultimately, the Dodgers won the National League pennant, but lost in five games to the New York Yankees in the 1949 World Series.
Summer 1949 brought an unwanted distraction for Robinson. In July, he was called to testify before the United States House of Representatives' Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) concerning statements made that April by black athlete and actor Paul Robeson. Robinson was reluctant to testify, but he eventually agreed to do so, fearing it might negatively affect his career if he declined.
In 1950, Robinson led the National League in double plays made by a second baseman with 133. His salary that year was the highest any Dodger had been paid to that point: $35,000 ($425,712 in 2022 dollars). He finished the year with 99 runs scored, a .328 batting average, and 12 stolen bases. The year saw the release of a film biography of Robinson's life, The Jackie Robinson Story, in which Robinson played himself, and actress Ruby Dee played Rachel "Rae" (Isum) Robinson. The project had been previously delayed when the film's producers refused to accede to demands of two Hollywood studios that the movie include scenes of Robinson being tutored in baseball by a white man. The New York Times wrote that Robinson, "doing that rare thing of playing himself in the picture's leading role, displays a calm assurance and composure that might be envied by many a Hollywood star."
Robinson's Hollywood exploits, however, did not sit well with Dodgers co-owner Walter O'Malley, who referred to Robinson as "Rickey's prima donna". In late 1950, Rickey's contract as the Dodgers' team President expired. Weary of constant disagreements with O'Malley, and with no hope of being re-appointed as President of the Dodgers, Rickey cashed out his one-quarter financial interest in the team, leaving O'Malley in full control of the franchise. Rickey shortly thereafter became general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Robinson was disappointed at the turn of events and wrote a sympathetic letter to Rickey, whom he considered a father figure, stating, "Regardless of what happens to me in the future, it all can be placed on what you have done and, believe me, I appreciate it."
Before the 1951 season, O'Malley reportedly offered Robinson the job of manager of the Montreal Royals, effective at the end of Robinson's playing career. O'Malley was quoted in the Montreal Standard as saying, "Jackie told me that he would be both delighted and honored to tackle this managerial post"—although reports differed as to whether a position was ever formally offered.
During the 1951 season, Robinson led the National League in double plays made by a second baseman for the second year in a row, with 137. He also kept the Dodgers in contention for the 1951 pennant. During the last game of the regular season, in the 13th inning, he had a hit to tie the game and then hit a home run in the 14th inning, which proved to be the winning margin. This forced a best-of-three playoff series against the crosstown rival New York Giants.
Despite Robinson's regular-season heroics, on October 3, 1951, the Dodgers lost the pennant on Bobby Thomson's famous home run, known as the Shot Heard 'Round the World. Overcoming his dejection, Robinson dutifully observed Thomson's feet to ensure he touched all the bases. Dodgers sportscaster Vin Scully later noted that the incident showed "how much of a competitor Robinson was." He finished the season with 106 runs scored, a batting average of .335, and 25 stolen bases.
Robinson had what was an average year for him in 1952. He finished the year with 104 runs, a .308 batting average, and 24 stolen bases. He did, however, record a career-high on-base percentage of .436. The Dodgers improved on their performance from the year before, winning the National League pennant before losing the 1952 World Series to the New York Yankees in seven games. That year, on the television show Youth Wants to Know, Robinson challenged the Yankees' general manager, George Weiss, on the racial record of his team, which had yet to sign a black player. Sportswriter Dick Young, whom Robinson had described as a "bigot", said, "If there was one flaw in Jackie, it was the common one. He believed that everything unpleasant that happened to him happened because of his blackness." The 1952 season was the last year Robinson was an everyday starter at second base. Afterward, Robinson played variously at first, second, and third bases, shortstop, and in the outfield, with Jim Gilliam, another black player, taking over everyday second base duties. Robinson's interests began to shift toward the prospect of managing a major league team. He had hoped to gain experience by managing in the Puerto Rican Winter League, but according to the New York Post, Commissioner Happy Chandler denied the request.
In 1953, Robinson had 109 runs, a .329 batting average, and 17 steals,leading the Dodgers to another National League pennant (and another World Series loss to the Yankees, this time in six games). Robinson's continued success spawned a string of death threats. He was not dissuaded, however, from addressing racial issues publicly. That year, he served as editor for Our Sports magazine, a periodical focusing on Negro sports issues; contributions to the magazine included an article on golf course segregation by Robinson's old friend Joe Louis. Robinson also openly criticized segregated hotels and restaurants that served the Dodger organization; a number of these establishments integrated as a result, including the five-star Chase Park Hotel in St. Louis.
In 1954, Robinson had 62 runs scored, a .311 batting average, and 7 steals. His best day at the plate was on June 17, when he hit two home runs and two doubles. The following autumn, Robinson won his only championship when the Dodgers defeated the New York Yankees in the 1955 World Series. Although the team enjoyed ultimate success, 1955 was the worst year of Robinson's individual career. He hit .256 and stole only 12 bases. The Dodgers tried Robinson in the outfield and as a third baseman, both because of his diminishing abilities and because Gilliam was established at second base. Robinson, then 36 years old, missed 49 games and did not play in Game 7 of the World Series. He missed the game because manager Walter Alston decided to play Gilliam at second and Don Hoak at third base. That season, the Dodgers' Don Newcombe became the first black major league pitcher to win twenty games in a year.
In 1956, Robinson had 61 runs scored, a .275 batting average, and 12 steals. By then, he had begun to exhibit the effects of diabetes and to lose interest in the prospect of playing or managing professional baseball. Robinson ended his major league career when he struck out to end Game 7 of the 1956 World Series. After the season, the Dodgers traded Robinson to the arch-rival New York Giants for Dick Littlefield and $35,000 cash (equal to $376,732 today). The trade, however, was never completed; unbeknownst to the Dodgers, Robinson had already agreed with the president of Chock full o'Nuts to quit baseball and become an executive with the company. Since Robinson had sold exclusive rights to any retirement story to Look magazine two years previously, his retirement decision was revealed through the magazine, instead of through the Dodgers organization.
Robinson's major league debut brought an end to approximately sixty years of segregation in professional baseball, known as the baseball color line. After World War II, several other forces were also leading the country toward increased equality for blacks, including their accelerated migration to the North, where their political clout grew, and President Harry Truman's desegregation of the military in 1948. Robinson's breaking of the baseball color line and his professional success symbolized these broader changes and demonstrated that the fight for equality was more than simply a political matter. Civil rights movement leader Martin Luther King Jr. said that he was "a legend and a symbol in his own time", and that he "challenged the dark skies of intolerance and frustration." According to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, Robinson's "efforts were a monumental step in the civil-rights revolution in America ... [His] accomplishments allowed black and white Americans to be more respectful and open to one another and more appreciative of everyone's abilities."
Beginning his major league career at the relatively advanced age of 28, he played only ten seasons from 1947 to 1956, all of them for the Brooklyn Dodgers. During his career, the Dodgers played in six World Series, and Robinson himself played in six All-Star Games. In 1999, he was one of 30 players named to the Major League Baseball All-Century Team.
Robinson's career is generally considered to mark the beginning of the post–"long ball" era in baseball, in which a reliance on raw power-hitting gave way to balanced offensive strategies that used footspeed to create runs through aggressive baserunning. Robinson exhibited the combination of hitting ability and speed which exemplified the new era. He scored more than 100 runs in six of his ten seasons (averaging more than 110 runs from 1947 to 1953), had a .311 career batting average, a .409 career on-base percentage, a .474 slugging percentage, and substantially more walks than strikeouts (740 to 291). Robinson was one of only two players during the span of 1947–56 to accumulate at least 125 steals while registering a slugging percentage over .425 (Minnie Miñoso was the other). He accumulated 197 stolen bases in total, including 19 steals of home. None of the latter were double steals (in which a player stealing home is assisted by a player stealing another base at the same time). Robinson has been referred to by author David Falkner as "the father of modern base-stealing".
I'm not concerned with your liking or disliking me ... all I ask is that you respect me as a human being.
— Robinson, on his legacy
Historical statistical analysis indicates Robinson was an outstanding fielder throughout his ten years in the major leagues and at virtually every position he played. After playing his rookie season at first base, Robinson spent most of his career as a second baseman. He led the league in fielding among second basemen in 1950 and 1951. Toward the end of his career, he played about 2,000 innings at third base and about 1,175 innings in the outfield, excelling at both.
Assessing himself, Robinson said, "I'm not concerned with your liking or disliking me ... all I ask is that you respect me as a human being." Regarding Robinson's qualities on the field, Leo Durocher said, "Ya want a guy that comes to play. This guy didn't just come to play. He come to beat ya. He come to stuff the goddamn bat right up your ass."
Robinson portrayed himself in the 1950 motion picture The Jackie Robinson Story. Other portrayals include:
Robinson was also the subject of a 2016 PBS documentary, Jackie Robinson, which was directed by Ken Burns and features Jamie Foxx doing voice-over as Robinson.
Robinson once told future Hall of Fame inductee Hank Aaron that "the game of baseball is great, but the greatest thing is what you do after your career is over." Robinson retired from baseball at age 37 on January 5, 1957. Later that year, after he complained of numerous physical ailments, he was diagnosed with diabetes, a disease that also afflicted his brothers. Although Robinson adopted an insulin injection regimen, the state of medicine at the time could not prevent the continued deterioration of Robinson's physical condition from the disease.
In October 1959, Robinson entered the Greenville Municipal Airport's whites-only waiting room. Airport police asked Robinson to leave, but he refused. At a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) speech in Greenville, South Carolina, Robinson urged "complete freedom" and encouraged black citizens to vote and to protest their second-class citizenship. The following January, approximately 1,000 people marched on New Year's Day to the airport, which was desegregated shortly thereafter.
In his first year of eligibility for the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962, Robinson encouraged voters to consider only his on-field qualifications, rather than his cultural impact on the game. He was elected on the first ballot, becoming the first black player inducted into the Cooperstown museum.
In 1965, Robinson served as an analyst for ABC's Major League Baseball Game of the Week telecasts, the first black person to do so. In 1966, Robinson was hired as general manager for the short-lived Brooklyn Dodgers of the Continental Football League. In 1972, he served as a part-time commentator on Montreal Expos telecasts.
On June 4, 1972, the Dodgers retired his uniform number, 42, alongside those of Roy Campanella (39) and Sandy Koufax (32). From 1957 to 1964, Robinson was the vice president for personnel at Chock full o'Nuts; he was the first black person to serve as vice president of a major American corporation. Robinson always considered his business career as advancing the cause of black people in commerce and industry. He also chaired the NAACP's million-dollar Freedom Fund Drive in 1957, and served on the organization's board until 1967. In 1964, he helped found, with Harlem businessman Dunbar McLaurin, Freedom National Bank—a black-owned and operated commercial bank based in Harlem. He also served as the bank's first chairman of the board. In 1970, Robinson established the Jackie Robinson Construction Company to build housing for low-income families.
Robinson was active in politics throughout his post-baseball life. He identified himself as a political independent, although he held conservative opinions on several issues, including the Vietnam War (he once wrote to Martin Luther King Jr. to defend the Johnson Administration's military policy). After supporting Richard Nixon in his 1960 presidential race against John F. Kennedy, Robinson later praised Kennedy effusively for his stance on civil rights. Robinson was angered by the 1964 presidential election candidacy of conservative Republican Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who had opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He became one of six national directors for Nelson Rockefeller's unsuccessful campaign to be nominated as the Republican candidate for the election. After the party nominated Goldwater instead, Robinson left the party's convention commenting that he now had "a better understanding of how it must have felt to be a Jew in Hitler's Germany". He later became special assistant for community affairs when Rockefeller was re-elected governor of New York in 1966 and in 1971 was appointed to the New York State Athletic Commission by Rockefeller. In 1968, he broke with the Republican party and supported Hubert Humphrey against Nixon in that year's presidential election.
Robinson protested against the major leagues' ongoing lack of minority managers and central office personnel, and he turned down an invitation to appear in an old-timers' game at Yankee Stadium in 1969. He made his final public appearance on October 15, 1972, nine days before his death, throwing the ceremonial first pitch before Game 2 of the World Series at Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati. He gratefully accepted a plaque honoring the twenty-fifth anniversary of his MLB debut, but also commented, "I'm going to be tremendously more pleased and more proud when I look at that third base coaching line one day and see a black face managing in baseball." This wish was only fulfilled after Robinson's death: following the 1974 season, the Cleveland Indians gave their managerial post to Frank Robinson (no relation to Jackie), a Hall of Fame-bound player who would go on to manage three other teams. Despite the success of these two Robinsons and other black players, the number of African-American players in Major League Baseball has declined since the 1970s.
After Robinson's retirement from baseball, his wife Rachel Robinson pursued a career in academic nursing. She became an assistant professor at the Yale School of Nursing and director of nursing at the Connecticut Mental Health Center. She also served on the board of the Freedom National Bank until it closed in 1990. She and Jackie had three children: Jackie Robinson Jr. (1946–1971), Sharon Robinson (b. 1950), and David Robinson (b. 1952).
Robinson's eldest son, Jackie Robinson Jr., had emotional trouble during his childhood and entered special education at an early age. He enlisted in the Army in search of a disciplined environment, served in the Vietnam War, and was wounded in action on November 19, 1965. After his discharge, he struggled with drug problems. Robinson Jr. eventually completed the treatment program at Daytop Village in Seymour, Connecticut, and became a counselor at the institution. On June 17, 1971, he was killed in an automobile accident at age 24. The experience with his son's drug addiction turned Robinson Sr. into an avid anti-drug crusader toward the end of his life.
Robinson did not outlive his son by very long. In 1968, he suffered a heart attack. Complications from heart disease and diabetes weakened Robinson and made him almost blind by middle age. On October 24, 1972, Robinson died of a heart attack at his home at 95 Cascade Road in North Stamford, Connecticut; he was 53 years old. Robinson's funeral service on October 27, 1972, at Upper Manhattan's Riverside Church in Morningside Heights, attracted 2,500 mourners. Many of his former teammates, other famous baseball players, and basketball star Bill Russell served as pallbearers, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson gave the eulogy. Tens of thousands of people lined the subsequent procession route to Robinson's interment site at Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn, where he was buried next to his son Jackie and mother-in-law Zellee Isum. Twenty-five years after Robinson's death, the Interboro Parkway was renamed the Jackie Robinson Parkway in his memory. This parkway bisects the cemetery in close proximity to Robinson's gravesite.
After Robinson's death, his widow founded the Jackie Robinson Foundation, and she remains an officer as of 2021. On April 15, 2008, she announced that in 2010 the foundation would open a museum devoted to Jackie in Lower Manhattan. Robinson's daughter, Sharon, became a midwife, educator, director of educational programming for MLB, and the author of two books about her father. His youngest son, David, who has ten children, is a coffee grower and social activist in Tanzania.
According to a poll conducted in 1947, Robinson was the second most popular man in the country, behind Bing Crosby. In 1999, he was named by Time on its list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.
Robinson was ranked No. 44 on The Sporting News list of "Baseball's 100 Greatest Players" in 1999. That same year, he was one of 30 players elected to the Major League Baseball All-Century Team. In 2020, The Athletic ranked Robinson at number 42 on its "Baseball 100" list, complied by sportswriter Joe Posnanski.
Baseball writer Bill James, in The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, ranked Robinson as the 32nd greatest player of all time strictly on the basis of his performance on the field, noting that he was one of the top players in the league throughout his career. Robinson was among the 25 charter members of UCLA's Athletics Hall of Fame in 1984. In 2002, Molefi Kete Asante included Robinson on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans. Robinson has also been honored by the United States Postal Service on three separate postage stamps, in 1982, 1999, and 2000.
The City of Pasadena has recognized Robinson with a baseball diamond and stadium named Jackie Robinson Field in Brookside Park next to the Rose Bowl, and with the Jackie Robinson Center (a community outreach center providing health services). In 1997, a $325,000 bronze sculpture (equal to $592,465 today) by artists Ralph Helmick, Stu Schecter, and John Outterbridge depicting oversized nine-foot busts of Robinson and his brother Mack was erected at Garfield Avenue, across from the main entrance of Pasadena City Hall; a granite footprint lists multiple donors to the commission project, which was organized by the Robinson Memorial Foundation and supported by members of the Robinson family.
Major League Baseball has honored Robinson many times since his death. In 1987, both the National and American League Rookie of the Year Awards were renamed the "Jackie Robinson Award" in honor of the first recipient (Robinson's Major League Rookie of the Year Award in 1947 encompassed both leagues). On April 15, 1997, Robinson's jersey number, 42, was retired throughout Major League Baseball, the first time any jersey number had been retired throughout one of the four major American sports leagues. Under the terms of the retirement, a grandfather clause allowed the handful of players who wore number 42 to continue doing so in tribute to Robinson, until such time as they subsequently changed teams or jersey numbers. This affected players such as the Mets' Butch Huskey and Boston's Mo Vaughn. The Yankees' Mariano Rivera, who retired at the end of the 2013 season, was the last player in Major League Baseball to wear jersey number 42 on a regular basis. Since 1997, only Wayne Gretzky's number 99, retired by the NHL in 2000, and Bill Russell's number 6, retired by the NBA in 2022, have been retired league-wide in any of the four major sports. There have also been calls for MLB to retire number 21 league-wide in honor of Roberto Clemente, a sentiment opposed by the Robinson family.
As an exception to the retired-number policy, MLB began honoring Robinson by allowing players to wear number 42 on April 15, Jackie Robinson Day, which is an annual observance that started in 2004. For the 60th anniversary of Robinson's major league debut, MLB invited players to wear the number 42 on Jackie Robinson Day in 2007. The gesture was originally the idea of outfielder Ken Griffey Jr., who sought Rachel Robinson's permission to wear the number. After Griffey received her permission, Commissioner Bud Selig not only allowed Griffey to wear the number, but also extended an invitation to all major league teams to do the same. Ultimately, more than 200 players wore number 42, including the entire rosters of the Los Angeles Dodgers, New York Mets, Houston Astros, Philadelphia Phillies, St. Louis Cardinals, Milwaukee Brewers, and Pittsburgh Pirates. The tribute was continued in 2008, when, during games on April 15, all members of the Mets, Cardinals, Washington Nationals, and Tampa Bay Rays wore Robinson's number 42. On June 25, 2008, MLB installed a new plaque for Robinson at the Baseball Hall of Fame commemorating his off-the-field impact on the game as well as his playing statistics. In 2009, all of MLB's uniformed personnel (including players) wore number 42 on April 15; this tradition has continued every year since on that date.
At the November 2006 groundbreaking for Citi Field, the new ballpark for the New York Mets, it was announced that the main entrance, modeled on the one in Brooklyn's old Ebbets Field, would be called the Jackie Robinson Rotunda. The rotunda was dedicated at the opening of Citi Field on April 16, 2009. It honors Robinson with large quotations spanning the inner curve of the facade and features a large freestanding statue of his number, 42, which has become an attraction in itself. Mets owner Fred Wilpon announced that the Mets—in conjunction with Citigroup and the Jackie Robinson Foundation—would create the Jackie Robinson Museum and Learning Center, located at the headquarters of the Jackie Robinson Foundation at One Hudson Square, along Canal Street in lower Manhattan. Along with the museum, scholarships will be awarded to "young people who live by and embody Jackie's ideals." The museum opened in 2022. At Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, a statue of Robinson was introduced in 2017. The New York Yankees honor Robinson with a plaque in Monument Park.
Since 2004, the Aflac National High School Baseball Player of the Year has been presented the "Jackie Robinson Award".
Robinson has also been recognized outside of baseball. In December 1956, the NAACP recognized him with the Spingarn Medal, which it awards annually for the highest achievement by an African-American. President Ronald Reagan posthumously awarded Robinson the Presidential Medal of Freedom on March 26, 1984, and on March 2, 2005, President George W. Bush gave Robinson's widow the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian award bestowed by Congress; Robinson was only the second baseball player to receive the award, after Roberto Clemente. On August 20, 2007, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife, Maria Shriver, announced that Robinson was inducted into the California Hall of Fame, located at The California Museum for History, Women and the Arts in Sacramento.
A number of buildings have been named in Robinson's honor. The UCLA Bruins baseball team plays in Jackie Robinson Stadium, which, because of the efforts of Jackie's brother Mack, features a memorial statue of Robinson by sculptor Richard H. Ellis. The stadium also unveiled a new mural of Robinson by Mike Sullivan on April 14, 2013. City Island Ballpark in Daytona Beach, Florida was renamed Jackie Robinson Ballpark in 1990 and a statue of Robinson with two children stands in front of the ballpark. His wife Rachel was present for the dedication on September 15. 1990. A number of facilities at Pasadena City College (successor to PJC) are named in Robinson's honor, including Robinson Field, a football/soccer/track facility named jointly for Robinson and his brother Mack. The New York Public School system has named a middle school after Robinson, and Dorsey High School plays at a Los Angeles football stadium named after him. His home in Brooklyn, the Jackie Robinson House, was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1976, and Brooklyn residents sought to turn his home into a city landmark. In 1978, Colonial Park in Harlem was renamed after Robinson. Robinson also has an asteroid named after him, 4319 Jackierobinson. In 1997, the United States Mint issued a Jackie Robinson commemorative silver dollar, and five-dollar gold coin. That same year, New York City renamed the Interboro Parkway in his honor. A statue of Robinson at Journal Square Transportation Center in Jersey City, New Jersey, was dedicated in 1998.
In 2011, the U.S. placed a plaque at Robinson's Montreal home to honor the ending of segregation in baseball. The house, at 8232 avenue de Gaspé near Jarry Park, was Robinson's residence when he played for the Montreal Royals during 1946. In a letter read during the ceremony, Rachel Robinson, Jackie's widow, wrote: "I remember Montreal and that house very well and have always had warm feeling for that great city. Before Jack and I moved to Montreal, we had just been through some very rough treatment in the racially biased South during spring training in Florida. In the end, Montreal was the perfect place for him to get his start. We never had a threatening or unpleasant experience there. The people were so welcoming and saw Jack as a player and as a man."
On November 22, 2014, UCLA announced that it would officially retire the number 42 across all university sports, effective immediately. While Robinson wore several different numbers during his UCLA career, the school chose 42 because it had become indelibly identified with him. The only sport this did not affect was men's basketball, which had previously retired the number for Walt Hazzard (although Kevin Love was actually the last player in that sport to wear 42, with Hazzard's blessing). In a move paralleling that of MLB when it retired the number, UCLA allowed three athletes (in women's soccer, softball, and football) who were already wearing 42 to continue to do so for the remainder of their UCLA careers. The school also announced it would prominently display the number at all of its athletic venues.
A jersey that Robinson brought home with him after his rookie season ended in 1947 was sold at an auction for $2.05 million on November 19, 2017. The price was the highest ever paid for a post-World War II jersey. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Jack Roosevelt Robinson (January 31, 1919 – October 24, 1972) was an American professional baseball player who became the first African American to play in Major League Baseball (MLB) in the modern era. Robinson broke the color line when he started at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947. The Dodgers signing Robinson heralded the end of racial segregation in professional baseball that had relegated black players to the Negro leagues since the 1880s. Robinson was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "During his 10-year MLB career, Robinson won the inaugural Rookie of the Year Award in 1947, was an All-Star for six consecutive seasons from 1949 through 1954, and won the National League (NL) Most Valuable Player Award in 1949—the first black player so honored. Robinson played in six World Series and contributed to the Dodgers' 1955 World Series championship.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In 1997, Major League Baseball retired his uniform No. 42 across all major league teams; he was the first professional athlete in any sport to be so honored. MLB also adopted a new annual tradition, \"Jackie Robinson Day\", for the first time on April 15, 2004, on which every player on every team wears No. 42.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Robinson's character, his use of nonviolence, and his talent challenged the traditional basis of segregation that had then marked many other aspects of American life. He influenced the culture of and contributed significantly to the civil rights movement. Robinson also was the first black television analyst in MLB and the first black vice president of a major American corporation, Chock full o'Nuts. In the 1960s, he helped establish the Freedom National Bank, an African-American-owned financial institution based in Harlem, New York. After his death in 1972, Robinson was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal and Presidential Medal of Freedom in recognition of his achievements on and off the field.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Jack Roosevelt Robinson was born on January 31, 1919, into a family of sharecroppers in Cairo, Georgia. He was the youngest of five children born to Mallie (née McGriff) and Jerry Robinson, after siblings Edgar, Frank, Matthew (nicknamed \"Mack\"), and Willa Mae. His middle name honored former President Theodore Roosevelt, who died 25 days before Robinson was born. After Robinson's father left the family in 1920, they moved to Pasadena, California.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The extended Robinson family established itself on a residential plot containing two small houses at 121 Pepper Street in Pasadena. Robinson's mother worked various odd jobs to support the family. Growing up in relative poverty in an otherwise affluent community, Robinson and his minority friends were excluded from many recreational opportunities. As a result, Robinson joined a neighborhood gang, but his friend Carl Anderson persuaded him to abandon it.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In 1935, Robinson graduated from Washington Junior High School and enrolled at John Muir Technical High School. Recognizing his athletic talents, Robinson's older brothers, Frank and Mack (himself an accomplished track and field athlete and silver medalist behind Jesse Owens in the 200 meters at the Berlin 1936 Summer Olympics) inspired Jackie to pursue his interest in sports.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "At Muir Tech, Robinson played numerous sports at the varsity level and lettered in four of them: football, basketball, track and field, and baseball. He played shortstop and catcher on the baseball team, quarterback on the football team, and guard on the basketball team. With the track and field squad, he won awards in the broad jump. He was also a member of the tennis team.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In 1936, Robinson won the junior boys singles championship in the annual Pacific Coast Negro Tennis Tournament and earned a place on the Pomona annual baseball tournament all-star team, which included future Hall of Famers Ted Williams and Bob Lemon. In late January 1937, the Pasadena Star-News newspaper reported that Robinson \"for two years has been the outstanding athlete at Muir, starring in football, basketball, track, baseball, and tennis.\"",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "After Muir, Robinson attended Pasadena Junior College (PJC), where he continued his athletic career by participating in basketball, football, baseball, and track. On the football team, he played quarterback and safety. He was a shortstop and leadoff hitter for the baseball team, and he broke an American junior college broad-jump record held by his brother Mack with a jump of 25 ft. 6+1⁄2 in. on May 7, 1938. As at Muir High School, most of Jackie's teammates were white. While playing football at PJC, Robinson suffered a fractured ankle, complications from which would eventually delay his deployment status while in the military. In 1938, he was elected to the All-Southland Junior College Team for baseball and selected as the region's Most Valuable Player.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "That year, Robinson was one of 10 students named to the school's Order of the Mast and Dagger (Omicron Mu Delta), awarded to students performing \"outstanding service to the school and whose scholastic and citizenship record is worthy of recognition.\" Also while at PJC, he was elected to the Lancers, a student-run police organization responsible for patrolling various school activities.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "An incident at PJC illustrated Robinson's impatience with authority figures he perceived as racist—a character trait that would resurface repeatedly in his life. On January 25, 1938, he was arrested after vocally disputing the detention of a black friend by police. Robinson received a two-year suspended sentence, but the incident—along with other rumored run-ins between Robinson and police—gave Robinson a reputation for combativeness in the face of racial antagonism. While at PJC, he was motivated by a preacher (the Rev. Karl Downs) to attend church on a regular basis, and Downs became a confidant for Robinson, a Christian. Toward the end of his PJC tenure, Frank Robinson (to whom Robinson felt closest among his three brothers) was killed in a motorcycle accident. The event motivated Jackie to pursue his athletic career at the nearby University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he could remain closer to Frank's family.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "After graduating from PJC in spring 1939, Robinson enrolled at UCLA, where he became the school's first athlete to win varsity letters in four sports: baseball, basketball, football, and track.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "He was one of four black players on the Bruins' 1939 football team; the others were Woody Strode, Kenny Washington, and Ray Bartlett. Washington, Strode, and Robinson made up three of the team's four backfield players. At a time when only a few black students played mainstream college football, this made UCLA college football's most integrated team. They went undefeated with four ties at 6–0–4. Robinson finished the season with 12.2 yards per attempt on 42 carries, which is the school football record for highest rushing yards per carry in a season as of 2022. Robinson also led the NCAA in punt return average in the 1939 and 1940 seasons.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In track and field, Robinson won the 1940 NCAA championship in the long jump at 24 ft 10+1⁄4 in (7.58 m). Baseball was Robinson's \"worst sport\" at UCLA; he hit .097 in his only season, although in his first game he went 4-for-4 and twice stole home.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "While a senior at UCLA, Robinson met his future wife, Rachel Isum (b.1922), a UCLA freshman who was familiar with Robinson's athletic career at PJC. He played football as a senior, but the 1940 Bruins won only one game. In the spring, Robinson left college just shy of graduation, despite the reservations of his mother and Isum. He took a job as an assistant athletic director with the government's National Youth Administration (NYA) in Atascadero, California.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "After the government ceased NYA operations, Robinson traveled to Honolulu in the fall of 1941 to play football for the semi-professional, racially integrated Honolulu Bears. After a short season, Robinson returned to California in December 1941 to pursue a career as running back for the Los Angeles Bulldogs of the Pacific Coast Football League. By that time, however, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had taken place, which drew the United States into World War II and ended Robinson's nascent football career.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In 1942, Robinson was drafted and assigned to a segregated Army cavalry unit at Fort Riley (in Kansas). Having the requisite qualifications, Robinson and several other black soldiers applied for admission to an Officer Candidate School (OCS) then located at Fort Riley.",
"title": "Military career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Although the Army's initial July 1941 guidelines for OCS had been drafted as race-neutral, few black applicants were admitted into OCS until after subsequent directives by Army leadership. The applications of Robinson and his colleagues were delayed for several months. After protests by heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis (then stationed at Fort Riley) and with the help of Truman Gibson (then an assistant civilian aide to the Secretary of War), the men were accepted into OCS. The experience led to a personal friendship between Robinson and Louis. Upon finishing OCS, Robinson was commissioned as a second lieutenant in January 1943. Shortly afterward, Robinson and Isum were formally engaged.",
"title": "Military career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "After receiving his commission, Robinson was reassigned to Fort Hood, Texas, where he joined the 761st \"Black Panthers\" Tank Battalion. While at Fort Hood, Robinson often used his weekend leave to visit the Rev. Karl Downs, President of Sam Huston College (now Huston–Tillotson University) in nearby Austin, Texas; in California, Downs had been Robinson's pastor at Scott United Methodist Church while Robinson attended PJC.",
"title": "Military career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "An event on July 6, 1944, derailed Robinson's military career. While awaiting results of hospital tests on the ankle he had injured in junior college, Robinson boarded an Army bus with a fellow officer's wife; although the Army had commissioned its own unsegregated bus line, the bus driver ordered Robinson to move to the back of the bus. Robinson refused. The driver backed down, but after reaching the end of the line, summoned the military police, who took Robinson into custody. When Robinson later confronted the investigating duty officer about racist questioning by the officer and his assistant, the officer recommended Robinson be court-martialed.",
"title": "Military career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "After Robinson's commander in the 761st, Paul L. Bates, refused to authorize the legal action, Robinson was summarily transferred to the 758th Battalion—where the commander quickly consented to charge Robinson with multiple offenses, including, among other charges, public drunkenness, even though Robinson did not drink.",
"title": "Military career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "By the time of the court-martial in August 1944, the charges against Robinson had been reduced to two counts of insubordination during questioning. Robinson was acquitted by an all-white panel of nine officers.",
"title": "Military career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Although his former unit, the 761st Tank Battalion, became the first black tank unit to see combat in World War II, Robinson's court-martial proceedings prohibited him from being deployed overseas, and he was never in combat.",
"title": "Military career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "After his acquittal, he was transferred to Camp Breckinridge, Kentucky, where he served as a coach for army athletics until receiving an honorable discharge in November 1944. While there, Robinson met a former player for the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro American League, who encouraged Robinson to write the Monarchs and ask for a tryout. Robinson took the former player's advice and wrote to Monarchs co-owner Thomas Baird.",
"title": "Military career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "After his discharge, Robinson briefly returned to his old football club, the Los Angeles Bulldogs. Robinson then accepted an offer from his old friend and pastor Rev. Karl Downs to be the athletic director at Samuel Huston College in Austin, then of the Southwestern Athletic Conference. The job included coaching the school's basketball team for the 1944–45 season. As it was a fledgling program, few students tried out for the basketball team, and Robinson even resorted to inserting himself into the lineup for exhibition games. Although his teams were outmatched by opponents, Robinson was respected as a disciplinarian coach, and drew the admiration of, among others, Langston University basketball player Marques Haynes, a future member of the Harlem Globetrotters.",
"title": "Post-military"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In early 1945, while Robinson was at Sam Huston College, the Kansas City Monarchs sent him a written offer to play professional baseball in the Negro leagues. Robinson accepted a contract for $400 per month. Although he played well for the Monarchs, Robinson was frustrated with the experience. He had grown used to a structured playing environment in college, and the Negro leagues' disorganization and embrace of gambling interests appalled him. The hectic travel schedule also placed a burden on his relationship with Isum, with whom he could now communicate only by letter. In all, Robinson played 47 games at shortstop for the Monarchs, hitting .387 with five home runs, and registering 13 stolen bases. He also appeared in the 1945 East–West All-Star Game, going hitless in five at-bats.",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "During the season, Robinson pursued potential major league interests. No black man had played in the major leagues since Moses Fleetwood Walker in 1884, but the Boston Red Sox nevertheless held a tryout at Fenway Park for Robinson and other black players on April 16. The tryout, however, was a farce chiefly designed to assuage the desegregationist sensibilities of powerful Boston City Councilman Isadore H. Y. Muchnick. Even with the stands limited to management, Robinson was subjected to racial epithets. He left the tryout humiliated, and more than 14 years later, in July 1959, the Red Sox became the final major league team to integrate its roster.",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Other teams, however, had more serious interest in signing a black ballplayer. In the mid-1940s, Branch Rickey, club president and general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, began to scout the Negro leagues for a possible addition to the Dodgers' roster. Rickey selected Robinson from a list of promising black players and interviewed him for possible assignment to Brooklyn's International League farm club, the Montreal Royals. Rickey was especially interested in making sure his eventual signee could withstand the inevitable racial abuse that would be directed at him. In a famous three-hour exchange on August 28, 1945, Rickey asked Robinson if he could face the racial animus without taking the bait and reacting angrily—a concern given Robinson's prior arguments with law enforcement officials at PJC and in the military. Robinson was aghast: \"Are you looking for a Negro who is afraid to fight back?\" Rickey replied that he needed a Negro player \"with guts enough not to fight back.\" After obtaining a commitment from Robinson to \"turn the other cheek\" to racial antagonism, Rickey agreed to sign him to a contract for $600 a month, equal to $9,753 today. Rickey did not offer compensation to the Monarchs, instead believing all Negro league players were free agents due to the contracts not containing a reserve clause. Among those with whom Rickey discussed prospects was Wendell Smith, writer for the black weekly Pittsburgh Courier, who, according to Cleveland Indians owner and team president Bill Veeck, \"influenced Rickey to take Jack Robinson, for which he's never completely gotten credit.\"",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Although he required Robinson to keep the arrangement a secret for the time being, Rickey committed to formally signing Robinson before November 1, 1945. On October 23, it was publicly announced that Robinson would be assigned to the Royals for the 1946 season. On the same day, with representatives of the Royals and Dodgers present, Robinson formally signed his contract with the Royals. In what was later referred to as \"The Noble Experiment\", Robinson was the first black baseball player in the International League since the 1880s. He was not necessarily the best player in the Negro leagues, and black talents Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson were upset when Robinson was selected first. Larry Doby, who broke the color line in the American League the same year as Robinson, said, \"One of the things that was disappointing and disheartening to a lot of the black players at the time was that Jack was not the best player. The best was Josh Gibson. I think that's one of the reasons why Josh died so early—he was heartbroken.\"",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Rickey's offer allowed Robinson to leave behind the Monarchs and their grueling bus rides, and he went home to Pasadena. That September, he signed with Chet Brewer's Kansas City Royals, a post-season barnstorming team in the California Winter League. Later that off-season, he briefly toured South America with another barnstorming team, while his fiancée Isum pursued nursing opportunities in New York City. On February 10, 1946, Robinson and Isum were married by their old friend, the Rev. Karl Downs.",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In 1946, Robinson arrived at Daytona Beach, Florida, for spring training with the Montreal Royals of the Class AAA International League. Clay Hopper, the manager of the Royals, asked Rickey to assign Robinson to any other Dodger affiliate, but Rickey refused.",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Robinson's presence was controversial in racially segregated Florida. He was not allowed to stay with his white teammates at the team hotel, and instead lodged at the home of Joe and Dufferin Harris, a politically active African American couple who introduced the Robinsons to civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune. Since the Dodgers organization did not own a spring training facility, scheduling was subject to the whim of area localities, several of which turned down any event involving Robinson or Johnny Wright, another black player whom Rickey had signed to the Dodgers' organization in January. In Sanford, Florida, the police chief threatened to cancel games if Robinson and Wright did not cease training activities there; as a result, Robinson was sent back to Daytona Beach. In Jacksonville, the stadium was padlocked shut without warning on game day, by order of the city's Parks and Public Property director. In DeLand, a scheduled day game was postponed, ostensibly because of issues with the stadium's electrical lighting.",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "After much lobbying of local officials by Rickey himself, the Royals were allowed to host a game involving Robinson in Daytona Beach. Robinson made his Royals debut at Daytona Beach's City Island Ballpark on March 17, 1946, in an exhibition game against the team's parent club, the Dodgers. Robinson thus became the first black player to openly play for a minor league team against a major league team since the de facto baseball color line had been implemented in the 1880s.",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Later in spring training, after some less-than-stellar performances, Robinson was shifted from shortstop to second base, allowing him to make shorter throws to first base. Robinson's performance soon rebounded. On April 18, 1946, Roosevelt Stadium hosted the Jersey City Giants' season opener against the Montreal Royals, marking the professional debut of the Royals' Jackie Robinson and the first time the color barrier had been broken in a game between two minor league clubs. Pitching against Robinson was Warren Sandel who had played against him when they both lived in California. During Robinson's first at bat, the Jersey City catcher, Dick Bouknight, demanded that Sandel throw at Robinson, but Sandel refused. Although Sandel induced Robinson to ground out at his first at bat, Robinson ended up with four hits in his five at bats; his first hit was a three-run home run in the game's third inning. He also scored four runs, drove in three, and stole two bases in the Royals' 14–1 victory. Robinson proceeded to lead the International League that season with a .349 batting average and .985 fielding percentage, and he was named the league's Most Valuable Player. Although he often faced hostility while on road trips (the Royals were forced to cancel a Southern exhibition tour, for example), the Montreal fan base enthusiastically supported Robinson. Whether fans supported or opposed it, Robinson's presence on the field was a boon to attendance; more than one million people went to games involving Robinson in 1946, an astounding figure by International League standards. In the fall of 1946, following the baseball season, Robinson returned home to California and briefly played professional basketball for the short-lived Los Angeles Red Devils.",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "In 1947, the Dodgers called Robinson up to the major leagues six days before the start of the season. With Eddie Stanky entrenched at second base for the Dodgers, Robinson played his initial major league season as a first baseman. Robinson made his debut as a Dodger wearing uniform number 42 on April 11, 1947, in a preseason exhibition game against the New York Yankees at Ebbets Field with 24,237 in attendance. On April 15, Robinson made his major league debut at the relatively advanced age of 28 at Ebbets Field before a crowd of 26,623 spectators, more than 14,000 of whom were black. Although he failed to get a base hit, he walked and scored a run in the Dodgers' 5–3 victory. Robinson became the first player since 1884 to openly break the major league baseball color line. Black fans began flocking to see the Dodgers when they came to town, abandoning their Negro league teams.",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Robinson's promotion met a generally positive, although mixed, reception among newspapers and white major league players. However, racial tension existed in the Dodger clubhouse. Some Dodger players insinuated they would sit out rather than play alongside Robinson. The brewing mutiny ended when Dodgers management took a stand for Robinson. Manager Leo Durocher informed the team, \"I do not care if the guy is yellow or black, or if he has stripes like a fuckin' zebra. I'm the manager of this team, and I say he plays. What's more, I say he can make us all rich. And if any of you cannot use the money, I will see that you are all traded.\"",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Robinson was also derided by opposing teams. According to a press report, the St. Louis Cardinals threatened to strike if Robinson played and spread the walkout across the entire National League. Existence of the plot was said to have been leaked by the Cardinals' team physician, Robert Hyland, to a friend, the New York Herald Tribune's Rutherford \"Rud\" Rennie. The reporter, concerned about protecting Hyland's anonymity and job, in turn leaked it to his Tribune colleague and editor, Stanley Woodward, whose own subsequent reporting with other sources protected Hyland. The Woodward article made national headlines. After it was published, National League President Ford Frick and Baseball Commissioner Happy Chandler let it be known that any striking players would be suspended. \"You will find that the friends that you think you have in the press box will not support you, that you will be outcasts,\" Frick was quoted as saying. \"I do not care if half the league strikes. Those who do it will encounter quick retribution. All will be suspended and I don't care if it wrecks the National League for five years. This is the United States of America and one citizen has as much right to play as another.\" Woodward's article received the E. P. Dutton Award in 1947 for Best Sports Reporting. The Cardinals players denied that they were planning to strike, and Woodward later told author Roger Kahn that Frick was his true source; writer Warren Corbett said that Frick's speech \"never happened\". Regardless, the report led to Robinson receiving increased support from the sports media. Even The Sporting News, a publication that had backed the color line, came out against the idea of a strike.",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Robinson nonetheless became the target of rough physical play by opponents (particularly the Cardinals). At one time, he received a seven-inch gash in his leg from Enos Slaughter. On April 22, 1947, during a game between the Dodgers and the Philadelphia Phillies, Phillies players and manager Ben Chapman called Robinson a \"nigger\" from their dugout and yelled that he should \"go back to the cotton fields\". Rickey later recalled that Chapman \"did more than anybody to unite the Dodgers. When he poured out that string of unconscionable abuse, he solidified and united thirty men.\"",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "However, Robinson received significant encouragement from several major league players. Robinson named Lee \"Jeep\" Handley, who played for the Phillies at the time, as the first opposing player to wish him well. Dodgers teammate Pee Wee Reese once came to Robinson's defense with the famous line, \"You can hate a man for many reasons. Color is not one of them.\" In 1947 or 1948, Reese is said to have put his arm around Robinson in response to fans who shouted racial slurs at Robinson before a game in Boston or Cincinnati. A statue by sculptor William Behrends, unveiled at KeySpan Park on November 1, 2005, depicts Reese with his arm around Robinson. Jewish baseball star Hank Greenberg, who had to deal with ethnic epithets during his career, also encouraged Robinson. Following an incident where Greenberg collided with Robinson at first base, he \"whispered a few words into Robinson's ear\", which Robinson later characterized as \"words of encouragement\". Greenberg had advised him to overcome his critics by defeating them in games. Robinson also talked frequently with Larry Doby, who endured his own hardships since becoming the first black player in the American League with the Cleveland Indians, as the two spoke to each other via telephone throughout the season.",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Robinson finished the season having played in 151 games for the Dodgers, with a batting average of .297, an on-base percentage of .383, and a .427 slugging percentage. He had 175 hits (scoring 125 runs) including 31 doubles, 5 triples, and 12 home runs, driving in 48 runs for the year. Robinson led the league in sacrifice hits, with 28, and in stolen bases, with 29. His cumulative performance earned him the inaugural Major League Baseball Rookie of the Year Award (separate National and American League Rookie of the Year honors were not awarded until 1949).",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "That year, the Brooklyn Dodgers won the National League pennant and went on to face the Yankees in the 1947 World Series. Robinson became the first black player to play in the World Series. He appeared in all seven games, with the Dodgers ultimately losing in Game 7.",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Following Stanky's trade to the Boston Braves in March 1948, Robinson took over second base, where he logged a .980 fielding percentage that year (second in the National League at the position, fractionally behind Stanky). Robinson had a batting average of .296 and 22 stolen bases for the season. In a 12–7 win against the St. Louis Cardinals on August 29, 1948, he hit for the cycle—a home run, a triple, a double, and a single in the same game. The Dodgers briefly moved into first place in the National League in late August 1948, but they ultimately finished third as the Braves went on to win the pennant and lose to the Cleveland Indians in the World Series.",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Racial pressure on Robinson eased in 1948 when a number of other black players entered the major leagues. Larry Doby (who broke the color barrier in the American League on July 5, 1947, just 11 weeks after Robinson) and Satchel Paige played for the Cleveland Indians, and the Dodgers had three other black players besides Robinson. In February 1948, he signed a $12,500 contract (equal to $152,251 today) with the Dodgers; while a significant amount, this was less than Robinson made in the off-season from a vaudeville tour, where he answered pre-set baseball questions and a speaking tour of the South. Between the tours, he underwent surgery on his right ankle. Because of his off-season activities, Robinson reported to training camp 30 pounds (14 kg) overweight. He lost the weight during training camp, but dieting left him weak at the plate. In 1948, Wendell Smith's book, Jackie Robinson: My Own Story, was released.",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "In the spring of 1949, Robinson turned to Hall of Famer George Sisler, working as an advisor to the Dodgers, for batting help. At Sisler's suggestion, Robinson spent hours at a batting tee, learning to hit the ball to right field. Sisler taught Robinson to anticipate a fastball, on the theory that it is easier to subsequently adjust to a slower curveball. Robinson also noted that \"Sisler showed me how to stop lunging, how to check my swing until the last fraction of a second\". The tutelage helped Robinson raise his batting average from .296 in 1948 to .342 in 1949. In addition to his improved batting average, Robinson stole 37 bases that season, was second place in the league for both doubles and triples, and registered 124 runs batted in with 122 runs scored. For the performance Robinson earned the Most Valuable Player Award for the National League. Baseball fans also voted Robinson as the starting second baseman for the 1949 All-Star Game — the first All-Star Game to include black players.",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "That year, a song about Robinson by Buddy Johnson, \"Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?\", reached number 13 on the charts; Count Basie recorded a famous version. Ultimately, the Dodgers won the National League pennant, but lost in five games to the New York Yankees in the 1949 World Series.",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Summer 1949 brought an unwanted distraction for Robinson. In July, he was called to testify before the United States House of Representatives' Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) concerning statements made that April by black athlete and actor Paul Robeson. Robinson was reluctant to testify, but he eventually agreed to do so, fearing it might negatively affect his career if he declined.",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "In 1950, Robinson led the National League in double plays made by a second baseman with 133. His salary that year was the highest any Dodger had been paid to that point: $35,000 ($425,712 in 2022 dollars). He finished the year with 99 runs scored, a .328 batting average, and 12 stolen bases. The year saw the release of a film biography of Robinson's life, The Jackie Robinson Story, in which Robinson played himself, and actress Ruby Dee played Rachel \"Rae\" (Isum) Robinson. The project had been previously delayed when the film's producers refused to accede to demands of two Hollywood studios that the movie include scenes of Robinson being tutored in baseball by a white man. The New York Times wrote that Robinson, \"doing that rare thing of playing himself in the picture's leading role, displays a calm assurance and composure that might be envied by many a Hollywood star.\"",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Robinson's Hollywood exploits, however, did not sit well with Dodgers co-owner Walter O'Malley, who referred to Robinson as \"Rickey's prima donna\". In late 1950, Rickey's contract as the Dodgers' team President expired. Weary of constant disagreements with O'Malley, and with no hope of being re-appointed as President of the Dodgers, Rickey cashed out his one-quarter financial interest in the team, leaving O'Malley in full control of the franchise. Rickey shortly thereafter became general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Robinson was disappointed at the turn of events and wrote a sympathetic letter to Rickey, whom he considered a father figure, stating, \"Regardless of what happens to me in the future, it all can be placed on what you have done and, believe me, I appreciate it.\"",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Before the 1951 season, O'Malley reportedly offered Robinson the job of manager of the Montreal Royals, effective at the end of Robinson's playing career. O'Malley was quoted in the Montreal Standard as saying, \"Jackie told me that he would be both delighted and honored to tackle this managerial post\"—although reports differed as to whether a position was ever formally offered.",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "During the 1951 season, Robinson led the National League in double plays made by a second baseman for the second year in a row, with 137. He also kept the Dodgers in contention for the 1951 pennant. During the last game of the regular season, in the 13th inning, he had a hit to tie the game and then hit a home run in the 14th inning, which proved to be the winning margin. This forced a best-of-three playoff series against the crosstown rival New York Giants.",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Despite Robinson's regular-season heroics, on October 3, 1951, the Dodgers lost the pennant on Bobby Thomson's famous home run, known as the Shot Heard 'Round the World. Overcoming his dejection, Robinson dutifully observed Thomson's feet to ensure he touched all the bases. Dodgers sportscaster Vin Scully later noted that the incident showed \"how much of a competitor Robinson was.\" He finished the season with 106 runs scored, a batting average of .335, and 25 stolen bases.",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Robinson had what was an average year for him in 1952. He finished the year with 104 runs, a .308 batting average, and 24 stolen bases. He did, however, record a career-high on-base percentage of .436. The Dodgers improved on their performance from the year before, winning the National League pennant before losing the 1952 World Series to the New York Yankees in seven games. That year, on the television show Youth Wants to Know, Robinson challenged the Yankees' general manager, George Weiss, on the racial record of his team, which had yet to sign a black player. Sportswriter Dick Young, whom Robinson had described as a \"bigot\", said, \"If there was one flaw in Jackie, it was the common one. He believed that everything unpleasant that happened to him happened because of his blackness.\" The 1952 season was the last year Robinson was an everyday starter at second base. Afterward, Robinson played variously at first, second, and third bases, shortstop, and in the outfield, with Jim Gilliam, another black player, taking over everyday second base duties. Robinson's interests began to shift toward the prospect of managing a major league team. He had hoped to gain experience by managing in the Puerto Rican Winter League, but according to the New York Post, Commissioner Happy Chandler denied the request.",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "In 1953, Robinson had 109 runs, a .329 batting average, and 17 steals,leading the Dodgers to another National League pennant (and another World Series loss to the Yankees, this time in six games). Robinson's continued success spawned a string of death threats. He was not dissuaded, however, from addressing racial issues publicly. That year, he served as editor for Our Sports magazine, a periodical focusing on Negro sports issues; contributions to the magazine included an article on golf course segregation by Robinson's old friend Joe Louis. Robinson also openly criticized segregated hotels and restaurants that served the Dodger organization; a number of these establishments integrated as a result, including the five-star Chase Park Hotel in St. Louis.",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "In 1954, Robinson had 62 runs scored, a .311 batting average, and 7 steals. His best day at the plate was on June 17, when he hit two home runs and two doubles. The following autumn, Robinson won his only championship when the Dodgers defeated the New York Yankees in the 1955 World Series. Although the team enjoyed ultimate success, 1955 was the worst year of Robinson's individual career. He hit .256 and stole only 12 bases. The Dodgers tried Robinson in the outfield and as a third baseman, both because of his diminishing abilities and because Gilliam was established at second base. Robinson, then 36 years old, missed 49 games and did not play in Game 7 of the World Series. He missed the game because manager Walter Alston decided to play Gilliam at second and Don Hoak at third base. That season, the Dodgers' Don Newcombe became the first black major league pitcher to win twenty games in a year.",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "In 1956, Robinson had 61 runs scored, a .275 batting average, and 12 steals. By then, he had begun to exhibit the effects of diabetes and to lose interest in the prospect of playing or managing professional baseball. Robinson ended his major league career when he struck out to end Game 7 of the 1956 World Series. After the season, the Dodgers traded Robinson to the arch-rival New York Giants for Dick Littlefield and $35,000 cash (equal to $376,732 today). The trade, however, was never completed; unbeknownst to the Dodgers, Robinson had already agreed with the president of Chock full o'Nuts to quit baseball and become an executive with the company. Since Robinson had sold exclusive rights to any retirement story to Look magazine two years previously, his retirement decision was revealed through the magazine, instead of through the Dodgers organization.",
"title": "Playing career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Robinson's major league debut brought an end to approximately sixty years of segregation in professional baseball, known as the baseball color line. After World War II, several other forces were also leading the country toward increased equality for blacks, including their accelerated migration to the North, where their political clout grew, and President Harry Truman's desegregation of the military in 1948. Robinson's breaking of the baseball color line and his professional success symbolized these broader changes and demonstrated that the fight for equality was more than simply a political matter. Civil rights movement leader Martin Luther King Jr. said that he was \"a legend and a symbol in his own time\", and that he \"challenged the dark skies of intolerance and frustration.\" According to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, Robinson's \"efforts were a monumental step in the civil-rights revolution in America ... [His] accomplishments allowed black and white Americans to be more respectful and open to one another and more appreciative of everyone's abilities.\"",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Beginning his major league career at the relatively advanced age of 28, he played only ten seasons from 1947 to 1956, all of them for the Brooklyn Dodgers. During his career, the Dodgers played in six World Series, and Robinson himself played in six All-Star Games. In 1999, he was one of 30 players named to the Major League Baseball All-Century Team.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Robinson's career is generally considered to mark the beginning of the post–\"long ball\" era in baseball, in which a reliance on raw power-hitting gave way to balanced offensive strategies that used footspeed to create runs through aggressive baserunning. Robinson exhibited the combination of hitting ability and speed which exemplified the new era. He scored more than 100 runs in six of his ten seasons (averaging more than 110 runs from 1947 to 1953), had a .311 career batting average, a .409 career on-base percentage, a .474 slugging percentage, and substantially more walks than strikeouts (740 to 291). Robinson was one of only two players during the span of 1947–56 to accumulate at least 125 steals while registering a slugging percentage over .425 (Minnie Miñoso was the other). He accumulated 197 stolen bases in total, including 19 steals of home. None of the latter were double steals (in which a player stealing home is assisted by a player stealing another base at the same time). Robinson has been referred to by author David Falkner as \"the father of modern base-stealing\".",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "I'm not concerned with your liking or disliking me ... all I ask is that you respect me as a human being.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "— Robinson, on his legacy",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Historical statistical analysis indicates Robinson was an outstanding fielder throughout his ten years in the major leagues and at virtually every position he played. After playing his rookie season at first base, Robinson spent most of his career as a second baseman. He led the league in fielding among second basemen in 1950 and 1951. Toward the end of his career, he played about 2,000 innings at third base and about 1,175 innings in the outfield, excelling at both.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Assessing himself, Robinson said, \"I'm not concerned with your liking or disliking me ... all I ask is that you respect me as a human being.\" Regarding Robinson's qualities on the field, Leo Durocher said, \"Ya want a guy that comes to play. This guy didn't just come to play. He come to beat ya. He come to stuff the goddamn bat right up your ass.\"",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Robinson portrayed himself in the 1950 motion picture The Jackie Robinson Story. Other portrayals include:",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Robinson was also the subject of a 2016 PBS documentary, Jackie Robinson, which was directed by Ken Burns and features Jamie Foxx doing voice-over as Robinson.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Robinson once told future Hall of Fame inductee Hank Aaron that \"the game of baseball is great, but the greatest thing is what you do after your career is over.\" Robinson retired from baseball at age 37 on January 5, 1957. Later that year, after he complained of numerous physical ailments, he was diagnosed with diabetes, a disease that also afflicted his brothers. Although Robinson adopted an insulin injection regimen, the state of medicine at the time could not prevent the continued deterioration of Robinson's physical condition from the disease.",
"title": "Post-baseball life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "In October 1959, Robinson entered the Greenville Municipal Airport's whites-only waiting room. Airport police asked Robinson to leave, but he refused. At a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) speech in Greenville, South Carolina, Robinson urged \"complete freedom\" and encouraged black citizens to vote and to protest their second-class citizenship. The following January, approximately 1,000 people marched on New Year's Day to the airport, which was desegregated shortly thereafter.",
"title": "Post-baseball life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "In his first year of eligibility for the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962, Robinson encouraged voters to consider only his on-field qualifications, rather than his cultural impact on the game. He was elected on the first ballot, becoming the first black player inducted into the Cooperstown museum.",
"title": "Post-baseball life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "In 1965, Robinson served as an analyst for ABC's Major League Baseball Game of the Week telecasts, the first black person to do so. In 1966, Robinson was hired as general manager for the short-lived Brooklyn Dodgers of the Continental Football League. In 1972, he served as a part-time commentator on Montreal Expos telecasts.",
"title": "Post-baseball life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "On June 4, 1972, the Dodgers retired his uniform number, 42, alongside those of Roy Campanella (39) and Sandy Koufax (32). From 1957 to 1964, Robinson was the vice president for personnel at Chock full o'Nuts; he was the first black person to serve as vice president of a major American corporation. Robinson always considered his business career as advancing the cause of black people in commerce and industry. He also chaired the NAACP's million-dollar Freedom Fund Drive in 1957, and served on the organization's board until 1967. In 1964, he helped found, with Harlem businessman Dunbar McLaurin, Freedom National Bank—a black-owned and operated commercial bank based in Harlem. He also served as the bank's first chairman of the board. In 1970, Robinson established the Jackie Robinson Construction Company to build housing for low-income families.",
"title": "Post-baseball life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Robinson was active in politics throughout his post-baseball life. He identified himself as a political independent, although he held conservative opinions on several issues, including the Vietnam War (he once wrote to Martin Luther King Jr. to defend the Johnson Administration's military policy). After supporting Richard Nixon in his 1960 presidential race against John F. Kennedy, Robinson later praised Kennedy effusively for his stance on civil rights. Robinson was angered by the 1964 presidential election candidacy of conservative Republican Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who had opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He became one of six national directors for Nelson Rockefeller's unsuccessful campaign to be nominated as the Republican candidate for the election. After the party nominated Goldwater instead, Robinson left the party's convention commenting that he now had \"a better understanding of how it must have felt to be a Jew in Hitler's Germany\". He later became special assistant for community affairs when Rockefeller was re-elected governor of New York in 1966 and in 1971 was appointed to the New York State Athletic Commission by Rockefeller. In 1968, he broke with the Republican party and supported Hubert Humphrey against Nixon in that year's presidential election.",
"title": "Post-baseball life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Robinson protested against the major leagues' ongoing lack of minority managers and central office personnel, and he turned down an invitation to appear in an old-timers' game at Yankee Stadium in 1969. He made his final public appearance on October 15, 1972, nine days before his death, throwing the ceremonial first pitch before Game 2 of the World Series at Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati. He gratefully accepted a plaque honoring the twenty-fifth anniversary of his MLB debut, but also commented, \"I'm going to be tremendously more pleased and more proud when I look at that third base coaching line one day and see a black face managing in baseball.\" This wish was only fulfilled after Robinson's death: following the 1974 season, the Cleveland Indians gave their managerial post to Frank Robinson (no relation to Jackie), a Hall of Fame-bound player who would go on to manage three other teams. Despite the success of these two Robinsons and other black players, the number of African-American players in Major League Baseball has declined since the 1970s.",
"title": "Post-baseball life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "After Robinson's retirement from baseball, his wife Rachel Robinson pursued a career in academic nursing. She became an assistant professor at the Yale School of Nursing and director of nursing at the Connecticut Mental Health Center. She also served on the board of the Freedom National Bank until it closed in 1990. She and Jackie had three children: Jackie Robinson Jr. (1946–1971), Sharon Robinson (b. 1950), and David Robinson (b. 1952).",
"title": "Family life and death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Robinson's eldest son, Jackie Robinson Jr., had emotional trouble during his childhood and entered special education at an early age. He enlisted in the Army in search of a disciplined environment, served in the Vietnam War, and was wounded in action on November 19, 1965. After his discharge, he struggled with drug problems. Robinson Jr. eventually completed the treatment program at Daytop Village in Seymour, Connecticut, and became a counselor at the institution. On June 17, 1971, he was killed in an automobile accident at age 24. The experience with his son's drug addiction turned Robinson Sr. into an avid anti-drug crusader toward the end of his life.",
"title": "Family life and death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Robinson did not outlive his son by very long. In 1968, he suffered a heart attack. Complications from heart disease and diabetes weakened Robinson and made him almost blind by middle age. On October 24, 1972, Robinson died of a heart attack at his home at 95 Cascade Road in North Stamford, Connecticut; he was 53 years old. Robinson's funeral service on October 27, 1972, at Upper Manhattan's Riverside Church in Morningside Heights, attracted 2,500 mourners. Many of his former teammates, other famous baseball players, and basketball star Bill Russell served as pallbearers, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson gave the eulogy. Tens of thousands of people lined the subsequent procession route to Robinson's interment site at Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn, where he was buried next to his son Jackie and mother-in-law Zellee Isum. Twenty-five years after Robinson's death, the Interboro Parkway was renamed the Jackie Robinson Parkway in his memory. This parkway bisects the cemetery in close proximity to Robinson's gravesite.",
"title": "Family life and death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "After Robinson's death, his widow founded the Jackie Robinson Foundation, and she remains an officer as of 2021. On April 15, 2008, she announced that in 2010 the foundation would open a museum devoted to Jackie in Lower Manhattan. Robinson's daughter, Sharon, became a midwife, educator, director of educational programming for MLB, and the author of two books about her father. His youngest son, David, who has ten children, is a coffee grower and social activist in Tanzania.",
"title": "Family life and death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "According to a poll conducted in 1947, Robinson was the second most popular man in the country, behind Bing Crosby. In 1999, he was named by Time on its list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.",
"title": "Awards and recognition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Robinson was ranked No. 44 on The Sporting News list of \"Baseball's 100 Greatest Players\" in 1999. That same year, he was one of 30 players elected to the Major League Baseball All-Century Team. In 2020, The Athletic ranked Robinson at number 42 on its \"Baseball 100\" list, complied by sportswriter Joe Posnanski.",
"title": "Awards and recognition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Baseball writer Bill James, in The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, ranked Robinson as the 32nd greatest player of all time strictly on the basis of his performance on the field, noting that he was one of the top players in the league throughout his career. Robinson was among the 25 charter members of UCLA's Athletics Hall of Fame in 1984. In 2002, Molefi Kete Asante included Robinson on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans. Robinson has also been honored by the United States Postal Service on three separate postage stamps, in 1982, 1999, and 2000.",
"title": "Awards and recognition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "The City of Pasadena has recognized Robinson with a baseball diamond and stadium named Jackie Robinson Field in Brookside Park next to the Rose Bowl, and with the Jackie Robinson Center (a community outreach center providing health services). In 1997, a $325,000 bronze sculpture (equal to $592,465 today) by artists Ralph Helmick, Stu Schecter, and John Outterbridge depicting oversized nine-foot busts of Robinson and his brother Mack was erected at Garfield Avenue, across from the main entrance of Pasadena City Hall; a granite footprint lists multiple donors to the commission project, which was organized by the Robinson Memorial Foundation and supported by members of the Robinson family.",
"title": "Awards and recognition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Major League Baseball has honored Robinson many times since his death. In 1987, both the National and American League Rookie of the Year Awards were renamed the \"Jackie Robinson Award\" in honor of the first recipient (Robinson's Major League Rookie of the Year Award in 1947 encompassed both leagues). On April 15, 1997, Robinson's jersey number, 42, was retired throughout Major League Baseball, the first time any jersey number had been retired throughout one of the four major American sports leagues. Under the terms of the retirement, a grandfather clause allowed the handful of players who wore number 42 to continue doing so in tribute to Robinson, until such time as they subsequently changed teams or jersey numbers. This affected players such as the Mets' Butch Huskey and Boston's Mo Vaughn. The Yankees' Mariano Rivera, who retired at the end of the 2013 season, was the last player in Major League Baseball to wear jersey number 42 on a regular basis. Since 1997, only Wayne Gretzky's number 99, retired by the NHL in 2000, and Bill Russell's number 6, retired by the NBA in 2022, have been retired league-wide in any of the four major sports. There have also been calls for MLB to retire number 21 league-wide in honor of Roberto Clemente, a sentiment opposed by the Robinson family.",
"title": "Awards and recognition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "As an exception to the retired-number policy, MLB began honoring Robinson by allowing players to wear number 42 on April 15, Jackie Robinson Day, which is an annual observance that started in 2004. For the 60th anniversary of Robinson's major league debut, MLB invited players to wear the number 42 on Jackie Robinson Day in 2007. The gesture was originally the idea of outfielder Ken Griffey Jr., who sought Rachel Robinson's permission to wear the number. After Griffey received her permission, Commissioner Bud Selig not only allowed Griffey to wear the number, but also extended an invitation to all major league teams to do the same. Ultimately, more than 200 players wore number 42, including the entire rosters of the Los Angeles Dodgers, New York Mets, Houston Astros, Philadelphia Phillies, St. Louis Cardinals, Milwaukee Brewers, and Pittsburgh Pirates. The tribute was continued in 2008, when, during games on April 15, all members of the Mets, Cardinals, Washington Nationals, and Tampa Bay Rays wore Robinson's number 42. On June 25, 2008, MLB installed a new plaque for Robinson at the Baseball Hall of Fame commemorating his off-the-field impact on the game as well as his playing statistics. In 2009, all of MLB's uniformed personnel (including players) wore number 42 on April 15; this tradition has continued every year since on that date.",
"title": "Awards and recognition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "At the November 2006 groundbreaking for Citi Field, the new ballpark for the New York Mets, it was announced that the main entrance, modeled on the one in Brooklyn's old Ebbets Field, would be called the Jackie Robinson Rotunda. The rotunda was dedicated at the opening of Citi Field on April 16, 2009. It honors Robinson with large quotations spanning the inner curve of the facade and features a large freestanding statue of his number, 42, which has become an attraction in itself. Mets owner Fred Wilpon announced that the Mets—in conjunction with Citigroup and the Jackie Robinson Foundation—would create the Jackie Robinson Museum and Learning Center, located at the headquarters of the Jackie Robinson Foundation at One Hudson Square, along Canal Street in lower Manhattan. Along with the museum, scholarships will be awarded to \"young people who live by and embody Jackie's ideals.\" The museum opened in 2022. At Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, a statue of Robinson was introduced in 2017. The New York Yankees honor Robinson with a plaque in Monument Park.",
"title": "Awards and recognition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Since 2004, the Aflac National High School Baseball Player of the Year has been presented the \"Jackie Robinson Award\".",
"title": "Awards and recognition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Robinson has also been recognized outside of baseball. In December 1956, the NAACP recognized him with the Spingarn Medal, which it awards annually for the highest achievement by an African-American. President Ronald Reagan posthumously awarded Robinson the Presidential Medal of Freedom on March 26, 1984, and on March 2, 2005, President George W. Bush gave Robinson's widow the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian award bestowed by Congress; Robinson was only the second baseball player to receive the award, after Roberto Clemente. On August 20, 2007, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife, Maria Shriver, announced that Robinson was inducted into the California Hall of Fame, located at The California Museum for History, Women and the Arts in Sacramento.",
"title": "Awards and recognition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "A number of buildings have been named in Robinson's honor. The UCLA Bruins baseball team plays in Jackie Robinson Stadium, which, because of the efforts of Jackie's brother Mack, features a memorial statue of Robinson by sculptor Richard H. Ellis. The stadium also unveiled a new mural of Robinson by Mike Sullivan on April 14, 2013. City Island Ballpark in Daytona Beach, Florida was renamed Jackie Robinson Ballpark in 1990 and a statue of Robinson with two children stands in front of the ballpark. His wife Rachel was present for the dedication on September 15. 1990. A number of facilities at Pasadena City College (successor to PJC) are named in Robinson's honor, including Robinson Field, a football/soccer/track facility named jointly for Robinson and his brother Mack. The New York Public School system has named a middle school after Robinson, and Dorsey High School plays at a Los Angeles football stadium named after him. His home in Brooklyn, the Jackie Robinson House, was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1976, and Brooklyn residents sought to turn his home into a city landmark. In 1978, Colonial Park in Harlem was renamed after Robinson. Robinson also has an asteroid named after him, 4319 Jackierobinson. In 1997, the United States Mint issued a Jackie Robinson commemorative silver dollar, and five-dollar gold coin. That same year, New York City renamed the Interboro Parkway in his honor. A statue of Robinson at Journal Square Transportation Center in Jersey City, New Jersey, was dedicated in 1998.",
"title": "Awards and recognition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "In 2011, the U.S. placed a plaque at Robinson's Montreal home to honor the ending of segregation in baseball. The house, at 8232 avenue de Gaspé near Jarry Park, was Robinson's residence when he played for the Montreal Royals during 1946. In a letter read during the ceremony, Rachel Robinson, Jackie's widow, wrote: \"I remember Montreal and that house very well and have always had warm feeling for that great city. Before Jack and I moved to Montreal, we had just been through some very rough treatment in the racially biased South during spring training in Florida. In the end, Montreal was the perfect place for him to get his start. We never had a threatening or unpleasant experience there. The people were so welcoming and saw Jack as a player and as a man.\"",
"title": "Awards and recognition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "On November 22, 2014, UCLA announced that it would officially retire the number 42 across all university sports, effective immediately. While Robinson wore several different numbers during his UCLA career, the school chose 42 because it had become indelibly identified with him. The only sport this did not affect was men's basketball, which had previously retired the number for Walt Hazzard (although Kevin Love was actually the last player in that sport to wear 42, with Hazzard's blessing). In a move paralleling that of MLB when it retired the number, UCLA allowed three athletes (in women's soccer, softball, and football) who were already wearing 42 to continue to do so for the remainder of their UCLA careers. The school also announced it would prominently display the number at all of its athletic venues.",
"title": "Awards and recognition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "A jersey that Robinson brought home with him after his rookie season ended in 1947 was sold at an auction for $2.05 million on November 19, 2017. The price was the highest ever paid for a post-World War II jersey.",
"title": "Awards and recognition"
}
]
| Jack Roosevelt Robinson was an American professional baseball player who became the first African American to play in Major League Baseball (MLB) in the modern era. Robinson broke the color line when he started at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947. The Dodgers signing Robinson heralded the end of racial segregation in professional baseball that had relegated black players to the Negro leagues since the 1880s. Robinson was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962. During his 10-year MLB career, Robinson won the inaugural Rookie of the Year Award in 1947, was an All-Star for six consecutive seasons from 1949 through 1954, and won the National League (NL) Most Valuable Player Award in 1949—the first black player so honored. Robinson played in six World Series and contributed to the Dodgers' 1955 World Series championship. In 1997, Major League Baseball retired his uniform No. 42 across all major league teams; he was the first professional athlete in any sport to be so honored. MLB also adopted a new annual tradition, "Jackie Robinson Day", for the first time on April 15, 2004, on which every player on every team wears No. 42. Robinson's character, his use of nonviolence, and his talent challenged the traditional basis of segregation that had then marked many other aspects of American life. He influenced the culture of and contributed significantly to the civil rights movement. Robinson also was the first black television analyst in MLB and the first black vice president of a major American corporation, Chock full o'Nuts. In the 1960s, he helped establish the Freedom National Bank, an African-American-owned financial institution based in Harlem, New York. After his death in 1972, Robinson was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal and Presidential Medal of Freedom in recognition of his achievements on and off the field. | 2001-11-03T15:04:41Z | 2023-12-31T14:02:16Z | [
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16,194 | JPEG Network Graphics | JPEG Network Graphics (JNG, /ˈdʒɪŋ/) is a JPEG-based graphics file format which is closely related to PNG: it uses the PNG file structure (with a different signature) as a container format to wrap JPEG-encoded image data.
JNG was created as an adjunct to the MNG animation format, but may be used as a stand-alone format. JNG files embed an 8-bit or 12-bit JPEG datastream in order to store color data, and may embed another datastream (1, 2, 4, 8, 16-bit PNG, or 8-bit JPEG grayscale image) for transparency information. However, a JNG may contain two separate JPEG datastreams for color information (one 8-bit and one 12-bit) to permit decoders that are unable to (or do not wish to) handle 12-bit datastreams to display the 8-bit datastream instead, if one is present.
Version 1.0 of the JNG specification was released on January 31, 2001 (initially as part of the MNG specification). Usually, all the applications supporting the MNG file format can handle JNG files too. For example, Konqueror has native MNG/JNG support, and MNG/JNG plugins are available for Opera, Internet Explorer, and Mozilla Firefox. The Mozilla Application Suite (and hence Netscape) originally supported MNG/JNG, but native support was removed in Mozilla 1.5a by developers, and Mozilla has not supported the format since, despite requests from its users. Safari does not support MNG/JNG.
JNG enhances the capabilities of the JFIF format (the usual JPEG file format) by supporting transparency, two consecutive color streams (one 8-bit and the other 12-bit), and other useful PNG features like color correction, gamma correction, embedded color profiles, PNG-style metadata, checksums, etc. The transparency information inside a JNG file (as an alpha channel) can be saved either in lossless PNG format or in lossy JPEG format. This way, users can benefit from the power of JPEG compression while preserving lossless (PNG-compressed) transparency information.
The chunk-based structure of JNG files is essentially the same as that of PNG files, differing only in the slightly different signature and the use of different chunks.
JNG does not have a registered Internet media type, but image/x-jng can be used.
Due to the lack of wide adoption of both the JNG and MNG format, it has fallen in disuse in favor of other formats that are in active development with similar qualities: | [
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"title": ""
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"text": "JNG was created as an adjunct to the MNG animation format, but may be used as a stand-alone format. JNG files embed an 8-bit or 12-bit JPEG datastream in order to store color data, and may embed another datastream (1, 2, 4, 8, 16-bit PNG, or 8-bit JPEG grayscale image) for transparency information. However, a JNG may contain two separate JPEG datastreams for color information (one 8-bit and one 12-bit) to permit decoders that are unable to (or do not wish to) handle 12-bit datastreams to display the 8-bit datastream instead, if one is present.",
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"text": "Version 1.0 of the JNG specification was released on January 31, 2001 (initially as part of the MNG specification). Usually, all the applications supporting the MNG file format can handle JNG files too. For example, Konqueror has native MNG/JNG support, and MNG/JNG plugins are available for Opera, Internet Explorer, and Mozilla Firefox. The Mozilla Application Suite (and hence Netscape) originally supported MNG/JNG, but native support was removed in Mozilla 1.5a by developers, and Mozilla has not supported the format since, despite requests from its users. Safari does not support MNG/JNG.",
"title": ""
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"text": "JNG enhances the capabilities of the JFIF format (the usual JPEG file format) by supporting transparency, two consecutive color streams (one 8-bit and the other 12-bit), and other useful PNG features like color correction, gamma correction, embedded color profiles, PNG-style metadata, checksums, etc. The transparency information inside a JNG file (as an alpha channel) can be saved either in lossless PNG format or in lossy JPEG format. This way, users can benefit from the power of JPEG compression while preserving lossless (PNG-compressed) transparency information.",
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},
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"text": "JNG does not have a registered Internet media type, but image/x-jng can be used.",
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"text": "Due to the lack of wide adoption of both the JNG and MNG format, it has fallen in disuse in favor of other formats that are in active development with similar qualities:",
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| JPEG Network Graphics is a JPEG-based graphics file format which is closely related to PNG: it uses the PNG file structure as a container format to wrap JPEG-encoded image data. JNG was created as an adjunct to the MNG animation format, but may be used as a stand-alone format. JNG files embed an 8-bit or 12-bit JPEG datastream in order to store color data, and may embed another datastream for transparency information. However, a JNG may contain two separate JPEG datastreams for color information to permit decoders that are unable to handle 12-bit datastreams to display the 8-bit datastream instead, if one is present. Version 1.0 of the JNG specification was released on January 31, 2001. Usually, all the applications supporting the MNG file format can handle JNG files too. For example, Konqueror has native MNG/JNG support, and MNG/JNG plugins are available for Opera, Internet Explorer, and Mozilla Firefox. The Mozilla Application Suite originally supported MNG/JNG, but native support was removed in Mozilla 1.5a by developers, and Mozilla has not supported the format since, despite requests from its users. Safari does not support MNG/JNG. JNG enhances the capabilities of the JFIF format by supporting transparency, two consecutive color streams, and other useful PNG features like color correction, gamma correction, embedded color profiles, PNG-style metadata, checksums, etc. The transparency information inside a JNG file can be saved either in lossless PNG format or in lossy JPEG format. This way, users can benefit from the power of JPEG compression while preserving lossless (PNG-compressed) transparency information. The chunk-based structure of JNG files is essentially the same as that of PNG files, differing only in the slightly different signature and the use of different chunks. JNG does not have a registered Internet media type, but image/x-jng can be used. | 2022-04-06T14:28:06Z | [
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|
16,196 | Jane Shore | Elizabeth "Jane" Shore (née Lambert; c. 1445 – c. 1527) was one of the many mistresses of King Edward IV of England. She became the best-known to history through being later accused of conspiracy by the future King Richard III, and compelled to do public penance. She was also a sometime mistress of other noblemen, including Edward's stepson, Thomas Grey, 1st Marquess of Dorset, and William Hastings, 1st Baron Hastings but ended her life in bourgeois respectability.
Born in London in about 1445, Elizabeth Lambert was the daughter of a prosperous merchant, John Lambert (d.1487), and his wife Amy (d.1488), who was the daughter of a well-off grocer named Robert Marshall. The name "Jane", which has sometimes been attached to her, was the invention of a 17th-century playwright (Heywood), because during the course of the sixteenth century, her real first name was omitted, then forgotten by authors. The tradition must go further back, however, as on 28 August 1599 was licensed the History of the Life and Death of Master Shore and Jane Shore his Wife.
Spending time in her father's shop at a young age may have brought the young Elizabeth into contact with ladies of high rank. C.J.S. Thompson's highly romanticised biography, The Witchery of Jane Shore, the Rose of London: The Romance of a Royal Mistress (1933) claimed that she was able to observe their behaviour and gain an understanding of the manners of those higher ranking than herself. She was thought to have been highly intelligent, and as a result received an education that was not usually associated with a person of her class. Thompson also claimed that her beauty earned her the title of "The Rose of London" – although this is not mentioned in contemporary sources. According to Thomas More, writing when Shore was elderly, she had been fair of body though not tall; she was attractive to men more through her personality than her physical beauty, being intelligent, literate, merry and playful.
She attracted many suitors, among them William Hastings, 1st Baron Hastings, friend and confidant of Edward IV. It is likely Hastings fell in love with Elizabeth Lambert before her marriage; his affection for her is apparent later in life by his continual protection of her.
Such extreme attention made John Lambert desirous of finding his daughter a suitable husband. Such an opportunity presented itself with William Shore (d. 1494), a goldsmith and banker and common visitor to the Lambert home. He was approximately 14 or 15 years older than Jane. Though handsome and well-to-do, he never really won her affections. Their marriage was annulled in March 1476 after she petitioned for the annulment of her marriage on the grounds that her husband was impotent, which prevented her from fulfilling her desire to have children. Pope Sixtus IV commissioned three bishops to decide the case, and they granted the annulment.
According to the Patent Rolls for 4 December 1476, it was during this same year that Shore began her liaison with Edward IV, after his return from France. Edward did not discard her as he did many of his mistresses, and was completely devoted to her. She had a large amount of influence over the king, but would not use it for her own personal gain. This was exemplified by her practice of bringing those out of favour before the king to help them gain pardon. Shore, according to the official records, was not showered with gifts, unlike many of Edward's previous mistresses. Their relationship lasted until Edward's death in 1483. It is reputed that her advocacy saved Eton College, and the society for the ladies at Eton College is to this day called the Jane Shore Society in her memory.
Shore's two other lovers were Edward IV's eldest stepson, Thomas Grey, 1st Marquess of Dorset, and William Hastings, 1st Baron Hastings. Grey's wife was the wealthy heiress Cecily Bonville, 7th Baroness Harington, who also happened to be Hastings' stepdaughter. Shore was instrumental in bringing about the alliance between Hastings and the Woodvilles, which was formed while Richard, Duke of Gloucester, was Protector, before he took the throne as King Richard III. She was accused of carrying messages between Hastings and Edward IV's widow, Elizabeth Woodville. It was because of her role in this alliance that Shore was charged with conspiracy, along with Hastings and the Woodvilles, against the Protector's government.
Simon Stallworth wrote to Sir William Stonor on 21 June 1483 that:
Mastres Chore is in prisone: what schall happyne hyr I knowe nott.
Shore's punishment included open penance at Paul's Cross for her promiscuous behaviour by Richard. The Great Chronicle of London records the event of Richard III's coronation on 6 July 1483 and that:
shortly afftyr was a woman namyd – Shoore that before days, after the common ffame, the lord Chambyrlain held, contrary his honour, called to a Reconnyng ffor part of his goodys & othyr thyngs, In soo much alle hyr movablys were attached by þe Shyrevys of London, and she lastly as a common harlot put to opyn penaunce, ffor the lyfe that she ledd wt þe said lord hastyngys & othir grete astatys.
But it may have been motivated by the suspicion that she had harboured Grey when he was a fugitive or as a result of Richard's antagonism towards any person who represented his older brother's court. A clash of personalities between the lighthearted Shore and stern Richard also generated a mutual dislike between the two. Shore accordingly went in her chemise through the streets one Sunday with a taper (thin candle) in her hand, attracting a lot of male attention along the way.
After her public penitence, Shore resided in Ludgate prison.
While in Ludgate prison, she captivated the King's Solicitor General, Thomas Lynom. After he expressed an interest in Shore to Richard, the king tried to dissuade him for his own good. This is evinced by a letter to John Russell from Richard where the King asked the chancellor to try to prevent the marriage, but if Lynom were determined on the marriage, to release Shore from prison and put her in the charge of her father until Richard's next arrival in London when the marriage could take place.
By the King
Right Reverend fadre in God, &c. Signifying unto you that it is shewed unto us that our Servant and Sollicitor Thomas Lynom merveillously blynded and abused with the late wife of William Shore nowe being in Ludgate by our commandement hathe made contract of matrymony with hir, as it is said, and entendethe to our full grete mervaile to procede to theffect of the same. We for many causes wold be sory that hee soo shuld be disposed. Pray you therefore to sende for him. And in that ye goodly may exhorte and sture hyme to the contrary. And if ye find him utterly set forto marye hur and noon otherwise wolbe advertised, than if it may stande with the lawe of the churche we be content, the tyme of marriage be deferred to ourcommyng next to London, that upon sufficient suertie founde for hure good abering ye doo sende hure keper and discharge hym of our saidcommaundement by warrant of thise, committing hure to the Rule and guyding of hur fader or any other by your discrecion in the meane season. Given, &c.
RIC. Rex.
To the Righte Reverend fadre in God &c. The Bisshop of Lincolne, our Chancellor
They were married and had one daughter. It is believed that Shore lived the remainder of her life in bourgeois respectability. Lynom lost his position as King's Solicitor when Henry VII defeated Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth in August 1485, but he was able to stay on as a mid-level bureaucrat in the new reign, becoming a gentleman who sat on the commissions in the Welsh Marches and clerk controller to Arthur, Prince of Wales, at Ludlow Castle. Thomas More attested that even in old age an attentive observer might discern in her shriveled countenance traces of her former beauty.
Thomas More's description remains to this day the most famous:
This woman was born in London, worshipfully frended, honestly brought vp, & very wel maryed, sauing somewhat to sone, her husbande an honest citezen, yonge & goodly & of good substance. But forasmuche as they were coupled ere she wer wel ripe, she not very feruently loued, for whom she neuer longed. Which was happely the thinge, that the more easily made her encline vnto the kings appetite when he required her. Howbeit the respect of his royaltie, the hope of gay apparel, ease, plesure & other wanton welth, was hable soone to perse a softe tender hearte. But when the king had abused her, anon her husband (as he was an honest man & one that could his good, not presuming to touch a kinges concubine) left her vp to him al togither. When the king died, the lord Chamberlen toke her. Which in the kinges daise, albeit he was sore ennamored vpon her, yet he forbare her, either for reuerence, or for a certain frendly faithfulnes. Proper she was & faire: nothing in her body that you would haue changed, but if you would haue wished her somewhat higher. Thus say thei that knew her in her youthe. Albeit some that now se her (for yet she liueth) deme her neuer to haue ben wel visaged. Whose iugement semeth me somwhat like, as though men should gesse the bewty of one longe before departed, by her scalpe taken out of the charnel house: for now is she old lene, withered & dried vp, nothing left but ryuilde skin & hard bone. An yet being euen such: whoso wel aduise her visage, might gesse & deuise which partes how filled, wold make it a faire face. Yet she delited not men so much in her bewty, as in her plesant behauiour. For a proper wit had she, & could both rede wel & write, mery in company, redy & quick of aunswer, neither mute nor ful of bable, sometime taunting without displeasure not without disport. The king would say that he had .iii. concubines, which in three diuers properties diuersly exceled. One the meriest, an other the wiliest, the thirde the holiest harlot in his realme, as one whom no man could get out of the church lightly to any place, but it wer to his bed. The other two were somwhat greter parsonages, & Natheles of their humilitie content to be nameles, & to forbere the praise of those properties. But the meriest was this Shoris wife, in whom the king therfore toke speciall pleasure. For many he had, but her he loued. Whose fauour, to sai the trouth, (for sinne it wer to belie the deuil) she neuer abused to any mans hurt, but to many a mans comfort & relief: where the king toke displeasure, she wolud mitigate & appease his mind: where men were out of fauour, she wold bring them in his grace. For many that had highly offended, shee obtained pardon. Of great forfetures she gate men remission. And finally in many weighty sutes, she stode many men in gret stede, either for none, or very smal rewardes, & those rather gay then rich: either for that she was content with the dede selfe well done, or for that she delited to be suid vnto, & to show what she was able to do wyth the king, or for that wanton women and welthy be not alway couetouse. I doubt not some shal think this woman to sleight a thing, to be written of & set amonge the remembraunces of great matters: which thei shal specially think, that happely shal esteme her only by that thei now see her. But me semeth the chaunce so much the more worthy to be remembred, in how much she is now in the more beggerly condicion, vnfrended & worne out of acquantance, after good substance, after as gret fauour with the prince, after as gret sute & seking to with al those that those days had busynes to spede, as many other men were in their times, which be now famouse, only by the infamy of their il dedes. Her doinges were not much lesse, albeit thei be muche lesse remembered, because thei were not so euil. For men vse if they haue an euil turne, to write it in marble: & whoso doth vs a good tourne, we write it in duste which is not worst proued by her: for at this daye shee beggeth of many at this daye liuing, that at this day had begged if she had not bene.
These words of Sir Thomas More probably suggested to Shakespeare that proverbial reflection in Hen. VIII. act iv. sc. 2.: "Men's evill manners live in brass: their virtues We write in water."
According to Michael Drayton, who had seen a purported portrait of her, "her hair [was] of a dark yellow, her face round and full, her eye gray, delicate harmony".
‘Julyan Lyneham’ is given 40 shillings in John Lambert's will of 1487.
It was recently discovered, 2021 a quoted inscription in an old book which may throw some further light on the matter. On the north wall of the chancel of St. Mary's, Whittlesea, is a marble mural monument to Thomas Hake, 1590. Its two panels are now blank, but it is probable that they had figures. The text, however, is still extant and perfectly readable:
Celastia seqvor terrestria sperno | Here Lyeth Bvried the Bodye of Thomas Hake, Esqvier | sonne and heire of Symon Hake of Depinge in | the countie of Lyncolne Esqvier and of Alice | his wife dovghter of Thomas Lynham Esqvier | somtyme President of Walles which Thomas | Hake died the first of March An° Dni 1590. | Who married Anne Dovghter of Roger Wylson of Govsner in the covntie of Lancaster Gent. | and of Jane his wife Dovghter of John Wallis which | Thomas and Anne had yssve 5 sonnes and 3 dovgh- | ters which died all yonge Bvt William Hake the | yongest ther only sonne and heire now livinge
Thomas Lynham, Esquire, referred to as sometime "President of Wales" (although in reality he was probably just a member of the Council of Wales and the Marches, not its president), had a daughter named Alice who married Simon Hake (or Hacke). They had at least one son, Thomas (d. 1 March 1590), and he had many children, though only one surviving, William, who erected the memorial.
William Hake (d.1625) of Peterborough married Lucy, daughter of Henry Gates of Gosberton, Lincolnshire, on 14 June 1596 at Gosberton, Lincoln, England and they had the children Henry, Fane, Thomas, Anthony, Symon, William (b.1601), Elizabeth, Anne, Lucy, Frances, Grace and Mary.
Their eldest daughter was called Elizabeth.
Both William Hake and his father Thomas were members of Parliament. The Hake family were Royalists during the Civil War, a sundial on a south-facing wall-end overlooking the garden then running down to the river's flood plain, but not now publicly accessible triumphantly declares VIVAL CAROLUS SECUNDUS 1663.
Of the same place, Whittlesea, Cambridge, in 1544–1551, we find Thomas Lynon or Lynom, executor of Richard, son of Thomas Lynon. In 1538 Thomas Lyname, yeoman, is granted a demise, indented, for 80 years, of the manor-place or lordship of Whittlesea, Cambridgeshire by Thorney Abbey. Simon Hake, Alice Lyneham's husband, had been a tenant of Thorney Abbey.
For a bibliography see James L. Harner, "Jane Shore in Literature: A Checklist" in Notes and Queries, v. 226, December 1981, p. 496.
The IMDb lists three films titled Jane Shore: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Elizabeth \"Jane\" Shore (née Lambert; c. 1445 – c. 1527) was one of the many mistresses of King Edward IV of England. She became the best-known to history through being later accused of conspiracy by the future King Richard III, and compelled to do public penance. She was also a sometime mistress of other noblemen, including Edward's stepson, Thomas Grey, 1st Marquess of Dorset, and William Hastings, 1st Baron Hastings but ended her life in bourgeois respectability.",
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"text": "Born in London in about 1445, Elizabeth Lambert was the daughter of a prosperous merchant, John Lambert (d.1487), and his wife Amy (d.1488), who was the daughter of a well-off grocer named Robert Marshall. The name \"Jane\", which has sometimes been attached to her, was the invention of a 17th-century playwright (Heywood), because during the course of the sixteenth century, her real first name was omitted, then forgotten by authors. The tradition must go further back, however, as on 28 August 1599 was licensed the History of the Life and Death of Master Shore and Jane Shore his Wife.",
"title": "Early life and first marriage"
},
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"text": "Spending time in her father's shop at a young age may have brought the young Elizabeth into contact with ladies of high rank. C.J.S. Thompson's highly romanticised biography, The Witchery of Jane Shore, the Rose of London: The Romance of a Royal Mistress (1933) claimed that she was able to observe their behaviour and gain an understanding of the manners of those higher ranking than herself. She was thought to have been highly intelligent, and as a result received an education that was not usually associated with a person of her class. Thompson also claimed that her beauty earned her the title of \"The Rose of London\" – although this is not mentioned in contemporary sources. According to Thomas More, writing when Shore was elderly, she had been fair of body though not tall; she was attractive to men more through her personality than her physical beauty, being intelligent, literate, merry and playful.",
"title": "Early life and first marriage"
},
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"text": "She attracted many suitors, among them William Hastings, 1st Baron Hastings, friend and confidant of Edward IV. It is likely Hastings fell in love with Elizabeth Lambert before her marriage; his affection for her is apparent later in life by his continual protection of her.",
"title": "Early life and first marriage"
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"text": "Such extreme attention made John Lambert desirous of finding his daughter a suitable husband. Such an opportunity presented itself with William Shore (d. 1494), a goldsmith and banker and common visitor to the Lambert home. He was approximately 14 or 15 years older than Jane. Though handsome and well-to-do, he never really won her affections. Their marriage was annulled in March 1476 after she petitioned for the annulment of her marriage on the grounds that her husband was impotent, which prevented her from fulfilling her desire to have children. Pope Sixtus IV commissioned three bishops to decide the case, and they granted the annulment.",
"title": "Early life and first marriage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "According to the Patent Rolls for 4 December 1476, it was during this same year that Shore began her liaison with Edward IV, after his return from France. Edward did not discard her as he did many of his mistresses, and was completely devoted to her. She had a large amount of influence over the king, but would not use it for her own personal gain. This was exemplified by her practice of bringing those out of favour before the king to help them gain pardon. Shore, according to the official records, was not showered with gifts, unlike many of Edward's previous mistresses. Their relationship lasted until Edward's death in 1483. It is reputed that her advocacy saved Eton College, and the society for the ladies at Eton College is to this day called the Jane Shore Society in her memory.",
"title": "Royal mistress"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Shore's two other lovers were Edward IV's eldest stepson, Thomas Grey, 1st Marquess of Dorset, and William Hastings, 1st Baron Hastings. Grey's wife was the wealthy heiress Cecily Bonville, 7th Baroness Harington, who also happened to be Hastings' stepdaughter. Shore was instrumental in bringing about the alliance between Hastings and the Woodvilles, which was formed while Richard, Duke of Gloucester, was Protector, before he took the throne as King Richard III. She was accused of carrying messages between Hastings and Edward IV's widow, Elizabeth Woodville. It was because of her role in this alliance that Shore was charged with conspiracy, along with Hastings and the Woodvilles, against the Protector's government.",
"title": "Open penance and prison"
},
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"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Simon Stallworth wrote to Sir William Stonor on 21 June 1483 that:",
"title": "Open penance and prison"
},
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"text": "Mastres Chore is in prisone: what schall happyne hyr I knowe nott.",
"title": "Open penance and prison"
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{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Shore's punishment included open penance at Paul's Cross for her promiscuous behaviour by Richard. The Great Chronicle of London records the event of Richard III's coronation on 6 July 1483 and that:",
"title": "Open penance and prison"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "shortly afftyr was a woman namyd – Shoore that before days, after the common ffame, the lord Chambyrlain held, contrary his honour, called to a Reconnyng ffor part of his goodys & othyr thyngs, In soo much alle hyr movablys were attached by þe Shyrevys of London, and she lastly as a common harlot put to opyn penaunce, ffor the lyfe that she ledd wt þe said lord hastyngys & othir grete astatys.",
"title": "Open penance and prison"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "But it may have been motivated by the suspicion that she had harboured Grey when he was a fugitive or as a result of Richard's antagonism towards any person who represented his older brother's court. A clash of personalities between the lighthearted Shore and stern Richard also generated a mutual dislike between the two. Shore accordingly went in her chemise through the streets one Sunday with a taper (thin candle) in her hand, attracting a lot of male attention along the way.",
"title": "Open penance and prison"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "After her public penitence, Shore resided in Ludgate prison.",
"title": "Open penance and prison"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "While in Ludgate prison, she captivated the King's Solicitor General, Thomas Lynom. After he expressed an interest in Shore to Richard, the king tried to dissuade him for his own good. This is evinced by a letter to John Russell from Richard where the King asked the chancellor to try to prevent the marriage, but if Lynom were determined on the marriage, to release Shore from prison and put her in the charge of her father until Richard's next arrival in London when the marriage could take place.",
"title": "Second marriage and later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "By the King",
"title": "Second marriage and later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Right Reverend fadre in God, &c. Signifying unto you that it is shewed unto us that our Servant and Sollicitor Thomas Lynom merveillously blynded and abused with the late wife of William Shore nowe being in Ludgate by our commandement hathe made contract of matrymony with hir, as it is said, and entendethe to our full grete mervaile to procede to theffect of the same. We for many causes wold be sory that hee soo shuld be disposed. Pray you therefore to sende for him. And in that ye goodly may exhorte and sture hyme to the contrary. And if ye find him utterly set forto marye hur and noon otherwise wolbe advertised, than if it may stande with the lawe of the churche we be content, the tyme of marriage be deferred to ourcommyng next to London, that upon sufficient suertie founde for hure good abering ye doo sende hure keper and discharge hym of our saidcommaundement by warrant of thise, committing hure to the Rule and guyding of hur fader or any other by your discrecion in the meane season. Given, &c.",
"title": "Second marriage and later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "RIC. Rex.",
"title": "Second marriage and later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "To the Righte Reverend fadre in God &c. The Bisshop of Lincolne, our Chancellor",
"title": "Second marriage and later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "They were married and had one daughter. It is believed that Shore lived the remainder of her life in bourgeois respectability. Lynom lost his position as King's Solicitor when Henry VII defeated Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth in August 1485, but he was able to stay on as a mid-level bureaucrat in the new reign, becoming a gentleman who sat on the commissions in the Welsh Marches and clerk controller to Arthur, Prince of Wales, at Ludlow Castle. Thomas More attested that even in old age an attentive observer might discern in her shriveled countenance traces of her former beauty.",
"title": "Second marriage and later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Thomas More's description remains to this day the most famous:",
"title": "Descriptions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "This woman was born in London, worshipfully frended, honestly brought vp, & very wel maryed, sauing somewhat to sone, her husbande an honest citezen, yonge & goodly & of good substance. But forasmuche as they were coupled ere she wer wel ripe, she not very feruently loued, for whom she neuer longed. Which was happely the thinge, that the more easily made her encline vnto the kings appetite when he required her. Howbeit the respect of his royaltie, the hope of gay apparel, ease, plesure & other wanton welth, was hable soone to perse a softe tender hearte. But when the king had abused her, anon her husband (as he was an honest man & one that could his good, not presuming to touch a kinges concubine) left her vp to him al togither. When the king died, the lord Chamberlen toke her. Which in the kinges daise, albeit he was sore ennamored vpon her, yet he forbare her, either for reuerence, or for a certain frendly faithfulnes. Proper she was & faire: nothing in her body that you would haue changed, but if you would haue wished her somewhat higher. Thus say thei that knew her in her youthe. Albeit some that now se her (for yet she liueth) deme her neuer to haue ben wel visaged. Whose iugement semeth me somwhat like, as though men should gesse the bewty of one longe before departed, by her scalpe taken out of the charnel house: for now is she old lene, withered & dried vp, nothing left but ryuilde skin & hard bone. An yet being euen such: whoso wel aduise her visage, might gesse & deuise which partes how filled, wold make it a faire face. Yet she delited not men so much in her bewty, as in her plesant behauiour. For a proper wit had she, & could both rede wel & write, mery in company, redy & quick of aunswer, neither mute nor ful of bable, sometime taunting without displeasure not without disport. The king would say that he had .iii. concubines, which in three diuers properties diuersly exceled. One the meriest, an other the wiliest, the thirde the holiest harlot in his realme, as one whom no man could get out of the church lightly to any place, but it wer to his bed. The other two were somwhat greter parsonages, & Natheles of their humilitie content to be nameles, & to forbere the praise of those properties. But the meriest was this Shoris wife, in whom the king therfore toke speciall pleasure. For many he had, but her he loued. Whose fauour, to sai the trouth, (for sinne it wer to belie the deuil) she neuer abused to any mans hurt, but to many a mans comfort & relief: where the king toke displeasure, she wolud mitigate & appease his mind: where men were out of fauour, she wold bring them in his grace. For many that had highly offended, shee obtained pardon. Of great forfetures she gate men remission. And finally in many weighty sutes, she stode many men in gret stede, either for none, or very smal rewardes, & those rather gay then rich: either for that she was content with the dede selfe well done, or for that she delited to be suid vnto, & to show what she was able to do wyth the king, or for that wanton women and welthy be not alway couetouse. I doubt not some shal think this woman to sleight a thing, to be written of & set amonge the remembraunces of great matters: which thei shal specially think, that happely shal esteme her only by that thei now see her. But me semeth the chaunce so much the more worthy to be remembred, in how much she is now in the more beggerly condicion, vnfrended & worne out of acquantance, after good substance, after as gret fauour with the prince, after as gret sute & seking to with al those that those days had busynes to spede, as many other men were in their times, which be now famouse, only by the infamy of their il dedes. Her doinges were not much lesse, albeit thei be muche lesse remembered, because thei were not so euil. For men vse if they haue an euil turne, to write it in marble: & whoso doth vs a good tourne, we write it in duste which is not worst proued by her: for at this daye shee beggeth of many at this daye liuing, that at this day had begged if she had not bene.",
"title": "Descriptions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "These words of Sir Thomas More probably suggested to Shakespeare that proverbial reflection in Hen. VIII. act iv. sc. 2.: \"Men's evill manners live in brass: their virtues We write in water.\"",
"title": "Descriptions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "According to Michael Drayton, who had seen a purported portrait of her, \"her hair [was] of a dark yellow, her face round and full, her eye gray, delicate harmony\".",
"title": "Descriptions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "‘Julyan Lyneham’ is given 40 shillings in John Lambert's will of 1487.",
"title": "Children"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "It was recently discovered, 2021 a quoted inscription in an old book which may throw some further light on the matter. On the north wall of the chancel of St. Mary's, Whittlesea, is a marble mural monument to Thomas Hake, 1590. Its two panels are now blank, but it is probable that they had figures. The text, however, is still extant and perfectly readable:",
"title": "Children"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Celastia seqvor terrestria sperno | Here Lyeth Bvried the Bodye of Thomas Hake, Esqvier | sonne and heire of Symon Hake of Depinge in | the countie of Lyncolne Esqvier and of Alice | his wife dovghter of Thomas Lynham Esqvier | somtyme President of Walles which Thomas | Hake died the first of March An° Dni 1590. | Who married Anne Dovghter of Roger Wylson of Govsner in the covntie of Lancaster Gent. | and of Jane his wife Dovghter of John Wallis which | Thomas and Anne had yssve 5 sonnes and 3 dovgh- | ters which died all yonge Bvt William Hake the | yongest ther only sonne and heire now livinge",
"title": "Children"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Thomas Lynham, Esquire, referred to as sometime \"President of Wales\" (although in reality he was probably just a member of the Council of Wales and the Marches, not its president), had a daughter named Alice who married Simon Hake (or Hacke). They had at least one son, Thomas (d. 1 March 1590), and he had many children, though only one surviving, William, who erected the memorial.",
"title": "Children"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "William Hake (d.1625) of Peterborough married Lucy, daughter of Henry Gates of Gosberton, Lincolnshire, on 14 June 1596 at Gosberton, Lincoln, England and they had the children Henry, Fane, Thomas, Anthony, Symon, William (b.1601), Elizabeth, Anne, Lucy, Frances, Grace and Mary.",
"title": "Children"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Their eldest daughter was called Elizabeth.",
"title": "Children"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Both William Hake and his father Thomas were members of Parliament. The Hake family were Royalists during the Civil War, a sundial on a south-facing wall-end overlooking the garden then running down to the river's flood plain, but not now publicly accessible triumphantly declares VIVAL CAROLUS SECUNDUS 1663.",
"title": "Children"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Of the same place, Whittlesea, Cambridge, in 1544–1551, we find Thomas Lynon or Lynom, executor of Richard, son of Thomas Lynon. In 1538 Thomas Lyname, yeoman, is granted a demise, indented, for 80 years, of the manor-place or lordship of Whittlesea, Cambridgeshire by Thorney Abbey. Simon Hake, Alice Lyneham's husband, had been a tenant of Thorney Abbey.",
"title": "Children"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "For a bibliography see James L. Harner, \"Jane Shore in Literature: A Checklist\" in Notes and Queries, v. 226, December 1981, p. 496.",
"title": "Fiction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The IMDb lists three films titled Jane Shore:",
"title": "Fiction"
}
]
| Elizabeth "Jane" Shore was one of the many mistresses of King Edward IV of England. She became the best-known to history through being later accused of conspiracy by the future King Richard III, and compelled to do public penance. She was also a sometime mistress of other noblemen, including Edward's stepson, Thomas Grey, 1st Marquess of Dorset, and William Hastings, 1st Baron Hastings but ended her life in bourgeois respectability. | 2001-10-10T20:52:42Z | 2023-12-26T15:23:22Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Shore |
16,200 | Jack Kemp | Jack French Kemp (July 13, 1935 – May 2, 2009) was an American politician and a professional football player. A member of the Republican Party from New York, he served as Housing Secretary in the administration of President George H. W. Bush from 1989 to 1993, having previously served nine terms in the United States House of Representatives from 1971 to 1989. He was the Republican Party's vice presidential nominee in the 1996 election, as the running mate of Bob Dole; they lost to incumbent president Bill Clinton and vice president Al Gore. Kemp had previously contended for the presidential nomination in the 1988 Republican primaries.
Before entering politics, Kemp was a professional quarterback for 13 years. He played briefly in the National Football League (NFL) and the Canadian Football League (CFL), but became a star in the American Football League (AFL). He served as captain of both the San Diego Chargers and Buffalo Bills and earned the AFL Most Valuable Player award in 1965 after leading the Bills to a second consecutive championship. He played in the AFL for all 10 years of its existence, appeared in its All-Star game seven times, played in its championship game five times, and set many of the league's career passing records. Kemp also co-founded the AFL Players Association, for which he served five terms as president. During the early part of his football career, he served in the United States Army Reserve.
As an economic conservative, Kemp advocated low taxes and supply-side policies during his political career. His positions spanned the social spectrum, ranging from his conservative opposition to abortion to his more libertarian stances advocating immigration reform. As a proponent of both Chicago school and supply-side economics, he is notable as an influence upon the Reagan agenda and the architect of the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, which is known as the Kemp–Roth tax cut.
After his days in political office, Kemp remained active as a political advocate and commentator; he served on corporate and nonprofit organization boards. He also authored, co-authored, and edited several books. He promoted American football and advocated for retired professional football players. Kemp was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009 by President Barack Obama.
Born, raised, and educated in Los Angeles, Kemp was the third of four sons of Frances Elizabeth (née Pope) and Paul Robert Kemp Sr. Paul turned his motorcycle messenger service into a trucking company that grew from one to 14 trucks. Frances was a well-educated social worker and Spanish teacher. Kemp grew up in the heavily Jewish Wilshire district of West Los Angeles, but his tight-knit middle-class family attended the Church of Christ, Scientist. In his youth, sports consumed Kemp, who once chose the forward pass as the subject of a school essay on important inventions, although his mother attempted to broaden his horizons with piano lessons and trips to the Hollywood Bowl.
Kemp attended Melrose Avenue's Fairfax High School, which was, at the time, known for its high concentration of both Jewish students and children of celebrities. Over 95% of Kemp's classmates were Jewish, and he later became a supporter of Jewish causes. His classmates included musician Herb Alpert, baseball pitcher Larry Sherry, and academic Judith A. Reisman. During his years in high school, Kemp worked with his brothers at his father's trucking company in downtown Los Angeles. In his spare time, he was a rigorous reader, preferring history and philosophy books.
After graduating from high school in 1953, he attended Occidental College, a founding member of the NCAA Division III Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. Kemp selected Occidental because its football team used professional formations and plays, which he hoped would help him to become a professional quarterback. At 5 feet 10 inches (178 cm) and 175 pounds (79 kg), he considered himself too small to play for the USC Trojans or UCLA Bruins, the major Southern California college football programs.
At Occidental, Kemp was a record-setting javelin hurler and played several positions on the football team: quarterback, defensive back, place kicker, and punter. Although he was near-sighted, Kemp was tenacious on the field. During his years as starting quarterback, the 1955 and 1956 Occidental teams posted 6–2 and 3–6 records. Kemp was named a Little All-America player one year in which he threw for over 1,100 yards. That year, he led the nation's small colleges in passing. He and close friend Jim Mora, who later became an NFL head coach, were members of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity. Another teammate in college was Ron Botchan, who was an NFL referee for years (record five Super Bowls). Kemp declined to become involved in student government. After graduating from Occidental with a degree in physical education, he pursued postgraduate studies in economics at Long Beach State University and California Western University in San Diego, and served in the military from 1958 to 1962.
Kemp graduated from Occidental in 1957 and married Joanne Main, his college sweetheart, after she graduated from Occidental in 1958. Main had grown up in Fillmore, California, and attended Fillmore High School in Ventura County. Kemp's Biblical Literature professor, Keith Beebe, presided over the wedding. The Kemps had two sons. Both were professional football quarterbacks: Jeff Kemp (born in 1959) played in the NFL from 1981 to 1991, and Jimmy Kemp (born in 1971) played in the CFL from 1994 to 2002. Significantly for a man with his demanding schedule, Jack never missed one of their games as children or in college. They also had two daughters: Jennifer Kemp Andrews (born in 1961) and Judith Kemp (born in 1963).
In 1976, C. Everett Koop wrote The Right to Live, The Right to Die, setting down his own concerns about abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia. Koop also took some time off from his surgical practice to make a series of films with Christian apologists Frank Schaeffer and his father Francis Schaeffer in 1978, entitled Whatever Happened to the Human Race? based on the book of the same title that had been previously written by the elder Schaeffer. Frank Schaeffer and his associate, Jim Buchfuehrer provided a private, five-hour screening of Whatever Happened to the Human Race? to Jack Kemp and wife Joanne in their home that, according to Frank Schaeffer's account of the late evening and early morning event in his book Crazy for God, led to both the Schaeffers and Koop obtaining "...access to everyone in the Republican Party".
Joanne Kemp once suffered a miscarriage, which Kemp later said made him re-evaluate the sanctity of human life and affirmed his opposition to abortion.
Following his wedding, Kemp converted to his wife's Presbyterian faith. He identified as a born-again Christian.
Kemp was a 33rd degree Freemason in the Northern Masonic Jurisdiction.
After being selected by the Detroit Lions in the 17th round of the 1957 NFL draft, Kemp was cut from the team before the 1957 NFL season began. He spent 1957 with the Pittsburgh Steelers and 1958 on the taxi squads of the San Francisco 49ers and New York Giants. The Giants hosted the NFL championship game, known as the "Greatest Game Ever Played" and the first overtime NFL playoff game, but, as a third-string quarterback member of the taxi squad, Kemp did not take the field.
In 1958, Kemp joined the United States Army Reserve and he served a year on active duty as a private to complete his initial training. He was a member of the San Diego-based 977th Transportation Company from 1958 to 1962. When his unit was activated for the Berlin Crisis of 1961, Kemp received a medical exemption for his chronically separated left shoulder. The injury led to his discharge from the Reserve in July 1962.
In 1959, Kemp played one game for the Calgary Stampeders of the Canadian Football League, which made him ineligible for the NFL, in 1959. According to his older brother Tom, his parents drove him from California to Calgary, Alberta, only to see him cut. By this time, Kemp had been cut from five professional teams (Lions, Steelers, Giants, 49ers, and Stampeders) and his family encouraged him to get on with his life. On February 9 and 11, 1960, the newly formed AFL agreed to "no tampering" policies with the NFL and CFL respectively, protecting each league's players. Players like Kemp, with modest NFL experience, were often signed by the AFL at the time. Kemp signed as a free agent with the AFL's Los Angeles Chargers.
In 1960, Kemp led the Chargers to a Western Division Championship with a 10–4 record. He finished second in the league to Frank Tripucka in passing attempts, completions, and yards (making him and Tripucka the league's first 3,000-yard passers), led the AFL in yards per completion and times sacked, and finished one rushing touchdown short of the league lead. Under Kemp, the Chargers' offense averaged 46 points over its last four games and scored more than 41 points in five of its last nine games. In the AFL championship game, he led the team to field goals on its first two possessions, but after the Houston Oilers posted a touchdown in the second quarter for a 7–6 lead, the Chargers never recovered.
In 1961, San Diego Union editor Jack Murphy convinced Barron Hilton to move the Chargers from Los Angeles to San Diego. Kemp led the relocated team to a 12–2 record and a repeat Western Division Championship. He again finished second in passing yards (this time to George Blanda). The Chargers earned an AFL championship game rematch against the Oilers. However, this time the Chargers were unable to score until a fourth-quarter field goal in a 10–3 loss.
In 1962, Kemp broke his middle finger two games into the season and was unable to play. He persuaded his doctors to set his broken finger around a football, so that his grip would not be affected once the finger healed. Chargers coach Sid Gillman put Kemp on waivers to try to "hide" him. Buffalo Bills coach Lou Saban noticed that Kemp was available and claimed him for a $100 waiver fee on September 25, 1962, in what sportswriter Randy Schultz has called one of the biggest bargains in professional football history. The Dallas Texans and Denver Broncos also attempted to claim Kemp, but he was awarded to Buffalo by AFL commissioner Joe Foss.
According to Billy Shaw, Kemp's acquisition solved the Bills' quarterback problem, but Kemp was not excited about coming to Buffalo. According to Van Miller, "Jack's a skier, and he wanted to go to Denver and play for the Broncos. He hated the thought of coming to Buffalo." In Buffalo, he would become known for his love of reading a broad range of books including those by Henry Thoreau, which led to chidings from Saban.
Injuries, including the broken finger, kept Kemp from playing for most of 1962. That season, Kemp received a military draft notice for service in the Vietnam War but was granted a draft waiver because of a knee problem. The injuries healed, and Kemp debuted for Buffalo on November 18, 1962, by directing the only touchdown drive in a 10–6 win over the Oakland Raiders. He played only four games for Buffalo in 1962, but made the AFL All-Star team. The Bills won three of their last four games to finish 7–6–1.
On December 14, 1962, the Bills outbid the Green Bay Packers for Notre Dame quarterback Daryle Lamonica. In 1963, a four-season starting quarterback battle began that continued until Lamonica left for the Raiders. Lamonica felt he "... learned a lot from Jack about quarterbacking. And I truly believe that we were a great one-two punch at the position for the Bills." In 1963, Kemp led the Bills from a slow start to a tie for the AFL Eastern Division lead with a 7–6–1 record. Kemp again placed second in passing attempts, completions, and yards, and he also finished second to teammate Cookie Gilchrist in rushing touchdowns. The Bills played the Boston Patriots in an Eastern Division playoff game to determine the division title on December 28 at War Memorial Stadium in Buffalo, New York, in 10 °F (−12 °C) weather. During the game, Buffalo replaced Kemp with Lamonica after falling behind 16–0, but still lost 26–8.
Kemp was said to be the "clubhouse lawyer" for the Bills because of his role in mediating conflicts. In 1964, he managed personalities such as Gilchrist, who walked off the field when plays were not being called for him, and Saban, whom he kept from cutting Gilchrist the following week. He also managed the politics of his quarterback battle with Lamonica, who engineered four winning touchdown drives in the Bills' first seven games. Kemp was the first and only Professional Football player to pass for three touchdowns in the first quarter of a season-opening game, against the Kansas City Chiefs in 1964, until the record was tied but not broken, 47 years later in 2011 by Aaron Rodgers. The 1964 team won its first nine games and went 12–2 for the regular season, winning the Eastern Division with a final game victory over the Patriots at Fenway Park. Kemp led the league in yards per attempt and finished one rushing touchdown short of the league lead, which was shared by Gilchrist and Sid Blanks. In the AFL championship game, he scored the final touchdown with just over nine minutes left in a 20–7 victory. Not long after, Kemp played a key role in an off the field decision. Kemp was part of the All-Star Game played three weeks after the Championship Game alongside teammates such as Cookie Gilchrist and Ernie Warlick, with the game scheduled to be played in New Orleans, Louisiana. However, Gilchrist led a movement of African American players wanting to boycott the game due to experiencing discrimination by cab drivers and others during their time in New Orleans; Kemp saw this firsthand when Gilchrist, and Warlick were not allowed to share a cab with him. Kemp attended a boycott meeting and alongside Ron Mix convinced the white players to go with the idea of a boycott. One day after the players left the city, AFL Commissioner Joe Foss moved the game to Houston, Texas.
According to Lamonica, the 1965 team had a new emphasis: "In '64 we had depended a lot on Gilchrist and our running attack to carry us. . .But that all changed in '65. The Bills had traded Gilchrist in the off season to the Denver Broncos. So we went to a pass-oriented game more that season than we ever had before. We not only went to our receivers, but we threw a lot to our running backs. And I really think it brought out the best in Jack that year." In 1965, the Bills finished with a 10–3–1 record. Kemp finished the season second in the league in pass completions. In the 1965 AFL Championship Game, Buffalo defeated the Chargers 23–0; for Kemp, the victory was special because it came against his former team. Kemp's role in leading the Bills to a repeat championship without Gilchrist and with star receiver Elbert Dubenion playing only three games earned him a share of the AFL MVP awards that he split with former Charger teammate, Paul Lowe. Kemp also won the Associated Press award and the Championship Game Most Valuable Player award.
Following the championship game, Saban resigned to coach the University of Maryland and defensive coordinator Joe Collier was promoted to head coach for the 1966 season. Kemp led the Bills to their third consecutive division title with a 9–4–1 record. However, in the AFL championship game, which was played for the right to represent the AFL in Super Bowl I, the Bills lost to the Kansas City Chiefs 31–7. Kemp was named an AFL All-Star for the sixth consecutive year. The 1967 Bills endured a 4–10 1967 AFL season, in which Kemp was not named to the All-Star game for the first time in his AFL career.
On August 23, 1968, the Bills suffered a blowout preseason loss to the Houston Oilers. On August 26, Collier put the Bills through a 40-play scrimmage. During the scrimmage, Ron McDole fell on Kemp's right knee and injured it, forcing Kemp to sit out the entire 1968 season. The Bills went 1–12–1 without Kemp.
Despite Kemp's return from injury and the arrival of running back O. J. Simpson, the Bills only compiled a 4–10 record during the 1969 season under new coach John Rauch. Kemp was named an AFL All-Star in 1969 for the seventh time in the league's 10 years. He advocated recognition of the league, and in its last year, 1969, lobbied Pete Rozelle to have AFL teams wear an AFL patch to honor it. In 1969, the Erie County Republican Party approached him about running for the United States Congress. After the January 17, 1970, AFL All-Star game, Kemp returned home and talked to his wife before deciding to enter politics. Kemp said, "I had a four-year no-cut contract with the Bills at the time. ... I figured that if I lost I could always come back and play. But the fans had their say and I was elected to Congress."
Kemp led Buffalo to the AFL playoffs four straight years (1963–1966), three consecutive Eastern Division titles (1964–1966) and two straight AFL Championships (1964–1965). He led the league in career passes attempted, completions, and yards gained passing. He played in five of the AFL's 10 Championship Games, and holds the same career records (passing attempts, completions, and yardage) for championships. He is second in many other championship game categories, including career and single-game passer rating. He ranks third in rushing touchdowns by an NFL or AFL quarterback with 40, behind Steve Young's 52 and Otto Graham's 44. A Sporting News All-League selection at quarterback in 1960 and 1965, and the AFL MVP in 1965. He was the only AFL quarterback to be listed as a starter all 10 years of the league's existence and one of only 20 players to serve all 10 of those years. His number 15 was retired by the Bills in 1984. In 2012, the Professional Football Researchers Association named Kemp to the PRFA Hall of Very Good Class of 2012
However, despite his success and important AFL records, he is most prominently listed in the NFL record book for less flattering accomplishments, including his place as a former record holder for most quarterback sacks in a game. Despite Kemp's many records, Joe Namath and Len Dawson were selected as the quarterbacks for the All-time AFL team. Kemp is a member of the Greater Buffalo Sports Hall of Fame and the Buffalo Bills' Wall of Fame.
Kemp co-founded the AFL Players Association with Tom Addison of the Boston Patriots, and was elected its president five times. His founding of and involvement in the players' union contributed to his frequent siding with the Democrats on labor issues later in his career.
The NCAA's highest honor, the Theodore Roosevelt Award, was presented to Kemp in 1992, and he was named one of the Association's 100 most influential student-athletes in 2006.
Kemp's political career began long before his 1970 campaign. In 1960 and 1961, Kemp was an editorial assistant to San Diego Union editor and future Richard Nixon aide Herb Klein. Subsequently, Kemp became a volunteer in both Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign and Ronald Reagan's successful 1966 California gubernatorial campaign. In the 1967 football off-season, Kemp worked on Reagan's staff in Sacramento. In 1969, he was special assistant to the Republican National Committee chairman.
Kemp was a voracious reader, and his political beliefs were founded in early readings of Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative, Ayn Rand's novels such as The Fountainhead, and Friedrich von Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty. He also brought from his football career a belief in racial equality which came from playing football with black teammates. As Kemp said, "I wasn't there with Rosa Parks or Dr. King or John Lewis. But I am here now, and I am going to yell from the rooftops about what we need to do." Kemp's football colleagues confirmed this influence: John Mackey explained that "the huddle is colorblind."
As a self-described "bleeding-heart conservative", Kemp represented a part of the suburban Buffalo region known as the Southtowns (that traditionally voted Democratic) in the United States House of Representatives from 1971 to 1989. He was described as having the charisma of the earlier John F. Kennedy. David Rosenbaum described Kemp as an independent politician who often legislated outside his committees' jurisdictions and often spoke in favor of ideals and principles rather than his party's political platforms. As a supply-sider, he was not a proponent of balanced budgeting and trivialized it while speaking of growth as an economic goal.
The Erie County, New York Republicans had drafted Kemp after incumbent congressman Richard D. McCarthy decided to run for the United States Senate. During his inaugural campaign, his district was in economic malaise, and The New York Times described him as a John F. Kennedy throwback who campaigned on family values, patriotism, sports, and defense. Upon his election to the Congress in a class of sixty-two freshmen, he was one of six newcomers—along with Ronald Dellums, Bella Abzug, Louise Day Hicks, Robert Drinan, and Pete du Pont—discussed in Time. The article described him as a football fan like United States President Richard Nixon and as the recipient of advice from White House adviser Robert Finch and former Kemp boss Herb Klein, Nixon's director of communications. The Nixon aides encouraged Kemp to endorse the Cambodian invasion and to oppose criticism of Nixon's war policies in order to firm up Kemp's support from military hawks.
Kemp championed several Chicago school and supply-side economics issues, including economic growth, free markets, free trade, tax simplification and lower tax rates on both employment and investment income. He was a long-time proponent of the flat tax. He also defended the use of anti-Communist contra forces in Central America, supported the gold standard, spoke for civil rights legislation, opposed abortion, and was the first lawmaker to popularize enterprise zones, which he supported to foster entrepreneurship and job creation and expand homeownership among public housing tenants. During his career, he sometimes sounded like a liberal Democrat; he supported affirmative action and rights for illegal immigrants. The New York Times described Kemp as the most proactive combatant in the war on poverty since Robert F. Kennedy. He differed from Rockefeller Republicans and earlier combatants such as Lyndon Johnson by supporting incentive-based systems instead of traditional social programs. For his commitment to inner city concerns from within the Republican party, David Gergen heralded him as a "courageous voice in the wilderness." Although he was liberal on many social issues and supported civil liberties for homosexuals, he opposed certain gay rights such as the right to teach in schools. Kemp at times felt his role was that of "freewheeling, entrepreneurial, wildcatting backbencher."
Time identified 38-year-old second-term congressman Kemp as a future leader in its 1974 "Faces for the Future" feature. Another early-career notable magazine appearance was in a 1978 issue of Esquire. The article explained allegations of homosexual activity among staffers in Ronald Reagan's Sacramento office in 1967; Kemp was not implicated. Kemp considered running for the U.S. Senate in 1980 and Hugh Sidey mentioned him as a contender to unseat Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election and was a front runner for the vice presidency at the 1980 Republican National Convention, where he received 43 votes from conservative detractors of George H. W. Bush. After he was reelected for a sixth term in 1980, his Republican peers elected him to a party leadership position, and he served seven years as chairman of the House Republican Conference. This promotion occurred immediately after Kemp and David Stockman urged Reagan by memorandum to dedicate his first 100 days to working on an economic package with Congress. Kemp considered running for Governor of New York in 1982 but ultimately decided to stay in the House. By 1984, many viewed Kemp as Reagan's heir apparent.
Kemp had his first encounter with supply-side economics in 1976, when The Wall Street Journal's Jude Wanniski interviewed him at his Congressional office. Kemp questioned Wanniski all day (until midnight, at Kemp's Bethesda, Maryland home) and was eventually converted to University of Southern California professor Arthur Laffer's supply-side discipline. Thereafter, Kemp espoused supply-side economics freely, and in 1978 he and Sen. William Roth of Delaware proposed tax-cutting legislation. Kemp has been credited as responsible for supply-side economics' inclusion in President Reagan's economic plan, although at the time of Robert Mundell's Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics recognition some attributed much of the credit to Mundell, Laffer, Robert Bartley, and Wanniski. In 1979, Kemp wrote An American Renaissance (ISBN 0-06-012283-8), to deliver his message that "A rising tide lifts all boats." Although the realization of early 1980s tax cuts are attributed to Reagan, they were initiated by Kemp and Roth through their 1981 Kemp–Roth Tax Cut legislation. Reagan's budget based on this legislation passed over the objection of United States House Committee on Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski.
During the Reagan years, Kemp and his followers ignored budget balancing while promoting tax cuts and economic growth. These tax cuts have been credited by conservatives for the economic growth from 1983 to 1990, which by 1996 had become one of the longest expansions in American history. Kemp notes that Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker's success at stemming inflation and the favorable regulatory environment were also major factors. Detractors note that the expansion was fueled by undesirable sectors like gaming, prisons, medical treatment, and credit card use.
An early Kemp tax reform attempt was an unsuccessful 1979 proposal to index tax brackets for cost of living fluctuations, which was incorporated in Reagan's 1980 package. Kemp co-sponsored a legislative attempt at enterprise zones in 1980. One of Kemp's more trying times as a congressman came in 1982 when Reagan decided to reverse the tax cuts and promote tax increases. The reversal was controversial and stimulated opposition by Kemp. Nonetheless, the revised taxes passed. In 1983, Kemp opposed the policies of chairman Volcker on multiple occasions. The debates included domestic monetary involvement and roles in funding the International Monetary Fund.
Kemp delivered speeches at several Republican National Conventions. He addressed the convention on July 15 at the 1980 Republican National Convention in Detroit, Michigan and on August 21 at the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas, Texas. During the 1984 Convention, with Trent Lott as Republican Party Platform Committee chairman, Congressmen Kemp and Newt Gingrich claimed control of the party platform to the consternation of G.O.P. senators Bob Dole and Howard Baker. Kemp's official role was as the chairman of the platform subcommittee on foreign policy. However, the three platform planks that he proposed involved tax hikes, the gold standard and the role of the Federal Reserve. Despite Kemp's official role, his real influence as an author was on the grammatical structure of the plank on tax hikes. By 1985, Kemp was a leading contender for the 1988 Presidential nomination. He also delivered remarks on free enterprise zones at the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston, Texas. Despite efforts and considerations of expanding his political domain, Kemp never held a fundraiser outside of his suburban Western New York district until well into his eighth term in Congress.
Kemp was a critic of association football, known as soccer in the United States. In 1986, during a House floor debate over whether the United States should host the 1994 FIFA World Cup, Kemp proclaimed: "I think it is important for all those young out there—who someday hope to play real football, where you throw it and kick it and run with it and put it in your hands—[that] a distinction should be made that football is democratic capitalism, whereas soccer is a European socialist sport." Kemp compared his speech to George Carlin's 1984 comedy routine on the differences between baseball and American football and wrote that his "tongue was firmly planted in cheek" when making the speech. Despite the levity of the speech, it garnered significant backlash. However, he continued to insist that soccer's main problem is "it doesn't have a quarterback". Kemp noted that about half of his grandchildren play or have played organized soccer and claimed to have "changed" his position on soccer. He even attended the 1994 FIFA World Cup with longtime soccer fan Henry Kissinger, although he wrote during the 2006 FIFA World Cup that soccer can be interesting to watch but is still a "boring game".
In 1988, if Kemp had won his campaign for the United States Presidency, it would have made him the first person to move from the United States House of Representatives to the White House since James Garfield. When he formed his exploratory committee, he signed Ed Rollins, Reagan's 1984 re-election political director, as an advisor. From the outset, Kemp had failed to position himself as the primary alternative to Vice President Bush. Except for a select few cognoscenti, the general public did not recognize Kemp's leadership ability, although he was a successful man of ideas. In fact, most of the Republican electorate found themselves unfamiliar with Kemp early in his campaign. Political pundits recognized him, however, as a visionary idea man. In addition, he was quickly perceived as a verbose speaker who sometimes lost contact with his audience. Although Kemp tried to appeal to conservatives, his libertarian philosophies of tolerance and individual rights and his commitment to supporting minorities, women, blue-collar workers and organized labor clashed with conservative voters' social and religious values. To Democrats, Kemp's free-market philosophies were a form of laissez-faire anarchy. However, as much as Kemp wanted to minimize government's role, he acknowledged that moves toward a more laissez-faire system should be well-thought out.
After the May 1987 Gary Hart–Donna Rice scandal, a questionnaire by The New York Times requested things such as psychiatric records and access to FBI files from all 14 presidential candidates. Candidates from each party expressed opinions on both sides of the personal privacy issue, and Kemp rejected the Times inquiry as "beneath the dignity of a presidential candidate". His campaign was on an early positive course with many key early endorsements in New Hampshire, but Bush held the support of much of the Republican establishment in New York. Although he had an eclectic mix of supporters, Kemp's campaign began borrowing against anticipated Federal matching funds because it had quickly spent itself into the red, which may have been due to the use of expensive direct mail fundraising techniques. To offset his socially moderate stances, Kemp clarified his opposition to abortion, his support of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) and his support for a stronger military than that favored by Secretary of State George Shultz. To position himself as Reagan's successor, Kemp called for Shultz's resignation based on claims that Shultz had neglected freedom fighters in Afghanistan and Nicaragua and had waffled on the SDI. In an attempt to highlight his stands on key Reagan Era foreign policy initiatives, Kemp traveled in September 1987 to Costa Rica, Honduras and El Salvador to lobby the presidents of those nations against the Arias Peace Plan—a peace accord US conservatives felt too conciliatory to Central American communists. He was accompanied on the trip by 50-plus US conservative leaders.
Despite a platform covering the full range of political subjects, Kemp's primary campaign weapon was a fiscal policy based on tax cuts. As part of his fiscal policy, he opposed a Social Security benefits freeze and endorsed a freeze on government spending. Some viewed Kemp's supply-side stance as an attempt to ignore the national budget deficit. In late 1987, political pundits saw that Kemp needed to gain support from the far right on non-social issues. Kemp was among the majority of Republican candidates in opposition to Reagan's INF Treaty agreement with the Soviet Union's Mikhail Gorbachev despite general Republican voter approval of the treaty. With aspirations of support from right-wing voters, all candidates with low levels of poll support for the nomination took this same "sabre-rattling" stand. By early 1988, the moderates (Bush and Dole) were clearly the front-runners and Kemp was battling with Pat Robertson as the conservative alternative to the moderates.
He used a somewhat negative advertising campaign that seemed to have the intended initial effect of boosting him to serious contention. His 1988 campaign was based on the platform of supply-side economics and inner-city enterprise zones. In Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms: My Life in American Politics, campaign chairman Rollins described Kemp as a candidate with foibles. Kemp's campaign managers say he was unmanageable: he ignored timers on his speeches, refused to call contributors, and refused to practice for debates. A humbling Super Tuesday, in which his 39 delegate total was fewer than eventual nominee and President Bush and both Dole and Pat Robertson, ended his campaign. After withdrawing from the race, he was still considered a contender for the vice presidential nomination. In 1989, the Kemps switched their official residence from Hamburg, New York to Bethesda, Maryland, their residence at the time of his death. In 1994, Kemp's 1988 campaign reached a settlement with the Federal Election Commission by agreeing to pay $120,000 in civil penalties for 1988 campaign election law violations for, among other things, excessive contributions, improper direct corporate donations, press overbilling, exceeding spending limits in Iowa and New Hampshire, and failure to reimburse corporations for providing air transportation.
As a so-called "bleeding-heart conservative", Kemp was a logical choice for Bush as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, whose job would be to foster public sector and private sector methods to meet the demands of public housing. However, the scandals of Reagan's Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Samuel Pierce and the neglect of the president were obstacles from the start, and Kemp was unsuccessful at either of his major initiatives: enacting enterprise zones and promoting public housing tenant ownership. The goal of these two plans was to change public housing into tenant-owned residences and to lure industry and business into inner cities with federal incentives. Although Kemp did not affect much policy as HUD's director, he cleaned up HUD's reputation, and developed a plan to salvage the Federal Housing Administration. He halted or revamped certain programs and developed an antidrug offensive, which enabled him to collaborate with Director of the National Drug Control Policy Bill Bennett. He supported "Operation Clean Sweep" and similar movements to prohibit firearm possession in public housing.
Although Kemp coaxed Bush to support a $4 billion housing program that encouraged public housing tenants to buy their own apartments, the Democratic Congress allocated only $361 million to the plan. In addition to opposition in Congress, Kemp fought White House Budget Director Richard Darman, who opposed Kemp's pet project HOPE (Homeownership and Opportunity for People Everywhere). The project involved selling public housing to its tenants. Darman also opposed Kemp's proposed welfare adjustment of government offsets. HOPE was first proposed to White House chief of staff John Sununu in June 1989 to create enterprise zones, increase subsidies for low-income renters, expand social services for the homeless and elderly, and enact tax changes to help first-time home buyers. Sununu opposed it at first as did most of the Cabinet, but in August 1990 Sununu, at the urging of United States Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, encouraged President Bush to endorse Kemp's Economic Empowerment Task Force. However, the Persian Gulf War and the budget negotiations overshadowed Kemp's new project. Darman battled Kemp and his allies such as Gingrich, James Pinkerton, and Vin Weber. The budget left him with $256 million for his plan, which Kemp increased during some appropriations battles. Soon after Clayton Yeutter was appointed chief White House domestic policy advisor, Kemp's Economic Empowerment Task Force was abolished.
President Bush avoided federal antipoverty issues, and instead used Kemp to speak on the administration's low priority conservative activist agenda. Bush's contribution to the urban agenda had been volunteerism through his "Points of Light" theme, and Kemp received stronger support for his ideas from presidential candidate Bill Clinton. By the time of the Los Angeles riots of 1992, Bush was a bit late in supporting enterprise zones, tenant ownership and welfare reform: Mort Zuckerman compared Bush's vision on racial issues to that of a man riding backwards in a railroad car. Nonetheless, the riots made Kemp a focal point of the administration, even though at first, Kemp had been overlooked. However, Charles E. Schumer had probably summarized the prospects of Kemp's success in advance best when he said in 1989, "Good ideas with money can do a whole lot. Good ideas without money aren't probably going to do a whole lot," and the issue here was the decision not to fund Kemp's ideas. Although Kemp was unable to procure money for his visions, he was among the administration's leading users of first class corporate jets. He cited lingering effects from a knee injury as the reason he had to fly first class at government expense as the Housing Secretary.
Generally, his time as housing secretary was considered unsuccessful. However, although he could not get federal funding for empowerment zones passed during his tenure, by 1992 38 states had created empowerment zones, and in 1994 $3.5 billion was approved for them under President Clinton. A free market Kemp initiative to allow homeowners to subdivide their houses for the purpose of creating rental units without inordinate bureaucracy did not get executed under the Clinton administration, however. In 1992, with H. Ross Perot mounting a formidable campaign, Kemp was again considered a vice presidential candidate.
Kemp was partly at fault for not achieving either of his primary goals because he did not get along with the rest of the Cabinet. At one point, Kemp told James Baker, White House Chief of Staff, that Bush's best chance to win reelection was to dump his economic advisors in dramatic fashion. Before the 1992 Republican National Convention, Kemp and six prominent Republican conservatives prepared a controversial memo urging Bush to revise his economic policy. Contemporaneously, conservative Republicans in office and in the media such as William F. Buckley Jr. and George Will felt Dan Quayle should be ousted in favor of Kemp. This followed Kemp's reference to parts of the President's economic policy as "gimmicks" after the 1992 State of the Union Address. Kemp was respected within the party for opposing Bush, and towards the end of Bush's administration insiders recognized his value. In late 1991, 81 of the 166 Republican Congressmen signed a letter co-authored by Curt Weldon and Dan Burton requesting that Bush cede some domestic authority to Kemp as a "domestic policy czar." The letter, highlighting Kemp's "energy, enthusiasm and national clout", insulted Bush. Kemp was a bit of a surprise to stay in the Bush Cabinet for the duration of his presidency, and he was described as one of the few Bush Administration members who would take tough stands. Kemp did not expect to be retained if the Republicans were reelected in 1992, and some pundits agreed with him.
Kemp gave public speeches for $35,000 apiece between his time as Housing Secretary and his vice presidential nomination. By 1994, Kemp had embarked on 241 fund-raising dinners to raise $35 million for a 1996 Presidential bid and to pay off his 1988 campaign debts. After stepping down from his $189,000 Secretary of Housing and Urban Development job, Kemp personally earned $6.9 million in the next three years, primarily for speaking on behalf of local Republican candidates. During the Super Bowl XXVIII festivities, Kemp hosted a notable fundraiser series.
Kemp was considered the star of the 1992 Republican National Convention. In 1992 and 1993, Kemp was considered the favorite or co-favorite for the 1996 Presidential nomination. At the time of the 1994 mid-term elections, Kemp was widely anticipated to announce his candidacy for 1996, and his supporters wanted a formal announcement by the end of the year. In January 1995, Kemp's stated reason for not entering the 1996 Republican Party presidential primaries was that his personal beliefs were out of balance with the contemporary Republican political landscape: Kemp opposed term limits, he always preferred tax cuts to anything resembling a balanced budget amendment and, unlike most Republicans, favored federal incentives to combat urban poverty. In 1995, Gloria Borger noted Kemp was not in step with the 1994 Contract with America. Kemp also noted a distaste for the vast fundraising necessary for a presidential campaign. Gergen stated that by 1996 the selection process had become so expensive, mean and personally invasive that it discouraged several top Republicans from running. In 1995, while the world awaited the campaign decision announcement by Colin Powell, Kemp had positive thoughts on the prospect of such a campaign.
Senate Majority Leader Dole and Gingrich appointed Kemp to head a tax reform commission, (the Kemp Commission), in response to voter concern that the tax code had become too complicated. Kemp championed many issues including the flat tax, which he formally proposed after he was appointed. The proposal included some politically popular income tax deductions, such as mortgage interest, but it remained fairly general. Among the 1996 Republican Party candidates, both Steve Forbes and Phil Gramm proposed the flat tax.
During the campaign, Kemp's endorsement was highly coveted. Forbes had tried to get Kemp to run in the 1996 campaign, but Kemp declined and in fact endorsed Forbes just as Dole was closing in on the nomination, and just after Dole gained the endorsements of former contenders Lamar Alexander and Richard Lugar. Some feel the primary reason for the endorsement was to keep the flat tax idea and other supply-side views alive. Many thought Kemp had destroyed his own political future with the endorsement, and Kemp profusely apologized to Dole's campaign offices. After it became clear Dole would be the nominee, Kemp attempted to form a bipartisan seminar with Felix Rohatyn to produce a fiscal plan that could be endorsed by both parties.
Kemp was also outspoken on immigration on around this time: according to Kemp's interpretation of a scientific index that he and Bennett support, "immigrants are a blessing, not a curse." In 1994, Kemp and Bennett opposed California ballot Proposition 187, a measure to bar illegal immigrants from obtaining public services, in direct opposition to first-term Republican California Governor Pete Wilson, one of its endorsers who was running for re-election. Republican Senate candidate Michael Huffington had also endorsed the proposition. Kemp supported rights for illegal immigrants, and opposed Lamar Smith and Alan Simpson's proposed restrictions on legal immigration.
Kemp had a reputation as the highest-profile progressive Republican. When Dole declined an invitation to speak to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, he suggested Kemp as a substitute even before Kemp had become the vice presidential nominee. On August 5, 1996, Dole announced a 15% across-the-board tax cut in response to both the Forbes campaign and Kemp's tax reform commission. Several of Dole's other campaign ideas came from Kemp and Bill Bennett's Empower America, which had Jeane Kirkpatrick, Weber, Forbes and Alexander as principals. For example, Dole borrowed Kirkpatrick's tough foreign policy, Bennett's "right conduct" and even Alexander's school choice interest.
Bennett declined the offer to be Dole's running mate but suggested Kemp, a man described as Dole's antagonist. On August 16, 1996, the Republican Party chose Kemp as its vice presidential nominee, running alongside former Senator Dole. Kemp was seen as a means to attract conservative and libertarian-minded voters like those of tough nomination-challengers Forbes and Pat Buchanan. Kemp was chosen over Connie Mack, John McCain, and Carroll Campbell, and it is assumed that this was partly because Kemp had several former staffers in influential positions as Dole's senior advisors. Dole had had a long history of representing the budget-balancing faction of the Party, while Kemp had had a long history of representing the tax-cutting advocates, and Kemp's tax-cutting fiscal track record was seen as the perfect fit for the ticket. When Kemp became Dole's running mate in 1996, they appeared on the cover of the August 19, 1996 issue of Time magazine, but the pair barely edged out a story on the reported discovery of extraterrestrial life on Mars, which was so close to being the cover story that Time inset it on the cover and wrote about how difficult the decision was.
The two politicians had a storied history stemming from alternative perspectives and objectives. Dole was a longstanding conservative deficit hawk who had even voted against John F. Kennedy's tax cuts, while Kemp was an outspoken supply-sider. In the early 1980s, according to David Stockman, Kemp persuaded Reagan to make a 30% across-the-board tax cut a central 1980 presidential campaign feature. Once Reagan was elected, Dole was the Senate Finance Committee chairman who Kemp claims resisted the plan every step of the way. Dole concedes he expressed reservations about the 1981 plan. The big confrontation came after the tax plan was approved and after Dole subsequently proposed tax increases that he referred to as reforms. Kemp was vocal in his opposition to the reforms and even penned an op-ed piece in The New York Times, which enraged Dole. Reagan supported the reforms at Dole's request, causing Kemp to summon allies to meetings to stop the act, which eventually passed in 1982. At the 1984 Republican National Convention, Kemp, along with allies such as Gingrich and Lott, added a plank to the party platform that put President Reagan on record as ruling out tax increases. Gingrich called this action "Dole proofing" the platform, and the plank passed over Dole's opposition. Then, in 1985, Dole proposed an austere budget that barely passed in the Senate with appendectomy patient Pete Wilson casting the tying vote and Vice President Bush casting the deciding vote. In meetings with the president that excluded Dole, Kemp reworked the budget to exclude crucial Social Security cutbacks. This is said to have been Dole's most crushing political defeat and to have contributed to the Republican loss of control of the Senate. During the 1988 presidential election, the two antagonized each other. After Bush won and Kemp left Congress for the Cabinet, the two did not really cross paths again until 1996, when Kemp endorsed Dole's opponent Forbes on the eve of the New York Primary in March.
Dole despised Kemp's economic theories, but he felt Kemp-like tax cuts offered his best chance at electoral success. For his part, Kemp had to make concessions as well: he had to back expelling the children of illegal immigrants from public schools despite his longstanding opposition to Proposition 187 and mute his opposition to abolishing affirmative-action programs in California. Some derided Kemp for his compromise and referred to him as a "con artist". From the outset of their campaign, Dole-Kemp trailed, and they faced skeptics even from within the party. However, Kemp was able to use the nomination to promote his opposition to Clinton's partial birth abortion ban veto. During the campaign, Kemp and Forbes advocated for a stronger stand on tax cutting than Dole used. However, in general, the opinion was that Kemp was helpful to the ticket's chances of catching Bill Clinton, and Kemp's advocacy gave a clear picture of the tax reforms that would likely occur on the condition of a successful campaign. Kemp was seen as likely to influence several types of swing voters, especially those of his native state of California, and even the Democrats feared Kemp might lure voters.
After receiving the nomination, Kemp became the ticket's spokesman for minorities and the inner-city. Due to agreement on the self-help policy that Louis Farrakhan has endorsed in many fora including the Million Man March, Kemp in a sense aligned himself with Farrakhan. However, Farrakhan was perceived as being anti-Semitic, and Kemp was considered an ally of Republican Jews. This issue necessitated some political sidestepping. As the nominee, Kemp at times overshadowed Dole. In fact, more than once, Kemp was described as if he was the presidential nominee. In addition to having overshadowed Dole, despite the negative ad campaigns that the ticket used, Kemp was a very positive running mate who relied on a pep rally type of campaign tour full of football-related metaphors and hyperbole. Although some enjoyed Kemp's style, referring to him as the Good Shepherd, his detractors, such as U.S. News & World Report writer Steven V. Roberts, criticized the extensive use of recounting stories of passing balls relative to the use of recounting stories of passing bills. During the campaign, Kemp expressed the opinion that Republican Party leaders did not stand behind the ticket wholeheartedly. Despite Kemp's voice on minority issues, Colin Powell's support and polls that showed about 30% of blacks identified themselves as conservatives on issues such as school prayer, school vouchers and criminal justice, the Republicans were unable to improve upon historical support levels from African-American voters.
Both Al Gore and Kemp had presidential aspirations, which induced pursuit of debate on a higher plane. In addition, Gore and Kemp were long-time friends, unlike Gore and his previous vice presidential opponent Dan Quayle. Thus, as debaters they avoided personal attacks. However, some felt Kemp failed to counter substantive attacks. In the final October 9, 1996 vice presidential debate against Al Gore (held as the Dole–Kemp ticket trailed badly in the national polls), Kemp was soundly beaten, and Al Gore's performance is considered one of the best modern debate performances. The debate topics ranged broadly from the usual such as abortion and foreign policy to the unusual such as an incident preceding the then-current baseball playoffs, in which Roberto Alomar, the Baltimore Orioles' second baseman, cursed and spat on an umpire. The Mexico policy debate was one of the more interesting topics for critical review. The Gore victory was not a surprise since Kemp had been outmatched by Gore in previous encounters, and Gore had a reputation as an experienced and vaunted debater.
In 1993, Kemp, Bennett, Kirkpatrick and financial backer Theodore Forstmann co-founded the free market advocacy group Empower America, which later merged with Citizens for a Sound Economy to form Freedom Works. Empower America represented the populist wing of the party: while avoiding divisive issues such as abortion and gay rights, it promoted free markets and growth over balancing the budget and cutting the deficit. He resigned as Co-Chairman of Freedom Works in March 2005 after the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) questioned his ties to Samir Vincent, a Northern Virginia oil trader implicated in the U.N. Oil-for-food scandal who pleaded guilty to four criminal charges, including illegally acting as an unregistered lobbyist of the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein. Testimony about Kemp became prominent in the trial. Also, FBI informant Richard Fino tied Kemp to James Cosentino just weeks before the 1996 election.
By 1996, Kemp had been named a director of six corporate boards. He was a director for Hawk Corporation, IDT Corporation, CNL Hotels and Resorts, InPhonic, Cyrix Corporation and American Bankers Insurance Group. Kemp briefly served on the board of Oracle Corporation, whose CEO was his friend Larry Ellison, in 1996, but resigned when he ran for vice president; he was named to the board of Six Flags, Inc. in December 2005. Kemp opted not to stand for re-election to IDT's board in 2006. He also served on the Habitat for Humanity board of directors, and served on the board of Atlanta-based software maker EzGov Inc. Kemp also served on the board of directors of Election.com, which was the private company that ran the world's first election on the internet (won by Al Gore), the 2000 Arizona Democratic Primary. Kemp was also a business partner with Edra and Tim Blixseth promoting membership in the elite private ski and golf Yellowstone Club. Kemp also partnered with the Blixseths in a failed anti-terrorism software venture called Blxware which was investigated for "conning" the federal government out of $20 million in contracts for software which fraudulently claimed to detect secret messages from Al-Qaeda in television broadcast signals. Kemp was the founder and chairman of Kemp Partners, a strategic consulting firm that helps clients achieve both business and public policy goals.
In addition to corporate boards of directors, Kemp served on several advisory boards such as the UCLA School of Public Policy Advisory Board, and the Toyota Diversity Advisory Board as well as the Howard University Board of Trustees, on which he served since 1993. On March 25, 2003, Kemp was selected as chairman of the board of Directors of USA Football, a national advocacy group for amateur football created by the National Football League (NFL) and the NFL Players Association. The organization supports Pop Warner, American Youth Football, Boys and Girls Clubs of America, National Recreation and Park Association, Police Athletic League, YMCA, and the Amateur Athletic Union. He was also vice president of NFL Charities.
In the late 1990s, Kemp remained outspoken on political issues: he was critical of Clinton's International Monetary Fund lax policies toward South Korea. In early 1998, he was a serious contender for the 2000 United States presidential election, but his campaign possibilities faltered, and he instead endorsed eventual winner George W. Bush. Kemp continued his political advocacy for reform of taxation, Social Security and education. When a 1997 budget surplus was earmarked for debt repayment, Kemp opposed the plan in favor of tax cuts. Along with John Ashcroft and Alan Krueger, he endorsed reform of payroll taxes to eliminate double taxation. In addition to his fiscal and economic policies, Kemp advocated against abortion when Congress was considering a bill banning intact dilation and extractions. He also advocated for retired NFL veterans on issues such as cardiovascular screening, assisted living, disability benefits, and the 2007 joint replacement program. He argued in support of reforming immigration laws. In the late 1990s, Kemp also was a vocal advocate for free market reform in Africa, arguing that the continent had great economic growth potential if it could shed autocratic and statist governmental policies.
In 1997, when Gingrich was embroiled in a House ethics controversy, Kemp served as an intermediary between Dole and Gingrich to save the Republican Party leader. Later, in 2002, when Lott made caustic remarks about Strom Thurmond, Kemp was upset, and he supported Lott's apology, saying he had encouraged him to "repudiate segregation in every manifestation." Kemp was among the prominent leaders who pledged to raise money in 2005 for Scooter Libby's defense when he was charged with perjury and obstruction of justice in a case regarding the release of Central Intelligence Agency information.
In June 2004, Kemp rescinded his support of Vernon Robinson for Congress due to the latter's views on immigration laws, citing Robinson's choice to run "as a Pat Buchanan Republican".
In 2006 Kemp, along with 2004 vice-presidential nominee John Edwards, co-chaired the Council on Foreign Relations task force on Russia, producing a document called "Russia's Wrong Direction: What the United States Can and Should Do". After their task force roles ended, the pair advocated solutions to poverty in America at various fora.
On January 6, 2008, Kemp endorsed McCain in the 2008 Republican presidential primaries shortly before the New Hampshire primary, which surprised conservative Republican tax cutters. However, as McCain neared the official nomination, the press associated McCain with Kemp more and more. Kemp prepared an open letter to Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham and other conservative talk show hosts on McCain's behalf to quell their dissatisfactions. In addition, Kemp and Phil Gramm advised McCain on economic policy.
He was a syndicated newspaper columnist.
In February 2008, Kemp was associated with a group called "Defense of Democracies" that was advocating an electronic surveillance bill that failed in the House of Representatives. The group's television ad caused such controversy that some of its advisors, including Schumer and Donna Brazile, resigned.
He was a member of the advisory council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and served as Co-Chair of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission Cabinet.
He was a board member for the Lott IMPACT Trophy, which is named after Pro Football Hall of Fame defensive back Ronnie Lott, and is awarded annually to college football's Defensive IMPACT Player of the Year.
On January 7, 2009, Kemp's office issued a statement announcing that he had cancer; the type of cancer and the anticipated treatment were not announced. His diagnosis and prognosis were never publicly disclosed. However, he continued to serve as chairman of his Washington-based Kemp Partners consulting firm and continued his involvement in charitable and political work until his death.
On May 2, 2009, Kemp died from cancer at his home in Bethesda, Maryland, at the age of 73. President Barack Obama praised Kemp's work on race, adding that Kemp understood that divisions involving race and class stood in the way of the country's common goals, and former President George W. Bush said that Kemp "will be remembered for his significant contributions to the Reagan Revolution and his steadfast dedication to conservative principles during his long and distinguished career in public service." It was later revealed that melanoma was the probable type of cancer Kemp died from
Kemp's legacy includes the Kemp–Roth Tax Cut of the 1980s, also known as the first of two "Reagan tax cuts." These served as the foundation of supply-side economics, known as Reaganomics. Many Republicans have endorsed this Laffer Curve view that tax cuts can spur economic growth and reduce deficits. Although George H. W. Bush called this philosophy voodoo economics, George W. Bush and his Treasury Secretary, John W. Snow, were believers. Kemp is also remembered alongside George Wallace and William Jennings Bryan for influencing history by changing the direction of presidential elections despite their defeats.
In the early 21st century, Kemp continued to be considered along with Reagan as the politician most responsible for the implementation of supply-side tax cuts and along with Steve Forbes as the political figure most responsible for their continued place in the marketplace of political ideas. He has been described as a beacon of economic conservatism and a hero for his urban agenda. Today, he continues to be described as a hero to fiscal conservatives who believe that free markets and low taxes work better than government bureaucracies. Kemp was considered the leader of the progressive conservatives who are socially conservative, but avoid protectionist fiscal and trade policy.
In addition to Roth, he has had numerous political allies. At times, he collaborated with Gingrich and Lott on deregulation and tax cuts, collaborated with McCain and Phil Gramm on tax cuts and spending restraints, legislated with and campaigned for Joseph Lieberman, and fought poverty with James Pinkerton. Pete du Pont was a progressive conservative ally. After retiring from Congress and serving in the Cabinet, Kemp remained close to Gingrich, Lott, Weber, and Mack. Kemp was a member of the federal committee to promote Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a national holiday. As a progressive voter, he had civil rights leaders such as Benjamin Hooks, Andrew Young and Coretta Scott King and conservative black intellectuals like Glenn C. Loury and Robert L. Woodson as supporters and friends. He boasted of having Democratic friends such as William H. Gray III, Charles B. Rangel and Robert Garcia. Ken Blackwell was a Deputy Secretary under Kemp. During the Reagan presidency, when Kemp was able to effect tax cutting, a leading United States Senate tax-cutting proponent was Democrat Bill Bradley, a former basketball star. Several American football players have followed Kemp to Congress, including Steve Largent, J. C. Watts, and Heath Shuler.
Congressman Paul Ryan cites Kemp as a mentor, and mentioned him in his acceptance speech as the Republican Vice-Presidential nominee in 2012.
"Growth is obviously what Jack Kemp was about" stated Fred Barnes in the opening of the session "Growth! Growth! Growth!" of Jack Kemp Foundation's Forum on The Future of the American Idea, in 2014. Kemp didn't believe in limits to growth, a blind spot shared by any politicians of his era and which prompted him to dismiss the 1991 Report of the United Nations Population Fund as "nonsense".
Senator Arlen Specter in a severe rebuke of federal governmental policy, stated just one day after Kemp died of cancer, that Kemp would still be alive if the federal government had done a better job funding cancer research.
Following Kemp's death, his son, Jimmy Kemp, created the Jack Kemp Foundation to continue his father's legacy. A 501(c)(3) charitable organization, the foundation's mission statement is to "develop, engage and recognize exceptional leaders who champion the American Idea". The foundation is located in Washington, D.C., and is committed to advancing the universal values of the American Idea: growth, freedom, democracy and hope.
The football stadium at Occidental College is named after him.
In addition to authoring significant legislation as a congressman, Kemp wrote or co-authored several books:
Kemp also wrote the foreword to several books: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Jack French Kemp (July 13, 1935 – May 2, 2009) was an American politician and a professional football player. A member of the Republican Party from New York, he served as Housing Secretary in the administration of President George H. W. Bush from 1989 to 1993, having previously served nine terms in the United States House of Representatives from 1971 to 1989. He was the Republican Party's vice presidential nominee in the 1996 election, as the running mate of Bob Dole; they lost to incumbent president Bill Clinton and vice president Al Gore. Kemp had previously contended for the presidential nomination in the 1988 Republican primaries.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Before entering politics, Kemp was a professional quarterback for 13 years. He played briefly in the National Football League (NFL) and the Canadian Football League (CFL), but became a star in the American Football League (AFL). He served as captain of both the San Diego Chargers and Buffalo Bills and earned the AFL Most Valuable Player award in 1965 after leading the Bills to a second consecutive championship. He played in the AFL for all 10 years of its existence, appeared in its All-Star game seven times, played in its championship game five times, and set many of the league's career passing records. Kemp also co-founded the AFL Players Association, for which he served five terms as president. During the early part of his football career, he served in the United States Army Reserve.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "As an economic conservative, Kemp advocated low taxes and supply-side policies during his political career. His positions spanned the social spectrum, ranging from his conservative opposition to abortion to his more libertarian stances advocating immigration reform. As a proponent of both Chicago school and supply-side economics, he is notable as an influence upon the Reagan agenda and the architect of the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, which is known as the Kemp–Roth tax cut.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "After his days in political office, Kemp remained active as a political advocate and commentator; he served on corporate and nonprofit organization boards. He also authored, co-authored, and edited several books. He promoted American football and advocated for retired professional football players. Kemp was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009 by President Barack Obama.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Born, raised, and educated in Los Angeles, Kemp was the third of four sons of Frances Elizabeth (née Pope) and Paul Robert Kemp Sr. Paul turned his motorcycle messenger service into a trucking company that grew from one to 14 trucks. Frances was a well-educated social worker and Spanish teacher. Kemp grew up in the heavily Jewish Wilshire district of West Los Angeles, but his tight-knit middle-class family attended the Church of Christ, Scientist. In his youth, sports consumed Kemp, who once chose the forward pass as the subject of a school essay on important inventions, although his mother attempted to broaden his horizons with piano lessons and trips to the Hollywood Bowl.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Kemp attended Melrose Avenue's Fairfax High School, which was, at the time, known for its high concentration of both Jewish students and children of celebrities. Over 95% of Kemp's classmates were Jewish, and he later became a supporter of Jewish causes. His classmates included musician Herb Alpert, baseball pitcher Larry Sherry, and academic Judith A. Reisman. During his years in high school, Kemp worked with his brothers at his father's trucking company in downtown Los Angeles. In his spare time, he was a rigorous reader, preferring history and philosophy books.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "After graduating from high school in 1953, he attended Occidental College, a founding member of the NCAA Division III Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. Kemp selected Occidental because its football team used professional formations and plays, which he hoped would help him to become a professional quarterback. At 5 feet 10 inches (178 cm) and 175 pounds (79 kg), he considered himself too small to play for the USC Trojans or UCLA Bruins, the major Southern California college football programs.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "At Occidental, Kemp was a record-setting javelin hurler and played several positions on the football team: quarterback, defensive back, place kicker, and punter. Although he was near-sighted, Kemp was tenacious on the field. During his years as starting quarterback, the 1955 and 1956 Occidental teams posted 6–2 and 3–6 records. Kemp was named a Little All-America player one year in which he threw for over 1,100 yards. That year, he led the nation's small colleges in passing. He and close friend Jim Mora, who later became an NFL head coach, were members of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity. Another teammate in college was Ron Botchan, who was an NFL referee for years (record five Super Bowls). Kemp declined to become involved in student government. After graduating from Occidental with a degree in physical education, he pursued postgraduate studies in economics at Long Beach State University and California Western University in San Diego, and served in the military from 1958 to 1962.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Kemp graduated from Occidental in 1957 and married Joanne Main, his college sweetheart, after she graduated from Occidental in 1958. Main had grown up in Fillmore, California, and attended Fillmore High School in Ventura County. Kemp's Biblical Literature professor, Keith Beebe, presided over the wedding. The Kemps had two sons. Both were professional football quarterbacks: Jeff Kemp (born in 1959) played in the NFL from 1981 to 1991, and Jimmy Kemp (born in 1971) played in the CFL from 1994 to 2002. Significantly for a man with his demanding schedule, Jack never missed one of their games as children or in college. They also had two daughters: Jennifer Kemp Andrews (born in 1961) and Judith Kemp (born in 1963).",
"title": "Marriage, family, and faith"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In 1976, C. Everett Koop wrote The Right to Live, The Right to Die, setting down his own concerns about abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia. Koop also took some time off from his surgical practice to make a series of films with Christian apologists Frank Schaeffer and his father Francis Schaeffer in 1978, entitled Whatever Happened to the Human Race? based on the book of the same title that had been previously written by the elder Schaeffer. Frank Schaeffer and his associate, Jim Buchfuehrer provided a private, five-hour screening of Whatever Happened to the Human Race? to Jack Kemp and wife Joanne in their home that, according to Frank Schaeffer's account of the late evening and early morning event in his book Crazy for God, led to both the Schaeffers and Koop obtaining \"...access to everyone in the Republican Party\".",
"title": "Marriage, family, and faith"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Joanne Kemp once suffered a miscarriage, which Kemp later said made him re-evaluate the sanctity of human life and affirmed his opposition to abortion.",
"title": "Marriage, family, and faith"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Following his wedding, Kemp converted to his wife's Presbyterian faith. He identified as a born-again Christian.",
"title": "Marriage, family, and faith"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Kemp was a 33rd degree Freemason in the Northern Masonic Jurisdiction.",
"title": "Marriage, family, and faith"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "After being selected by the Detroit Lions in the 17th round of the 1957 NFL draft, Kemp was cut from the team before the 1957 NFL season began. He spent 1957 with the Pittsburgh Steelers and 1958 on the taxi squads of the San Francisco 49ers and New York Giants. The Giants hosted the NFL championship game, known as the \"Greatest Game Ever Played\" and the first overtime NFL playoff game, but, as a third-string quarterback member of the taxi squad, Kemp did not take the field.",
"title": "Football career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In 1958, Kemp joined the United States Army Reserve and he served a year on active duty as a private to complete his initial training. He was a member of the San Diego-based 977th Transportation Company from 1958 to 1962. When his unit was activated for the Berlin Crisis of 1961, Kemp received a medical exemption for his chronically separated left shoulder. The injury led to his discharge from the Reserve in July 1962.",
"title": "Football career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In 1959, Kemp played one game for the Calgary Stampeders of the Canadian Football League, which made him ineligible for the NFL, in 1959. According to his older brother Tom, his parents drove him from California to Calgary, Alberta, only to see him cut. By this time, Kemp had been cut from five professional teams (Lions, Steelers, Giants, 49ers, and Stampeders) and his family encouraged him to get on with his life. On February 9 and 11, 1960, the newly formed AFL agreed to \"no tampering\" policies with the NFL and CFL respectively, protecting each league's players. Players like Kemp, with modest NFL experience, were often signed by the AFL at the time. Kemp signed as a free agent with the AFL's Los Angeles Chargers.",
"title": "Football career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In 1960, Kemp led the Chargers to a Western Division Championship with a 10–4 record. He finished second in the league to Frank Tripucka in passing attempts, completions, and yards (making him and Tripucka the league's first 3,000-yard passers), led the AFL in yards per completion and times sacked, and finished one rushing touchdown short of the league lead. Under Kemp, the Chargers' offense averaged 46 points over its last four games and scored more than 41 points in five of its last nine games. In the AFL championship game, he led the team to field goals on its first two possessions, but after the Houston Oilers posted a touchdown in the second quarter for a 7–6 lead, the Chargers never recovered.",
"title": "Football career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In 1961, San Diego Union editor Jack Murphy convinced Barron Hilton to move the Chargers from Los Angeles to San Diego. Kemp led the relocated team to a 12–2 record and a repeat Western Division Championship. He again finished second in passing yards (this time to George Blanda). The Chargers earned an AFL championship game rematch against the Oilers. However, this time the Chargers were unable to score until a fourth-quarter field goal in a 10–3 loss.",
"title": "Football career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In 1962, Kemp broke his middle finger two games into the season and was unable to play. He persuaded his doctors to set his broken finger around a football, so that his grip would not be affected once the finger healed. Chargers coach Sid Gillman put Kemp on waivers to try to \"hide\" him. Buffalo Bills coach Lou Saban noticed that Kemp was available and claimed him for a $100 waiver fee on September 25, 1962, in what sportswriter Randy Schultz has called one of the biggest bargains in professional football history. The Dallas Texans and Denver Broncos also attempted to claim Kemp, but he was awarded to Buffalo by AFL commissioner Joe Foss.",
"title": "Football career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "According to Billy Shaw, Kemp's acquisition solved the Bills' quarterback problem, but Kemp was not excited about coming to Buffalo. According to Van Miller, \"Jack's a skier, and he wanted to go to Denver and play for the Broncos. He hated the thought of coming to Buffalo.\" In Buffalo, he would become known for his love of reading a broad range of books including those by Henry Thoreau, which led to chidings from Saban.",
"title": "Football career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Injuries, including the broken finger, kept Kemp from playing for most of 1962. That season, Kemp received a military draft notice for service in the Vietnam War but was granted a draft waiver because of a knee problem. The injuries healed, and Kemp debuted for Buffalo on November 18, 1962, by directing the only touchdown drive in a 10–6 win over the Oakland Raiders. He played only four games for Buffalo in 1962, but made the AFL All-Star team. The Bills won three of their last four games to finish 7–6–1.",
"title": "Football career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "On December 14, 1962, the Bills outbid the Green Bay Packers for Notre Dame quarterback Daryle Lamonica. In 1963, a four-season starting quarterback battle began that continued until Lamonica left for the Raiders. Lamonica felt he \"... learned a lot from Jack about quarterbacking. And I truly believe that we were a great one-two punch at the position for the Bills.\" In 1963, Kemp led the Bills from a slow start to a tie for the AFL Eastern Division lead with a 7–6–1 record. Kemp again placed second in passing attempts, completions, and yards, and he also finished second to teammate Cookie Gilchrist in rushing touchdowns. The Bills played the Boston Patriots in an Eastern Division playoff game to determine the division title on December 28 at War Memorial Stadium in Buffalo, New York, in 10 °F (−12 °C) weather. During the game, Buffalo replaced Kemp with Lamonica after falling behind 16–0, but still lost 26–8.",
"title": "Football career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Kemp was said to be the \"clubhouse lawyer\" for the Bills because of his role in mediating conflicts. In 1964, he managed personalities such as Gilchrist, who walked off the field when plays were not being called for him, and Saban, whom he kept from cutting Gilchrist the following week. He also managed the politics of his quarterback battle with Lamonica, who engineered four winning touchdown drives in the Bills' first seven games. Kemp was the first and only Professional Football player to pass for three touchdowns in the first quarter of a season-opening game, against the Kansas City Chiefs in 1964, until the record was tied but not broken, 47 years later in 2011 by Aaron Rodgers. The 1964 team won its first nine games and went 12–2 for the regular season, winning the Eastern Division with a final game victory over the Patriots at Fenway Park. Kemp led the league in yards per attempt and finished one rushing touchdown short of the league lead, which was shared by Gilchrist and Sid Blanks. In the AFL championship game, he scored the final touchdown with just over nine minutes left in a 20–7 victory. Not long after, Kemp played a key role in an off the field decision. Kemp was part of the All-Star Game played three weeks after the Championship Game alongside teammates such as Cookie Gilchrist and Ernie Warlick, with the game scheduled to be played in New Orleans, Louisiana. However, Gilchrist led a movement of African American players wanting to boycott the game due to experiencing discrimination by cab drivers and others during their time in New Orleans; Kemp saw this firsthand when Gilchrist, and Warlick were not allowed to share a cab with him. Kemp attended a boycott meeting and alongside Ron Mix convinced the white players to go with the idea of a boycott. One day after the players left the city, AFL Commissioner Joe Foss moved the game to Houston, Texas.",
"title": "Football career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "According to Lamonica, the 1965 team had a new emphasis: \"In '64 we had depended a lot on Gilchrist and our running attack to carry us. . .But that all changed in '65. The Bills had traded Gilchrist in the off season to the Denver Broncos. So we went to a pass-oriented game more that season than we ever had before. We not only went to our receivers, but we threw a lot to our running backs. And I really think it brought out the best in Jack that year.\" In 1965, the Bills finished with a 10–3–1 record. Kemp finished the season second in the league in pass completions. In the 1965 AFL Championship Game, Buffalo defeated the Chargers 23–0; for Kemp, the victory was special because it came against his former team. Kemp's role in leading the Bills to a repeat championship without Gilchrist and with star receiver Elbert Dubenion playing only three games earned him a share of the AFL MVP awards that he split with former Charger teammate, Paul Lowe. Kemp also won the Associated Press award and the Championship Game Most Valuable Player award.",
"title": "Football career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Following the championship game, Saban resigned to coach the University of Maryland and defensive coordinator Joe Collier was promoted to head coach for the 1966 season. Kemp led the Bills to their third consecutive division title with a 9–4–1 record. However, in the AFL championship game, which was played for the right to represent the AFL in Super Bowl I, the Bills lost to the Kansas City Chiefs 31–7. Kemp was named an AFL All-Star for the sixth consecutive year. The 1967 Bills endured a 4–10 1967 AFL season, in which Kemp was not named to the All-Star game for the first time in his AFL career.",
"title": "Football career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "On August 23, 1968, the Bills suffered a blowout preseason loss to the Houston Oilers. On August 26, Collier put the Bills through a 40-play scrimmage. During the scrimmage, Ron McDole fell on Kemp's right knee and injured it, forcing Kemp to sit out the entire 1968 season. The Bills went 1–12–1 without Kemp.",
"title": "Football career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Despite Kemp's return from injury and the arrival of running back O. J. Simpson, the Bills only compiled a 4–10 record during the 1969 season under new coach John Rauch. Kemp was named an AFL All-Star in 1969 for the seventh time in the league's 10 years. He advocated recognition of the league, and in its last year, 1969, lobbied Pete Rozelle to have AFL teams wear an AFL patch to honor it. In 1969, the Erie County Republican Party approached him about running for the United States Congress. After the January 17, 1970, AFL All-Star game, Kemp returned home and talked to his wife before deciding to enter politics. Kemp said, \"I had a four-year no-cut contract with the Bills at the time. ... I figured that if I lost I could always come back and play. But the fans had their say and I was elected to Congress.\"",
"title": "Football career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Kemp led Buffalo to the AFL playoffs four straight years (1963–1966), three consecutive Eastern Division titles (1964–1966) and two straight AFL Championships (1964–1965). He led the league in career passes attempted, completions, and yards gained passing. He played in five of the AFL's 10 Championship Games, and holds the same career records (passing attempts, completions, and yardage) for championships. He is second in many other championship game categories, including career and single-game passer rating. He ranks third in rushing touchdowns by an NFL or AFL quarterback with 40, behind Steve Young's 52 and Otto Graham's 44. A Sporting News All-League selection at quarterback in 1960 and 1965, and the AFL MVP in 1965. He was the only AFL quarterback to be listed as a starter all 10 years of the league's existence and one of only 20 players to serve all 10 of those years. His number 15 was retired by the Bills in 1984. In 2012, the Professional Football Researchers Association named Kemp to the PRFA Hall of Very Good Class of 2012",
"title": "Football career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "However, despite his success and important AFL records, he is most prominently listed in the NFL record book for less flattering accomplishments, including his place as a former record holder for most quarterback sacks in a game. Despite Kemp's many records, Joe Namath and Len Dawson were selected as the quarterbacks for the All-time AFL team. Kemp is a member of the Greater Buffalo Sports Hall of Fame and the Buffalo Bills' Wall of Fame.",
"title": "Football career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Kemp co-founded the AFL Players Association with Tom Addison of the Boston Patriots, and was elected its president five times. His founding of and involvement in the players' union contributed to his frequent siding with the Democrats on labor issues later in his career.",
"title": "Football career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The NCAA's highest honor, the Theodore Roosevelt Award, was presented to Kemp in 1992, and he was named one of the Association's 100 most influential student-athletes in 2006.",
"title": "Football career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Kemp's political career began long before his 1970 campaign. In 1960 and 1961, Kemp was an editorial assistant to San Diego Union editor and future Richard Nixon aide Herb Klein. Subsequently, Kemp became a volunteer in both Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign and Ronald Reagan's successful 1966 California gubernatorial campaign. In the 1967 football off-season, Kemp worked on Reagan's staff in Sacramento. In 1969, he was special assistant to the Republican National Committee chairman.",
"title": "Political career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Kemp was a voracious reader, and his political beliefs were founded in early readings of Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative, Ayn Rand's novels such as The Fountainhead, and Friedrich von Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty. He also brought from his football career a belief in racial equality which came from playing football with black teammates. As Kemp said, \"I wasn't there with Rosa Parks or Dr. King or John Lewis. But I am here now, and I am going to yell from the rooftops about what we need to do.\" Kemp's football colleagues confirmed this influence: John Mackey explained that \"the huddle is colorblind.\"",
"title": "Political career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "As a self-described \"bleeding-heart conservative\", Kemp represented a part of the suburban Buffalo region known as the Southtowns (that traditionally voted Democratic) in the United States House of Representatives from 1971 to 1989. He was described as having the charisma of the earlier John F. Kennedy. David Rosenbaum described Kemp as an independent politician who often legislated outside his committees' jurisdictions and often spoke in favor of ideals and principles rather than his party's political platforms. As a supply-sider, he was not a proponent of balanced budgeting and trivialized it while speaking of growth as an economic goal.",
"title": "Political career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The Erie County, New York Republicans had drafted Kemp after incumbent congressman Richard D. McCarthy decided to run for the United States Senate. During his inaugural campaign, his district was in economic malaise, and The New York Times described him as a John F. Kennedy throwback who campaigned on family values, patriotism, sports, and defense. Upon his election to the Congress in a class of sixty-two freshmen, he was one of six newcomers—along with Ronald Dellums, Bella Abzug, Louise Day Hicks, Robert Drinan, and Pete du Pont—discussed in Time. The article described him as a football fan like United States President Richard Nixon and as the recipient of advice from White House adviser Robert Finch and former Kemp boss Herb Klein, Nixon's director of communications. The Nixon aides encouraged Kemp to endorse the Cambodian invasion and to oppose criticism of Nixon's war policies in order to firm up Kemp's support from military hawks.",
"title": "Political career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Kemp championed several Chicago school and supply-side economics issues, including economic growth, free markets, free trade, tax simplification and lower tax rates on both employment and investment income. He was a long-time proponent of the flat tax. He also defended the use of anti-Communist contra forces in Central America, supported the gold standard, spoke for civil rights legislation, opposed abortion, and was the first lawmaker to popularize enterprise zones, which he supported to foster entrepreneurship and job creation and expand homeownership among public housing tenants. During his career, he sometimes sounded like a liberal Democrat; he supported affirmative action and rights for illegal immigrants. The New York Times described Kemp as the most proactive combatant in the war on poverty since Robert F. Kennedy. He differed from Rockefeller Republicans and earlier combatants such as Lyndon Johnson by supporting incentive-based systems instead of traditional social programs. For his commitment to inner city concerns from within the Republican party, David Gergen heralded him as a \"courageous voice in the wilderness.\" Although he was liberal on many social issues and supported civil liberties for homosexuals, he opposed certain gay rights such as the right to teach in schools. Kemp at times felt his role was that of \"freewheeling, entrepreneurial, wildcatting backbencher.\"",
"title": "Political career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Time identified 38-year-old second-term congressman Kemp as a future leader in its 1974 \"Faces for the Future\" feature. Another early-career notable magazine appearance was in a 1978 issue of Esquire. The article explained allegations of homosexual activity among staffers in Ronald Reagan's Sacramento office in 1967; Kemp was not implicated. Kemp considered running for the U.S. Senate in 1980 and Hugh Sidey mentioned him as a contender to unseat Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election and was a front runner for the vice presidency at the 1980 Republican National Convention, where he received 43 votes from conservative detractors of George H. W. Bush. After he was reelected for a sixth term in 1980, his Republican peers elected him to a party leadership position, and he served seven years as chairman of the House Republican Conference. This promotion occurred immediately after Kemp and David Stockman urged Reagan by memorandum to dedicate his first 100 days to working on an economic package with Congress. Kemp considered running for Governor of New York in 1982 but ultimately decided to stay in the House. By 1984, many viewed Kemp as Reagan's heir apparent.",
"title": "Political career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Kemp had his first encounter with supply-side economics in 1976, when The Wall Street Journal's Jude Wanniski interviewed him at his Congressional office. Kemp questioned Wanniski all day (until midnight, at Kemp's Bethesda, Maryland home) and was eventually converted to University of Southern California professor Arthur Laffer's supply-side discipline. Thereafter, Kemp espoused supply-side economics freely, and in 1978 he and Sen. William Roth of Delaware proposed tax-cutting legislation. Kemp has been credited as responsible for supply-side economics' inclusion in President Reagan's economic plan, although at the time of Robert Mundell's Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics recognition some attributed much of the credit to Mundell, Laffer, Robert Bartley, and Wanniski. In 1979, Kemp wrote An American Renaissance (ISBN 0-06-012283-8), to deliver his message that \"A rising tide lifts all boats.\" Although the realization of early 1980s tax cuts are attributed to Reagan, they were initiated by Kemp and Roth through their 1981 Kemp–Roth Tax Cut legislation. Reagan's budget based on this legislation passed over the objection of United States House Committee on Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski.",
"title": "Political career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "During the Reagan years, Kemp and his followers ignored budget balancing while promoting tax cuts and economic growth. These tax cuts have been credited by conservatives for the economic growth from 1983 to 1990, which by 1996 had become one of the longest expansions in American history. Kemp notes that Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker's success at stemming inflation and the favorable regulatory environment were also major factors. Detractors note that the expansion was fueled by undesirable sectors like gaming, prisons, medical treatment, and credit card use.",
"title": "Political career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "An early Kemp tax reform attempt was an unsuccessful 1979 proposal to index tax brackets for cost of living fluctuations, which was incorporated in Reagan's 1980 package. Kemp co-sponsored a legislative attempt at enterprise zones in 1980. One of Kemp's more trying times as a congressman came in 1982 when Reagan decided to reverse the tax cuts and promote tax increases. The reversal was controversial and stimulated opposition by Kemp. Nonetheless, the revised taxes passed. In 1983, Kemp opposed the policies of chairman Volcker on multiple occasions. The debates included domestic monetary involvement and roles in funding the International Monetary Fund.",
"title": "Political career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Kemp delivered speeches at several Republican National Conventions. He addressed the convention on July 15 at the 1980 Republican National Convention in Detroit, Michigan and on August 21 at the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas, Texas. During the 1984 Convention, with Trent Lott as Republican Party Platform Committee chairman, Congressmen Kemp and Newt Gingrich claimed control of the party platform to the consternation of G.O.P. senators Bob Dole and Howard Baker. Kemp's official role was as the chairman of the platform subcommittee on foreign policy. However, the three platform planks that he proposed involved tax hikes, the gold standard and the role of the Federal Reserve. Despite Kemp's official role, his real influence as an author was on the grammatical structure of the plank on tax hikes. By 1985, Kemp was a leading contender for the 1988 Presidential nomination. He also delivered remarks on free enterprise zones at the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston, Texas. Despite efforts and considerations of expanding his political domain, Kemp never held a fundraiser outside of his suburban Western New York district until well into his eighth term in Congress.",
"title": "Political career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Kemp was a critic of association football, known as soccer in the United States. In 1986, during a House floor debate over whether the United States should host the 1994 FIFA World Cup, Kemp proclaimed: \"I think it is important for all those young out there—who someday hope to play real football, where you throw it and kick it and run with it and put it in your hands—[that] a distinction should be made that football is democratic capitalism, whereas soccer is a European socialist sport.\" Kemp compared his speech to George Carlin's 1984 comedy routine on the differences between baseball and American football and wrote that his \"tongue was firmly planted in cheek\" when making the speech. Despite the levity of the speech, it garnered significant backlash. However, he continued to insist that soccer's main problem is \"it doesn't have a quarterback\". Kemp noted that about half of his grandchildren play or have played organized soccer and claimed to have \"changed\" his position on soccer. He even attended the 1994 FIFA World Cup with longtime soccer fan Henry Kissinger, although he wrote during the 2006 FIFA World Cup that soccer can be interesting to watch but is still a \"boring game\".",
"title": "Political career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "In 1988, if Kemp had won his campaign for the United States Presidency, it would have made him the first person to move from the United States House of Representatives to the White House since James Garfield. When he formed his exploratory committee, he signed Ed Rollins, Reagan's 1984 re-election political director, as an advisor. From the outset, Kemp had failed to position himself as the primary alternative to Vice President Bush. Except for a select few cognoscenti, the general public did not recognize Kemp's leadership ability, although he was a successful man of ideas. In fact, most of the Republican electorate found themselves unfamiliar with Kemp early in his campaign. Political pundits recognized him, however, as a visionary idea man. In addition, he was quickly perceived as a verbose speaker who sometimes lost contact with his audience. Although Kemp tried to appeal to conservatives, his libertarian philosophies of tolerance and individual rights and his commitment to supporting minorities, women, blue-collar workers and organized labor clashed with conservative voters' social and religious values. To Democrats, Kemp's free-market philosophies were a form of laissez-faire anarchy. However, as much as Kemp wanted to minimize government's role, he acknowledged that moves toward a more laissez-faire system should be well-thought out.",
"title": "Political career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "After the May 1987 Gary Hart–Donna Rice scandal, a questionnaire by The New York Times requested things such as psychiatric records and access to FBI files from all 14 presidential candidates. Candidates from each party expressed opinions on both sides of the personal privacy issue, and Kemp rejected the Times inquiry as \"beneath the dignity of a presidential candidate\". His campaign was on an early positive course with many key early endorsements in New Hampshire, but Bush held the support of much of the Republican establishment in New York. Although he had an eclectic mix of supporters, Kemp's campaign began borrowing against anticipated Federal matching funds because it had quickly spent itself into the red, which may have been due to the use of expensive direct mail fundraising techniques. To offset his socially moderate stances, Kemp clarified his opposition to abortion, his support of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) and his support for a stronger military than that favored by Secretary of State George Shultz. To position himself as Reagan's successor, Kemp called for Shultz's resignation based on claims that Shultz had neglected freedom fighters in Afghanistan and Nicaragua and had waffled on the SDI. In an attempt to highlight his stands on key Reagan Era foreign policy initiatives, Kemp traveled in September 1987 to Costa Rica, Honduras and El Salvador to lobby the presidents of those nations against the Arias Peace Plan—a peace accord US conservatives felt too conciliatory to Central American communists. He was accompanied on the trip by 50-plus US conservative leaders.",
"title": "Political career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Despite a platform covering the full range of political subjects, Kemp's primary campaign weapon was a fiscal policy based on tax cuts. As part of his fiscal policy, he opposed a Social Security benefits freeze and endorsed a freeze on government spending. Some viewed Kemp's supply-side stance as an attempt to ignore the national budget deficit. In late 1987, political pundits saw that Kemp needed to gain support from the far right on non-social issues. Kemp was among the majority of Republican candidates in opposition to Reagan's INF Treaty agreement with the Soviet Union's Mikhail Gorbachev despite general Republican voter approval of the treaty. With aspirations of support from right-wing voters, all candidates with low levels of poll support for the nomination took this same \"sabre-rattling\" stand. By early 1988, the moderates (Bush and Dole) were clearly the front-runners and Kemp was battling with Pat Robertson as the conservative alternative to the moderates.",
"title": "Political career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "He used a somewhat negative advertising campaign that seemed to have the intended initial effect of boosting him to serious contention. His 1988 campaign was based on the platform of supply-side economics and inner-city enterprise zones. In Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms: My Life in American Politics, campaign chairman Rollins described Kemp as a candidate with foibles. Kemp's campaign managers say he was unmanageable: he ignored timers on his speeches, refused to call contributors, and refused to practice for debates. A humbling Super Tuesday, in which his 39 delegate total was fewer than eventual nominee and President Bush and both Dole and Pat Robertson, ended his campaign. After withdrawing from the race, he was still considered a contender for the vice presidential nomination. In 1989, the Kemps switched their official residence from Hamburg, New York to Bethesda, Maryland, their residence at the time of his death. In 1994, Kemp's 1988 campaign reached a settlement with the Federal Election Commission by agreeing to pay $120,000 in civil penalties for 1988 campaign election law violations for, among other things, excessive contributions, improper direct corporate donations, press overbilling, exceeding spending limits in Iowa and New Hampshire, and failure to reimburse corporations for providing air transportation.",
"title": "Political career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "As a so-called \"bleeding-heart conservative\", Kemp was a logical choice for Bush as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, whose job would be to foster public sector and private sector methods to meet the demands of public housing. However, the scandals of Reagan's Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Samuel Pierce and the neglect of the president were obstacles from the start, and Kemp was unsuccessful at either of his major initiatives: enacting enterprise zones and promoting public housing tenant ownership. The goal of these two plans was to change public housing into tenant-owned residences and to lure industry and business into inner cities with federal incentives. Although Kemp did not affect much policy as HUD's director, he cleaned up HUD's reputation, and developed a plan to salvage the Federal Housing Administration. He halted or revamped certain programs and developed an antidrug offensive, which enabled him to collaborate with Director of the National Drug Control Policy Bill Bennett. He supported \"Operation Clean Sweep\" and similar movements to prohibit firearm possession in public housing.",
"title": "Political career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Although Kemp coaxed Bush to support a $4 billion housing program that encouraged public housing tenants to buy their own apartments, the Democratic Congress allocated only $361 million to the plan. In addition to opposition in Congress, Kemp fought White House Budget Director Richard Darman, who opposed Kemp's pet project HOPE (Homeownership and Opportunity for People Everywhere). The project involved selling public housing to its tenants. Darman also opposed Kemp's proposed welfare adjustment of government offsets. HOPE was first proposed to White House chief of staff John Sununu in June 1989 to create enterprise zones, increase subsidies for low-income renters, expand social services for the homeless and elderly, and enact tax changes to help first-time home buyers. Sununu opposed it at first as did most of the Cabinet, but in August 1990 Sununu, at the urging of United States Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, encouraged President Bush to endorse Kemp's Economic Empowerment Task Force. However, the Persian Gulf War and the budget negotiations overshadowed Kemp's new project. Darman battled Kemp and his allies such as Gingrich, James Pinkerton, and Vin Weber. The budget left him with $256 million for his plan, which Kemp increased during some appropriations battles. Soon after Clayton Yeutter was appointed chief White House domestic policy advisor, Kemp's Economic Empowerment Task Force was abolished.",
"title": "Political career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "President Bush avoided federal antipoverty issues, and instead used Kemp to speak on the administration's low priority conservative activist agenda. Bush's contribution to the urban agenda had been volunteerism through his \"Points of Light\" theme, and Kemp received stronger support for his ideas from presidential candidate Bill Clinton. By the time of the Los Angeles riots of 1992, Bush was a bit late in supporting enterprise zones, tenant ownership and welfare reform: Mort Zuckerman compared Bush's vision on racial issues to that of a man riding backwards in a railroad car. Nonetheless, the riots made Kemp a focal point of the administration, even though at first, Kemp had been overlooked. However, Charles E. Schumer had probably summarized the prospects of Kemp's success in advance best when he said in 1989, \"Good ideas with money can do a whole lot. Good ideas without money aren't probably going to do a whole lot,\" and the issue here was the decision not to fund Kemp's ideas. Although Kemp was unable to procure money for his visions, he was among the administration's leading users of first class corporate jets. He cited lingering effects from a knee injury as the reason he had to fly first class at government expense as the Housing Secretary.",
"title": "Political career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Generally, his time as housing secretary was considered unsuccessful. However, although he could not get federal funding for empowerment zones passed during his tenure, by 1992 38 states had created empowerment zones, and in 1994 $3.5 billion was approved for them under President Clinton. A free market Kemp initiative to allow homeowners to subdivide their houses for the purpose of creating rental units without inordinate bureaucracy did not get executed under the Clinton administration, however. In 1992, with H. Ross Perot mounting a formidable campaign, Kemp was again considered a vice presidential candidate.",
"title": "Political career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Kemp was partly at fault for not achieving either of his primary goals because he did not get along with the rest of the Cabinet. At one point, Kemp told James Baker, White House Chief of Staff, that Bush's best chance to win reelection was to dump his economic advisors in dramatic fashion. Before the 1992 Republican National Convention, Kemp and six prominent Republican conservatives prepared a controversial memo urging Bush to revise his economic policy. Contemporaneously, conservative Republicans in office and in the media such as William F. Buckley Jr. and George Will felt Dan Quayle should be ousted in favor of Kemp. This followed Kemp's reference to parts of the President's economic policy as \"gimmicks\" after the 1992 State of the Union Address. Kemp was respected within the party for opposing Bush, and towards the end of Bush's administration insiders recognized his value. In late 1991, 81 of the 166 Republican Congressmen signed a letter co-authored by Curt Weldon and Dan Burton requesting that Bush cede some domestic authority to Kemp as a \"domestic policy czar.\" The letter, highlighting Kemp's \"energy, enthusiasm and national clout\", insulted Bush. Kemp was a bit of a surprise to stay in the Bush Cabinet for the duration of his presidency, and he was described as one of the few Bush Administration members who would take tough stands. Kemp did not expect to be retained if the Republicans were reelected in 1992, and some pundits agreed with him.",
"title": "Political career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Kemp gave public speeches for $35,000 apiece between his time as Housing Secretary and his vice presidential nomination. By 1994, Kemp had embarked on 241 fund-raising dinners to raise $35 million for a 1996 Presidential bid and to pay off his 1988 campaign debts. After stepping down from his $189,000 Secretary of Housing and Urban Development job, Kemp personally earned $6.9 million in the next three years, primarily for speaking on behalf of local Republican candidates. During the Super Bowl XXVIII festivities, Kemp hosted a notable fundraiser series.",
"title": "Political career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Kemp was considered the star of the 1992 Republican National Convention. In 1992 and 1993, Kemp was considered the favorite or co-favorite for the 1996 Presidential nomination. At the time of the 1994 mid-term elections, Kemp was widely anticipated to announce his candidacy for 1996, and his supporters wanted a formal announcement by the end of the year. In January 1995, Kemp's stated reason for not entering the 1996 Republican Party presidential primaries was that his personal beliefs were out of balance with the contemporary Republican political landscape: Kemp opposed term limits, he always preferred tax cuts to anything resembling a balanced budget amendment and, unlike most Republicans, favored federal incentives to combat urban poverty. In 1995, Gloria Borger noted Kemp was not in step with the 1994 Contract with America. Kemp also noted a distaste for the vast fundraising necessary for a presidential campaign. Gergen stated that by 1996 the selection process had become so expensive, mean and personally invasive that it discouraged several top Republicans from running. In 1995, while the world awaited the campaign decision announcement by Colin Powell, Kemp had positive thoughts on the prospect of such a campaign.",
"title": "Political career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Senate Majority Leader Dole and Gingrich appointed Kemp to head a tax reform commission, (the Kemp Commission), in response to voter concern that the tax code had become too complicated. Kemp championed many issues including the flat tax, which he formally proposed after he was appointed. The proposal included some politically popular income tax deductions, such as mortgage interest, but it remained fairly general. Among the 1996 Republican Party candidates, both Steve Forbes and Phil Gramm proposed the flat tax.",
"title": "Political career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "During the campaign, Kemp's endorsement was highly coveted. Forbes had tried to get Kemp to run in the 1996 campaign, but Kemp declined and in fact endorsed Forbes just as Dole was closing in on the nomination, and just after Dole gained the endorsements of former contenders Lamar Alexander and Richard Lugar. Some feel the primary reason for the endorsement was to keep the flat tax idea and other supply-side views alive. Many thought Kemp had destroyed his own political future with the endorsement, and Kemp profusely apologized to Dole's campaign offices. After it became clear Dole would be the nominee, Kemp attempted to form a bipartisan seminar with Felix Rohatyn to produce a fiscal plan that could be endorsed by both parties.",
"title": "Political career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Kemp was also outspoken on immigration on around this time: according to Kemp's interpretation of a scientific index that he and Bennett support, \"immigrants are a blessing, not a curse.\" In 1994, Kemp and Bennett opposed California ballot Proposition 187, a measure to bar illegal immigrants from obtaining public services, in direct opposition to first-term Republican California Governor Pete Wilson, one of its endorsers who was running for re-election. Republican Senate candidate Michael Huffington had also endorsed the proposition. Kemp supported rights for illegal immigrants, and opposed Lamar Smith and Alan Simpson's proposed restrictions on legal immigration.",
"title": "Political career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Kemp had a reputation as the highest-profile progressive Republican. When Dole declined an invitation to speak to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, he suggested Kemp as a substitute even before Kemp had become the vice presidential nominee. On August 5, 1996, Dole announced a 15% across-the-board tax cut in response to both the Forbes campaign and Kemp's tax reform commission. Several of Dole's other campaign ideas came from Kemp and Bill Bennett's Empower America, which had Jeane Kirkpatrick, Weber, Forbes and Alexander as principals. For example, Dole borrowed Kirkpatrick's tough foreign policy, Bennett's \"right conduct\" and even Alexander's school choice interest.",
"title": "Political career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Bennett declined the offer to be Dole's running mate but suggested Kemp, a man described as Dole's antagonist. On August 16, 1996, the Republican Party chose Kemp as its vice presidential nominee, running alongside former Senator Dole. Kemp was seen as a means to attract conservative and libertarian-minded voters like those of tough nomination-challengers Forbes and Pat Buchanan. Kemp was chosen over Connie Mack, John McCain, and Carroll Campbell, and it is assumed that this was partly because Kemp had several former staffers in influential positions as Dole's senior advisors. Dole had had a long history of representing the budget-balancing faction of the Party, while Kemp had had a long history of representing the tax-cutting advocates, and Kemp's tax-cutting fiscal track record was seen as the perfect fit for the ticket. When Kemp became Dole's running mate in 1996, they appeared on the cover of the August 19, 1996 issue of Time magazine, but the pair barely edged out a story on the reported discovery of extraterrestrial life on Mars, which was so close to being the cover story that Time inset it on the cover and wrote about how difficult the decision was.",
"title": "Political career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "The two politicians had a storied history stemming from alternative perspectives and objectives. Dole was a longstanding conservative deficit hawk who had even voted against John F. Kennedy's tax cuts, while Kemp was an outspoken supply-sider. In the early 1980s, according to David Stockman, Kemp persuaded Reagan to make a 30% across-the-board tax cut a central 1980 presidential campaign feature. Once Reagan was elected, Dole was the Senate Finance Committee chairman who Kemp claims resisted the plan every step of the way. Dole concedes he expressed reservations about the 1981 plan. The big confrontation came after the tax plan was approved and after Dole subsequently proposed tax increases that he referred to as reforms. Kemp was vocal in his opposition to the reforms and even penned an op-ed piece in The New York Times, which enraged Dole. Reagan supported the reforms at Dole's request, causing Kemp to summon allies to meetings to stop the act, which eventually passed in 1982. At the 1984 Republican National Convention, Kemp, along with allies such as Gingrich and Lott, added a plank to the party platform that put President Reagan on record as ruling out tax increases. Gingrich called this action \"Dole proofing\" the platform, and the plank passed over Dole's opposition. Then, in 1985, Dole proposed an austere budget that barely passed in the Senate with appendectomy patient Pete Wilson casting the tying vote and Vice President Bush casting the deciding vote. In meetings with the president that excluded Dole, Kemp reworked the budget to exclude crucial Social Security cutbacks. This is said to have been Dole's most crushing political defeat and to have contributed to the Republican loss of control of the Senate. During the 1988 presidential election, the two antagonized each other. After Bush won and Kemp left Congress for the Cabinet, the two did not really cross paths again until 1996, when Kemp endorsed Dole's opponent Forbes on the eve of the New York Primary in March.",
"title": "Political career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Dole despised Kemp's economic theories, but he felt Kemp-like tax cuts offered his best chance at electoral success. For his part, Kemp had to make concessions as well: he had to back expelling the children of illegal immigrants from public schools despite his longstanding opposition to Proposition 187 and mute his opposition to abolishing affirmative-action programs in California. Some derided Kemp for his compromise and referred to him as a \"con artist\". From the outset of their campaign, Dole-Kemp trailed, and they faced skeptics even from within the party. However, Kemp was able to use the nomination to promote his opposition to Clinton's partial birth abortion ban veto. During the campaign, Kemp and Forbes advocated for a stronger stand on tax cutting than Dole used. However, in general, the opinion was that Kemp was helpful to the ticket's chances of catching Bill Clinton, and Kemp's advocacy gave a clear picture of the tax reforms that would likely occur on the condition of a successful campaign. Kemp was seen as likely to influence several types of swing voters, especially those of his native state of California, and even the Democrats feared Kemp might lure voters.",
"title": "Political career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "After receiving the nomination, Kemp became the ticket's spokesman for minorities and the inner-city. Due to agreement on the self-help policy that Louis Farrakhan has endorsed in many fora including the Million Man March, Kemp in a sense aligned himself with Farrakhan. However, Farrakhan was perceived as being anti-Semitic, and Kemp was considered an ally of Republican Jews. This issue necessitated some political sidestepping. As the nominee, Kemp at times overshadowed Dole. In fact, more than once, Kemp was described as if he was the presidential nominee. In addition to having overshadowed Dole, despite the negative ad campaigns that the ticket used, Kemp was a very positive running mate who relied on a pep rally type of campaign tour full of football-related metaphors and hyperbole. Although some enjoyed Kemp's style, referring to him as the Good Shepherd, his detractors, such as U.S. News & World Report writer Steven V. Roberts, criticized the extensive use of recounting stories of passing balls relative to the use of recounting stories of passing bills. During the campaign, Kemp expressed the opinion that Republican Party leaders did not stand behind the ticket wholeheartedly. Despite Kemp's voice on minority issues, Colin Powell's support and polls that showed about 30% of blacks identified themselves as conservatives on issues such as school prayer, school vouchers and criminal justice, the Republicans were unable to improve upon historical support levels from African-American voters.",
"title": "Political career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Both Al Gore and Kemp had presidential aspirations, which induced pursuit of debate on a higher plane. In addition, Gore and Kemp were long-time friends, unlike Gore and his previous vice presidential opponent Dan Quayle. Thus, as debaters they avoided personal attacks. However, some felt Kemp failed to counter substantive attacks. In the final October 9, 1996 vice presidential debate against Al Gore (held as the Dole–Kemp ticket trailed badly in the national polls), Kemp was soundly beaten, and Al Gore's performance is considered one of the best modern debate performances. The debate topics ranged broadly from the usual such as abortion and foreign policy to the unusual such as an incident preceding the then-current baseball playoffs, in which Roberto Alomar, the Baltimore Orioles' second baseman, cursed and spat on an umpire. The Mexico policy debate was one of the more interesting topics for critical review. The Gore victory was not a surprise since Kemp had been outmatched by Gore in previous encounters, and Gore had a reputation as an experienced and vaunted debater.",
"title": "Political career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "In 1993, Kemp, Bennett, Kirkpatrick and financial backer Theodore Forstmann co-founded the free market advocacy group Empower America, which later merged with Citizens for a Sound Economy to form Freedom Works. Empower America represented the populist wing of the party: while avoiding divisive issues such as abortion and gay rights, it promoted free markets and growth over balancing the budget and cutting the deficit. He resigned as Co-Chairman of Freedom Works in March 2005 after the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) questioned his ties to Samir Vincent, a Northern Virginia oil trader implicated in the U.N. Oil-for-food scandal who pleaded guilty to four criminal charges, including illegally acting as an unregistered lobbyist of the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein. Testimony about Kemp became prominent in the trial. Also, FBI informant Richard Fino tied Kemp to James Cosentino just weeks before the 1996 election.",
"title": "Late career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "By 1996, Kemp had been named a director of six corporate boards. He was a director for Hawk Corporation, IDT Corporation, CNL Hotels and Resorts, InPhonic, Cyrix Corporation and American Bankers Insurance Group. Kemp briefly served on the board of Oracle Corporation, whose CEO was his friend Larry Ellison, in 1996, but resigned when he ran for vice president; he was named to the board of Six Flags, Inc. in December 2005. Kemp opted not to stand for re-election to IDT's board in 2006. He also served on the Habitat for Humanity board of directors, and served on the board of Atlanta-based software maker EzGov Inc. Kemp also served on the board of directors of Election.com, which was the private company that ran the world's first election on the internet (won by Al Gore), the 2000 Arizona Democratic Primary. Kemp was also a business partner with Edra and Tim Blixseth promoting membership in the elite private ski and golf Yellowstone Club. Kemp also partnered with the Blixseths in a failed anti-terrorism software venture called Blxware which was investigated for \"conning\" the federal government out of $20 million in contracts for software which fraudulently claimed to detect secret messages from Al-Qaeda in television broadcast signals. Kemp was the founder and chairman of Kemp Partners, a strategic consulting firm that helps clients achieve both business and public policy goals.",
"title": "Late career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "In addition to corporate boards of directors, Kemp served on several advisory boards such as the UCLA School of Public Policy Advisory Board, and the Toyota Diversity Advisory Board as well as the Howard University Board of Trustees, on which he served since 1993. On March 25, 2003, Kemp was selected as chairman of the board of Directors of USA Football, a national advocacy group for amateur football created by the National Football League (NFL) and the NFL Players Association. The organization supports Pop Warner, American Youth Football, Boys and Girls Clubs of America, National Recreation and Park Association, Police Athletic League, YMCA, and the Amateur Athletic Union. He was also vice president of NFL Charities.",
"title": "Late career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "In the late 1990s, Kemp remained outspoken on political issues: he was critical of Clinton's International Monetary Fund lax policies toward South Korea. In early 1998, he was a serious contender for the 2000 United States presidential election, but his campaign possibilities faltered, and he instead endorsed eventual winner George W. Bush. Kemp continued his political advocacy for reform of taxation, Social Security and education. When a 1997 budget surplus was earmarked for debt repayment, Kemp opposed the plan in favor of tax cuts. Along with John Ashcroft and Alan Krueger, he endorsed reform of payroll taxes to eliminate double taxation. In addition to his fiscal and economic policies, Kemp advocated against abortion when Congress was considering a bill banning intact dilation and extractions. He also advocated for retired NFL veterans on issues such as cardiovascular screening, assisted living, disability benefits, and the 2007 joint replacement program. He argued in support of reforming immigration laws. In the late 1990s, Kemp also was a vocal advocate for free market reform in Africa, arguing that the continent had great economic growth potential if it could shed autocratic and statist governmental policies.",
"title": "Late career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "In 1997, when Gingrich was embroiled in a House ethics controversy, Kemp served as an intermediary between Dole and Gingrich to save the Republican Party leader. Later, in 2002, when Lott made caustic remarks about Strom Thurmond, Kemp was upset, and he supported Lott's apology, saying he had encouraged him to \"repudiate segregation in every manifestation.\" Kemp was among the prominent leaders who pledged to raise money in 2005 for Scooter Libby's defense when he was charged with perjury and obstruction of justice in a case regarding the release of Central Intelligence Agency information.",
"title": "Late career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "In June 2004, Kemp rescinded his support of Vernon Robinson for Congress due to the latter's views on immigration laws, citing Robinson's choice to run \"as a Pat Buchanan Republican\".",
"title": "Late career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "In 2006 Kemp, along with 2004 vice-presidential nominee John Edwards, co-chaired the Council on Foreign Relations task force on Russia, producing a document called \"Russia's Wrong Direction: What the United States Can and Should Do\". After their task force roles ended, the pair advocated solutions to poverty in America at various fora.",
"title": "Late career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "On January 6, 2008, Kemp endorsed McCain in the 2008 Republican presidential primaries shortly before the New Hampshire primary, which surprised conservative Republican tax cutters. However, as McCain neared the official nomination, the press associated McCain with Kemp more and more. Kemp prepared an open letter to Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham and other conservative talk show hosts on McCain's behalf to quell their dissatisfactions. In addition, Kemp and Phil Gramm advised McCain on economic policy.",
"title": "Late career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "He was a syndicated newspaper columnist.",
"title": "Late career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "In February 2008, Kemp was associated with a group called \"Defense of Democracies\" that was advocating an electronic surveillance bill that failed in the House of Representatives. The group's television ad caused such controversy that some of its advisors, including Schumer and Donna Brazile, resigned.",
"title": "Late career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "He was a member of the advisory council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and served as Co-Chair of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission Cabinet.",
"title": "Late career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "He was a board member for the Lott IMPACT Trophy, which is named after Pro Football Hall of Fame defensive back Ronnie Lott, and is awarded annually to college football's Defensive IMPACT Player of the Year.",
"title": "Late career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "On January 7, 2009, Kemp's office issued a statement announcing that he had cancer; the type of cancer and the anticipated treatment were not announced. His diagnosis and prognosis were never publicly disclosed. However, he continued to serve as chairman of his Washington-based Kemp Partners consulting firm and continued his involvement in charitable and political work until his death.",
"title": "Illness and death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "On May 2, 2009, Kemp died from cancer at his home in Bethesda, Maryland, at the age of 73. President Barack Obama praised Kemp's work on race, adding that Kemp understood that divisions involving race and class stood in the way of the country's common goals, and former President George W. Bush said that Kemp \"will be remembered for his significant contributions to the Reagan Revolution and his steadfast dedication to conservative principles during his long and distinguished career in public service.\" It was later revealed that melanoma was the probable type of cancer Kemp died from",
"title": "Illness and death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Kemp's legacy includes the Kemp–Roth Tax Cut of the 1980s, also known as the first of two \"Reagan tax cuts.\" These served as the foundation of supply-side economics, known as Reaganomics. Many Republicans have endorsed this Laffer Curve view that tax cuts can spur economic growth and reduce deficits. Although George H. W. Bush called this philosophy voodoo economics, George W. Bush and his Treasury Secretary, John W. Snow, were believers. Kemp is also remembered alongside George Wallace and William Jennings Bryan for influencing history by changing the direction of presidential elections despite their defeats.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "In the early 21st century, Kemp continued to be considered along with Reagan as the politician most responsible for the implementation of supply-side tax cuts and along with Steve Forbes as the political figure most responsible for their continued place in the marketplace of political ideas. He has been described as a beacon of economic conservatism and a hero for his urban agenda. Today, he continues to be described as a hero to fiscal conservatives who believe that free markets and low taxes work better than government bureaucracies. Kemp was considered the leader of the progressive conservatives who are socially conservative, but avoid protectionist fiscal and trade policy.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "In addition to Roth, he has had numerous political allies. At times, he collaborated with Gingrich and Lott on deregulation and tax cuts, collaborated with McCain and Phil Gramm on tax cuts and spending restraints, legislated with and campaigned for Joseph Lieberman, and fought poverty with James Pinkerton. Pete du Pont was a progressive conservative ally. After retiring from Congress and serving in the Cabinet, Kemp remained close to Gingrich, Lott, Weber, and Mack. Kemp was a member of the federal committee to promote Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a national holiday. As a progressive voter, he had civil rights leaders such as Benjamin Hooks, Andrew Young and Coretta Scott King and conservative black intellectuals like Glenn C. Loury and Robert L. Woodson as supporters and friends. He boasted of having Democratic friends such as William H. Gray III, Charles B. Rangel and Robert Garcia. Ken Blackwell was a Deputy Secretary under Kemp. During the Reagan presidency, when Kemp was able to effect tax cutting, a leading United States Senate tax-cutting proponent was Democrat Bill Bradley, a former basketball star. Several American football players have followed Kemp to Congress, including Steve Largent, J. C. Watts, and Heath Shuler.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Congressman Paul Ryan cites Kemp as a mentor, and mentioned him in his acceptance speech as the Republican Vice-Presidential nominee in 2012.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "\"Growth is obviously what Jack Kemp was about\" stated Fred Barnes in the opening of the session \"Growth! Growth! Growth!\" of Jack Kemp Foundation's Forum on The Future of the American Idea, in 2014. Kemp didn't believe in limits to growth, a blind spot shared by any politicians of his era and which prompted him to dismiss the 1991 Report of the United Nations Population Fund as \"nonsense\".",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Senator Arlen Specter in a severe rebuke of federal governmental policy, stated just one day after Kemp died of cancer, that Kemp would still be alive if the federal government had done a better job funding cancer research.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Following Kemp's death, his son, Jimmy Kemp, created the Jack Kemp Foundation to continue his father's legacy. A 501(c)(3) charitable organization, the foundation's mission statement is to \"develop, engage and recognize exceptional leaders who champion the American Idea\". The foundation is located in Washington, D.C., and is committed to advancing the universal values of the American Idea: growth, freedom, democracy and hope.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "The football stadium at Occidental College is named after him.",
"title": "Legacy"
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"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "In addition to authoring significant legislation as a congressman, Kemp wrote or co-authored several books:",
"title": "Books"
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"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "Kemp also wrote the foreword to several books:",
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| Jack French Kemp was an American politician and a professional football player. A member of the Republican Party from New York, he served as Housing Secretary in the administration of President George H. W. Bush from 1989 to 1993, having previously served nine terms in the United States House of Representatives from 1971 to 1989. He was the Republican Party's vice presidential nominee in the 1996 election, as the running mate of Bob Dole; they lost to incumbent president Bill Clinton and vice president Al Gore. Kemp had previously contended for the presidential nomination in the 1988 Republican primaries. Before entering politics, Kemp was a professional quarterback for 13 years. He played briefly in the National Football League (NFL) and the Canadian Football League (CFL), but became a star in the American Football League (AFL). He served as captain of both the San Diego Chargers and Buffalo Bills and earned the AFL Most Valuable Player award in 1965 after leading the Bills to a second consecutive championship. He played in the AFL for all 10 years of its existence, appeared in its All-Star game seven times, played in its championship game five times, and set many of the league's career passing records. Kemp also co-founded the AFL Players Association, for which he served five terms as president. During the early part of his football career, he served in the United States Army Reserve. As an economic conservative, Kemp advocated low taxes and supply-side policies during his political career. His positions spanned the social spectrum, ranging from his conservative opposition to abortion to his more libertarian stances advocating immigration reform. As a proponent of both Chicago school and supply-side economics, he is notable as an influence upon the Reagan agenda and the architect of the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, which is known as the Kemp–Roth tax cut. After his days in political office, Kemp remained active as a political advocate and commentator; he served on corporate and nonprofit organization boards. He also authored, co-authored, and edited several books. He promoted American football and advocated for retired professional football players. Kemp was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009 by President Barack Obama. | 2001-10-11T20:29:43Z | 2023-12-27T08:36:15Z | [
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16,202 | January 18 | January 18 is the 18th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 347 days remain until the end of the year (348 in leap years). | [
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"text": "January 18 is the 18th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 347 days remain until the end of the year (348 in leap years).",
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| January 18 is the 18th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 347 days remain until the end of the year. | 2001-10-15T15:03:11Z | 2023-12-28T21:45:43Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_18 |
16,203 | Jihad | Jihad (/dʒɪˈhɑːd/; Arabic: جِهَاد, romanized: jihād [dʒiˈhaːd]) is an Arabic word which literally means "striving" or "struggling", especially with a praiseworthy aim. In an Islamic context, it can refer to almost any effort to make personal and social life conform with God's guidance, such as struggle against one's evil inclinations, proselytizing, or efforts toward the moral betterment of the Muslim community (Ummah), though it is most frequently associated with war. In classical Islamic law (sharia), the term refers to armed struggle against unbelievers, while modernist Islamic scholars generally equate military jihad with defensive warfare. In Sufi circles, spiritual and moral jihad has been traditionally emphasized under the name of greater jihad. The term has gained additional attention in recent decades through its use by various insurgent Islamic extremist, militant Islamist, and terrorist individuals and organizations whose ideology is based on the Islamic notion of jihad.
The word jihad appears frequently in the Qur'an with and without military connotations, often in the idiomatic expression "striving in the path of God (al-jihad fi sabil Allah)", conveying a sense of self-exertion. They developed an elaborate set of rules pertaining to jihad, including prohibitions on harming those who are not engaged in combat. In the modern era, the notion of jihad has lost its jurisprudential relevance and instead given rise to an ideological and political discourse. While modernist Islamic scholars have emphasized the defensive and non-military aspects of jihad, some Islamists have advanced aggressive interpretations that go beyond the classical theory.
Jihad is classified into inner ("greater") jihad, which involves a struggle against one's own base impulses, and external ("lesser") jihad, which is further subdivided into jihad of the pen/tongue (debate or persuasion) and jihad of the sword. Most Western writers consider external jihad to have primacy over inner jihad in the Islamic tradition, while much of contemporary Muslim opinion favors the opposite view. Gallup analysis of a large survey reveals considerable nuance in the conceptions of jihad held by Muslims around the world.
The sense of jihad as armed resistance was first used in the context of persecution faced by Muslims, as when Muhammad was at Mecca, when the community had two choices: emigration (hijra) or jihad. In Twelver Shi'a Islam, jihad is one of the Ancillaries of the Faith. A person engaged in jihad is called a mujahid (plural: mujahideen). The term jihad is often rendered in English as "Holy War", although this translation is controversial. Today, the word jihad is often used without religious connotations, like the English crusade.
The term jihad is derived from the Arabic root jahada, meaning "to exert strength and effort, to use all means in order to accomplish a task". In its expanded sense, it can be fighting the enemies of Islam, as well as adhering to religious teachings, enjoining good and forbidding evil. The peaceful sense of "efforts towards the moral uplift of society or towards the spread of Islam" can be known as "jihad of the tongue" or "jihad of the pen", as opposed to "jihad of the sword". It is used as a term in fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) mostly in the latter sense, while in Sufism mostly in the sense of fighting the nafs al-ammara, which is the psychological state of being consumed by one's own desires. Spiritual and moral jihad is generally emphasized in pious and mystical circles.
The Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic defines the term as "fight, battle; jihad, holy war (against the infidels, as a religious duty)". However, given the range of meanings, it is incorrect to equate it simply with "holy war". The notion of jihad has its origins in the Islamic idea that the whole humankind will embrace Islam. In the Qur'an and in later Muslim usage, jihad is commonly followed by the expression fi sabil illah, "in the path of God." Muhammad Abdel-Haleem states that it indicates "the way of truth and justice, including all the teachings it gives on the justifications and the conditions for the conduct of war and peace."
In Modern Standard Arabic, the term jihad is used for a struggle for causes, both religious and secular. It is sometimes used without religious connotation, with a meaning similar to the English word "crusade" (as in "a crusade against drugs"). Jihad is also used quite commonly in Arabic countries, in the neutral sense of "a struggle for a noble cause", as a unisex name given to children. Nonetheless, jihad is usually used in the religious sense and its beginnings are traced back to the Qur'an and the words and actions of Muhammad.
Jihad is mentioned in four places in the Qur'an as a noun, while its derived verb is used in twenty-four places. Mujahid, the active participle meaning "jihadist", is mentioned in two verses. In some of these mentions (see At-Tawbah 9/41, 44, 81, 86), it is understood that the word jihad directly refers to war, and in others, jihad is used in the sense of "the effort to live in accordance with Allah's will". Quranic exhortions to jihad have been interpreted by Islamic scholars both in the combative and non-combative sense. Ahmed al-Dawoody writes that there seventeen references to or derivatices of jihad occur altogether forty-one times in eleven Meccan texts and thirty Medinan ones, with 28 mentions related to religious belief or spiritual struggle and 13 mentions related to warfare or physical struggle.
There are also many hadiths (records of the teachings, deeds and sayings of the Islamic prophet Muhammad) about jihad, typically under the headings of kitab al-jihad (book of jihad) or faza'il al-jihad (virtues of jihad) in hadith collections or as the subject of independent works. Of the 199 hadith references to jihad in the Bukhari collection of hadith, all assume that jihad means warfare.
Among reported sayings of the Islamic prophet Muhammad involving jihad are
The best Jihad is the word of Justice in front of the oppressive sultan.
and
The Messenger of Allah was asked about the best jihad. He said: "The best jihad is the one in which your horse is slain and your blood is spilled."
Ibn Nuhaas also cited a hadith from Musnad Ahmad ibn Hanbal, where Muhammad states that the highest kind of jihad is "The person who is killed whilst spilling the last of his blood" (Ahmed 4/144). Muhammad also said, “I cannot find anything” as meritorious as jihad; he further likened jihad to “praying ceaselessly and fasting continuously”. Muhammad said that “if it were not a hardship for the Muslims, I would never idle behind from a raiding party going out to fight in the path of Allah.... I [would] love to raid in the path of Allah and be killed, to raid again and be killed, and to raid again and be killed”. Muhammad also said that "Lining up for battle in the path of Allah [jihad] is worthier than 60 years of worship". Muhammad claimed that any muslim who refused to fight in Jihad “will be tortured like no other sinful human” in hell with confirmation from Quran 8:15-16. Another hadith has Muhammad saying that “the sword wipes away all sins” and “being killed in the path of Allah washes away impurity”
According to another hadith, supporting one's parents is also an example of jihad. It has also been reported that Muhammad considered performing hajj well to be the best jihad for Muslim women.
The hadith emphasize jihad as one of the means to Paradise. All sins (except debt) would be forgiven for the one who dies in it. Participation in jihad had to be voluntary and intention must be pure, for jihad is only waged for the sake of God not for material wealth. On the contrary, jihad required man to put both his life and wealth at risk. Jihad is ranked as one of the highest good deeds; according to one hadith it is the third best deed after prayer and being good to one's parents. One hadith exempts military jihad on men whose parents are alive, as serving one's parents is considered a superior jihad.
Tradition distinguishes the "greater jihad" (inner struggle against sinful behavior) from the "lesser jihad" (military sense). Early Islamic thought considered non-violent interpretations of jihad, especially for those Muslims who could not partake in warfare in distant lands. Most classical writings use the term "jihad" in the military sense. The tradition differentiating between the "greater and lesser jihad" is not included in any of the authoritative compilations of Hadith. In consequence, some Islamists dismiss it as not authentic.
The most commonly cited hadith for "greater jihad" is:
A number of fighters came to Muhammad and he said "You have come from the 'lesser jihad' to the 'greater jihad'." The fighters asked "what is the greater jihad?" Muhammad replied, "It is the struggle against one's passions."
This was also cited in The History of Baghdad by Al-Khatib al-Baghdadi, an 11th-century Islamic scholar. This reference gave rise to the distinguishing of two forms of jihad: "greater" and "lesser". Some Islamic scholars, such as Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, consider the hadith to have a weak chain of transmission.
The concept has had "enormous influence" in Islamic mysticism (Sufism).
Ibn Hazm lists four kinds of jihad fi sabilillah (struggle in the cause of God):
A related hadith tradition that has "found its way into popular Muslim literature", and which has been said to "embody the Muslim mindset" of the Islamic Golden Age (the period from the mid-8th century to mid-13th century following the relocation of the Abbasid capital from Damascus to Baghdad), is:
"The ink of the scholar is more holy than the blood of the martyr."
The belief in the veracity of this hadith was a contributing factor in the efforts by successive caliphs to subsidize translations of "Greek, Hebrew and Syriac science and philosophy texts", and the saying continues to be heavily emphasised to this day in certain Islamic traditions advocating intellectualism over violence, for example in Timbuktu, where it is central to one of two key lessons in the work Tuhfat al-fudala by the 16th-century Berber scholar Ahmed Baba. In general, however, fewer people today are aware of the hadith, which suffers from "a general lack of knowledge", according to Akbar Ahmed.
According to classical Islamic scholars like Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Jihad is against four types of enemies: the lower self (nafs), Satan, the unbelievers, and the hypocrites. The first two types of Jihad are purely peaceful spiritual struggles. According to Ibn Qayyim "Jihad against the lower self precedes jihad against external enemies". Confirming the central importance of the spiritual aspect of Jihad, Ibn Taymiyyah writes:
"Jihad against the lower self and whims is the foundation of jihad against the unbelievers and hypocrites, for a Muslim cannot wage jihad against them unless he has waged jihad against himself and his desires first, before he goes out against them."
Engaging in the greater jihad need not preclude engaging in the lesser jihad. Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani recommended his followers to pursue both the greater and the lesser jihads.
At least one important contemporary Twelver Shia figure, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the Iranian Revolution and the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, wrote a treatise on the "Greater Jihad" (i.e., internal/personal struggle against sin).
Robert W. Schaefer discusses jihad and gazavat in the context of the Caucasus: "Gazavat was the jihad of its day. Gazavat meant putting yourself on the right path (what Muslims refer to as the lesser jihad) as well as expelling the invader (what is referred to as greater jihad)."
The Historian and Jurist Ibn Khaldun explains how Islamic concept of Jihad was unqiue among all other religions:
In the Muslim community, the holy war [Jihad] is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the [Muslim] mission and [the obligation to] convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force. The other religious groups did not have a universal mission, and the holy war was not a religious duty for them, save only for purposes of defense. Islam is under obligation to gain power over other nations.
Classical scholars discussed justifications for jihad, including waging it defensively vs offensively. However, classical jurists paid more attention to conduct of war jus in bello (see next section) than justification of war jus ad bellum. The decision of when to wage war was often viewed as a political decision best left to political authorities.
Two justifications for jihad were given: defensive war against external aggression, or an offensive or preemptive attack against an enemy state. According to the majority of jurists, the casus belli (justifications for war) are restricted to aggression against Muslims, and fitna—persecution of Muslims because of their religious belief. They hold that unbelief in itself is not a justification for war. These jurists therefore maintain that only combatants are to be fought; noncombatants such as women, children, clergy, the aged, the insane, farmers, serfs, the blind, and so on are not to be killed in war. Thus, the Hanafī Ibn Najīm states: "the reason for jihād in our [the Hanafīs] view is kawnuhum harbā ‛alaynā [literally, their being at war against us]." The Hanafī jurists al-Shaybānī state that "although kufr [unbelief in God] is one of the greatest sins, it is between the individual and his God the Almighty and the punishment for this sin is to be postponed to the dār al-jazā’, (the abode of reckoning, the Hereafter)," and al-Sarakhsī says something similar. Offensive jihad involved forays into enemy territory either for conquest, and thus enlarging the Muslim political order, or to dissuade the enemy from attacking Muslim lands.
Shia and Sunni theories of jihad are similar, except that Shias consider offensive jihad to be valid only under the leadership of the Mahdi, who is currently believed to be in occultation but will return at some point in the future. However, defensive jihad is permissible in Shia Islam before the Mahdi's return. In fact, Shia scholars emphasized it was a religious duty for Shia to defend all Muslims (including Sunni Muslims) from outside invaders.
They might be our enemies but they are human beings. They consist of civil population comprising of women and children; how can one kill, loot and plunder them?
Rules prohibit attacking or molesting non-combatants, which include women, children under the age of puberty, elderly men, people with disabilities and those who are sick. Diplomats, merchants and peasants are similarly immune from being attacked. Monks are presumed to be non-combatants and thus have immunity too; similarly places of worship should not be attacked. Even if the enemy disregarded the immunity of noncombatants, Muslims could not respond in kind. However, these categories lose their immunity if they participate in fighting, planning or supplying the enemy. Some jurists argued that immunity was more related to noncombatant status than being in a certain demographic class. For example, Muhaqqiq al-Hilli opined that only old men are only immune from being killed if they neither fight, nor take a role in military decision making.
Up until the Crusades, Muslim jurists disallowed the use of mangonels because the weapon killed indiscriminately with the potential of harming noncombatants. But during Crusades this ruling was reversed out of military need. Jurists also grappled with the question of attacking an enemy that used women, children or Muslims as human shields. Most jurists held that it was permissible to attack the enemy in cases of military necessity, but steps should be taken to direct at the attack towards the combatants and avoiding the human shield. Abu Hanifa argued that if Muslims stopped combat for fear of killing noncombatants, then such a rule would make fighting impossible, as every city had civilians. Mutilating the dead bodies of the enemy is prohibited.
There are two conflicting rulings on destruction of enemy property. In one military battle, Prophet Muhammad ordered the destruction of an enemy's palm trees as a means of ending a siege without bloodshed. By contrast, Abu Bakr prohibited destruction of trees, buildings and livestock. Most jurists did not allow unnecessary destruction of enemy property, but allowed it in cases of military necessity, such as destroying buildings in which the enemy is taking shelter. Some jurists also allowed destruction if it would weaken the enemy or win the war. Many jurists cautioned against "unnecessary devastation", not just out of humanitarian concerns, but practical ones: it is more useful to capture an enemy's property than to destroy it. Islamic scholars prohibited killing animals, unless due to military necessity (such as killing horses in battle). This is because, unlike other enemy property, animals are capable of feeling pain.
In pre-Islamic Arabia, Bedouins conducted raids against enemy tribes and settlements to collect spoils. According to some scholars (such as James Turner Johnson), while Islamic leaders "instilled into the hearts of the warriors the belief" in jihad "holy war" and ghaza (raids), the "fundamental structure" of this bedouin warfare "remained, ... raiding to collect booty". According to Jonathan Berkey, the Quran's statements in support of jihad may have originally been directed against Muhammad's local enemies, the pagans of Mecca or the Jews of Medina, but these same statements could be redirected once new enemies appeared. According to another scholar (Majid Khadduri), it was the shift in focus to the conquest and spoils collecting of non-Bedouin unbelievers and away from traditional inter-bedouin tribal raids, that may have made it possible for Islam not only to expand but to avoid self-destruction.
The primary aim of jihad as warfare is not the conversion of non-Muslims to Islam by force, but rather the expansion and defense of the Islamic state. In theory, jihad was to continue until "all mankind either embraced Islam or submitted to the authority of the Muslim state." There could be truces before this was achieved, but no permanent peace. One who died "on the path of God" was a martyr (shahid), whose sins were remitted and who was secured "immediate entry to paradise".
According with Bernard Lewis, "from an early date Muslim law laid down" jihad in the military sense as "one of the principal obligations" of both "the head of the Muslim state", who declared the jihad, and the Muslim community. According to legal historian Sadakat Kadri, Islamic jurists first developed classical doctrine of jihad "towards the end of the eighth century", using the doctrine of naskh (that God gradually improved His revelations over the course of Muhammed's mission) they subordinated verses in the Quran emphasizing harmony to more the more "confrontational" verses of Muhammad's later years and linked verses on exertion (jihad) to those of fighting (qital). Muslims jurists of the eighth century developed a paradigm of international relations that divides the world into three conceptual divisions, dar al-Islam/dar al-‛adl/dar al-salam (house of Islam/house of justice/house of peace), dar al-harb/dar al-jawr (house of war/house of injustice, oppression), and dar al-sulh/dar al-‛ahd/dār al-muwada‛ah (house of peace/house of covenant/house of reconciliation). The second/eighth century jurist Sufyan al-Thawri (d. 161/778) headed what Khadduri calls a pacifist school, which maintained that jihad was only a defensive war. He also states that the jurists who held this position, among whom he refers to Hanafi jurists al-Awza‛i (d. 157/774) and Malik ibn Anas (d. 179/795), and other early jurists, "stressed that tolerance should be shown unbelievers, especially scripturaries and advised the Imam to prosecute war only when the inhabitants of the dar al-harb came into conflict with Islam." The duty of Jihad was a collective one (fard al-kifaya). It was to be directed only by the caliph who might delayed it when convenient, negotiating truces for up to ten years at a time. Within classical Islamic jurisprudence—the development of which is to be dated into—the first few centuries after the prophet's death—jihad consisted of wars against unbelievers, apostates, and was the only form of warfare permissible. (Another source—Bernard Lewis—states that fighting rebels and bandits was legitimate though not a form of jihad, and that while the classical perception and presentation of the jihad was warfare in the field against a foreign enemy, internal jihad "against an infidel renegade, or otherwise illegitimate regime was not unknown.")
However, some argue martyrdom is never automatic because it is within God's exclusive province to judge who is worthy of that designation.
Classical manuals of Islamic jurisprudence often contained a section called Book of Jihad, with rules governing the conduct of war covered at great length. Such rules include treatment of nonbelligerents, women, children (also cultivated or residential areas), and division of spoils. Such rules offered protection for civilians. Spoils include Ghanimah (spoils obtained by actual fighting), and fai (obtained without fighting i.e. when the enemy surrenders or flees).
The first documentation of the law of jihad was written by 'Abd al-Rahman al-Awza'i and Muhammad ibn al-Hasan al-Shaybani. (It grew out of debates that surfaced following Muhammad's death.) Although some Islamic scholars have differed on the implementation of Jihad, there is consensus amongst them that the concept of jihad will always include armed struggle against persecution and oppression.
Both Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim asserted that Muhammad never initiated any hostilities and that all the wars he engaged in were primarily defensive. He never forced non-Muslims to Islam and upheld the truces with non-Muslims so long as they didn't violate them. Ibn Taymiyya's views on Jihad are explained in his treatise titled Qāʿidah mukhtaṣarah fī qitāl al-kuffār wa muhādanatuhum wa taḥrīm qatlahum li mujarrad kufrihim. (An abridged rule on fighting the unbelievers and making truces with them, and the prohibition of killing them merely because of their unbelief) According to Ibn Taymiyya, every human blood is inviolable by default, except "by right of justice". Although Ibn Taymiyya authorised offensive Jihad ( Jihad al-Talab) against enemies who threaten Muslims or obstruct their citizens from freely accepting Islam, unbelief (Kufr) by itself is not a justification for violence, whether against individuals or states. According to Ibn Taymīyah, jihad is a legitimate reaction to military aggression by unbelievers and not merely due to religious differences. Ibn Taymiyya writes:
"As for the transgressor who does not fight, there are no texts in which Allah commands him to be fought. Rather, the unbelievers are only fought on the condition that they wage war, as is practiced by the majority of scholars and is evident in the Book and Sunnah."
As important as jihad was, it has not been considered one of the "pillars of Islam". According to one scholar (Majid Khadduri, this is because the five pillars are individual obligations, but jihad is a "collective obligation" of the whole Muslim community meant to be carried out by the Islamic state. This was the belief of "all jurists, with almost no exception", but did not apply to defense of the Muslim community from a sudden attack, in which case jihad was and "individual obligation" of all believers, including women and children.
Scholars had previously assumed it was the responsibility of a centralized government to organize jihad. But this changed as the authority of the Abbasid caliph weakened. Al-Mawardi allowed local governors to wage jihad on the caliph's behalf. This decentralization of jihad became especially pressing after the Crusades. Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami argued that all Muslims were responsible for waging wars of self-defense. Al-Sulami encouraged Muslim rulers from distant lands to assist those Muslims being invaded.
Classical Shia doctrine maintained defensive jihad was always permissible, but offensive jihad required the presence of the Imam. An exception to this, during medieval times, was when the first Fatimid caliph Abdallah al-Mahdi Billah claimed to be the representative of the Imam and claimed the right to launch offensive jihad.
After the Mongol invasions, Shia scholar Muhaqqiq al-Hilli made defensive war not just permissible but praiseworthy, even obligatory. If a Muslim could not take part in the defense then he should, at least, send material support. This remained the case even if the Muslims were ruled by an unjust ruler.
In the early era that inspired classical Islam (Rashidun Caliphate) and lasted less than a century, jihad spread the realm of Islam to include millions of subjects, and an area extending "from the borders of India and China to the Pyrenees and the Atlantic". The role of religion in these early conquests is debated. Medieval Arabic authors believed the conquests were commanded by God, and presented them as orderly and disciplined, under the command of the caliph. Many modern historians question whether hunger and desertification, rather than jihad, was a motivating force in the conquests. The famous historian William Montgomery Watt argued that "Most of the participants in the [early Islamic] expeditions probably thought of nothing more than booty ... There was no thought of spreading the religion of Islam." Similarly, Edward J. Jurji argues that the motivations of the Arab conquests were certainly not "for the propagation of Islam ... Military advantage, economic desires, [and] the attempt to strengthen the hand of the state and enhance its sovereignty ... are some of the determining factors." Some recent explanations cite both material and religious causes in the conquests.
According to some authors, the more spiritual definitions of jihad developed sometime after the 150 years of jihad wars and Muslim territorial expansion, and particularly after the Mongol invaders sacked Baghdad and overthrew the Abbasid Caliphate. The historian Hamilton Gibb states that "in the historic [Muslim] Community the concept of jihad had gradually weakened and at length it had been largely reinterpreted in terms of Sufi ethics." Johnson notes that "despite the theoretical importance of the idea of jihad in classical Islamic juristic thought", by the time of the Abbasids, the concept was no longer central to statecraft.
Rudolph Peters also wrote that with the stagnation of Islamic expansionism, the concept of jihad became internalized as a moral or spiritual struggle. Earlier classical works on fiqh emphasized jihad as war for God's religion, Peters found. Later Islamic scholars like Ibn al-Amir al-San'ani, Muhammad Abduh, Rashid Rida, Ubaidullah Sindhi, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Shibli Nomani, etc. emphasized the defensive aspect of Jihad, distinguishing between defensive Jihad ( jihad al-daf) and offensive Jihad ( Jihad al-talab or Jihad of choice ). They refuted the notion of consensus on Jihad al-talab being a communal obligation( fard kifaya ). In support of this view, these scholars referred to the works of classical scholars such as Al-Jassas, Ibn Taymiyyah, etc. According to Ibn Taymiyya, the reason for Jihad against non-Muslims is not their disbelief, but the threat they pose to Muslims. Citing Ibn Taymiyya, scholars like Rashid Rida, Al San'ani, Qaradawi, etc. argues that unbelievers need not be fought unless they pose a threat to Muslims. Thus, Jihad is obligatory only as a defensive warfare to respond to aggression or "perfidy" against the Muslim community, and that the "normal and desired state" between Islamic and non-Islamic territories was one of "peaceful coexistence." This was similar to the Western concept of a "Just war". Similarly the 18th-century Islamic scholar Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab defined Jihad as a defensive military action to protect the Muslim community, and emphasized its defensive aspect in synchrony with later 20th century Islamic writers. Today, some Muslim authors only recognize wars fought for the purpose of territorial defense as well as wars fought for the defense of religious freedom as legitimate.
Ibn Taymiyyah's hallmark themes included the permissibility of overthrowing a ruler who is classified as an unbeliever due to a failure to adhere to Islamic law, the absolute division of the world into dar al-kufr and dar al-Islam, the labeling of anyone not adhering to one's particular interpretation of Islam as an unbeliever, and the call for blanket warfare against Non-Muslims, particularly Jews and Christians.
Ibn Taymiyyah recognized "the possibility of a jihad against `heretical` and `deviant` Muslims within dar al-Islam. He identified as heretical and deviant Muslims anyone who propagated innovations (bida') contrary to the Quran and Sunna ... legitimated jihad against anyone who refused to abide by Islamic law or revolted against the true Muslim authorities." He used a very "broad definition" of what constituted aggression or rebellion against Muslims, which would make jihad "not only permissible but necessary." Ibn Taymiyyah also paid careful and lengthy attention to the questions of martyrdom and the benefits of jihad: 'It is in jihad that one can live and die in ultimate happiness, both in this world and in the Hereafter. Abandoning it means losing entirely or partially both kinds of happiness.`
Bernard Lewis states that while most Islamic theologians in the classical period (750–1258 CE) understood jihad to be a military endeavor, after Islamic conquest stagnated and the caliphate broke up into smaller states the "irresistible and permanent jihad came to an end". As jihad became unfeasible it was "postponed from historic to messianic time." Even when the Ottoman Empire carried on a new holy war of expansion in the seventeenth century, "the war was not universally pursued". They made no attempt to recover Spain or Sicily.
By the 1500s, it had become accepted that the permanent state of relations between dar al-Islam and dar al-harb was that of peace.
Shah Ismail of the Safavid dynasty tried to claim the right to wage offensive jihad, particularly against the Ottomans. However, Shia ulama did not permit that, maintaining the classical position that the true Imam could wage such a war. During the Qajar period, Shia ulama adopted the position that the Shah was responsible for national security. They authorized the Perso-Russian wars in the 19th century as jihad.
In the 18th century, the Durrani Empire under the reigns of Ahmad Shah Durrani and his son and successor, Timur Shah Durrani had issued multiple jihads against Sikh Misls in the Punjab region, often to consolidate territory and continue Afghan rule in the region, efforts under Ahmad Shah failed, while Timur Shah had succeeded.
When Europeans began the colonization of the Muslim world, jihad was one of the first responses by local Muslims. Emir Abdelkader organized a jihad in Algeria against French domination, tapping into existing Sufi networks. Other wars against colonialist powers were often declared to be jihad: the Senussi religious order declared jihad against Italian control of Libya in 1912, and the "Mahdi" in the Sudan declared jihad against both the British and the Egyptians in 1881.
Rashid Rida and Muhammad Abduh argued that peaceful coexistence should be the normal state between Muslim and non-Muslim states, citing verses in the Qur'an that allowed war only in self-defense. However, this view still left open jihad against colonialism, which was seen as an attack on Muslims.
Sayyid Ahmad Khan also argued jihad was limited to cases of oppression, and since the British Raj allowed freedom of religion, there was no need to wage jihad against the British. Instead, Khan formulated jihad as recovering past Muslim scientific progress to modernize the Muslim world.
A concept that played a role in anti-colonial jihad (or lack thereof) was the belief in Mahdi. According to Islamic eschatology, a messianic figure named Mahdi will appear and restore justice on earth. Such a belief sometimes discouraged Muslims from conducting jihad against the colonial powers, instead inducing them to passively wait for the messiah to come. Such messages were circulated in Algeria to undermine Emir Abdelkader's jihad against the French. On the other hand, this belief could be a powerful mobilizing force in cases when someone would proclaim himself Mahdi. Such mahdist rebellions happened in India (1810), Egypt (1865) and Sudan (1881).
With the Islamic revival, a new "fundamentalist" movement arose, with some different interpretations of Islam, which often placed an increased emphasis on jihad. The Wahhabi movement which spread across the Arabian peninsula starting in the 18th century, emphasized jihad as armed struggle. The so-called Fulbe jihad states and a few other jihad states in West Africa were established by a series of offensive wars in the 19th century. None of these jihad movements were victorious. The most powerful, the Sokoto Caliphate, lasted about a century until being incorporated into Colonial Nigeria in 1903.
When the Ottoman caliph called for a "Great Jihad" by all Muslims against Allied powers during World War I, there were hopes and fears that non-Turkish Muslims would side with Ottoman Turkey, but the appeal did not "[unite] the Muslim world", and Muslims did not turn on their non-Muslim commanders in the Allied forces. (The war led to the end of the caliphate as the Ottoman Empire entered on the side of the war's losers and surrendered by agreeing to "viciously punitive" conditions. These were overturned by the popular war hero Mustafa Kemal, who was also a secularist and later abolished the caliphate.)
Prior to the Iranian revolution in 1922, the Shiite cleric Mehdi Al-Khalissi issued a fatwa calling upon Iraqis not to participate in the Iraqi elections, as the Iraqi government was established by foreign powers. He later played a role in the Iraqi revolt of 1920. Between 1918 and 1919 in the Shia holy city of Najaf the League of the Islamic Awakening was established by several religious scholars, tribal chiefs, and landlords assassinated a British officer in the hopes of sparking a similar rebellion in Karbala which is also regarded as sacred for Shias.
During the Iraqi revolt of 1920, Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Taqi Shirazi the father of Mohammad al-Husayni al-Shirazi and grandfather of Sadiq Hussaini Shirazi, declared British rule impermissible and called for a jihad against European occupations in the Middle East.
Islamism has played an increasing role in the Muslim world in the 20th century, especially following the economic crises of the 1970s and 1980s. One of the first Islamist groups, the Muslim Brotherhood, emphasized physical struggle and martyrdom in its creed: "God is our objective; the Quran is our constitution; the Prophet is our leader; struggle (jihad) is our way; and death for the sake of God is the highest of our aspirations." Hassan al-Banna emphasized jihad of the sword, and called on Egyptians to prepare for jihad against the British Empire, (making him the first influential scholar since the 1857 India uprising to call for jihad of the sword). The group called for jihad against Israel in the 1940s, and its Palestinian branch, Hamas, called for jihad against Israel when the First Intifada started.
Modern Muslim thought had been focused on when to go to war (jus ad bellum), not paying much attention on conduct during war (jus in bello). This was because most Muslim theorists viewed international humanitarian law as consistent with Islamic requirements. However, recently Muslims have once again started discussing conduct during war in response to certain terrorist groups targeting civilians.
According to Rudolph F. Peters and Natana J. DeLong-Bas, the new "fundamentalist" movement brought a reinterpretation of Islam and their own writings on jihad. These writings tended to be less interested and involved with legal arguments, what the different of schools of Islamic law had to say, or in solutions for all potential situations. "They emphasize more the moral justifications and the underlying ethical values of the rules, than the detailed elaboration of those rules." They also tended to ignore the distinction between Greater and Lesser jihad because it distracted Muslims "from the development of the combative spirit they believe is required to rid the Islamic world of Western influences".
Contemporary Islamic fundamentalists were often influenced by medieval Islamic jurist Ibn Taymiyyah's, and Egyptian journalist Sayyid Qutb's, ideas on jihad.
The highly influential Muslim Brotherhood leader, Sayyid Qutb, preached in his book Milestones that jihad, `is not a temporary phase but a permanent war ... Jihad for freedom cannot cease until the Satanic forces are put to an end and the religion is purified for God in toto.` Qutb focused on martyrdom and jihad, but he added the theme of the treachery and enmity towards Islam of Christians and especially Jews. If non-Muslims were waging a "war against Islam", jihad against them was not offensive but defensive. He also insisted that Christians and Jews were mushrikeen (not monotheists) because (he alleged) gave their priests or rabbis "authority to make laws, obeying laws which were made by them [and] not permitted by God" and "obedience to laws and judgments is a sort of worship".
Later ideologue, Muhammad abd-al-Salam Faraj, departed from some of Qutb's teachings on jihad. While Qutb felt that jihad was a proclamation of "liberation for humanity" (in which humanity has the free choice between Islam and unbelief), Faraj saw jihad as a mean of conquering the world and reestablishing the caliphate. Faraj legitimized lying, attacking by night (even if it leads to accidentally killing innocents), and destroying trees of the infidel. His ideas influenced Egyptian Islamist extremist groups, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, later the No. 2 person in al-Qaeda.
During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, despite being a predominantly Sunni nation, Afghanistan's Shiite population took arms against the Communist government and allied Soviet forces like the nation's Sunnis and were collectively referred to as the Afghan Mujahideen. Shiite Jihadists in Afghanistan were known as the Tehran Eight and received support from the Iranian government in fighting against the Communist Afghan government and allied Soviet forces in Afghanistan.
Many Muslims, including scholars like al-Qaradawi and Sayyid Tantawi, denounced Islamic terrorist attacks against civilians, seeing them as contrary to rules of jihad that prohibit targeting noncombatants. After the September 11 attacks in 2001, the United States blamed Saudi Arabian Osama bin Laden and the Taliban in Afghanistan, triggering bin Laden, who in turn on October 7 issued a televised message, declaring "Allah had blessed a vanguard group of Muslims, the spearhead of Islam, to destroy America." American and British forces were deployed around Afghanistan, and the Mullah Mohammad Omar, also the Commander to the Faithful of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, in turn called the world's Muslims to join him in a jihad.
In the 1980s Abdullah Azzam advocated waging jihad against the "unbelievers". Azzam issued a fatwa calling for jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, declaring it an individual obligation for all able bodied Muslims because it was a defensive jihad to repel invaders. His fatwa was endorsed by a number of clerics including leading Saudi clerics such as Sheikh Abd al-Aziz ibn Baz.
Azzam claimed that "anyone who looks into the state of Muslims today will find that their great misfortune is their abandonment of Jihad", and he also warned that "without Jihad, shirk (joining partners with Allah) will spread and become dominant". Jihad was so important that to "repel" the unbelievers was "the most important obligation after Iman [faith]".
Azzam also argued for a broader interpretation of who it was permissible to kill in jihad, an interpretation that some think may have influenced some of his students, including Osama bin Laden.
A charismatic speaker, Azzam traveled to dozens of cities in Europe and North America to encourage support for jihad in Afghanistan. He inspired young Muslims with stories of miraculous deeds during jihad—mujahideen who defeated vast columns of Soviet troops virtually single-handed, who had been run over by tanks but survived, who were shot but unscathed by bullets. Angels were witnessed riding into battle on horseback, and falling bombs were intercepted by birds, which raced ahead of the jets to form a protective canopy over the warriors. In Afghanistan he set up a "services office" for foreign fighters and with support from his former student Osama bin Laden and Saudi charities, foreign mujahideed or would-be mujahideen were provided for. Between 1982 and 1992 an estimated 35,000 individual Muslim volunteers went to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets and their Afghan regime. Thousands more attended frontier schools teeming with former and future fighters. Saudi Arabia and the other conservative Gulf monarchies also provided considerable financial support to the jihad—$600 million a year by 1982. CIA also funded Azzam's Maktab al-Khidamat and others via Operation Cyclone.
Azzam saw Afghanistan as the beginning of jihad to repel unbelievers from many countries—the southern Soviet Republics of Central Asia, Bosnia, the Philippines, Kashmir, Somalia, Eritrea, Spain, and especially his home country of Palestine. The defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan is said to have "amplified the jihadist tendency from a fringe phenomenon to a major force in the Muslim world."
Having tasted victory in Afghanistan, many of the thousands of fighters returned to their home country such as Egypt, Algeria, Kashmir or to places like Bosnia to continue jihad. Not all the former fighters agreed with Azzam's chioice of targets (Azzam was assassinated in November 1989) but former Afghan fighters led or participated in serious insurgencies in Egypt, Algeria, Kashmir, Somalia in the 1990s and later creating a "transnational jihadist stream."
In February 1998, Osama bin Laden put a "Declaration of the World Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders" in the Al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper. On 11 September 2001, four passenger planes were hijacked in the United States and crashed, destroying the World Trade Center and damaging the Pentagon.
In Shia Islam, jihad is one of the ten Practices of the Religion (though not one of the five pillars). Traditionally, Twelver Shi'a doctrine has differed from that of Sunni Islam on the concept of jihad, with jihad being "seen as a lesser priority" in Shia theology and "armed activism" by Shias being "limited to a person's immediate geography".
Because of their history of being oppressed, Shias also associated jihad with certain passionate features, notably in the remembrance of Ashura. Mahmoud M. Ayoub says:
In Islamic tradition jihad or the struggle in the way of God, whether as armed struggle, or any form of opposition of the wrong, is generally regarded as one of the essential requirements of a person's faith as a Muslim. Shi'î tradition carried this requirement a step further, making jihad one of the pillars or foundations (arkan) of religion. If, therefore, Husayn's struggle against the Umayyad regime must be regarded as an act of jihad, then, In the mind of devotees, the participation of the community in his suffering and its ascent to the truth of his message must also be regarded as an extension of the holy struggle of the Imam himself. The hadith from which we took the title of this chapter states this point very clearly. Ja'far al-Sadiq is said to have declared to al-Mufaddal, one of his closest disciples, 'The sigh of the sorrowful for the wrong done us is an act of praise (tasbih) [of God], his sorrow for us is an act of worship, and his keeping of our secret is a struggle (jihad) in the way of God'; the Imâm then added, 'This hadith should be inscribed in letters of gold'.
and
Hence, the concept of jihad (holy struggle) gained a deeper and more personal meaning. Whether through weeping, the composition and recitation of poetry, showing compassion and doing good to the poor or carrying arms, the Shi'i Muslim saw himself helping the Imam in his struggle against the wrong (zulm) and gaining for himself the same merit (thawab) of those who actually fought and died for him. The ta'ziyah, in its broader sense the sharing of the entire life of the suffering family of Muhammad, has become for the Shi'i community the true meaning of compassion.
In the Syrian civil war, Shia and Sunni fighters waged jihad against each other. In Yemen, the Houthi Movement has used appeals to jihad as part of their ideology as well as their recruitment.
Some observers have noted the evolution in the rules of jihad—from the original "classical" doctrine to that of 21st century Salafi jihadism. According to the legal historian Sadarat Kadri, during the last couple of centuries, incremental changes in Islamic legal doctrine (developed by Islamists who otherwise condemn any bid‘ah (innovation) in religion), have "normalized" what was once "unthinkable". "The very idea that Muslims might blow themselves up for God was unheard of before 1983, and it was not until the early 1990s that anyone anywhere had tried to justify killing innocent Muslims who were not on a battlefield."
The first or the "classical" doctrine of jihad which was developed towards the end of the 8th century, emphasized the jihad of the sword (jihad bil-saif) rather than the "jihad of the heart", but it contained many legal restrictions which were developed from interpretations of both the Quran and the Hadith, such as detailed rules involving "the initiation, the conduct, the termination" of jihad, the treatment of prisoners, the distribution of booty, etc. Unless there was a sudden attack on the Muslim community, jihad was not a "personal obligation" (fard ayn); instead it was a "collective one" (fard al-kifaya), which had to be discharged "in the way of God" (fi sabil Allah), and it could only be directed by the caliph, "whose discretion over its conduct was all but absolute." (This was designed in part to avoid incidents like the Kharijia's jihad against and killing of Caliph Ali, since they deemed that he was no longer a Muslim). Martyrdom resulting from an attack on the enemy with no concern for your own safety was praiseworthy, but dying by your own hand (as opposed to the enemy's) merited a special place in Hell. The category of jihad which is considered to be a collective obligation is sometimes simplified as "offensive jihad" in Western texts.
Islamic theologian Abu Abdullah al-Muhajir has been identified as the key theorist and ideologue behind modern jihadist violence. His theological and legal justifications influenced Abu Musab al-Zarqawi of al-Qaeda as well as several jihadi terrorist groups, including ISIS. Zarqawi used a manuscript of al-Muhajir's ideas at AQI training camps that were later deployed by ISIS, referred to as The Jurisprudence of Jihad or The Jurisprudence of Blood.
The book has been described as rationalising "the murder of non-combatants" by The Guardian's Mark Towsend, citing Salah al-Ansari of Quilliam, who notes: "There is a startling lack of study and concern regarding this abhorrent and dangerous text [The Jurisprudence of Blood] in almost all Western and Arab scholarship". Charlie Winter of The Atlantic describes it as a "theological playbook used to justify the group's abhorrent acts". He states:
Ranging from ruminations on the merits of beheading, torturing, or burning prisoners to thoughts on assassination, siege warfare, and the use of biological weapons, Muhajir's intellectual legacy is a crucial component of the literary corpus of ISIS—and, indeed, whatever comes after it—a way to render practically anything permissible, provided, that is, it can be spun as beneficial to the jihad. [...] According to Muhajir, committing suicide to kill people is not only a theologically sound act, but a commendable one, too, something to be cherished and celebrated regardless of its outcome. [...] neither Zarqawi nor his inheritors have looked back, liberally using Muhajir's work to normalize the use of suicide tactics in the time since, such that they have become the single most important military and terrorist method—defensive or offensive—used by ISIS today. The way that Muhajir theorized it was simple—he offered up a theological fix that allows any who desire it to sidestep the Koranic injunctions against suicide.
Psychologist Chris E. Stout also discusses the al Muhajir-inspired text in his book, Terrorism, Political Violence, and Extremism. He assesses that jihadists regard their actions as being "for the greater good"; that they are in a "weakened in the earth" situation that renders terrorism a valid means of solution.
The term 'jihad' has accrued both violent and non-violent meanings. According to John Esposito, it can simply mean striving to live a moral and virtuous life, spreading and defending Islam as well as fighting injustice and oppression, among other things. The relative importance of these two forms of jihad is a matter of controversy. Rudoph Peters writes that, in the contemporary world, traditionalist Muslims understand jihad from classical works on fiqh; modernist Muslims regard jihad as a just war in international law and emphasize its defensive aspects; and fundamentalists view it as an expansion of Islam and realization of Islamic ideals. David Cook writes that Muslims have understood jihad in a military sense, both in classical texts and in contemporary ones. For Cook the idea that jihad is primarily non-violent comes primarily from Sufi texts and the Western scholars who study them, or from Muslim apologists. Gallup has stated that its surveys show that the concept of jihad among Muslims "is considerably more nuanced than the single sense in which Western commentators invariably invoke the term."
A poll by Gallup asked Muslims in eight countries what jihad meant to them. In Lebanon, Kuwait, Jordan, and Morocco, the most frequent response was to "duty toward God", a "divine duty", or a "worship of God", with no militaristic connotations. In Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and Indonesia, many of the responses includes "sacrificing one's life for the sake of Islam/God/a just cause" or "fighting against the opponents of Islam". Other common meanings of "jihad" in the Muslim world include "a commitment to hard work", "promoting peace", and "living the principles of Islam". The terminology is also applied to the fight for women's liberation.
Shia Muslim scholar Mahmoud M. Ayoud states that "The goal of true jihad is to attain a harmony between Islam (submission), iman (faith), and ihsan (righteous living)." Jihad is a process encompassing both individual and social reform, this is called jihad fi sabil Allah ("struggle in the way of God"), and can be undertaken by the means of the Quran (jihad bi-al-qur'an). According to Ayoud the greatest Jihad is the struggle of every Muslim against the social, moral, and political evils. However, depending on social and political circumstances, Jihad may be regarded as a sixth fundamental obligation (farid) incumbent on the entire Muslim community (ummah) when their integrity is in danger, in this case jihad becomes an "absolute obligation" (fard 'ayn), or when social and religious reform is gravely hampered. Otherwise it is a "limited obligation" (fard kifayah), incumbent upon those who are directly involved. These rules apply to armed struggle or "jihad of the sword".
In modern times, Pakistani scholar and professor Fazlur Rahman Malik has used the term to describe the struggle to establish a "just moral-social order", while President Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia has used it to describe the struggle for economic development in that country.
According to the BBC, a third meaning of jihad is the struggle to build a good society. In a commentary of the hadith Sahih Muslim, entitled al-Minhaj, the medieval Islamic scholar Yahya ibn Sharaf al-Nawawi stated that "one of the collective duties of the community as a whole (fard kifaya) is to lodge a valid protest, to solve problems of religion, to have knowledge of Divine Law, to command what is right and forbid wrong conduct".
Scholar Natana J. Delong-Bas lists a number of types of "jihad" that have been proposed by Muslims
Other "types" mentioned include
In Ahmadiyya Islam, jihad is primarily one's personal inner struggle and should not be used violently for political motives. Violence is the last option only to be used to protect religion and one's own life in extreme situations of persecution.
Quranists do not believe that the word jihad means holy war. They believe it means to struggle, or to strive. They believe it can incorporate both military and non-military aspects. When it refers to the military aspect, it is understood primarily as defensive warfare. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Jihad (/dʒɪˈhɑːd/; Arabic: جِهَاد, romanized: jihād [dʒiˈhaːd]) is an Arabic word which literally means \"striving\" or \"struggling\", especially with a praiseworthy aim. In an Islamic context, it can refer to almost any effort to make personal and social life conform with God's guidance, such as struggle against one's evil inclinations, proselytizing, or efforts toward the moral betterment of the Muslim community (Ummah), though it is most frequently associated with war. In classical Islamic law (sharia), the term refers to armed struggle against unbelievers, while modernist Islamic scholars generally equate military jihad with defensive warfare. In Sufi circles, spiritual and moral jihad has been traditionally emphasized under the name of greater jihad. The term has gained additional attention in recent decades through its use by various insurgent Islamic extremist, militant Islamist, and terrorist individuals and organizations whose ideology is based on the Islamic notion of jihad.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The word jihad appears frequently in the Qur'an with and without military connotations, often in the idiomatic expression \"striving in the path of God (al-jihad fi sabil Allah)\", conveying a sense of self-exertion. They developed an elaborate set of rules pertaining to jihad, including prohibitions on harming those who are not engaged in combat. In the modern era, the notion of jihad has lost its jurisprudential relevance and instead given rise to an ideological and political discourse. While modernist Islamic scholars have emphasized the defensive and non-military aspects of jihad, some Islamists have advanced aggressive interpretations that go beyond the classical theory.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Jihad is classified into inner (\"greater\") jihad, which involves a struggle against one's own base impulses, and external (\"lesser\") jihad, which is further subdivided into jihad of the pen/tongue (debate or persuasion) and jihad of the sword. Most Western writers consider external jihad to have primacy over inner jihad in the Islamic tradition, while much of contemporary Muslim opinion favors the opposite view. Gallup analysis of a large survey reveals considerable nuance in the conceptions of jihad held by Muslims around the world.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The sense of jihad as armed resistance was first used in the context of persecution faced by Muslims, as when Muhammad was at Mecca, when the community had two choices: emigration (hijra) or jihad. In Twelver Shi'a Islam, jihad is one of the Ancillaries of the Faith. A person engaged in jihad is called a mujahid (plural: mujahideen). The term jihad is often rendered in English as \"Holy War\", although this translation is controversial. Today, the word jihad is often used without religious connotations, like the English crusade.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The term jihad is derived from the Arabic root jahada, meaning \"to exert strength and effort, to use all means in order to accomplish a task\". In its expanded sense, it can be fighting the enemies of Islam, as well as adhering to religious teachings, enjoining good and forbidding evil. The peaceful sense of \"efforts towards the moral uplift of society or towards the spread of Islam\" can be known as \"jihad of the tongue\" or \"jihad of the pen\", as opposed to \"jihad of the sword\". It is used as a term in fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) mostly in the latter sense, while in Sufism mostly in the sense of fighting the nafs al-ammara, which is the psychological state of being consumed by one's own desires. Spiritual and moral jihad is generally emphasized in pious and mystical circles.",
"title": "Etymology and literary origins"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic defines the term as \"fight, battle; jihad, holy war (against the infidels, as a religious duty)\". However, given the range of meanings, it is incorrect to equate it simply with \"holy war\". The notion of jihad has its origins in the Islamic idea that the whole humankind will embrace Islam. In the Qur'an and in later Muslim usage, jihad is commonly followed by the expression fi sabil illah, \"in the path of God.\" Muhammad Abdel-Haleem states that it indicates \"the way of truth and justice, including all the teachings it gives on the justifications and the conditions for the conduct of war and peace.\"",
"title": "Etymology and literary origins"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In Modern Standard Arabic, the term jihad is used for a struggle for causes, both religious and secular. It is sometimes used without religious connotation, with a meaning similar to the English word \"crusade\" (as in \"a crusade against drugs\"). Jihad is also used quite commonly in Arabic countries, in the neutral sense of \"a struggle for a noble cause\", as a unisex name given to children. Nonetheless, jihad is usually used in the religious sense and its beginnings are traced back to the Qur'an and the words and actions of Muhammad.",
"title": "Etymology and literary origins"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Jihad is mentioned in four places in the Qur'an as a noun, while its derived verb is used in twenty-four places. Mujahid, the active participle meaning \"jihadist\", is mentioned in two verses. In some of these mentions (see At-Tawbah 9/41, 44, 81, 86), it is understood that the word jihad directly refers to war, and in others, jihad is used in the sense of \"the effort to live in accordance with Allah's will\". Quranic exhortions to jihad have been interpreted by Islamic scholars both in the combative and non-combative sense. Ahmed al-Dawoody writes that there seventeen references to or derivatices of jihad occur altogether forty-one times in eleven Meccan texts and thirty Medinan ones, with 28 mentions related to religious belief or spiritual struggle and 13 mentions related to warfare or physical struggle.",
"title": "Etymology and literary origins"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "There are also many hadiths (records of the teachings, deeds and sayings of the Islamic prophet Muhammad) about jihad, typically under the headings of kitab al-jihad (book of jihad) or faza'il al-jihad (virtues of jihad) in hadith collections or as the subject of independent works. Of the 199 hadith references to jihad in the Bukhari collection of hadith, all assume that jihad means warfare.",
"title": "Etymology and literary origins"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Among reported sayings of the Islamic prophet Muhammad involving jihad are",
"title": "Etymology and literary origins"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The best Jihad is the word of Justice in front of the oppressive sultan.",
"title": "Etymology and literary origins"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "and",
"title": "Etymology and literary origins"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The Messenger of Allah was asked about the best jihad. He said: \"The best jihad is the one in which your horse is slain and your blood is spilled.\"",
"title": "Etymology and literary origins"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Ibn Nuhaas also cited a hadith from Musnad Ahmad ibn Hanbal, where Muhammad states that the highest kind of jihad is \"The person who is killed whilst spilling the last of his blood\" (Ahmed 4/144). Muhammad also said, “I cannot find anything” as meritorious as jihad; he further likened jihad to “praying ceaselessly and fasting continuously”. Muhammad said that “if it were not a hardship for the Muslims, I would never idle behind from a raiding party going out to fight in the path of Allah.... I [would] love to raid in the path of Allah and be killed, to raid again and be killed, and to raid again and be killed”. Muhammad also said that \"Lining up for battle in the path of Allah [jihad] is worthier than 60 years of worship\". Muhammad claimed that any muslim who refused to fight in Jihad “will be tortured like no other sinful human” in hell with confirmation from Quran 8:15-16. Another hadith has Muhammad saying that “the sword wipes away all sins” and “being killed in the path of Allah washes away impurity”",
"title": "Etymology and literary origins"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "According to another hadith, supporting one's parents is also an example of jihad. It has also been reported that Muhammad considered performing hajj well to be the best jihad for Muslim women.",
"title": "Etymology and literary origins"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The hadith emphasize jihad as one of the means to Paradise. All sins (except debt) would be forgiven for the one who dies in it. Participation in jihad had to be voluntary and intention must be pure, for jihad is only waged for the sake of God not for material wealth. On the contrary, jihad required man to put both his life and wealth at risk. Jihad is ranked as one of the highest good deeds; according to one hadith it is the third best deed after prayer and being good to one's parents. One hadith exempts military jihad on men whose parents are alive, as serving one's parents is considered a superior jihad.",
"title": "Etymology and literary origins"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Tradition distinguishes the \"greater jihad\" (inner struggle against sinful behavior) from the \"lesser jihad\" (military sense). Early Islamic thought considered non-violent interpretations of jihad, especially for those Muslims who could not partake in warfare in distant lands. Most classical writings use the term \"jihad\" in the military sense. The tradition differentiating between the \"greater and lesser jihad\" is not included in any of the authoritative compilations of Hadith. In consequence, some Islamists dismiss it as not authentic.",
"title": "Greater and lesser jihad"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The most commonly cited hadith for \"greater jihad\" is:",
"title": "Greater and lesser jihad"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "A number of fighters came to Muhammad and he said \"You have come from the 'lesser jihad' to the 'greater jihad'.\" The fighters asked \"what is the greater jihad?\" Muhammad replied, \"It is the struggle against one's passions.\"",
"title": "Greater and lesser jihad"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "This was also cited in The History of Baghdad by Al-Khatib al-Baghdadi, an 11th-century Islamic scholar. This reference gave rise to the distinguishing of two forms of jihad: \"greater\" and \"lesser\". Some Islamic scholars, such as Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, consider the hadith to have a weak chain of transmission.",
"title": "Greater and lesser jihad"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The concept has had \"enormous influence\" in Islamic mysticism (Sufism).",
"title": "Greater and lesser jihad"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Ibn Hazm lists four kinds of jihad fi sabilillah (struggle in the cause of God):",
"title": "Greater and lesser jihad"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "A related hadith tradition that has \"found its way into popular Muslim literature\", and which has been said to \"embody the Muslim mindset\" of the Islamic Golden Age (the period from the mid-8th century to mid-13th century following the relocation of the Abbasid capital from Damascus to Baghdad), is:",
"title": "Greater and lesser jihad"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "\"The ink of the scholar is more holy than the blood of the martyr.\"",
"title": "Greater and lesser jihad"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The belief in the veracity of this hadith was a contributing factor in the efforts by successive caliphs to subsidize translations of \"Greek, Hebrew and Syriac science and philosophy texts\", and the saying continues to be heavily emphasised to this day in certain Islamic traditions advocating intellectualism over violence, for example in Timbuktu, where it is central to one of two key lessons in the work Tuhfat al-fudala by the 16th-century Berber scholar Ahmed Baba. In general, however, fewer people today are aware of the hadith, which suffers from \"a general lack of knowledge\", according to Akbar Ahmed.",
"title": "Greater and lesser jihad"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "According to classical Islamic scholars like Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Jihad is against four types of enemies: the lower self (nafs), Satan, the unbelievers, and the hypocrites. The first two types of Jihad are purely peaceful spiritual struggles. According to Ibn Qayyim \"Jihad against the lower self precedes jihad against external enemies\". Confirming the central importance of the spiritual aspect of Jihad, Ibn Taymiyyah writes:",
"title": "Greater and lesser jihad"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "\"Jihad against the lower self and whims is the foundation of jihad against the unbelievers and hypocrites, for a Muslim cannot wage jihad against them unless he has waged jihad against himself and his desires first, before he goes out against them.\"",
"title": "Greater and lesser jihad"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Engaging in the greater jihad need not preclude engaging in the lesser jihad. Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani recommended his followers to pursue both the greater and the lesser jihads.",
"title": "Greater and lesser jihad"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "At least one important contemporary Twelver Shia figure, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the Iranian Revolution and the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, wrote a treatise on the \"Greater Jihad\" (i.e., internal/personal struggle against sin).",
"title": "Greater and lesser jihad"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Robert W. Schaefer discusses jihad and gazavat in the context of the Caucasus: \"Gazavat was the jihad of its day. Gazavat meant putting yourself on the right path (what Muslims refer to as the lesser jihad) as well as expelling the invader (what is referred to as greater jihad).\"",
"title": "Greater and lesser jihad"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The Historian and Jurist Ibn Khaldun explains how Islamic concept of Jihad was unqiue among all other religions:",
"title": "Defensive and offensive jihad"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In the Muslim community, the holy war [Jihad] is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the [Muslim] mission and [the obligation to] convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force. The other religious groups did not have a universal mission, and the holy war was not a religious duty for them, save only for purposes of defense. Islam is under obligation to gain power over other nations.",
"title": "Defensive and offensive jihad"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Classical scholars discussed justifications for jihad, including waging it defensively vs offensively. However, classical jurists paid more attention to conduct of war jus in bello (see next section) than justification of war jus ad bellum. The decision of when to wage war was often viewed as a political decision best left to political authorities.",
"title": "Defensive and offensive jihad"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Two justifications for jihad were given: defensive war against external aggression, or an offensive or preemptive attack against an enemy state. According to the majority of jurists, the casus belli (justifications for war) are restricted to aggression against Muslims, and fitna—persecution of Muslims because of their religious belief. They hold that unbelief in itself is not a justification for war. These jurists therefore maintain that only combatants are to be fought; noncombatants such as women, children, clergy, the aged, the insane, farmers, serfs, the blind, and so on are not to be killed in war. Thus, the Hanafī Ibn Najīm states: \"the reason for jihād in our [the Hanafīs] view is kawnuhum harbā ‛alaynā [literally, their being at war against us].\" The Hanafī jurists al-Shaybānī state that \"although kufr [unbelief in God] is one of the greatest sins, it is between the individual and his God the Almighty and the punishment for this sin is to be postponed to the dār al-jazā’, (the abode of reckoning, the Hereafter),\" and al-Sarakhsī says something similar. Offensive jihad involved forays into enemy territory either for conquest, and thus enlarging the Muslim political order, or to dissuade the enemy from attacking Muslim lands.",
"title": "Defensive and offensive jihad"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Shia and Sunni theories of jihad are similar, except that Shias consider offensive jihad to be valid only under the leadership of the Mahdi, who is currently believed to be in occultation but will return at some point in the future. However, defensive jihad is permissible in Shia Islam before the Mahdi's return. In fact, Shia scholars emphasized it was a religious duty for Shia to defend all Muslims (including Sunni Muslims) from outside invaders.",
"title": "Defensive and offensive jihad"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "They might be our enemies but they are human beings. They consist of civil population comprising of women and children; how can one kill, loot and plunder them?",
"title": "Rules of warfare"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Rules prohibit attacking or molesting non-combatants, which include women, children under the age of puberty, elderly men, people with disabilities and those who are sick. Diplomats, merchants and peasants are similarly immune from being attacked. Monks are presumed to be non-combatants and thus have immunity too; similarly places of worship should not be attacked. Even if the enemy disregarded the immunity of noncombatants, Muslims could not respond in kind. However, these categories lose their immunity if they participate in fighting, planning or supplying the enemy. Some jurists argued that immunity was more related to noncombatant status than being in a certain demographic class. For example, Muhaqqiq al-Hilli opined that only old men are only immune from being killed if they neither fight, nor take a role in military decision making.",
"title": "Rules of warfare"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Up until the Crusades, Muslim jurists disallowed the use of mangonels because the weapon killed indiscriminately with the potential of harming noncombatants. But during Crusades this ruling was reversed out of military need. Jurists also grappled with the question of attacking an enemy that used women, children or Muslims as human shields. Most jurists held that it was permissible to attack the enemy in cases of military necessity, but steps should be taken to direct at the attack towards the combatants and avoiding the human shield. Abu Hanifa argued that if Muslims stopped combat for fear of killing noncombatants, then such a rule would make fighting impossible, as every city had civilians. Mutilating the dead bodies of the enemy is prohibited.",
"title": "Rules of warfare"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "There are two conflicting rulings on destruction of enemy property. In one military battle, Prophet Muhammad ordered the destruction of an enemy's palm trees as a means of ending a siege without bloodshed. By contrast, Abu Bakr prohibited destruction of trees, buildings and livestock. Most jurists did not allow unnecessary destruction of enemy property, but allowed it in cases of military necessity, such as destroying buildings in which the enemy is taking shelter. Some jurists also allowed destruction if it would weaken the enemy or win the war. Many jurists cautioned against \"unnecessary devastation\", not just out of humanitarian concerns, but practical ones: it is more useful to capture an enemy's property than to destroy it. Islamic scholars prohibited killing animals, unless due to military necessity (such as killing horses in battle). This is because, unlike other enemy property, animals are capable of feeling pain.",
"title": "Rules of warfare"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "In pre-Islamic Arabia, Bedouins conducted raids against enemy tribes and settlements to collect spoils. According to some scholars (such as James Turner Johnson), while Islamic leaders \"instilled into the hearts of the warriors the belief\" in jihad \"holy war\" and ghaza (raids), the \"fundamental structure\" of this bedouin warfare \"remained, ... raiding to collect booty\". According to Jonathan Berkey, the Quran's statements in support of jihad may have originally been directed against Muhammad's local enemies, the pagans of Mecca or the Jews of Medina, but these same statements could be redirected once new enemies appeared. According to another scholar (Majid Khadduri), it was the shift in focus to the conquest and spoils collecting of non-Bedouin unbelievers and away from traditional inter-bedouin tribal raids, that may have made it possible for Islam not only to expand but to avoid self-destruction.",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "The primary aim of jihad as warfare is not the conversion of non-Muslims to Islam by force, but rather the expansion and defense of the Islamic state. In theory, jihad was to continue until \"all mankind either embraced Islam or submitted to the authority of the Muslim state.\" There could be truces before this was achieved, but no permanent peace. One who died \"on the path of God\" was a martyr (shahid), whose sins were remitted and who was secured \"immediate entry to paradise\".",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "According with Bernard Lewis, \"from an early date Muslim law laid down\" jihad in the military sense as \"one of the principal obligations\" of both \"the head of the Muslim state\", who declared the jihad, and the Muslim community. According to legal historian Sadakat Kadri, Islamic jurists first developed classical doctrine of jihad \"towards the end of the eighth century\", using the doctrine of naskh (that God gradually improved His revelations over the course of Muhammed's mission) they subordinated verses in the Quran emphasizing harmony to more the more \"confrontational\" verses of Muhammad's later years and linked verses on exertion (jihad) to those of fighting (qital). Muslims jurists of the eighth century developed a paradigm of international relations that divides the world into three conceptual divisions, dar al-Islam/dar al-‛adl/dar al-salam (house of Islam/house of justice/house of peace), dar al-harb/dar al-jawr (house of war/house of injustice, oppression), and dar al-sulh/dar al-‛ahd/dār al-muwada‛ah (house of peace/house of covenant/house of reconciliation). The second/eighth century jurist Sufyan al-Thawri (d. 161/778) headed what Khadduri calls a pacifist school, which maintained that jihad was only a defensive war. He also states that the jurists who held this position, among whom he refers to Hanafi jurists al-Awza‛i (d. 157/774) and Malik ibn Anas (d. 179/795), and other early jurists, \"stressed that tolerance should be shown unbelievers, especially scripturaries and advised the Imam to prosecute war only when the inhabitants of the dar al-harb came into conflict with Islam.\" The duty of Jihad was a collective one (fard al-kifaya). It was to be directed only by the caliph who might delayed it when convenient, negotiating truces for up to ten years at a time. Within classical Islamic jurisprudence—the development of which is to be dated into—the first few centuries after the prophet's death—jihad consisted of wars against unbelievers, apostates, and was the only form of warfare permissible. (Another source—Bernard Lewis—states that fighting rebels and bandits was legitimate though not a form of jihad, and that while the classical perception and presentation of the jihad was warfare in the field against a foreign enemy, internal jihad \"against an infidel renegade, or otherwise illegitimate regime was not unknown.\")",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "However, some argue martyrdom is never automatic because it is within God's exclusive province to judge who is worthy of that designation.",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Classical manuals of Islamic jurisprudence often contained a section called Book of Jihad, with rules governing the conduct of war covered at great length. Such rules include treatment of nonbelligerents, women, children (also cultivated or residential areas), and division of spoils. Such rules offered protection for civilians. Spoils include Ghanimah (spoils obtained by actual fighting), and fai (obtained without fighting i.e. when the enemy surrenders or flees).",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The first documentation of the law of jihad was written by 'Abd al-Rahman al-Awza'i and Muhammad ibn al-Hasan al-Shaybani. (It grew out of debates that surfaced following Muhammad's death.) Although some Islamic scholars have differed on the implementation of Jihad, there is consensus amongst them that the concept of jihad will always include armed struggle against persecution and oppression.",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Both Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim asserted that Muhammad never initiated any hostilities and that all the wars he engaged in were primarily defensive. He never forced non-Muslims to Islam and upheld the truces with non-Muslims so long as they didn't violate them. Ibn Taymiyya's views on Jihad are explained in his treatise titled Qāʿidah mukhtaṣarah fī qitāl al-kuffār wa muhādanatuhum wa taḥrīm qatlahum li mujarrad kufrihim. (An abridged rule on fighting the unbelievers and making truces with them, and the prohibition of killing them merely because of their unbelief) According to Ibn Taymiyya, every human blood is inviolable by default, except \"by right of justice\". Although Ibn Taymiyya authorised offensive Jihad ( Jihad al-Talab) against enemies who threaten Muslims or obstruct their citizens from freely accepting Islam, unbelief (Kufr) by itself is not a justification for violence, whether against individuals or states. According to Ibn Taymīyah, jihad is a legitimate reaction to military aggression by unbelievers and not merely due to religious differences. Ibn Taymiyya writes:",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "\"As for the transgressor who does not fight, there are no texts in which Allah commands him to be fought. Rather, the unbelievers are only fought on the condition that they wage war, as is practiced by the majority of scholars and is evident in the Book and Sunnah.\"",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "As important as jihad was, it has not been considered one of the \"pillars of Islam\". According to one scholar (Majid Khadduri, this is because the five pillars are individual obligations, but jihad is a \"collective obligation\" of the whole Muslim community meant to be carried out by the Islamic state. This was the belief of \"all jurists, with almost no exception\", but did not apply to defense of the Muslim community from a sudden attack, in which case jihad was and \"individual obligation\" of all believers, including women and children.",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Scholars had previously assumed it was the responsibility of a centralized government to organize jihad. But this changed as the authority of the Abbasid caliph weakened. Al-Mawardi allowed local governors to wage jihad on the caliph's behalf. This decentralization of jihad became especially pressing after the Crusades. Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami argued that all Muslims were responsible for waging wars of self-defense. Al-Sulami encouraged Muslim rulers from distant lands to assist those Muslims being invaded.",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Classical Shia doctrine maintained defensive jihad was always permissible, but offensive jihad required the presence of the Imam. An exception to this, during medieval times, was when the first Fatimid caliph Abdallah al-Mahdi Billah claimed to be the representative of the Imam and claimed the right to launch offensive jihad.",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "After the Mongol invasions, Shia scholar Muhaqqiq al-Hilli made defensive war not just permissible but praiseworthy, even obligatory. If a Muslim could not take part in the defense then he should, at least, send material support. This remained the case even if the Muslims were ruled by an unjust ruler.",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "In the early era that inspired classical Islam (Rashidun Caliphate) and lasted less than a century, jihad spread the realm of Islam to include millions of subjects, and an area extending \"from the borders of India and China to the Pyrenees and the Atlantic\". The role of religion in these early conquests is debated. Medieval Arabic authors believed the conquests were commanded by God, and presented them as orderly and disciplined, under the command of the caliph. Many modern historians question whether hunger and desertification, rather than jihad, was a motivating force in the conquests. The famous historian William Montgomery Watt argued that \"Most of the participants in the [early Islamic] expeditions probably thought of nothing more than booty ... There was no thought of spreading the religion of Islam.\" Similarly, Edward J. Jurji argues that the motivations of the Arab conquests were certainly not \"for the propagation of Islam ... Military advantage, economic desires, [and] the attempt to strengthen the hand of the state and enhance its sovereignty ... are some of the determining factors.\" Some recent explanations cite both material and religious causes in the conquests.",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "According to some authors, the more spiritual definitions of jihad developed sometime after the 150 years of jihad wars and Muslim territorial expansion, and particularly after the Mongol invaders sacked Baghdad and overthrew the Abbasid Caliphate. The historian Hamilton Gibb states that \"in the historic [Muslim] Community the concept of jihad had gradually weakened and at length it had been largely reinterpreted in terms of Sufi ethics.\" Johnson notes that \"despite the theoretical importance of the idea of jihad in classical Islamic juristic thought\", by the time of the Abbasids, the concept was no longer central to statecraft.",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Rudolph Peters also wrote that with the stagnation of Islamic expansionism, the concept of jihad became internalized as a moral or spiritual struggle. Earlier classical works on fiqh emphasized jihad as war for God's religion, Peters found. Later Islamic scholars like Ibn al-Amir al-San'ani, Muhammad Abduh, Rashid Rida, Ubaidullah Sindhi, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Shibli Nomani, etc. emphasized the defensive aspect of Jihad, distinguishing between defensive Jihad ( jihad al-daf) and offensive Jihad ( Jihad al-talab or Jihad of choice ). They refuted the notion of consensus on Jihad al-talab being a communal obligation( fard kifaya ). In support of this view, these scholars referred to the works of classical scholars such as Al-Jassas, Ibn Taymiyyah, etc. According to Ibn Taymiyya, the reason for Jihad against non-Muslims is not their disbelief, but the threat they pose to Muslims. Citing Ibn Taymiyya, scholars like Rashid Rida, Al San'ani, Qaradawi, etc. argues that unbelievers need not be fought unless they pose a threat to Muslims. Thus, Jihad is obligatory only as a defensive warfare to respond to aggression or \"perfidy\" against the Muslim community, and that the \"normal and desired state\" between Islamic and non-Islamic territories was one of \"peaceful coexistence.\" This was similar to the Western concept of a \"Just war\". Similarly the 18th-century Islamic scholar Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab defined Jihad as a defensive military action to protect the Muslim community, and emphasized its defensive aspect in synchrony with later 20th century Islamic writers. Today, some Muslim authors only recognize wars fought for the purpose of territorial defense as well as wars fought for the defense of religious freedom as legitimate.",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Ibn Taymiyyah's hallmark themes included the permissibility of overthrowing a ruler who is classified as an unbeliever due to a failure to adhere to Islamic law, the absolute division of the world into dar al-kufr and dar al-Islam, the labeling of anyone not adhering to one's particular interpretation of Islam as an unbeliever, and the call for blanket warfare against Non-Muslims, particularly Jews and Christians.",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Ibn Taymiyyah recognized \"the possibility of a jihad against `heretical` and `deviant` Muslims within dar al-Islam. He identified as heretical and deviant Muslims anyone who propagated innovations (bida') contrary to the Quran and Sunna ... legitimated jihad against anyone who refused to abide by Islamic law or revolted against the true Muslim authorities.\" He used a very \"broad definition\" of what constituted aggression or rebellion against Muslims, which would make jihad \"not only permissible but necessary.\" Ibn Taymiyyah also paid careful and lengthy attention to the questions of martyrdom and the benefits of jihad: 'It is in jihad that one can live and die in ultimate happiness, both in this world and in the Hereafter. Abandoning it means losing entirely or partially both kinds of happiness.`",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Bernard Lewis states that while most Islamic theologians in the classical period (750–1258 CE) understood jihad to be a military endeavor, after Islamic conquest stagnated and the caliphate broke up into smaller states the \"irresistible and permanent jihad came to an end\". As jihad became unfeasible it was \"postponed from historic to messianic time.\" Even when the Ottoman Empire carried on a new holy war of expansion in the seventeenth century, \"the war was not universally pursued\". They made no attempt to recover Spain or Sicily.",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "By the 1500s, it had become accepted that the permanent state of relations between dar al-Islam and dar al-harb was that of peace.",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Shah Ismail of the Safavid dynasty tried to claim the right to wage offensive jihad, particularly against the Ottomans. However, Shia ulama did not permit that, maintaining the classical position that the true Imam could wage such a war. During the Qajar period, Shia ulama adopted the position that the Shah was responsible for national security. They authorized the Perso-Russian wars in the 19th century as jihad.",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "In the 18th century, the Durrani Empire under the reigns of Ahmad Shah Durrani and his son and successor, Timur Shah Durrani had issued multiple jihads against Sikh Misls in the Punjab region, often to consolidate territory and continue Afghan rule in the region, efforts under Ahmad Shah failed, while Timur Shah had succeeded.",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "When Europeans began the colonization of the Muslim world, jihad was one of the first responses by local Muslims. Emir Abdelkader organized a jihad in Algeria against French domination, tapping into existing Sufi networks. Other wars against colonialist powers were often declared to be jihad: the Senussi religious order declared jihad against Italian control of Libya in 1912, and the \"Mahdi\" in the Sudan declared jihad against both the British and the Egyptians in 1881.",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Rashid Rida and Muhammad Abduh argued that peaceful coexistence should be the normal state between Muslim and non-Muslim states, citing verses in the Qur'an that allowed war only in self-defense. However, this view still left open jihad against colonialism, which was seen as an attack on Muslims.",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Sayyid Ahmad Khan also argued jihad was limited to cases of oppression, and since the British Raj allowed freedom of religion, there was no need to wage jihad against the British. Instead, Khan formulated jihad as recovering past Muslim scientific progress to modernize the Muslim world.",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "A concept that played a role in anti-colonial jihad (or lack thereof) was the belief in Mahdi. According to Islamic eschatology, a messianic figure named Mahdi will appear and restore justice on earth. Such a belief sometimes discouraged Muslims from conducting jihad against the colonial powers, instead inducing them to passively wait for the messiah to come. Such messages were circulated in Algeria to undermine Emir Abdelkader's jihad against the French. On the other hand, this belief could be a powerful mobilizing force in cases when someone would proclaim himself Mahdi. Such mahdist rebellions happened in India (1810), Egypt (1865) and Sudan (1881).",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "With the Islamic revival, a new \"fundamentalist\" movement arose, with some different interpretations of Islam, which often placed an increased emphasis on jihad. The Wahhabi movement which spread across the Arabian peninsula starting in the 18th century, emphasized jihad as armed struggle. The so-called Fulbe jihad states and a few other jihad states in West Africa were established by a series of offensive wars in the 19th century. None of these jihad movements were victorious. The most powerful, the Sokoto Caliphate, lasted about a century until being incorporated into Colonial Nigeria in 1903.",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "When the Ottoman caliph called for a \"Great Jihad\" by all Muslims against Allied powers during World War I, there were hopes and fears that non-Turkish Muslims would side with Ottoman Turkey, but the appeal did not \"[unite] the Muslim world\", and Muslims did not turn on their non-Muslim commanders in the Allied forces. (The war led to the end of the caliphate as the Ottoman Empire entered on the side of the war's losers and surrendered by agreeing to \"viciously punitive\" conditions. These were overturned by the popular war hero Mustafa Kemal, who was also a secularist and later abolished the caliphate.)",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Prior to the Iranian revolution in 1922, the Shiite cleric Mehdi Al-Khalissi issued a fatwa calling upon Iraqis not to participate in the Iraqi elections, as the Iraqi government was established by foreign powers. He later played a role in the Iraqi revolt of 1920. Between 1918 and 1919 in the Shia holy city of Najaf the League of the Islamic Awakening was established by several religious scholars, tribal chiefs, and landlords assassinated a British officer in the hopes of sparking a similar rebellion in Karbala which is also regarded as sacred for Shias.",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "During the Iraqi revolt of 1920, Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Taqi Shirazi the father of Mohammad al-Husayni al-Shirazi and grandfather of Sadiq Hussaini Shirazi, declared British rule impermissible and called for a jihad against European occupations in the Middle East.",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Islamism has played an increasing role in the Muslim world in the 20th century, especially following the economic crises of the 1970s and 1980s. One of the first Islamist groups, the Muslim Brotherhood, emphasized physical struggle and martyrdom in its creed: \"God is our objective; the Quran is our constitution; the Prophet is our leader; struggle (jihad) is our way; and death for the sake of God is the highest of our aspirations.\" Hassan al-Banna emphasized jihad of the sword, and called on Egyptians to prepare for jihad against the British Empire, (making him the first influential scholar since the 1857 India uprising to call for jihad of the sword). The group called for jihad against Israel in the 1940s, and its Palestinian branch, Hamas, called for jihad against Israel when the First Intifada started.",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Modern Muslim thought had been focused on when to go to war (jus ad bellum), not paying much attention on conduct during war (jus in bello). This was because most Muslim theorists viewed international humanitarian law as consistent with Islamic requirements. However, recently Muslims have once again started discussing conduct during war in response to certain terrorist groups targeting civilians.",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "According to Rudolph F. Peters and Natana J. DeLong-Bas, the new \"fundamentalist\" movement brought a reinterpretation of Islam and their own writings on jihad. These writings tended to be less interested and involved with legal arguments, what the different of schools of Islamic law had to say, or in solutions for all potential situations. \"They emphasize more the moral justifications and the underlying ethical values of the rules, than the detailed elaboration of those rules.\" They also tended to ignore the distinction between Greater and Lesser jihad because it distracted Muslims \"from the development of the combative spirit they believe is required to rid the Islamic world of Western influences\".",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Contemporary Islamic fundamentalists were often influenced by medieval Islamic jurist Ibn Taymiyyah's, and Egyptian journalist Sayyid Qutb's, ideas on jihad.",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "The highly influential Muslim Brotherhood leader, Sayyid Qutb, preached in his book Milestones that jihad, `is not a temporary phase but a permanent war ... Jihad for freedom cannot cease until the Satanic forces are put to an end and the religion is purified for God in toto.` Qutb focused on martyrdom and jihad, but he added the theme of the treachery and enmity towards Islam of Christians and especially Jews. If non-Muslims were waging a \"war against Islam\", jihad against them was not offensive but defensive. He also insisted that Christians and Jews were mushrikeen (not monotheists) because (he alleged) gave their priests or rabbis \"authority to make laws, obeying laws which were made by them [and] not permitted by God\" and \"obedience to laws and judgments is a sort of worship\".",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Later ideologue, Muhammad abd-al-Salam Faraj, departed from some of Qutb's teachings on jihad. While Qutb felt that jihad was a proclamation of \"liberation for humanity\" (in which humanity has the free choice between Islam and unbelief), Faraj saw jihad as a mean of conquering the world and reestablishing the caliphate. Faraj legitimized lying, attacking by night (even if it leads to accidentally killing innocents), and destroying trees of the infidel. His ideas influenced Egyptian Islamist extremist groups, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, later the No. 2 person in al-Qaeda.",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, despite being a predominantly Sunni nation, Afghanistan's Shiite population took arms against the Communist government and allied Soviet forces like the nation's Sunnis and were collectively referred to as the Afghan Mujahideen. Shiite Jihadists in Afghanistan were known as the Tehran Eight and received support from the Iranian government in fighting against the Communist Afghan government and allied Soviet forces in Afghanistan.",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Many Muslims, including scholars like al-Qaradawi and Sayyid Tantawi, denounced Islamic terrorist attacks against civilians, seeing them as contrary to rules of jihad that prohibit targeting noncombatants. After the September 11 attacks in 2001, the United States blamed Saudi Arabian Osama bin Laden and the Taliban in Afghanistan, triggering bin Laden, who in turn on October 7 issued a televised message, declaring \"Allah had blessed a vanguard group of Muslims, the spearhead of Islam, to destroy America.\" American and British forces were deployed around Afghanistan, and the Mullah Mohammad Omar, also the Commander to the Faithful of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, in turn called the world's Muslims to join him in a jihad.",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "In the 1980s Abdullah Azzam advocated waging jihad against the \"unbelievers\". Azzam issued a fatwa calling for jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, declaring it an individual obligation for all able bodied Muslims because it was a defensive jihad to repel invaders. His fatwa was endorsed by a number of clerics including leading Saudi clerics such as Sheikh Abd al-Aziz ibn Baz.",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Azzam claimed that \"anyone who looks into the state of Muslims today will find that their great misfortune is their abandonment of Jihad\", and he also warned that \"without Jihad, shirk (joining partners with Allah) will spread and become dominant\". Jihad was so important that to \"repel\" the unbelievers was \"the most important obligation after Iman [faith]\".",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Azzam also argued for a broader interpretation of who it was permissible to kill in jihad, an interpretation that some think may have influenced some of his students, including Osama bin Laden.",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "A charismatic speaker, Azzam traveled to dozens of cities in Europe and North America to encourage support for jihad in Afghanistan. He inspired young Muslims with stories of miraculous deeds during jihad—mujahideen who defeated vast columns of Soviet troops virtually single-handed, who had been run over by tanks but survived, who were shot but unscathed by bullets. Angels were witnessed riding into battle on horseback, and falling bombs were intercepted by birds, which raced ahead of the jets to form a protective canopy over the warriors. In Afghanistan he set up a \"services office\" for foreign fighters and with support from his former student Osama bin Laden and Saudi charities, foreign mujahideed or would-be mujahideen were provided for. Between 1982 and 1992 an estimated 35,000 individual Muslim volunteers went to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets and their Afghan regime. Thousands more attended frontier schools teeming with former and future fighters. Saudi Arabia and the other conservative Gulf monarchies also provided considerable financial support to the jihad—$600 million a year by 1982. CIA also funded Azzam's Maktab al-Khidamat and others via Operation Cyclone.",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Azzam saw Afghanistan as the beginning of jihad to repel unbelievers from many countries—the southern Soviet Republics of Central Asia, Bosnia, the Philippines, Kashmir, Somalia, Eritrea, Spain, and especially his home country of Palestine. The defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan is said to have \"amplified the jihadist tendency from a fringe phenomenon to a major force in the Muslim world.\"",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Having tasted victory in Afghanistan, many of the thousands of fighters returned to their home country such as Egypt, Algeria, Kashmir or to places like Bosnia to continue jihad. Not all the former fighters agreed with Azzam's chioice of targets (Azzam was assassinated in November 1989) but former Afghan fighters led or participated in serious insurgencies in Egypt, Algeria, Kashmir, Somalia in the 1990s and later creating a \"transnational jihadist stream.\"",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "In February 1998, Osama bin Laden put a \"Declaration of the World Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders\" in the Al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper. On 11 September 2001, four passenger planes were hijacked in the United States and crashed, destroying the World Trade Center and damaging the Pentagon.",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "In Shia Islam, jihad is one of the ten Practices of the Religion (though not one of the five pillars). Traditionally, Twelver Shi'a doctrine has differed from that of Sunni Islam on the concept of jihad, with jihad being \"seen as a lesser priority\" in Shia theology and \"armed activism\" by Shias being \"limited to a person's immediate geography\".",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Because of their history of being oppressed, Shias also associated jihad with certain passionate features, notably in the remembrance of Ashura. Mahmoud M. Ayoub says:",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "In Islamic tradition jihad or the struggle in the way of God, whether as armed struggle, or any form of opposition of the wrong, is generally regarded as one of the essential requirements of a person's faith as a Muslim. Shi'î tradition carried this requirement a step further, making jihad one of the pillars or foundations (arkan) of religion. If, therefore, Husayn's struggle against the Umayyad regime must be regarded as an act of jihad, then, In the mind of devotees, the participation of the community in his suffering and its ascent to the truth of his message must also be regarded as an extension of the holy struggle of the Imam himself. The hadith from which we took the title of this chapter states this point very clearly. Ja'far al-Sadiq is said to have declared to al-Mufaddal, one of his closest disciples, 'The sigh of the sorrowful for the wrong done us is an act of praise (tasbih) [of God], his sorrow for us is an act of worship, and his keeping of our secret is a struggle (jihad) in the way of God'; the Imâm then added, 'This hadith should be inscribed in letters of gold'.",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "and",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "Hence, the concept of jihad (holy struggle) gained a deeper and more personal meaning. Whether through weeping, the composition and recitation of poetry, showing compassion and doing good to the poor or carrying arms, the Shi'i Muslim saw himself helping the Imam in his struggle against the wrong (zulm) and gaining for himself the same merit (thawab) of those who actually fought and died for him. The ta'ziyah, in its broader sense the sharing of the entire life of the suffering family of Muhammad, has become for the Shi'i community the true meaning of compassion.",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "In the Syrian civil war, Shia and Sunni fighters waged jihad against each other. In Yemen, the Houthi Movement has used appeals to jihad as part of their ideology as well as their recruitment.",
"title": "History of usage and practice"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Some observers have noted the evolution in the rules of jihad—from the original \"classical\" doctrine to that of 21st century Salafi jihadism. According to the legal historian Sadarat Kadri, during the last couple of centuries, incremental changes in Islamic legal doctrine (developed by Islamists who otherwise condemn any bid‘ah (innovation) in religion), have \"normalized\" what was once \"unthinkable\". \"The very idea that Muslims might blow themselves up for God was unheard of before 1983, and it was not until the early 1990s that anyone anywhere had tried to justify killing innocent Muslims who were not on a battlefield.\"",
"title": "Evolution of the term in Islamic jurisprudence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "The first or the \"classical\" doctrine of jihad which was developed towards the end of the 8th century, emphasized the jihad of the sword (jihad bil-saif) rather than the \"jihad of the heart\", but it contained many legal restrictions which were developed from interpretations of both the Quran and the Hadith, such as detailed rules involving \"the initiation, the conduct, the termination\" of jihad, the treatment of prisoners, the distribution of booty, etc. Unless there was a sudden attack on the Muslim community, jihad was not a \"personal obligation\" (fard ayn); instead it was a \"collective one\" (fard al-kifaya), which had to be discharged \"in the way of God\" (fi sabil Allah), and it could only be directed by the caliph, \"whose discretion over its conduct was all but absolute.\" (This was designed in part to avoid incidents like the Kharijia's jihad against and killing of Caliph Ali, since they deemed that he was no longer a Muslim). Martyrdom resulting from an attack on the enemy with no concern for your own safety was praiseworthy, but dying by your own hand (as opposed to the enemy's) merited a special place in Hell. The category of jihad which is considered to be a collective obligation is sometimes simplified as \"offensive jihad\" in Western texts.",
"title": "Evolution of the term in Islamic jurisprudence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "Islamic theologian Abu Abdullah al-Muhajir has been identified as the key theorist and ideologue behind modern jihadist violence. His theological and legal justifications influenced Abu Musab al-Zarqawi of al-Qaeda as well as several jihadi terrorist groups, including ISIS. Zarqawi used a manuscript of al-Muhajir's ideas at AQI training camps that were later deployed by ISIS, referred to as The Jurisprudence of Jihad or The Jurisprudence of Blood.",
"title": "Evolution of the term in Islamic jurisprudence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "The book has been described as rationalising \"the murder of non-combatants\" by The Guardian's Mark Towsend, citing Salah al-Ansari of Quilliam, who notes: \"There is a startling lack of study and concern regarding this abhorrent and dangerous text [The Jurisprudence of Blood] in almost all Western and Arab scholarship\". Charlie Winter of The Atlantic describes it as a \"theological playbook used to justify the group's abhorrent acts\". He states:",
"title": "Evolution of the term in Islamic jurisprudence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "Ranging from ruminations on the merits of beheading, torturing, or burning prisoners to thoughts on assassination, siege warfare, and the use of biological weapons, Muhajir's intellectual legacy is a crucial component of the literary corpus of ISIS—and, indeed, whatever comes after it—a way to render practically anything permissible, provided, that is, it can be spun as beneficial to the jihad. [...] According to Muhajir, committing suicide to kill people is not only a theologically sound act, but a commendable one, too, something to be cherished and celebrated regardless of its outcome. [...] neither Zarqawi nor his inheritors have looked back, liberally using Muhajir's work to normalize the use of suicide tactics in the time since, such that they have become the single most important military and terrorist method—defensive or offensive—used by ISIS today. The way that Muhajir theorized it was simple—he offered up a theological fix that allows any who desire it to sidestep the Koranic injunctions against suicide.",
"title": "Evolution of the term in Islamic jurisprudence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "Psychologist Chris E. Stout also discusses the al Muhajir-inspired text in his book, Terrorism, Political Violence, and Extremism. He assesses that jihadists regard their actions as being \"for the greater good\"; that they are in a \"weakened in the earth\" situation that renders terrorism a valid means of solution.",
"title": "Evolution of the term in Islamic jurisprudence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "The term 'jihad' has accrued both violent and non-violent meanings. According to John Esposito, it can simply mean striving to live a moral and virtuous life, spreading and defending Islam as well as fighting injustice and oppression, among other things. The relative importance of these two forms of jihad is a matter of controversy. Rudoph Peters writes that, in the contemporary world, traditionalist Muslims understand jihad from classical works on fiqh; modernist Muslims regard jihad as a just war in international law and emphasize its defensive aspects; and fundamentalists view it as an expansion of Islam and realization of Islamic ideals. David Cook writes that Muslims have understood jihad in a military sense, both in classical texts and in contemporary ones. For Cook the idea that jihad is primarily non-violent comes primarily from Sufi texts and the Western scholars who study them, or from Muslim apologists. Gallup has stated that its surveys show that the concept of jihad among Muslims \"is considerably more nuanced than the single sense in which Western commentators invariably invoke the term.\"",
"title": "Current usage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "A poll by Gallup asked Muslims in eight countries what jihad meant to them. In Lebanon, Kuwait, Jordan, and Morocco, the most frequent response was to \"duty toward God\", a \"divine duty\", or a \"worship of God\", with no militaristic connotations. In Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and Indonesia, many of the responses includes \"sacrificing one's life for the sake of Islam/God/a just cause\" or \"fighting against the opponents of Islam\". Other common meanings of \"jihad\" in the Muslim world include \"a commitment to hard work\", \"promoting peace\", and \"living the principles of Islam\". The terminology is also applied to the fight for women's liberation.",
"title": "Current usage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "Shia Muslim scholar Mahmoud M. Ayoud states that \"The goal of true jihad is to attain a harmony between Islam (submission), iman (faith), and ihsan (righteous living).\" Jihad is a process encompassing both individual and social reform, this is called jihad fi sabil Allah (\"struggle in the way of God\"), and can be undertaken by the means of the Quran (jihad bi-al-qur'an). According to Ayoud the greatest Jihad is the struggle of every Muslim against the social, moral, and political evils. However, depending on social and political circumstances, Jihad may be regarded as a sixth fundamental obligation (farid) incumbent on the entire Muslim community (ummah) when their integrity is in danger, in this case jihad becomes an \"absolute obligation\" (fard 'ayn), or when social and religious reform is gravely hampered. Otherwise it is a \"limited obligation\" (fard kifayah), incumbent upon those who are directly involved. These rules apply to armed struggle or \"jihad of the sword\".",
"title": "Current usage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "In modern times, Pakistani scholar and professor Fazlur Rahman Malik has used the term to describe the struggle to establish a \"just moral-social order\", while President Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia has used it to describe the struggle for economic development in that country.",
"title": "Current usage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "According to the BBC, a third meaning of jihad is the struggle to build a good society. In a commentary of the hadith Sahih Muslim, entitled al-Minhaj, the medieval Islamic scholar Yahya ibn Sharaf al-Nawawi stated that \"one of the collective duties of the community as a whole (fard kifaya) is to lodge a valid protest, to solve problems of religion, to have knowledge of Divine Law, to command what is right and forbid wrong conduct\".",
"title": "Current usage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "Scholar Natana J. Delong-Bas lists a number of types of \"jihad\" that have been proposed by Muslims",
"title": "Current usage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "Other \"types\" mentioned include",
"title": "Current usage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "In Ahmadiyya Islam, jihad is primarily one's personal inner struggle and should not be used violently for political motives. Violence is the last option only to be used to protect religion and one's own life in extreme situations of persecution.",
"title": "Current usage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "Quranists do not believe that the word jihad means holy war. They believe it means to struggle, or to strive. They believe it can incorporate both military and non-military aspects. When it refers to the military aspect, it is understood primarily as defensive warfare.",
"title": "Current usage"
}
]
| Jihad is an Arabic word which literally means "striving" or "struggling", especially with a praiseworthy aim. In an Islamic context, it can refer to almost any effort to make personal and social life conform with God's guidance, such as struggle against one's evil inclinations, proselytizing, or efforts toward the moral betterment of the Muslim community (Ummah), though it is most frequently associated with war. In classical Islamic law (sharia), the term refers to armed struggle against unbelievers, while modernist Islamic scholars generally equate military jihad with defensive warfare. In Sufi circles, spiritual and moral jihad has been traditionally emphasized under the name of greater jihad. The term has gained additional attention in recent decades through its use by various insurgent Islamic extremist, militant Islamist, and terrorist individuals and organizations whose ideology is based on the Islamic notion of jihad. The word jihad appears frequently in the Qur'an with and without military connotations, often in the idiomatic expression "striving in the path of God (al-jihad fi sabil Allah)", conveying a sense of self-exertion. They developed an elaborate set of rules pertaining to jihad, including prohibitions on harming those who are not engaged in combat.
In the modern era, the notion of jihad has lost its jurisprudential relevance and instead given rise to an ideological and political discourse. While modernist Islamic scholars have emphasized the defensive and non-military aspects of jihad, some Islamists have advanced aggressive interpretations that go beyond the classical theory. Jihad is classified into inner ("greater") jihad, which involves a struggle against one's own base impulses, and external ("lesser") jihad, which is further subdivided into jihad of the pen/tongue and jihad of the sword. Most Western writers consider external jihad to have primacy over inner jihad in the Islamic tradition, while much of contemporary Muslim opinion favors the opposite view. Gallup analysis of a large survey reveals considerable nuance in the conceptions of jihad held by Muslims around the world. The sense of jihad as armed resistance was first used in the context of persecution faced by Muslims, as when Muhammad was at Mecca, when the community had two choices: emigration (hijra) or jihad. In Twelver Shi'a Islam, jihad is one of the Ancillaries of the Faith. A person engaged in jihad is called a mujahid. The term jihad is often rendered in English as "Holy War", although this translation is controversial. Today, the word jihad is often used without religious connotations, like the English crusade. | 2001-10-12T19:10:22Z | 2023-12-17T23:40:36Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jihad |
16,205 | Jacobin (politics) | A Jacobin (French pronunciation: [ʒakɔbɛ̃]; English: /ˈdʒækəbɪn/) was a member of the Jacobin Club, a revolutionary political movement that was the most famous political club during the French Revolution (1789–1799). The club got its name from meeting at the Dominican rue Saint-Honoré Monastery of the Jacobins. The Dominicans in France were called Jacobins (Latin: Jacobus, corresponds to Jacques in French and James in English) because their first house in Paris was the Saint Jacques Monastery.
The terms Jacobin and Jacobinism have been used in a variety of senses. Prior to 1793, the terms were used by contemporaries to describe the politics of Jacobins in the congresses of 1789 through 1792. With the ascendancy of Maximilien Robespierre and the Montagnards into 1793, they have since become synonymous with the policies of the Reign of Terror, with Jacobinism now meaning "Robespierrism". As Jacobinism was memorialized through legend, heritage, tradition and other nonhistorical means over the centuries, the term acquired a "semantic elasticity" in French politics of the late 20th Century with a "vague range of meanings", but all with the "central figure of a sovereign and indivisible public authority with power over civil society." Today in France, Jacobin colloquially indicates an ardent or republican supporter of a centralized and revolutionary democracy or state as well as "a politician who is hostile to any idea of weakening and dismemberment of the State."
The Jacobin Club was one of several organizations that grew out of the French Revolution and it was distinguished for its left-wing, revolutionary politics. Because of this, the Jacobins, unlike other sects such as the Girondins (who were originally part of the Jacobins, but branched off), were closely allied to the sans-culottes, who were a popular force of working-class Parisians that played a pivotal role in the development of the revolution.
The Jacobins had a significant presence in the National Convention; they were dubbed "the mountain" or Montagnards for their seats in the uppermost part of the chamber. Eventually, the Revolution coalesced around The Mountain's power, with the help of the insurrections of the sans-culottes, and, led by Robespierre, the Jacobins established a revolutionary dictatorship, or the joint domination of the Committee of Public Safety and Committee of General Security.
The Jacobins were known for creating a strong government that could deal with the needs of war, economic chaos, as well as internal rebellion (such as the war in the Vendée). This included establishing the world's first universal military draft as a solution to filling army ranks to put down civil unrest and prosecute war. The Jacobin dictatorship was known for enacting the Reign of Terror, which targeted speculators, monarchists, right-wing Girondin, Hébertists, and traitors, and led to many beheadings.
The Jacobins supported the rights of property, but represented a much more middle-class position than the government that succeeded them in Thermidor.
They favored free trade and a market economy much like the Girondists, but their relationship to the people made them more willing to adopt interventionist economic policies. Unlike the Girondins, their economic policy favored price controls (i.e., General maximum) on staples like grain and select household and grocery goods to address economic problems. Using the armée revolutionnaire, they targeted farmers, the rich and others who may have stocks of essential goods ("goods of the first necessity") in service of a national distribution system with severe punishment for uncooperative hoarders.
Another tenet of Jacobinism is a secularism that includes the elimination of existing religions in favor of one run by the state (i.e., the cults of Reason and the Supreme Being).
Jacobinism was as an ideology thus developed and implemented during the French Revolution of 1789. In the words of François Furet, in Penser la révolution française (quoted by Hoel in Introduction au Jacobinisme..., "Jacobinism is both an ideology and a power: a system of representations and a system of action." ("le jacobinisme est à la fois une idéologie et un pouvoir : un système de représentations et un système d'action"). Its political goals were largely achieved later during France's Third Republic.
Jacobinism did not end with the Jacobins. The Robespierrist François-Noël Babeuf eventually rejected the rule of the Jacobins and welcomed the end of the Terror. However, he later eschewed the Thermidorean Reaction that overthrew the Jacobins and he returned to Robespierrism. In May 1796, he led a failed coup d'état with neo-Robespierrists to attempt to return the republic to the Montagnard Constitution of 1793 in the Conspiracy of Equals. His political ideology was a form of neo-Jacobinism and primordial communism that highlighted egalitarian division of all land and property enforced by a dictatorship run by the Equals. His ideas were widely publicized and further developed as "Babeuvism" by colleague Filippo Buonaroti in his 1828 book, Histoire de la Conspiration Pour l'Égalité Dite de Babeuf (History of Babeuf's Conspiracy for Equality).
Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx called the Conspiracy of Equals "the first appearance of a truly active Communist party." Leon Trotsky echoed these sentiments, stating that the foundation of the Communist International marked a "carrying on in direct succession the heroic endeavours and martyrdom of a long line of revolutionary generations from Babeuf."
Himself a Robespierrist, Buonaroti went on to write Observations sur Maximilien Robespierre in 1836, which extolled the Jacobin leader as a legend and hero. His portrayal of Robespierre as a model for socialist revolutionaries greatly influenced young socialists and republicans, such as Albert Laponneraye.
The 19th century socialist firebrand, nationalist and founder of Blanquism, Louis Auguste Blanqui expressed admiration for Jacobin leaders of the Terror like Robespierre and Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, framing them in messianic terms. There is evidence that his principles were also instructed by Babeuvism through his familiarity with Buonarroti. After the French Revolution of 1848, he criticized contemporaries who claimed to be heirs of Jacobinism, writing: "Our own self-styled Montagnards are a caricature, indeed a very poor copy, of the Girondins." His view of Robespierre later changed over an understanding of the Terror's executions of Georges Danton and the Hébertists, as well as the formation of the Cult of the Supreme Being, the latter due to Blanqui's promotion of materialism and atheism. According to Blanqui, the Hebertists were the true revolutionaries in defending atheism, science and equality. He said that socialism needed to be built on the foundations laid by the French Revolution, and would better defend the ideals of the Enlightenment than Jacobinism, adding the toast, "Citizens, the Mountain is dead! To socialism, its sole heir!"
Various French left-wing parties would claim to be the "true heirs" to the French Revolution and the 1871 Paris Commune. Aspects of Blanqui were likewise claimed by French political groups like the Radical Socialists and the Stalinists. Other organizations included the French Central Revolutionary Committee and its successor, the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and the Blanquist section of the International Workingmen's Association or First International.
On 4 October 1919, Alexandre Varenne founded the socialist daily La Montagne, Quotidien de la Démocratie Socialiste du Center. The title was selected to reflect its alignment with the ideas of the Montagnards.
In the 1930s, the Popular Front coalition included the French Communist Party or Parti communiste français (PCF), who along with portions of the alliance's socialist French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) party increasingly emphasized patriotism. The PCF were characterized as "New Jacobins", and their leader Maurice Thorez as a "Stalinist Jacobin".
In 1794, Tipu Sultan founded the Jacobin Club of Mysore with the support of French Republican officers and declared himself "Citizen Tipoo". In the subsequent Fourth Anglo-Mysore war in 1799 against Tipu, the British forced the surrender of French military personnel, citing their "most virulent principles of Jacobinism". One historian argued that Britain's East India Company fabricated the club's existence to justify British military intervention.
Blanquism had a notable influence on Benito Mussolini who founded fascism as an outgrowth of revolutionary socialism. He claimed he "introduced into Italian socialism something of (Henri) Bergson mixed with much of Blanqui," including Blanqui's nationalism, the idea of rule by a dominant minority and use of violence. However, Mussolini dispensed with Blanquism's links to the Enlightenment and communism and instead stated, fascism is "opposed to all individualistic abstractions based on eighteenth century materialism; and it is opposed to all Jacobinistic utopias and innovations." The masthead of his newspaper Il Popolo d'Italia carried quotes from Blanqui ("Whoever has steel has bread") and Napoleon Bonaparte ("The Revolution is an idea which has found bayonets!"). Leon Trotsky called fascism in a sense "a caricature of Jacobinism".
King Stanisław II August was enamored with the American Constitution, the ideals of the Gironde of 1790–1792, and the office of Roi Citoyen ("Citizen King"). He helped develop the 1791 Polish Constitution which embraced social reforms guaranteeing "the freedom, property and equality of every citizen." Its ratification led some Society of the Friends of the Constitution chapters to endorse the King and his Rzeczypospolita and helped shape the French constitution adopted later that year.
While the Constitutionalists had contacts with Jacobin Clubs, they were expressly not Jacobins. However prior to the 1792 war that crushed the republic, Russian Empress Catherine the Great claimed the constitution was the work of the Jacobins and that she would be "fighting Jacobinism in Poland" and "the Jacobins of Warsaw".
The 1870s saw the emergence of the "Worker's Marseillaise", a Russian revolutionary song set to a Robert Schumann melody inspired by the 1792 "Marseillaise". It was used as a national anthem by the Russian Provisional Government and in Soviet Russia for a short time alongside "The Internationale".
In the early 20th Century, Bolshevism and Jacobinism were linked. Russia's notion of the French Revolution permeated educated society and was reflected in speeches and writings of leaders, including Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin. They modeled their revolution after the Jacobins and the Terror with Trotsky even envisioning a trial for Nicholas II akin to that for Louis XVI. Lenin regarded the execution of the former tsar and his immediate family as necessary, highlighting the precedent set in the French Revolution. At the same time, the Bolsheviks consciously tried to avoid the mistakes they saw made by the French revolutionaries.
Lenin referred to Robespierre as a "Bolshevik avant la lettre" and erected a statue to him. Other statues were planned or erected of other prominent members of the Terror as well as Babeuf. The Voskresenskaya Embankment in St. Petersburg was also renamed Naberezhnaya Robespera for the French leader in 1923; it was returned to its original name in 2014.
Like Karl Marx, Lenin saw the overall progress in events in France from 1789 through 1871 as the French Bourgeois Revolution. He adhered to the Montagnards' policies of centralization of authority to stabilize a new state, the virtue and necessity of terror against oppressors and "an alliance between the proletariat and peasantry" ("the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasants"). He would refer to his side as the Mountain or Jacobin and label his Menshevik opponents as the "Gironde".
The conventionalized scrawny, French revolutionary sans-culottes Jacobin, was developed from about 1790 by British satirical artists James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson and George Cruikshank. It was commonly contrasted with the stolid stocky conservative and well-meaning John Bull, dressed like an English country squire. C. L. R. James also used the term to refer to revolutionaries during the Haitian Revolution in his book The Black Jacobins.
Thomas Paine was a believer in the French Revolution and supported the Girondins. At the same time, Protestant Dissenters seeking for relief from the Test and Corporation Acts supported the French Revolution at least in its early stages after seeing concessions to religious minorities by the French authorities in 1787 and in the Declaration of Rights of Man. Paine's publications enjoyed support by Painite Radical factions like the Manchester Constitutional Society. Prominent members of the Society who worked for the Radical Manchester Herald newspaper even contacted the Jacobin Club in France on 13 April 1792. Thus, Radicals were labeled Jacobins by their opponents. Regional Painite radicalism was incorrectly portrayed as English Jacobinism and were attacked by Conservative forces including Edmund Burke as early as 1791. The London Revolution Society also corresponded with the National Assembly starting in November 1789. Their letters were circulated among the regional Jacobin clubs, with around 52 clubs corresponding with the society by the spring of 1792. Other regional British revolutionary societies formed in centers of British Jacobinism. English Jacobins included the young Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and others prior to their disillusionment with the outbreak of the Reign of Terror. Others, such as Paine, William Hazlitt and Whig statesman Charles James Fox, remained idealistic about the Revolution.
The London Corresponding Society founded in 1792 was partly modeled on the Jacobins to pressure the government in a law-abiding manner for democratic reform. Scottish chapters of the Societies of the Friends of the People pressed for parliamentary reform at the 1792 Scottish Convention in Edinburgh using explicit imitations of the Jacobins.
Overall, after 1793 with the sidelining of the Girondins and the Terror, "Jacobin" became a pejorative for radical left-wing revolutionary politics and was linked to sedition. The word was further promoted in England by George Canning's 1797–98 newspaper Anti-Jacobin and later, John Gifford's 1798–1821 Anti-Jacobin Review, which both criticized the English Radicals of the 18th and 19th centuries. Much detail on English Jacobinism can be found in E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class.
Welsh Jacobins include William Jones, a radical patriot who was a keen disciple of Voltaire. Rather than preaching revolution, Jones believed that an exodus from Wales was required and that a new Welsh colony should be founded in the United States.
The socialist Chartist movement in the first half of the 19th Century was inspired by Robespierre. Chartist leader James Bronterre O'Brien defended Robespierre, describing him as "one of the greatest men, and one of the purest and most enlightened reformers, that ever existed in the world." He came to Robespierre through his studies of Buonarroti and even served as Buonarroti's translator for the English edition of Buanarroti's History of Babeuf's Conspiracy for Equality, for which he further included his own observations.
In the correspondence of Austrian statesman and diplomat Prince Klemens von Metternich and other leaders of the repressive policies that followed the second fall of Napoleon in 1815, Jacobin is the term commonly applied to anyone with progressive tendencies, such as the emperor Alexander I of Russia.
Federalists often characterized Thomas Jefferson, who himself had intervened in the French Revolution, and his Democratic-Republican party as Jacobins. Early Federalist-leaning American newspapers during the French Revolution referred to the Democratic-Republican party as the "Jacobin Party". The most notable examples are the Gazette of the United States, published in Philadelphia, and the Delaware and Eastern-Shore Advertiser, published in Wilmington, during the elections of 1800.
In modern American politics, the term Jacobin is often used to describe extremists of any party who demand ideological purity.
Evidencing the antagonistic relationship between the press and insurgent Arizona conservative presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, The New York Times attacked Goldwater in their Bastille Day coverage of the 1964 Republican National Convention. The paper called his supporters "Cactus Jacobins", comparing their opposition to "establishment" Eastern Republicans (see Rockefeller Republican) and "sensation‐seeking columnists and commentators" as expressed by moderate former president Dwight Eisenhower to the execution of representatives of the Ancien Régime in the Reign of Terror. In contrast, L. Brent Bozell, Jr. has written in Goldwater's seminal The Conscience of a Conservative (1960) that "Throughout history, true Conservatism has been at war equally with autocrats and with 'democratic' Jacobins."
In 2010 an American left-wing socialist publication, Jacobin, was founded.
On 27 May 2010 issue of The New York Review of Books, Columbia university political science and humanities professor and self-described liberal Mark Lilla analyzed three recent books dealing with American political party discontent in a review titled "The Tea Party Jacobins". On the other side, historian Victor Davis Hanson likened the rise and policies of leftists in the Democratic Party in 2019 to the Jacobins and Jacobinism.
The political rhetoric and populist ideas espoused by the Jacobins would lead to the development of the modern leftist movements throughout the 19th and 20th century, with Jacobinism being the political foundation of almost all leftist schools of thought including anarchism, communism and socialism. The Paris Commune was seen as the revolutionary successor to the Jacobins. The undercurrent of radical and populist tendencies espoused and enacted by the Jacobins would create a complete cultural and societal shock within the traditional and conservative governments of Europe, leading to new political ideas of society emerging. Jacobin rhetoric would lead to increasing secularization and skepticism towards the governments of Europe throughout the 1800s. This complex and complete revolution in political, societal and cultural structure, caused in part by the Jacobins, had lasting impact throughout Europe, with such societal revolutions throughout the 1800s culminating in the Revolutions of 1848.
Jacobin populism and complete structural destruction of the old order led to an increasingly revolutionary spirit throughout Europe and such changes would contribute to new political foundations. It also informed new political ideologies. For instance in France, Georges Valois, founder of the first non-Italian fascist party Faisceau, claimed the roots of fascism stemmed from the Jacobin movement. While fascism bears similarities to Jacobinism particularly as a democratic nationalism fighting against an existing order, it is difficult to directly trace such lineage. Fascist groups themselves have held a variety of opinions mostly negative about the French Revolution, with the German National Socialists straightforwardly condemning it. Italian fascists called on fascism to surpass the French Revolution "with a new kind of democracy run by producers." Some French fascists were ambivalent or admired parts of Jacobinism and the Revolution. Valois on the other hand saw the Revolution as the start of a movement both socialist and nationalist, which fascists would complete.
Leftist organizations would take different elements from Jacobin's core foundation. Anarchists took influence from the Jacobins use of mass movements, direct democracy and left-wing populism which would influence the tactics of direct action. Some Marxists would take influence from the extreme protectionism of the Jacobins and the notion of the vanguard defender of the republic which would later evolve into vanguardism. The Jacobin philosophy of a complete dismantling of an old system, with completely radical and new structure, is historically seen as one of the most revolutionary and important movements throughout modern history. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "A Jacobin (French pronunciation: [ʒakɔbɛ̃]; English: /ˈdʒækəbɪn/) was a member of the Jacobin Club, a revolutionary political movement that was the most famous political club during the French Revolution (1789–1799). The club got its name from meeting at the Dominican rue Saint-Honoré Monastery of the Jacobins. The Dominicans in France were called Jacobins (Latin: Jacobus, corresponds to Jacques in French and James in English) because their first house in Paris was the Saint Jacques Monastery.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The terms Jacobin and Jacobinism have been used in a variety of senses. Prior to 1793, the terms were used by contemporaries to describe the politics of Jacobins in the congresses of 1789 through 1792. With the ascendancy of Maximilien Robespierre and the Montagnards into 1793, they have since become synonymous with the policies of the Reign of Terror, with Jacobinism now meaning \"Robespierrism\". As Jacobinism was memorialized through legend, heritage, tradition and other nonhistorical means over the centuries, the term acquired a \"semantic elasticity\" in French politics of the late 20th Century with a \"vague range of meanings\", but all with the \"central figure of a sovereign and indivisible public authority with power over civil society.\" Today in France, Jacobin colloquially indicates an ardent or republican supporter of a centralized and revolutionary democracy or state as well as \"a politician who is hostile to any idea of weakening and dismemberment of the State.\"",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The Jacobin Club was one of several organizations that grew out of the French Revolution and it was distinguished for its left-wing, revolutionary politics. Because of this, the Jacobins, unlike other sects such as the Girondins (who were originally part of the Jacobins, but branched off), were closely allied to the sans-culottes, who were a popular force of working-class Parisians that played a pivotal role in the development of the revolution.",
"title": "In the French Revolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The Jacobins had a significant presence in the National Convention; they were dubbed \"the mountain\" or Montagnards for their seats in the uppermost part of the chamber. Eventually, the Revolution coalesced around The Mountain's power, with the help of the insurrections of the sans-culottes, and, led by Robespierre, the Jacobins established a revolutionary dictatorship, or the joint domination of the Committee of Public Safety and Committee of General Security.",
"title": "In the French Revolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The Jacobins were known for creating a strong government that could deal with the needs of war, economic chaos, as well as internal rebellion (such as the war in the Vendée). This included establishing the world's first universal military draft as a solution to filling army ranks to put down civil unrest and prosecute war. The Jacobin dictatorship was known for enacting the Reign of Terror, which targeted speculators, monarchists, right-wing Girondin, Hébertists, and traitors, and led to many beheadings.",
"title": "In the French Revolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The Jacobins supported the rights of property, but represented a much more middle-class position than the government that succeeded them in Thermidor.",
"title": "In the French Revolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "They favored free trade and a market economy much like the Girondists, but their relationship to the people made them more willing to adopt interventionist economic policies. Unlike the Girondins, their economic policy favored price controls (i.e., General maximum) on staples like grain and select household and grocery goods to address economic problems. Using the armée revolutionnaire, they targeted farmers, the rich and others who may have stocks of essential goods (\"goods of the first necessity\") in service of a national distribution system with severe punishment for uncooperative hoarders.",
"title": "In the French Revolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Another tenet of Jacobinism is a secularism that includes the elimination of existing religions in favor of one run by the state (i.e., the cults of Reason and the Supreme Being).",
"title": "In the French Revolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Jacobinism was as an ideology thus developed and implemented during the French Revolution of 1789. In the words of François Furet, in Penser la révolution française (quoted by Hoel in Introduction au Jacobinisme..., \"Jacobinism is both an ideology and a power: a system of representations and a system of action.\" (\"le jacobinisme est à la fois une idéologie et un pouvoir : un système de représentations et un système d'action\"). Its political goals were largely achieved later during France's Third Republic.",
"title": "In the French Revolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Jacobinism did not end with the Jacobins. The Robespierrist François-Noël Babeuf eventually rejected the rule of the Jacobins and welcomed the end of the Terror. However, he later eschewed the Thermidorean Reaction that overthrew the Jacobins and he returned to Robespierrism. In May 1796, he led a failed coup d'état with neo-Robespierrists to attempt to return the republic to the Montagnard Constitution of 1793 in the Conspiracy of Equals. His political ideology was a form of neo-Jacobinism and primordial communism that highlighted egalitarian division of all land and property enforced by a dictatorship run by the Equals. His ideas were widely publicized and further developed as \"Babeuvism\" by colleague Filippo Buonaroti in his 1828 book, Histoire de la Conspiration Pour l'Égalité Dite de Babeuf (History of Babeuf's Conspiracy for Equality).",
"title": "France"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx called the Conspiracy of Equals \"the first appearance of a truly active Communist party.\" Leon Trotsky echoed these sentiments, stating that the foundation of the Communist International marked a \"carrying on in direct succession the heroic endeavours and martyrdom of a long line of revolutionary generations from Babeuf.\"",
"title": "France"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Himself a Robespierrist, Buonaroti went on to write Observations sur Maximilien Robespierre in 1836, which extolled the Jacobin leader as a legend and hero. His portrayal of Robespierre as a model for socialist revolutionaries greatly influenced young socialists and republicans, such as Albert Laponneraye.",
"title": "France"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The 19th century socialist firebrand, nationalist and founder of Blanquism, Louis Auguste Blanqui expressed admiration for Jacobin leaders of the Terror like Robespierre and Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, framing them in messianic terms. There is evidence that his principles were also instructed by Babeuvism through his familiarity with Buonarroti. After the French Revolution of 1848, he criticized contemporaries who claimed to be heirs of Jacobinism, writing: \"Our own self-styled Montagnards are a caricature, indeed a very poor copy, of the Girondins.\" His view of Robespierre later changed over an understanding of the Terror's executions of Georges Danton and the Hébertists, as well as the formation of the Cult of the Supreme Being, the latter due to Blanqui's promotion of materialism and atheism. According to Blanqui, the Hebertists were the true revolutionaries in defending atheism, science and equality. He said that socialism needed to be built on the foundations laid by the French Revolution, and would better defend the ideals of the Enlightenment than Jacobinism, adding the toast, \"Citizens, the Mountain is dead! To socialism, its sole heir!\"",
"title": "France"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Various French left-wing parties would claim to be the \"true heirs\" to the French Revolution and the 1871 Paris Commune. Aspects of Blanqui were likewise claimed by French political groups like the Radical Socialists and the Stalinists. Other organizations included the French Central Revolutionary Committee and its successor, the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and the Blanquist section of the International Workingmen's Association or First International.",
"title": "France"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "On 4 October 1919, Alexandre Varenne founded the socialist daily La Montagne, Quotidien de la Démocratie Socialiste du Center. The title was selected to reflect its alignment with the ideas of the Montagnards.",
"title": "France"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In the 1930s, the Popular Front coalition included the French Communist Party or Parti communiste français (PCF), who along with portions of the alliance's socialist French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) party increasingly emphasized patriotism. The PCF were characterized as \"New Jacobins\", and their leader Maurice Thorez as a \"Stalinist Jacobin\".",
"title": "France"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In 1794, Tipu Sultan founded the Jacobin Club of Mysore with the support of French Republican officers and declared himself \"Citizen Tipoo\". In the subsequent Fourth Anglo-Mysore war in 1799 against Tipu, the British forced the surrender of French military personnel, citing their \"most virulent principles of Jacobinism\". One historian argued that Britain's East India Company fabricated the club's existence to justify British military intervention.",
"title": "India"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Blanquism had a notable influence on Benito Mussolini who founded fascism as an outgrowth of revolutionary socialism. He claimed he \"introduced into Italian socialism something of (Henri) Bergson mixed with much of Blanqui,\" including Blanqui's nationalism, the idea of rule by a dominant minority and use of violence. However, Mussolini dispensed with Blanquism's links to the Enlightenment and communism and instead stated, fascism is \"opposed to all individualistic abstractions based on eighteenth century materialism; and it is opposed to all Jacobinistic utopias and innovations.\" The masthead of his newspaper Il Popolo d'Italia carried quotes from Blanqui (\"Whoever has steel has bread\") and Napoleon Bonaparte (\"The Revolution is an idea which has found bayonets!\"). Leon Trotsky called fascism in a sense \"a caricature of Jacobinism\".",
"title": "Italy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "King Stanisław II August was enamored with the American Constitution, the ideals of the Gironde of 1790–1792, and the office of Roi Citoyen (\"Citizen King\"). He helped develop the 1791 Polish Constitution which embraced social reforms guaranteeing \"the freedom, property and equality of every citizen.\" Its ratification led some Society of the Friends of the Constitution chapters to endorse the King and his Rzeczypospolita and helped shape the French constitution adopted later that year.",
"title": "Poland"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "While the Constitutionalists had contacts with Jacobin Clubs, they were expressly not Jacobins. However prior to the 1792 war that crushed the republic, Russian Empress Catherine the Great claimed the constitution was the work of the Jacobins and that she would be \"fighting Jacobinism in Poland\" and \"the Jacobins of Warsaw\".",
"title": "Poland"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The 1870s saw the emergence of the \"Worker's Marseillaise\", a Russian revolutionary song set to a Robert Schumann melody inspired by the 1792 \"Marseillaise\". It was used as a national anthem by the Russian Provisional Government and in Soviet Russia for a short time alongside \"The Internationale\".",
"title": "Russia and Soviet Union"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In the early 20th Century, Bolshevism and Jacobinism were linked. Russia's notion of the French Revolution permeated educated society and was reflected in speeches and writings of leaders, including Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin. They modeled their revolution after the Jacobins and the Terror with Trotsky even envisioning a trial for Nicholas II akin to that for Louis XVI. Lenin regarded the execution of the former tsar and his immediate family as necessary, highlighting the precedent set in the French Revolution. At the same time, the Bolsheviks consciously tried to avoid the mistakes they saw made by the French revolutionaries.",
"title": "Russia and Soviet Union"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Lenin referred to Robespierre as a \"Bolshevik avant la lettre\" and erected a statue to him. Other statues were planned or erected of other prominent members of the Terror as well as Babeuf. The Voskresenskaya Embankment in St. Petersburg was also renamed Naberezhnaya Robespera for the French leader in 1923; it was returned to its original name in 2014.",
"title": "Russia and Soviet Union"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Like Karl Marx, Lenin saw the overall progress in events in France from 1789 through 1871 as the French Bourgeois Revolution. He adhered to the Montagnards' policies of centralization of authority to stabilize a new state, the virtue and necessity of terror against oppressors and \"an alliance between the proletariat and peasantry\" (\"the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasants\"). He would refer to his side as the Mountain or Jacobin and label his Menshevik opponents as the \"Gironde\".",
"title": "Russia and Soviet Union"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The conventionalized scrawny, French revolutionary sans-culottes Jacobin, was developed from about 1790 by British satirical artists James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson and George Cruikshank. It was commonly contrasted with the stolid stocky conservative and well-meaning John Bull, dressed like an English country squire. C. L. R. James also used the term to refer to revolutionaries during the Haitian Revolution in his book The Black Jacobins.",
"title": "United Kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Thomas Paine was a believer in the French Revolution and supported the Girondins. At the same time, Protestant Dissenters seeking for relief from the Test and Corporation Acts supported the French Revolution at least in its early stages after seeing concessions to religious minorities by the French authorities in 1787 and in the Declaration of Rights of Man. Paine's publications enjoyed support by Painite Radical factions like the Manchester Constitutional Society. Prominent members of the Society who worked for the Radical Manchester Herald newspaper even contacted the Jacobin Club in France on 13 April 1792. Thus, Radicals were labeled Jacobins by their opponents. Regional Painite radicalism was incorrectly portrayed as English Jacobinism and were attacked by Conservative forces including Edmund Burke as early as 1791. The London Revolution Society also corresponded with the National Assembly starting in November 1789. Their letters were circulated among the regional Jacobin clubs, with around 52 clubs corresponding with the society by the spring of 1792. Other regional British revolutionary societies formed in centers of British Jacobinism. English Jacobins included the young Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and others prior to their disillusionment with the outbreak of the Reign of Terror. Others, such as Paine, William Hazlitt and Whig statesman Charles James Fox, remained idealistic about the Revolution.",
"title": "United Kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The London Corresponding Society founded in 1792 was partly modeled on the Jacobins to pressure the government in a law-abiding manner for democratic reform. Scottish chapters of the Societies of the Friends of the People pressed for parliamentary reform at the 1792 Scottish Convention in Edinburgh using explicit imitations of the Jacobins.",
"title": "United Kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Overall, after 1793 with the sidelining of the Girondins and the Terror, \"Jacobin\" became a pejorative for radical left-wing revolutionary politics and was linked to sedition. The word was further promoted in England by George Canning's 1797–98 newspaper Anti-Jacobin and later, John Gifford's 1798–1821 Anti-Jacobin Review, which both criticized the English Radicals of the 18th and 19th centuries. Much detail on English Jacobinism can be found in E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class.",
"title": "United Kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Welsh Jacobins include William Jones, a radical patriot who was a keen disciple of Voltaire. Rather than preaching revolution, Jones believed that an exodus from Wales was required and that a new Welsh colony should be founded in the United States.",
"title": "United Kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The socialist Chartist movement in the first half of the 19th Century was inspired by Robespierre. Chartist leader James Bronterre O'Brien defended Robespierre, describing him as \"one of the greatest men, and one of the purest and most enlightened reformers, that ever existed in the world.\" He came to Robespierre through his studies of Buonarroti and even served as Buonarroti's translator for the English edition of Buanarroti's History of Babeuf's Conspiracy for Equality, for which he further included his own observations.",
"title": "United Kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "In the correspondence of Austrian statesman and diplomat Prince Klemens von Metternich and other leaders of the repressive policies that followed the second fall of Napoleon in 1815, Jacobin is the term commonly applied to anyone with progressive tendencies, such as the emperor Alexander I of Russia.",
"title": "Austria"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Federalists often characterized Thomas Jefferson, who himself had intervened in the French Revolution, and his Democratic-Republican party as Jacobins. Early Federalist-leaning American newspapers during the French Revolution referred to the Democratic-Republican party as the \"Jacobin Party\". The most notable examples are the Gazette of the United States, published in Philadelphia, and the Delaware and Eastern-Shore Advertiser, published in Wilmington, during the elections of 1800.",
"title": "United States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In modern American politics, the term Jacobin is often used to describe extremists of any party who demand ideological purity.",
"title": "United States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Evidencing the antagonistic relationship between the press and insurgent Arizona conservative presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, The New York Times attacked Goldwater in their Bastille Day coverage of the 1964 Republican National Convention. The paper called his supporters \"Cactus Jacobins\", comparing their opposition to \"establishment\" Eastern Republicans (see Rockefeller Republican) and \"sensation‐seeking columnists and commentators\" as expressed by moderate former president Dwight Eisenhower to the execution of representatives of the Ancien Régime in the Reign of Terror. In contrast, L. Brent Bozell, Jr. has written in Goldwater's seminal The Conscience of a Conservative (1960) that \"Throughout history, true Conservatism has been at war equally with autocrats and with 'democratic' Jacobins.\"",
"title": "United States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In 2010 an American left-wing socialist publication, Jacobin, was founded.",
"title": "United States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "On 27 May 2010 issue of The New York Review of Books, Columbia university political science and humanities professor and self-described liberal Mark Lilla analyzed three recent books dealing with American political party discontent in a review titled \"The Tea Party Jacobins\". On the other side, historian Victor Davis Hanson likened the rise and policies of leftists in the Democratic Party in 2019 to the Jacobins and Jacobinism.",
"title": "United States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The political rhetoric and populist ideas espoused by the Jacobins would lead to the development of the modern leftist movements throughout the 19th and 20th century, with Jacobinism being the political foundation of almost all leftist schools of thought including anarchism, communism and socialism. The Paris Commune was seen as the revolutionary successor to the Jacobins. The undercurrent of radical and populist tendencies espoused and enacted by the Jacobins would create a complete cultural and societal shock within the traditional and conservative governments of Europe, leading to new political ideas of society emerging. Jacobin rhetoric would lead to increasing secularization and skepticism towards the governments of Europe throughout the 1800s. This complex and complete revolution in political, societal and cultural structure, caused in part by the Jacobins, had lasting impact throughout Europe, with such societal revolutions throughout the 1800s culminating in the Revolutions of 1848.",
"title": "Influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Jacobin populism and complete structural destruction of the old order led to an increasingly revolutionary spirit throughout Europe and such changes would contribute to new political foundations. It also informed new political ideologies. For instance in France, Georges Valois, founder of the first non-Italian fascist party Faisceau, claimed the roots of fascism stemmed from the Jacobin movement. While fascism bears similarities to Jacobinism particularly as a democratic nationalism fighting against an existing order, it is difficult to directly trace such lineage. Fascist groups themselves have held a variety of opinions mostly negative about the French Revolution, with the German National Socialists straightforwardly condemning it. Italian fascists called on fascism to surpass the French Revolution \"with a new kind of democracy run by producers.\" Some French fascists were ambivalent or admired parts of Jacobinism and the Revolution. Valois on the other hand saw the Revolution as the start of a movement both socialist and nationalist, which fascists would complete.",
"title": "Influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Leftist organizations would take different elements from Jacobin's core foundation. Anarchists took influence from the Jacobins use of mass movements, direct democracy and left-wing populism which would influence the tactics of direct action. Some Marxists would take influence from the extreme protectionism of the Jacobins and the notion of the vanguard defender of the republic which would later evolve into vanguardism. The Jacobin philosophy of a complete dismantling of an old system, with completely radical and new structure, is historically seen as one of the most revolutionary and important movements throughout modern history.",
"title": "Influence"
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| A Jacobin was a member of the Jacobin Club, a revolutionary political movement that was the most famous political club during the French Revolution (1789–1799). The club got its name from meeting at the Dominican rue Saint-Honoré Monastery of the Jacobins. The Dominicans in France were called Jacobins because their first house in Paris was the
Saint Jacques Monastery. The terms Jacobin and Jacobinism have been used in a variety of senses. Prior to 1793, the terms were used by contemporaries to describe the politics of Jacobins in the congresses of 1789 through 1792. With the ascendancy of Maximilien Robespierre and the Montagnards into 1793, they have since become synonymous with the policies of the Reign of Terror, with Jacobinism now meaning "Robespierrism". As Jacobinism was memorialized through legend, heritage, tradition and other nonhistorical means over the centuries, the term acquired a "semantic elasticity" in French politics of the late 20th Century with a "vague range of meanings", but all with the "central figure of a sovereign and indivisible public authority with power over civil society." Today in France, Jacobin colloquially indicates an ardent or republican supporter of a centralized and revolutionary democracy or state as well as "a politician who is hostile to any idea of weakening and dismemberment of the State." | 2002-02-25T15:43:11Z | 2023-12-05T01:38:18Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_(politics) |
16,206 | Johann Tobias Krebs | Johann Tobias Krebs (7 July 1690 – 11 February 1762) was a German organist and composer, today best remembered as the father of Johann Ludwig Krebs, one of Bach's most accomplished pupils.
Krebs was born in Heichelheim and went to school in the nearby Weimar. Nothing is known about his early musical training, but at age 20 Krebs was proficient enough at the keyboard to be invited to become organist at Buttelstedt, another town in the same area. Krebs accepted, but continued his music studies in Weimar, travelling there twice a week to study with Johann Gottfried Walther, and later with Johann Sebastian Bach. In 1721 he was accepted a position at Buttstädt, where he played the organ of Michaeliskirche and taught at the school. Krebs remained in Buttstädt for the rest of his life. He had three sons, and the eldest, Johann Ludwig Krebs, became a well-known composer.
Krebs' surviving works are scarce. A few chorale preludes preserved in manuscripts show a marked fondness for counterpoint. Two of the lesser known pieces from the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis catalogue may have been composed by Krebs:
In addition, the Eight Short Preludes and Fugues, BWV 553–560, once attributed to Bach, are now considered to be the work of either Johann Tobias Krebs, or his eldest son. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Johann Tobias Krebs (7 July 1690 – 11 February 1762) was a German organist and composer, today best remembered as the father of Johann Ludwig Krebs, one of Bach's most accomplished pupils.",
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},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Krebs was born in Heichelheim and went to school in the nearby Weimar. Nothing is known about his early musical training, but at age 20 Krebs was proficient enough at the keyboard to be invited to become organist at Buttelstedt, another town in the same area. Krebs accepted, but continued his music studies in Weimar, travelling there twice a week to study with Johann Gottfried Walther, and later with Johann Sebastian Bach. In 1721 he was accepted a position at Buttstädt, where he played the organ of Michaeliskirche and taught at the school. Krebs remained in Buttstädt for the rest of his life. He had three sons, and the eldest, Johann Ludwig Krebs, became a well-known composer.",
"title": ""
},
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"text": "Krebs' surviving works are scarce. A few chorale preludes preserved in manuscripts show a marked fondness for counterpoint. Two of the lesser known pieces from the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis catalogue may have been composed by Krebs:",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In addition, the Eight Short Preludes and Fugues, BWV 553–560, once attributed to Bach, are now considered to be the work of either Johann Tobias Krebs, or his eldest son.",
"title": ""
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"paragraph_id": 4,
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| Johann Tobias Krebs was a German organist and composer, today best remembered as the father of Johann Ludwig Krebs, one of Bach's most accomplished pupils. Krebs was born in Heichelheim and went to school in the nearby Weimar. Nothing is known about his early musical training, but at age 20 Krebs was proficient enough at the keyboard to be invited to become organist at Buttelstedt, another town in the same area. Krebs accepted, but continued his music studies in Weimar, travelling there twice a week to study with Johann Gottfried Walther, and later with Johann Sebastian Bach. In 1721 he was accepted a position at Buttstädt, where he played the organ of Michaeliskirche and taught at the school. Krebs remained in Buttstädt for the rest of his life. He had three sons, and the eldest, Johann Ludwig Krebs, became a well-known composer. Krebs' surviving works are scarce. A few chorale preludes preserved in manuscripts show a marked fondness for counterpoint. Two of the lesser known pieces from the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis catalogue may have been composed by Krebs: Chorale prelude Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, BWV 660b, an arrangement of one of Bach's Leipzig Chorales, Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, BWV 660
Trio in C minor, BWV Anh. 46, a contrapuntal trio which bears some similarity to Bach's organ trio sonatas In addition, the Eight Short Preludes and Fugues, BWV 553–560, once attributed to Bach, are now considered to be the work of either Johann Tobias Krebs, or his eldest son. | 2023-06-20T21:21:26Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Tobias_Krebs |
|
16,207 | Joseph Gurney Cannon | Joseph Gurney Cannon (May 7, 1836 – November 12, 1926) was an American politician from Illinois and leader of the Republican Party. Cannon represented parts of Illinois in the United States House of Representatives for twenty-three non-consecutive terms between 1873 and 1923; upon his retirement, he was the longest serving member of the United States Congress ever. From 1903 to 1911, he presided as Speaker of the House, becoming the most powerful speaker in United States history.
As the Speaker during most of the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, Cannon was an obstacle to the progressive policies advanced by Roosevelt and later abandoned by Taft. A revolt against Cannon's authority as Speaker, led by George W. Norris, was a contributing factor to the Republican Party split in the elections of 1910 and 1912 and led to significant reforms to the House rules.
The Cannon House Office Building, the oldest congressional office building, was named for him in 1962.
Joseph Gurney Cannon was born in Guilford County, North Carolina on May 7, 1836. He was the elder of two sons of Horace Franklin Cannon, a country doctor, and Gulielma Cannon (née Hollingsworth).
The Cannon family were Quakers and, like most members of their faith, opposed to slavery. Abhorring the practice and fearing war, the Cannons were among the many Quakers who left the South for the Western frontier. In 1840, his family moved west with other North Carolina Quakers, settling about 30 miles north of Terre Haute along the Wabash River. Their new settlement became Annapolis, Indiana. Horace Cannon drowned on August 7, 1851, as he tried to reach a sick patient by crossing a creek. Joe Cannon, aged fourteen, became head of the family and took charge of the family farm. He worked as a clerk in a country store to save money and, after five years, the family were able to pay their mortgage.
Cannon became fascinated by the law when asked to testify in a slander case on behalf of a friend represented by John Palmer Usher. He studied under Usher at his Terre Haute office and used the remainder of his savings to enroll in law school at the University of Cincinnati. In 1858, he was admitted to the bar and commenced practice in Terre Haute, Indiana, but was disappointed when Usher refused to offer him a place in his office. He relocated to Shelbyville, Illinois but failed to attract clients, and from there moved on to Tuscola, county seat of the newly organized Coles County. His choice of a new hometown was involuntary; while travelling from Shelbyville to Chicago to find more clients, he ran out of money. He boarded a Chicago-bound train in Mattoon but was removed from the train in Tuscola after failing to show a ticket.
While building his law practice, Cannon became a follower of Abraham Lincoln during the Lincoln–Douglas debates of 1858. He launched his first campaign for the office of state's attorney for Coles County in 1860 but was defeated. However, he was elected in 1861 as state's attorney for the twenty-seventh judicial district, after the Republican legislature reformed the state judicial system. Cannon remained in that position until 1872, when he was elected to the U.S. House.
In 1872, Cannon ran for the U.S. House as an anti-reform candidate supportive of President Ulysses S. Grant. He later recalled it as "a reform year, the beginning of a decade of 'reform' which shook up the virtues as well as the vices of the people. Nothing was right and nobody was safe from the reformers." Despite this, Cannon was elected to represent Illinois's 14th district, which included nearby Danville, in the 43rd Congress.
Initially, Cannon focused on purely local issues. He secured an appointment to the Committee on Post Offices and Post Roads, from which he promoted a bill to provide that postage on newspapers and magazines should be prepaid by publishers, rather than by the subscribers after arrival. Despite opposition from the publishing industry, the measure passed both houses of Congress and became law. His maiden speech in the House was a defense of this bill and the free mailing of seed. Upon a remark by William Walter Phelps that Cannon "must have oats in his pocket," the freshman Representative exclaimed, "Yes! I have oats in my pocket and hayseed in my hair, and the Western people generally are affected the same way. And we expect that the seed, being good, will yield a good crop." The incident gained Cannon an instant national reputation as an advocate for farmers, though he would frequently bemoan that the press treated him as a caricature, rather than giving serious consideration to his legislative proposals.
In 1889, Cannon stood as a candidate for Speaker of the House, but finished a poor third behind Thomas Brackett Reed and William McKinley. Instead, Cannon was named (alongside Reed and McKinley) to the powerful Committee on Rules. As his career progressed, Cannon had gained a reputation for partisan loyalty which was made evident in the 51st Congress. For example, he led opposition within the Republican Party to the Lodge Federal Elections Bill, but after the party caucus approved the bill by one vote, Cannon aided Speaker Reed in passing the bill on an expedited process by a party-line vote. Likewise, when Reed introduced dramatic reforms to the House Rules, Cannon vigorously pressed the issue both in committee and in the whole House. As a consequence of his efforts, Cannon was among the many House Republicans unseated in the 1890 elections.
Cannon was out of office for only one term; he was elected again in 1892. After Reed's abrupt retirement in 1899, Cannon stood again for the Speakership but was defeated by David B. Henderson of Iowa. Cannon finally became Speaker in 1903, at the start of the 58th Congress. From 1895 until he became Speaker, Cannon chaired the powerful Appropriations Committee.
At the time Cannon was elevated to Speaker, the President was Theodore Roosevelt, a fellow Republican. Roosevelt immediately took steps to consult Cannon on legislative matters and the two met several times a week at Roosevelt's request. However, unlike Roosevelt, Cannon opposed most of the progressive reform efforts of the day, including conservation, women's suffrage, the labor movement, and especially reductions in the overall tariff rate. Cannon also came to personally oppose Roosevelt's demanding, autocratic personality, once asserting that Roosevelt had "no more use for the Constitution than a tomcat has for a marriage license." On another occasion, he said, "That fellow at the other end of the Avenue wants everything from the birth of Christ to the death of the devil."
At the time of Cannon's election, the Speaker of the House concurrently held the chair of the Rules Committee, which determined under what rules and restrictions bills could be debated, amended, and voted on, and, in some cases, whether they would be allowed on the floor at all. As such, Cannon effectively controlled every aspect of the House's agenda: bills reached the floor of the house only if Cannon approved of them, and then in whatever form he determined – with Cannon himself deciding whether and to what extent the measures could be debated and amended. Cannon also reserved to himself the right to appoint not only the chairs of the various House committees, but also all of the committees' members, and (despite the seniority system that had begun to develop) used that power to appoint his allies and proteges to leadership positions while punishing those who opposed his legislation.
Cannon wielded the Speaker's authority with unprecedented severity. While his predecessor Thomas Brackett Reed was noted for his dramatic expansion of the Speaker's authority, Cannon distinguished himself by the manner in which he wielded that authority. According to historian Booth Mooney, "The deadly rapier wielded by Reed gave way to a bludgeon, which at first he used only to knock down Democrats." Though Reed had been lampooned as a "Czar," press treatment of "Uncle Joe" Cannon was far more critical during his first term as Speaker. Cannon was criticized by the Democratic press for the arbitrary exercise of his considerable power; on one voice vote, he ruled, "The ayes make the most noise, but the nays have it." On another occasion, Representative Cordell Hull attempted to offer an income tax amendment to a tariff bill, and Cannon simply ignored him. When one Representative was asked by a constituent for a copy of the House Rules, the Representative simply sent back a picture of Speaker Cannon. When confronted with criticisms directly, Cannon would respond that the power he exercised was granted by the whole House, which reserved the authority to amend the Rules or vote him out as Speaker.
Early in his term, Cannon was largely free from opposition within the House majority. His wrath was typically reserved for the Senate, and in conference committees he was a vigorous defender of the House position on legislation, winning him support and admiration from his colleagues. He continued to enjoy the public support of the President, who praised him in 1906 as "a patriotic American... for every man, rich or poor, capitalist or labor man, so long as he is a decent American, and [Cannon] is entitled to our support because he is a patriotic man."
After the 1906 election, the relationship between Cannon and Roosevelt began to fray. Roosevelt, who had already announced he would not campaign in 1908, adopted a more progressive stance against major corporations. Roosevelt's new proposals for a Pure Food and Drug Act, an income tax, an inheritance tax, a federal corporation law, government involvement in labor disputes, laws regulating the labor of women and children, and regulation of railroad securities all drew opposition from Cannon. Quoting John Morley, Cannon began to frequently refer to Roosevelt as "half St. Paul, half St. Vitus." Rumors began to spread that Roosevelt would look to supplant Cannon as speaker, in order to hasten his legislative agenda through the House, but Roosevelt never addressed them, and Cannon survived as Speaker through Roosevelt's term in office.
As early as 1905, Cannon had expressed confidence that he was a contender for the 1908 presidential nomination. Ultimately, Roosevelt was able to maneuver the delegates at the 1908 Republican National Convention in support of William Howard Taft, his Secretary of War. Cannon received 51 of the 54 Illinois delegates and a handful from other states, finishing a distant fourth. Taft was nominated easily on the first ballot. Nevertheless, Cannon was majorly influential at the convention, engineering the party platform and the nomination of conservative James S. Sherman of New York, one of his strongest House allies, for vice president.
During the 1908 campaign, Cannon came under heavy fire from the press, which denounced him as a tyrant and obstacle to every piece of progressive legislation introduced in the prior thirty years. One cartoon depicted him as the "Unrepentant Defendant" in the court trial of "Predatory Wealth" for its victimization of "The Common People." For his part, Cannon attributed the newspaper opposition to his refusal to support Roosevelt's proposal to permit the duty-free importation of newsprint and wood pulp, as well as his very first House bill which passed the cost of magazine and newspaper subscriptions to publishers.
The Democratic Party seized on the issue of House reform, stating in their party platform, "The House of Representatives, as controlled in recent years by the Republican party, has ceased to be a deliberative and legislative body, responsive to the will of a majority of its members, but has come under the absolute domination of the Speaker, who has entire control of its deliberations and powers of legislation. ... Legislative government becomes a failure when one member, in the person of the Speaker, is more powerful than the entire body." William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic nominee for president, and labor leader Samuel Gompers each visited Illinois to campaign against Cannon's re-election. Even some Republicans, including Nebraska representative George W. Norris, campaigned against "Cannonism." Taft himself privately admitted, "the great weight I have to carry in this campaign is Cannonism." Nevertheless, Taft and the Republicans won an easy victory in the fall elections; Norris, who had distinguished himself as an intra-party rival to Cannon's power, won re-election by only 22 votes.
When the 61st Congress met in March 1909, Roosevelt and Taft agreed that Cannon could not be removed as Speaker. The large Republican majority carried him to another term in office, though a core of twelve "Insurgent" members refused to vote for him. However, the new Democratic floor leader, Champ Clark, forced a roll-call vote on the usually uncontested vote to adopt the rules of the previous Congress. An amendment was ultimately adopted, with Democratic and Insurgent votes, to revise certain rules, including the introduction of a unanimous consent calendar for those bills which were not contested. In retaliation, Cannon removed three Insurgents from committee chairs and moved others to less significant committees. To the press, Cannon said, "Judas was an insurgent and sold his Master for thirty pieces of silver. I have no doubt he would have been applauded by the newspapers in Jerusalem had there been any in that day."
As Cannon's power continued to expand, his relationship with Taft continued to decline. Taft stayed out of House business, neither aiding nor opposing Cannon, but he privately noted that it was his wish to have Cannon removed. Cannon likewise grew critical of Taft, particularly after his elevation of Edward Douglass White, a Catholic Democrat, as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. A growing movement within the Republican Party came to support Cannon's removal as Speaker, for pragmatic reasons; Henry Cabot Lodge advised Roosevelt that the Republicans would lose the House if Cannon remained, Taft expressed that such removal would "accord... with the welfare of the Republican party," and various Republican newspapers suggested his resignation as Speaker or even from Congress. In the face of growing opposition, Cannon grew defiant. He said, "I will say positively that I will not retire from Congress until my constituents fail to give me a majority." In one public meeting, he pulled open his coat and shouted, "Behold Mr. Cannon, the Beelzebub of Congress! Gaze on this noble manly form—me, Beelzebub! Me, the Czar!" Of the Insurgents, he remarked that they were "dishonest and disgruntled"; he accused them of introducing demagogic bills which would never be approved, then telling the "ignorant element" of their constituents that Cannon had personally stopped the bill, "thus creating the belief that the Speaker was a 'Czar' and controlled by the 'interests.'"
On March 16, 1910, Cannon's power began to crack when the House voted against his ruling on a matter of procedure. Edgar Crumpacker, chair of the Committee on the Census, introduced a joint resolution regarding the upcoming census. Though the resolution was not in the order of business, Crumpacker argued that the matter was constitutionally privileged, as the census was mandated by the Constitution, and the Constitution overrode any House rule. Cannon ruled in favor of the argument, but the House majority voted not to sustain his ruling. It was rare for the House to reject a Speaker's ruling, and Cannon bitterly remarked that his "face [had been] rubbed in the sand." Sensing an opening, George Norris took the opportunity. The next day, Norris introduced a prepared resolution to create a new Rules Committee with fifteen members, all elected by the House. The Speaker, who had been the chair of the Rules Committee ex officio since 1880, would be barred from membership, thus placing the Committee (and ostensibly the House) above the Speaker's authority, with the power to revise that authority. Like Crumpacker, Norris claimed his resolution was constitutionally privileged under Article I, Section 5: "Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings..." and therefore should be heard immediately by the whole House. Having used Cannon's own ruling against him, Norris placed the Speaker in a double-bind. Cannon immediately denounced the resolution as "anarchy under the color of law," but hurriedly withdrew to whip votes against it. His lieutenants delayed through dilatory tactics while loyal members returned to the Capitol, but after a weekend recess, Cannon proved unable to rally support to his side. On March 19, Cannon ruled Norris's resolution out of order, citing a long list of precedential rulings by prior Speakers, but the House again overruled him on appeal, by a vote of 182 to 163. The House immediately voted on the resolution itself, and it passed with 42 Republican and all 149 Democratic votes by the margin of 191 to 156. Cannon did maintain his position as Speaker by entertaining an immediate motion to vacate, which he won handily since the Republican majority would not risk a Democratic speaker replacing him. However, his iron rule of the House was broken.
The new Rules Committee, chaired by John Dalzell, passed a flurry of reforms, including a discharge rule empowering a majority to remove bills from committee and a "Calendar Wednesday," allowing committees to present bills otherwise blocked from consideration by the Speaker's scheduling. Despite the dramatic reduction in Cannon's powers, Republican prospects for the upcoming election did not improve. The Democrats won control of the House in the 1910 midterm elections for the first time since 1894; Cannon himself struggled for his re-election.
After Republicans became the minority party in the House, Cannon refused to serve as minority leader. He returned as ranking member of the Appropriations Committee, which he had chaired before his term as Speaker. While as chair he had favored lower spending, as ranking member he presented numerous expenditure measures to the Democratic majority. When the Insurgents' revolt of 1910 evolved into the Republican Party split of 1912, Cannon was defeated for re-election. He returned in 1914 and was re-elected each congressional election until 1920. He was a critic of President Woodrow Wilson and U.S. entry into World War I. He was also an outspoken critic of Wilson's League of Nations.
Cannon declined to run in the 1922 congressional election and retired at the end of his last term in 1923; he was featured on the cover of the first issue of Time magazine on the last day of his last term in office.
Cannon was one of the charter members of Tuscola's Masonic Lodge No. 332, which was founded on October 2, 1860.
Cannon married Mary Reed in 1862. They had two daughters. In 1876, Cannon moved his family to Danville, Illinois, where he resided for the rest of his life.
Born a Quaker, he became a Methodist after leaving Congress. However, he may have been effectively a Methodist long before this. After marrying in a Methodist service, a Quaker encouraged him to express regret for this, to which Cannon replied, "If you mean that I am to get up in meeting and say that I am sorry I married Mary, I won't do it. I'm damned if I'm sorry and I'm damned if I will say I am."
Cannon died in his residence in Danville, Vermilion County, Illinois on November 12, 1926, while in a deep sleep. He had a weakened heart and also suffered from the general effects of old age.
He was buried in Spring Hill Cemetery.
The first building of offices for congressmen outside of the United States Capitol building was named after Cannon.
His antic speaking style, diminutive stature and pugnacious manner were his trademarks. The newspapers frequently lampooned him as a colorful rube.
Despite his reputation for tyranny in the House, Cannon was well-liked by colleagues and friends in Washington, including members of the opposition.
Cannon is to date the second longest-serving Republican Representative, surpassed only by Alaska congressman Don Young, and also was the first member of Congress of either party ever to surpass 40 years of service (non-consecutive). His congressional career spanned 46 years of cumulative service, a concurrent 50 years, barring two terms after which he came back—a record not broken until 1959. He is the longest-serving member ever of the House of Representatives in Illinois, although the longest continuous service belongs to Adolph J. Sabath. He served in the House during the terms of 11 presidents, a record he shares with John Dingell and Jamie Whitten.
Cannon is to date the second-longest continuously serving Republican Speaker in history, after another Illinoisan, Dennis Hastert, who surpassed him on June 1, 2006. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Joseph Gurney Cannon (May 7, 1836 – November 12, 1926) was an American politician from Illinois and leader of the Republican Party. Cannon represented parts of Illinois in the United States House of Representatives for twenty-three non-consecutive terms between 1873 and 1923; upon his retirement, he was the longest serving member of the United States Congress ever. From 1903 to 1911, he presided as Speaker of the House, becoming the most powerful speaker in United States history.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "As the Speaker during most of the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, Cannon was an obstacle to the progressive policies advanced by Roosevelt and later abandoned by Taft. A revolt against Cannon's authority as Speaker, led by George W. Norris, was a contributing factor to the Republican Party split in the elections of 1910 and 1912 and led to significant reforms to the House rules.",
"title": ""
},
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"text": "The Cannon House Office Building, the oldest congressional office building, was named for him in 1962.",
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"text": "Joseph Gurney Cannon was born in Guilford County, North Carolina on May 7, 1836. He was the elder of two sons of Horace Franklin Cannon, a country doctor, and Gulielma Cannon (née Hollingsworth).",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The Cannon family were Quakers and, like most members of their faith, opposed to slavery. Abhorring the practice and fearing war, the Cannons were among the many Quakers who left the South for the Western frontier. In 1840, his family moved west with other North Carolina Quakers, settling about 30 miles north of Terre Haute along the Wabash River. Their new settlement became Annapolis, Indiana. Horace Cannon drowned on August 7, 1851, as he tried to reach a sick patient by crossing a creek. Joe Cannon, aged fourteen, became head of the family and took charge of the family farm. He worked as a clerk in a country store to save money and, after five years, the family were able to pay their mortgage.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Cannon became fascinated by the law when asked to testify in a slander case on behalf of a friend represented by John Palmer Usher. He studied under Usher at his Terre Haute office and used the remainder of his savings to enroll in law school at the University of Cincinnati. In 1858, he was admitted to the bar and commenced practice in Terre Haute, Indiana, but was disappointed when Usher refused to offer him a place in his office. He relocated to Shelbyville, Illinois but failed to attract clients, and from there moved on to Tuscola, county seat of the newly organized Coles County. His choice of a new hometown was involuntary; while travelling from Shelbyville to Chicago to find more clients, he ran out of money. He boarded a Chicago-bound train in Mattoon but was removed from the train in Tuscola after failing to show a ticket.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "While building his law practice, Cannon became a follower of Abraham Lincoln during the Lincoln–Douglas debates of 1858. He launched his first campaign for the office of state's attorney for Coles County in 1860 but was defeated. However, he was elected in 1861 as state's attorney for the twenty-seventh judicial district, after the Republican legislature reformed the state judicial system. Cannon remained in that position until 1872, when he was elected to the U.S. House.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In 1872, Cannon ran for the U.S. House as an anti-reform candidate supportive of President Ulysses S. Grant. He later recalled it as \"a reform year, the beginning of a decade of 'reform' which shook up the virtues as well as the vices of the people. Nothing was right and nobody was safe from the reformers.\" Despite this, Cannon was elected to represent Illinois's 14th district, which included nearby Danville, in the 43rd Congress.",
"title": "Early House career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Initially, Cannon focused on purely local issues. He secured an appointment to the Committee on Post Offices and Post Roads, from which he promoted a bill to provide that postage on newspapers and magazines should be prepaid by publishers, rather than by the subscribers after arrival. Despite opposition from the publishing industry, the measure passed both houses of Congress and became law. His maiden speech in the House was a defense of this bill and the free mailing of seed. Upon a remark by William Walter Phelps that Cannon \"must have oats in his pocket,\" the freshman Representative exclaimed, \"Yes! I have oats in my pocket and hayseed in my hair, and the Western people generally are affected the same way. And we expect that the seed, being good, will yield a good crop.\" The incident gained Cannon an instant national reputation as an advocate for farmers, though he would frequently bemoan that the press treated him as a caricature, rather than giving serious consideration to his legislative proposals.",
"title": "Early House career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In 1889, Cannon stood as a candidate for Speaker of the House, but finished a poor third behind Thomas Brackett Reed and William McKinley. Instead, Cannon was named (alongside Reed and McKinley) to the powerful Committee on Rules. As his career progressed, Cannon had gained a reputation for partisan loyalty which was made evident in the 51st Congress. For example, he led opposition within the Republican Party to the Lodge Federal Elections Bill, but after the party caucus approved the bill by one vote, Cannon aided Speaker Reed in passing the bill on an expedited process by a party-line vote. Likewise, when Reed introduced dramatic reforms to the House Rules, Cannon vigorously pressed the issue both in committee and in the whole House. As a consequence of his efforts, Cannon was among the many House Republicans unseated in the 1890 elections.",
"title": "Early House career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Cannon was out of office for only one term; he was elected again in 1892. After Reed's abrupt retirement in 1899, Cannon stood again for the Speakership but was defeated by David B. Henderson of Iowa. Cannon finally became Speaker in 1903, at the start of the 58th Congress. From 1895 until he became Speaker, Cannon chaired the powerful Appropriations Committee.",
"title": "Early House career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "At the time Cannon was elevated to Speaker, the President was Theodore Roosevelt, a fellow Republican. Roosevelt immediately took steps to consult Cannon on legislative matters and the two met several times a week at Roosevelt's request. However, unlike Roosevelt, Cannon opposed most of the progressive reform efforts of the day, including conservation, women's suffrage, the labor movement, and especially reductions in the overall tariff rate. Cannon also came to personally oppose Roosevelt's demanding, autocratic personality, once asserting that Roosevelt had \"no more use for the Constitution than a tomcat has for a marriage license.\" On another occasion, he said, \"That fellow at the other end of the Avenue wants everything from the birth of Christ to the death of the devil.\"",
"title": "Speaker of the House (1903–1911)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "At the time of Cannon's election, the Speaker of the House concurrently held the chair of the Rules Committee, which determined under what rules and restrictions bills could be debated, amended, and voted on, and, in some cases, whether they would be allowed on the floor at all. As such, Cannon effectively controlled every aspect of the House's agenda: bills reached the floor of the house only if Cannon approved of them, and then in whatever form he determined – with Cannon himself deciding whether and to what extent the measures could be debated and amended. Cannon also reserved to himself the right to appoint not only the chairs of the various House committees, but also all of the committees' members, and (despite the seniority system that had begun to develop) used that power to appoint his allies and proteges to leadership positions while punishing those who opposed his legislation.",
"title": "Speaker of the House (1903–1911)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Cannon wielded the Speaker's authority with unprecedented severity. While his predecessor Thomas Brackett Reed was noted for his dramatic expansion of the Speaker's authority, Cannon distinguished himself by the manner in which he wielded that authority. According to historian Booth Mooney, \"The deadly rapier wielded by Reed gave way to a bludgeon, which at first he used only to knock down Democrats.\" Though Reed had been lampooned as a \"Czar,\" press treatment of \"Uncle Joe\" Cannon was far more critical during his first term as Speaker. Cannon was criticized by the Democratic press for the arbitrary exercise of his considerable power; on one voice vote, he ruled, \"The ayes make the most noise, but the nays have it.\" On another occasion, Representative Cordell Hull attempted to offer an income tax amendment to a tariff bill, and Cannon simply ignored him. When one Representative was asked by a constituent for a copy of the House Rules, the Representative simply sent back a picture of Speaker Cannon. When confronted with criticisms directly, Cannon would respond that the power he exercised was granted by the whole House, which reserved the authority to amend the Rules or vote him out as Speaker.",
"title": "Speaker of the House (1903–1911)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Early in his term, Cannon was largely free from opposition within the House majority. His wrath was typically reserved for the Senate, and in conference committees he was a vigorous defender of the House position on legislation, winning him support and admiration from his colleagues. He continued to enjoy the public support of the President, who praised him in 1906 as \"a patriotic American... for every man, rich or poor, capitalist or labor man, so long as he is a decent American, and [Cannon] is entitled to our support because he is a patriotic man.\"",
"title": "Speaker of the House (1903–1911)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "After the 1906 election, the relationship between Cannon and Roosevelt began to fray. Roosevelt, who had already announced he would not campaign in 1908, adopted a more progressive stance against major corporations. Roosevelt's new proposals for a Pure Food and Drug Act, an income tax, an inheritance tax, a federal corporation law, government involvement in labor disputes, laws regulating the labor of women and children, and regulation of railroad securities all drew opposition from Cannon. Quoting John Morley, Cannon began to frequently refer to Roosevelt as \"half St. Paul, half St. Vitus.\" Rumors began to spread that Roosevelt would look to supplant Cannon as speaker, in order to hasten his legislative agenda through the House, but Roosevelt never addressed them, and Cannon survived as Speaker through Roosevelt's term in office.",
"title": "Speaker of the House (1903–1911)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "As early as 1905, Cannon had expressed confidence that he was a contender for the 1908 presidential nomination. Ultimately, Roosevelt was able to maneuver the delegates at the 1908 Republican National Convention in support of William Howard Taft, his Secretary of War. Cannon received 51 of the 54 Illinois delegates and a handful from other states, finishing a distant fourth. Taft was nominated easily on the first ballot. Nevertheless, Cannon was majorly influential at the convention, engineering the party platform and the nomination of conservative James S. Sherman of New York, one of his strongest House allies, for vice president.",
"title": "Speaker of the House (1903–1911)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "During the 1908 campaign, Cannon came under heavy fire from the press, which denounced him as a tyrant and obstacle to every piece of progressive legislation introduced in the prior thirty years. One cartoon depicted him as the \"Unrepentant Defendant\" in the court trial of \"Predatory Wealth\" for its victimization of \"The Common People.\" For his part, Cannon attributed the newspaper opposition to his refusal to support Roosevelt's proposal to permit the duty-free importation of newsprint and wood pulp, as well as his very first House bill which passed the cost of magazine and newspaper subscriptions to publishers.",
"title": "Speaker of the House (1903–1911)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The Democratic Party seized on the issue of House reform, stating in their party platform, \"The House of Representatives, as controlled in recent years by the Republican party, has ceased to be a deliberative and legislative body, responsive to the will of a majority of its members, but has come under the absolute domination of the Speaker, who has entire control of its deliberations and powers of legislation. ... Legislative government becomes a failure when one member, in the person of the Speaker, is more powerful than the entire body.\" William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic nominee for president, and labor leader Samuel Gompers each visited Illinois to campaign against Cannon's re-election. Even some Republicans, including Nebraska representative George W. Norris, campaigned against \"Cannonism.\" Taft himself privately admitted, \"the great weight I have to carry in this campaign is Cannonism.\" Nevertheless, Taft and the Republicans won an easy victory in the fall elections; Norris, who had distinguished himself as an intra-party rival to Cannon's power, won re-election by only 22 votes.",
"title": "Speaker of the House (1903–1911)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "When the 61st Congress met in March 1909, Roosevelt and Taft agreed that Cannon could not be removed as Speaker. The large Republican majority carried him to another term in office, though a core of twelve \"Insurgent\" members refused to vote for him. However, the new Democratic floor leader, Champ Clark, forced a roll-call vote on the usually uncontested vote to adopt the rules of the previous Congress. An amendment was ultimately adopted, with Democratic and Insurgent votes, to revise certain rules, including the introduction of a unanimous consent calendar for those bills which were not contested. In retaliation, Cannon removed three Insurgents from committee chairs and moved others to less significant committees. To the press, Cannon said, \"Judas was an insurgent and sold his Master for thirty pieces of silver. I have no doubt he would have been applauded by the newspapers in Jerusalem had there been any in that day.\"",
"title": "Speaker of the House (1903–1911)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "As Cannon's power continued to expand, his relationship with Taft continued to decline. Taft stayed out of House business, neither aiding nor opposing Cannon, but he privately noted that it was his wish to have Cannon removed. Cannon likewise grew critical of Taft, particularly after his elevation of Edward Douglass White, a Catholic Democrat, as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. A growing movement within the Republican Party came to support Cannon's removal as Speaker, for pragmatic reasons; Henry Cabot Lodge advised Roosevelt that the Republicans would lose the House if Cannon remained, Taft expressed that such removal would \"accord... with the welfare of the Republican party,\" and various Republican newspapers suggested his resignation as Speaker or even from Congress. In the face of growing opposition, Cannon grew defiant. He said, \"I will say positively that I will not retire from Congress until my constituents fail to give me a majority.\" In one public meeting, he pulled open his coat and shouted, \"Behold Mr. Cannon, the Beelzebub of Congress! Gaze on this noble manly form—me, Beelzebub! Me, the Czar!\" Of the Insurgents, he remarked that they were \"dishonest and disgruntled\"; he accused them of introducing demagogic bills which would never be approved, then telling the \"ignorant element\" of their constituents that Cannon had personally stopped the bill, \"thus creating the belief that the Speaker was a 'Czar' and controlled by the 'interests.'\"",
"title": "Speaker of the House (1903–1911)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "On March 16, 1910, Cannon's power began to crack when the House voted against his ruling on a matter of procedure. Edgar Crumpacker, chair of the Committee on the Census, introduced a joint resolution regarding the upcoming census. Though the resolution was not in the order of business, Crumpacker argued that the matter was constitutionally privileged, as the census was mandated by the Constitution, and the Constitution overrode any House rule. Cannon ruled in favor of the argument, but the House majority voted not to sustain his ruling. It was rare for the House to reject a Speaker's ruling, and Cannon bitterly remarked that his \"face [had been] rubbed in the sand.\" Sensing an opening, George Norris took the opportunity. The next day, Norris introduced a prepared resolution to create a new Rules Committee with fifteen members, all elected by the House. The Speaker, who had been the chair of the Rules Committee ex officio since 1880, would be barred from membership, thus placing the Committee (and ostensibly the House) above the Speaker's authority, with the power to revise that authority. Like Crumpacker, Norris claimed his resolution was constitutionally privileged under Article I, Section 5: \"Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings...\" and therefore should be heard immediately by the whole House. Having used Cannon's own ruling against him, Norris placed the Speaker in a double-bind. Cannon immediately denounced the resolution as \"anarchy under the color of law,\" but hurriedly withdrew to whip votes against it. His lieutenants delayed through dilatory tactics while loyal members returned to the Capitol, but after a weekend recess, Cannon proved unable to rally support to his side. On March 19, Cannon ruled Norris's resolution out of order, citing a long list of precedential rulings by prior Speakers, but the House again overruled him on appeal, by a vote of 182 to 163. The House immediately voted on the resolution itself, and it passed with 42 Republican and all 149 Democratic votes by the margin of 191 to 156. Cannon did maintain his position as Speaker by entertaining an immediate motion to vacate, which he won handily since the Republican majority would not risk a Democratic speaker replacing him. However, his iron rule of the House was broken.",
"title": "Speaker of the House (1903–1911)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The new Rules Committee, chaired by John Dalzell, passed a flurry of reforms, including a discharge rule empowering a majority to remove bills from committee and a \"Calendar Wednesday,\" allowing committees to present bills otherwise blocked from consideration by the Speaker's scheduling. Despite the dramatic reduction in Cannon's powers, Republican prospects for the upcoming election did not improve. The Democrats won control of the House in the 1910 midterm elections for the first time since 1894; Cannon himself struggled for his re-election.",
"title": "Speaker of the House (1903–1911)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "After Republicans became the minority party in the House, Cannon refused to serve as minority leader. He returned as ranking member of the Appropriations Committee, which he had chaired before his term as Speaker. While as chair he had favored lower spending, as ranking member he presented numerous expenditure measures to the Democratic majority. When the Insurgents' revolt of 1910 evolved into the Republican Party split of 1912, Cannon was defeated for re-election. He returned in 1914 and was re-elected each congressional election until 1920. He was a critic of President Woodrow Wilson and U.S. entry into World War I. He was also an outspoken critic of Wilson's League of Nations.",
"title": "Later House career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Cannon declined to run in the 1922 congressional election and retired at the end of his last term in 1923; he was featured on the cover of the first issue of Time magazine on the last day of his last term in office.",
"title": "Later House career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Cannon was one of the charter members of Tuscola's Masonic Lodge No. 332, which was founded on October 2, 1860.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Cannon married Mary Reed in 1862. They had two daughters. In 1876, Cannon moved his family to Danville, Illinois, where he resided for the rest of his life.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Born a Quaker, he became a Methodist after leaving Congress. However, he may have been effectively a Methodist long before this. After marrying in a Methodist service, a Quaker encouraged him to express regret for this, to which Cannon replied, \"If you mean that I am to get up in meeting and say that I am sorry I married Mary, I won't do it. I'm damned if I'm sorry and I'm damned if I will say I am.\"",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Cannon died in his residence in Danville, Vermilion County, Illinois on November 12, 1926, while in a deep sleep. He had a weakened heart and also suffered from the general effects of old age.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "He was buried in Spring Hill Cemetery.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The first building of offices for congressmen outside of the United States Capitol building was named after Cannon.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "His antic speaking style, diminutive stature and pugnacious manner were his trademarks. The newspapers frequently lampooned him as a colorful rube.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Despite his reputation for tyranny in the House, Cannon was well-liked by colleagues and friends in Washington, including members of the opposition.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Cannon is to date the second longest-serving Republican Representative, surpassed only by Alaska congressman Don Young, and also was the first member of Congress of either party ever to surpass 40 years of service (non-consecutive). His congressional career spanned 46 years of cumulative service, a concurrent 50 years, barring two terms after which he came back—a record not broken until 1959. He is the longest-serving member ever of the House of Representatives in Illinois, although the longest continuous service belongs to Adolph J. Sabath. He served in the House during the terms of 11 presidents, a record he shares with John Dingell and Jamie Whitten.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Cannon is to date the second-longest continuously serving Republican Speaker in history, after another Illinoisan, Dennis Hastert, who surpassed him on June 1, 2006.",
"title": "Legacy"
}
]
| Joseph Gurney Cannon was an American politician from Illinois and leader of the Republican Party. Cannon represented parts of Illinois in the United States House of Representatives for twenty-three non-consecutive terms between 1873 and 1923; upon his retirement, he was the longest serving member of the United States Congress ever. From 1903 to 1911, he presided as Speaker of the House, becoming the most powerful speaker in United States history. As the Speaker during most of the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, Cannon was an obstacle to the progressive policies advanced by Roosevelt and later abandoned by Taft. A revolt against Cannon's authority as Speaker, led by George W. Norris, was a contributing factor to the Republican Party split in the elections of 1910 and 1912 and led to significant reforms to the House rules. The Cannon House Office Building, the oldest congressional office building, was named for him in 1962. | 2002-02-07T05:08:41Z | 2023-12-26T23:08:03Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Gurney_Cannon |
16,208 | James G. Blaine | James Gillespie Blaine (January 31, 1830 – January 27, 1893) was an American statesman and Republican politician who represented Maine in the United States House of Representatives from 1863 to 1876, serving as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1869 to 1875, and then in the United States Senate from 1876 to 1881.
Blaine twice served as Secretary of State, first in 1881 under President James A. Garfield and Chester A. Arthur, and then from 1889 to 1892 under President Benjamin Harrison. He is one of only two U.S. Secretaries of State to hold the position under three separate presidents, the other being Daniel Webster. Blaine unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for President in 1876 and 1880 before being nominated in 1884. In the 1884 general election, he was narrowly defeated by Democratic nominee Grover Cleveland. Blaine was one of the late 19th century's leading Republicans and a champion of the party's moderate reformist faction, later known as the "Half-Breeds".
Blaine was born in the western Pennsylvania town of West Brownsville and moved to Maine after completing college where he became a newspaper editor. Nicknamed "the Magnetic Man", he was a charismatic speaker in an era that prized oratory. He began his political career as an early supporter of Republican Abraham Lincoln and the Union war effort in the American Civil War. During Reconstruction, Blaine was a supporter of black suffrage, but opposed some of the more coercive measures of the Radical Republicans. Initially in favor of high tariffs, he later worked to lower tariffs and expand international trade. Railroad promotion and construction were important issues in his time and, as a result of his interest and support, Blaine was widely suspected of corruption in awarding railroad charters, especially with the emergence of the Mulligan letters. Though no evidence of corruption ever surfaced from these allegations, they nevertheless plagued his 1884 presidential candidacy.
As Secretary of State, Blaine was a transitional figure, marking the end of an isolationist era in foreign policy and foreshadowing the rise of the American Century that would begin with the Spanish–American War. His efforts to expand U.S. trade and influence began the nation's shift to a more active American foreign policy. Blaine was a pioneer of tariff reciprocity and urged greater involvement in Latin American affairs. An expansionist, Blaine's policies would lead in less than a decade to the establishment of the U.S. acquisition of Pacific colonies and dominance in the Caribbean.
James Gillespie Blaine was born January 31, 1830, in West Brownsville, Pennsylvania, the third child of Ephraim Lyon Blaine and his wife Maria (Gillespie) Blaine. He had two older sisters, Harriet and Margaret. Blaine's father was a western Pennsylvania businessman and landowner, and the family lived in relative comfort. On his father's side, Blaine was descended from Scotch-Irish settlers who first emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1745. His great-grandfather Ephraim Blaine served as a Commissary-General under George Washington in the American Revolutionary War. Blaine's mother and her forebears were Irish Catholics who immigrated to Pennsylvania in the 1780s. Blaine's parents were married in 1820 in a Catholic ceremony, although Blaine's father remained a Presbyterian. Following a common compromise of the era, the Blaines agreed that their daughters would be raised in their mother's Catholic faith while their sons would be brought up in their father's religion. James Blaine's cousin, Angela Gillespie, was a nun and founded the American branch of the Sisters of the Holy Cross. In politics, Blaine's father supported the Whig Party.
Blaine's biographers describe his childhood as "harmonious," and note that the boy took an early interest in history and literature. At the age of thirteen, Blaine enrolled in his father's alma mater, Washington College (now Washington & Jefferson College), in nearby Washington, Pennsylvania. There, he was a member of the Washington Literary Society, one of the college's debating societies. Blaine succeeded academically, graduating near the top of his class and delivering the salutatory address in June 1847. After graduation, Blaine considered attending Yale Law School, but ultimately decided against it, instead moving west to find a job.
In 1848, Blaine was hired as a professor of mathematics and ancient languages at the Western Military Institute in Georgetown, Kentucky. Although he was only 18 years old and younger than many of his students, Blaine adapted well to his new profession. Blaine grew to enjoy life in his adopted state and became an admirer of Kentucky Senator Henry Clay. He also made the acquaintance of Harriet Stanwood, a teacher at the nearby Millersburg Female College and native of Maine. On June 30, 1850, the two wed. Blaine once again considered taking up the study of law, but instead took his new bride to visit his family in Pennsylvania. They next lived with Harriet Blaine's family in Augusta, Maine, for several months, where their first child, Stanwood Blaine, was born in 1851. The young family soon moved again, this time to Philadelphia where Blaine took a job at the Pennsylvania Institution for the Instruction of the Blind (now Overbrook School for the Blind) in 1852, teaching science and literature.
Philadelphia's law libraries gave Blaine the chance to at last begin to study the law, but in 1853 he received a more tempting offer: to become editor and co-owner of the Kennebec Journal. Blaine had spent several vacations in his wife's native state of Maine and had become friendly with the Journal's editors. When the newspaper's founder, Luther Severance, retired, Blaine was invited to purchase the publication along with co-editor Joseph Baker. He quickly accepted, borrowing the purchase price from his wife's brothers. In 1854, Baker sold his share to John L. Stevens, a local minister. The Journal had been a staunchly Whig newspaper, which coincided with Blaine's and Stevens' political opinions. The decision to become a newspaperman, unexpected as it was, started Blaine on the road to a lifelong career in politics. Blaine's purchase of the Journal coincided with the demise of the Whig party and birth of the Republican party, and Blaine and Stevens actively promoted the new party in their newspaper. The newspaper was financially successful, and Blaine was soon able to invest his profits in coal mines in Pennsylvania and Virginia, forming the basis of his future wealth.
Blaine's career as a Republican newspaperman led naturally to involvement in party politics. In 1856, he was selected as a delegate to the first Republican National Convention. From the party's early days, Blaine identified with the conservative wing, supporting Supreme Court Justice John McLean for the presidential nomination over the more radical John C. Frémont, the eventual nominee. The following year, Blaine was offered the editorship of the Portland Daily Advertiser, which he accepted, selling his interest in the Journal soon thereafter. He still maintained his home in Augusta, however, with his growing family. Although Blaine's first son, Stanwood, died in infancy, he and Harriet had two more sons soon afterward: Walker, in 1855, and Emmons, in 1857. They would have four more children in years to come: Alice, James, Margaret, and Harriet. It was around this time that Blaine left the Presbyterian church of his childhood and joined his wife's new denomination, becoming a member of the South Parish Congregational Church in Augusta.
In 1858, Blaine ran for a seat in the Maine House of Representatives, and was elected. He ran for reelection in 1859, 1860, and 1861, and was successful each time by large majorities. The added responsibilities led Blaine to reduce his duties with the Advertiser in 1860, and he soon ceased editorial work altogether. Meanwhile, his political power was growing as he became chairman of the Republican state committee in 1859, replacing Stevens. Blaine was not a delegate to the Republican convention in 1860, but attended anyway as an enthusiastic supporter of Abraham Lincoln. Returning to Maine, he was elected Speaker of the Maine House of Representatives in 1861 and reelected in 1862. With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, he supported Lincoln's war effort and saw that the Maine Legislature voted to organize and equip units to join the Union Army.
Blaine had considered running for the United States House of Representatives from Maine's 4th district in 1860, but agreed to step aside when Anson P. Morrill, a former governor, announced his interest in the seat. Morrill was successful, but after redistricting placed Blaine in the 3rd district for the 1862 election, he allowed his name to be put forward. Running on a campaign of staunch support for the war effort, Blaine was elected by a wide margin; though nationwide, the Republican Party lost a significant number of seats in Congress as the Union war effort to date had been only weakly successful. By the time Blaine took his seat in December 1863, at the start of the 38th Congress, the Union Army had turned the tide of the war with victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg.
As a first-term congressman, he initially said little, mostly following the administration's lead in supporting the continuing war effort. He did clash several times with the leader of the Republicans' radical faction, Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, firstly over payment of states' debts incurred in supporting the war, and again over monetary policy concerning the new greenback currency. Blaine also spoke in support of the commutation provision of the military draft law passed in 1863 and proposed a constitutional amendment allowing the federal government to impose taxes on exports, but it never passed.
Blaine was reelected in 1864 and, when the 39th Congress assembled in December 1865, the main issue was the Reconstruction of the defeated Confederate States. Although he was not a member of the committee charged with drafting what became the Fourteenth Amendment, Blaine did make his views on the subject known and believed that three-fourths of the non-seceded states would be needed to ratify it, rather than three-fourths of all states, an opinion that did not prevail and placed him, atypically, in the radical camp. The Republican Congress also played a role in the governance of the conquered South, dissolving the state governments President Andrew Johnson had installed and substituting military governments under Congress' control. Blaine voted in favor of these new, harsher measures, but also supported some leniency toward the former rebels when he opposed a bill that would have barred Southerners from attending the United States Military Academy. Blaine voted to impeach Johnson in 1868, although he had initially opposed the effort. Later, Blaine was more ambiguous about the validity of the charges against Johnson, writing that "there was a very grave difference of opinion among those equally competent to decide," but he followed his party's leaders.
Continuing his earlier battle with Stevens, Blaine led the fight in Congress for a strong dollar. After the issuance of 150 million dollars in greenbacks—non-gold-backed currency—the value of the dollar stood at a low ebb. A bipartisan group of inflationists, led by Republican Benjamin F. Butler and Democrat George H. Pendleton, wished to preserve the status quo and allow the Treasury to continue to issue greenbacks and even to use them to pay the interest due on pre-war bonds. Blaine called this idea a repudiation of the nation's promise to investors, which was made when the only currency was gold. Speaking several times on the matter, Blaine said that the greenbacks had only ever been an emergency measure to avoid bankruptcy during the war. Blaine and his hard money allies were successful, but the issue remained alive until 1879, when all remaining greenbacks were made redeemable in gold by the Specie Payment Resumption Act of 1875.
During his first three terms in Congress, Blaine had earned for himself a reputation as an expert of parliamentary procedure, and, aside from a growing feud with Roscoe Conkling of New York, had become popular among his fellow Republicans. In March 1869, when Speaker Schuyler Colfax resigned from office at the end of the 40th Congress to become vice president, the highly regarded Blaine was the unanimous choice of the Republican Congressional Caucus to become Speaker of the House for the 41st Congress. In the subsequent March 4, 1869, election for Speaker, Blaine easily defeated Democrat Michael C. Kerr of Indiana by a vote of 135 to 57. Republicans remained in control of the House in the 42nd and 43rd congresses, and Blaine was re-elected as speaker at the start of both of them. His time as speaker came to an end following the 1874-75 elections which produced a Democratic majority in the House for the 44th Congress.
Blaine was an effective Speaker with a magnetic personality. In the words of Washington journalist Benjamin Perley Poore, Blaine's "graceful as well as powerful figure, his strong features, glowing with health, and his hearty, honest manner, made him an attractive speaker and an esteemed friend." Moreover, President Ulysses S. Grant valued his skill and loyalty in leading the House. He enjoyed the job and made his presence in Washington more permanent by buying a large residence on Fifteenth Street in the city. At the same time, the Blaine family moved to a mansion in Augusta.
During Blaine's six-year tenure as Speaker his popularity continued to grow, and Republicans dissatisfied with Grant mentioned Blaine as a potential presidential candidate prior to the 1872 Republican National Convention. Instead, Blaine worked steadfastly for Grant's re-election. Blaine's growing fame brought growing opposition from the Democrats, as well, and during the 1872 campaign he was accused of receiving bribes in the Crédit Mobilier scandal. Blaine denied any part in the scandal, which involved railroad companies bribing federal officials to turn a blind eye to fraudulent railroad contracts that overcharged the government by millions of dollars. No one was able to satisfactorily prove Blaine's involvement. Though not an absolute defense, it is true that the law that made the fraud possible had been written before he was elected to Congress. But other Republicans were exposed by the accusations, including Vice President Colfax, who was dropped from the 1872 presidential ticket in favor of Henry Wilson.
Although he supported a general amnesty for former Confederates, Blaine opposed extending it to include Jefferson Davis, and he cooperated with Grant in helping to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1875 in response to increased violence and disenfranchisement of blacks in the South. He refrained from voting on the anti-third term resolution that overwhelmingly passed the House that same year, believing that to vote for it would look self-interested. Blaine was loyal to Grant, and the scandals of the Grant administration did not seem to affect how the public perceived him; according to his biographer, Blaine was never more popular than when he was Speaker. Liberal Republicans saw him as an alternative to the evident corruption of other Republican leaders, and some even urged him to form a new, reformist party. Although he remained a Republican, this base of moderate reformers remained loyal to Blaine and became known as the Half Breed faction of the party.
Once out of the speaker's chair, Blaine had more time to concentrate on his presidential ambitions, and to develop new policy ideas. One result was a foray into education policy. In late 1875, President Grant made several speeches on the importance of the separation of church and state and the duty of the states to provide free public education. Blaine saw in this an issue that would distract from the Grant administration scandals and let the Republican party regain the high moral ground. In December 1875, he proposed a joint resolution that became known as the Blaine Amendment.
The proposed amendment codified the church-state separation Blaine and Grant were promoting, stating that:
No State shall make any law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; and no money raised by taxation in any State for the support of public schools, or derived from any public fund therefor, nor any public lands devoted thereto, shall ever be under the control of any religious sect; nor shall any money so raised or lands so devoted be divided between religious sects or denominations.
The effect was to prohibit the use of public funds by any religious school, although it did not advance Grant's other aim of requiring states to provide public education to all children. The bill passed the House but failed in the Senate. Although it never passed Congress, and left Blaine open to charges of anti-Catholicism, the proposed amendment served Blaine's purpose of rallying Protestants to the Republican party and promoting himself as one of the party's foremost leaders.
Blaine entered the 1876 presidential campaign as the favorite, but his chances were almost immediately harmed by the emergence of a scandal. Rumors had begun to spread in February that Blaine had been involved in a transaction with the Union Pacific Railroad which had paid Blaine $64,000 for some Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad bonds he owned even though they were nearly worthless. In essence, the alleged transaction was presented as a sham designed to bribe Blaine. Blaine denied the charges, as did the Union Pacific's directors. Blaine claimed that he never had any dealings with the Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad except to purchase bonds at market price and that he had lost money on the transaction. Democrats in the House of Representatives, however, demanded a congressional investigation. The testimony appeared to favor Blaine's version of events until May 31, when James Mulligan, a Boston clerk who had been employed by Blaine's brother-in-law, testified that the allegations were true, he had arranged the transaction, and he had letters to prove it. The letters ended with the damning phrase "Kindly burn this letter." When the investigating committee recessed, Blaine met with Mulligan that night in his hotel room. What happened between the men is unclear, but Blaine acquired the letters or, as Mulligan told the committee, snatched them from Mulligan's hands and fled the room. In any event, Blaine had the letters and refused the committee's demand to turn them over.
Opinion swiftly turned against Blaine; the June 3 The New York Times carried the headline "Blaine's Nomination Now Out of the Question." Blaine took his case to the House floor on June 5, theatrically proclaiming his innocence and calling the investigation a partisan attack by Southern Democrats in revenge for his exclusion of Jefferson Davis from the amnesty bill of the previous year. He read selected passages from the letters aloud and said, "Thank God Almighty, I am not afraid to show them!" Blaine even succeeded in extracting an apology from the committee chairman. The political tide turned anew in Blaine's favor, but the pressure had now begun to affect Blaine's health, and he collapsed while leaving church services on June 14. His opponents called the collapse a political stunt, with one Democratic newspaper reporting the event as "Blaine Feigns a Faint." Rumors of Blaine's ill health combined with the lack of hard evidence against him garnered him sympathy among Republicans, and when the Republican convention began in Cincinnati later that month, he was again seen as the frontrunner.
Though he was damaged by the Mulligan letters, Blaine entered the convention as the favorite. Five other men were also considered serious candidates: Benjamin Bristow, the Kentucky-born Treasury Secretary; Roscoe Conkling, Blaine's old enemy and now a Senator from New York; Senator Oliver P. Morton of Indiana; Governor Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio; and Governor John F. Hartranft of Pennsylvania. Blaine was nominated by Illinois orator Robert G. Ingersoll in what became a famous speech:
This is a grand year—a year filled with recollections of the Revolution ... a year in which the people call for the man who has torn from the throat of treason the tongue of slander, the man who has snatched the mask of Democracy from the hideous face of rebellion ... Like an armed warrior, like a plumed knight, James G. Blaine from the state of Maine marched down the halls of the American Congress and threw his shining lance full and fair against the brazen foreheads of every traitor to his country and every maligner of his fair reputation.
The speech was a success and Ingersoll's appellation of "plumed knight" remained a nickname for Blaine for years to come. On the first ballot, no candidate received the required majority of 378, but Blaine had the most votes, with 285 and no other candidate had more than 125. There were a few vote shifts in the next five ballots, and Blaine climbed to 308 votes, with his nearest competitor at just 111. On the seventh ballot the situation shifted drastically as anti-Blaine delegates began to coalesce around Hayes; by the time the balloting ended, Blaine's votes had risen to 351, but Hayes surpassed him at 384, a majority.
Blaine received the news at his home in Washington and telegraphed Hayes his congratulations. In the subsequent contest of 1876, Hayes was elected after a contentious compromise over disputed electoral votes. The results of the convention had further effects on Blaine's political career, as Bristow, having lost the nomination, also resigned as Treasury Secretary three days after the convention ended. President Grant selected Senator Lot M. Morrill of Maine to fill the cabinet post, and Maine's governor, Seldon Connor, appointed Blaine to the now-vacant Senate seat. When the Maine Legislature reconvened that autumn, they confirmed Blaine's appointment and elected him to the full six-year term that would begin on March 4, 1877.
Blaine was appointed to the Senate on July 10, 1876, but did not begin his duties there until the Senate convened in December of that year. While in the Senate, he served on the Appropriations Committee and held the chairmanship of the Committee on Civil Service and Retrenchment, but he never achieved the role of leadership that he had held as a member of the House. The Senate in the 45th Congress was controlled by a narrow Republican majority, but it was a majority often divided against itself and against the Hayes administration. Blaine did not number himself among the administration's defenders — later known as the Half-Breeds — but neither could he join the Republicans led by Conkling—later known as the Stalwarts — who opposed Hayes, because of the deep personal enmity between Blaine and Conkling. He opposed Hayes's withdrawal of federal troops from Southern capitals, which effectively ended the Reconstruction of the South, but to no avail. Blaine continued to antagonize Southern Democrats, voting against bills passed in the Democrat-controlled House that would reduce the Army's appropriation and repeal the post-war Enforcement Acts he had helped pass. Such bills passed Congress several times and Hayes vetoed them several times; ultimately, the Enforcement Acts remained in place, but the funds to enforce them dwindled. By 1879, there were only 1,155 soldiers stationed in the former Confederacy, and Blaine believed that this small force could never guarantee the civil and political rights of black Southerners—which would mean an end to the Republican party in the South.
On monetary issues, Blaine continued the advocacy for a strong dollar that he had begun as a Representative. This stance was in opposition to Senate Republican leadership, including Senate President Pro Tempore Thomas W. Ferry, who generally supported the greenback movement. The issue had shifted from debate over greenbacks to debate over which metal should back the dollar: gold and silver, or gold alone. The Coinage Act of 1873 stopped the coinage of silver for all coins worth a dollar or more, effectively tying the dollar to the value of gold. As a result, the money supply contracted and the effects of the Panic of 1873 grew worse, making it more expensive for debtors to pay debts they had entered into when currency was less valuable. Farmers and laborers, especially, clamored for the return of coinage in both metals, believing the increased money supply would restore wages and property values. Democratic Representative Richard P. Bland of Missouri proposed a bill, which passed the House, that required the United States to coin as much silver as miners could sell the government, thus increasing the money supply and aiding debtors. In the Senate, William B. Allison, a Republican from Iowa offered an amendment to limit the silver coinage to two to four million dollars per month. This was still too much for Blaine, and he denounced the bill and the proposed amendment, but the amended Bland–Allison Act passed the Senate by a 48 to 21 vote. Hayes vetoed the bill, but Congress mustered the two-thirds vote to pass it over his veto. Even after the Bland–Allison Act's passage, Blaine continued his opposition, making a series of speeches against it during the 1878 congressional campaign season.
His time in the Senate allowed Blaine to develop his foreign policy ideas. He advocated expansion of the American navy and merchant marine, which had been in decline since the Civil War. Blaine also bitterly opposed the results of the arbitration with Great Britain over American fishermen's right to fish in Canadian waters, which resulted in a $5.5 million award to Britain. Blaine's Anglophobia combined with his support of high tariffs. He had initially opposed a reciprocity treaty with Canada that would have reduced tariffs between the two nations, but by the end of his time in the Senate, he had changed his mind, believing that Americans had more to gain by increasing exports than they would lose by the risk of cheap imports.
Hayes had announced early in his presidency that he would not seek another term, which meant that the contest for the Republican nomination in 1880 was open to all challengers—including Blaine. Blaine was among the early favorites for the nomination, as were former President Grant, Treasury Secretary John Sherman of Ohio, and Senator George F. Edmunds of Vermont. Although Grant did not actively promote his candidacy, his entry into the race re-energized the Stalwarts and when the convention met in Chicago in June 1880, they instantly polarized the delegates into Grant and anti-Grant factions, with Blaine the most popular choice of the latter group. Blaine was nominated by James Frederick Joy of Michigan, but in contrast to Ingersoll's exciting speech of 1876, Joy's lengthy oration was remembered only for its maladroitness. After the other candidates were nominated, the first ballot showed Grant leading with 304 votes and Blaine in second with 284; no other candidate had more than Sherman's 93, and none had the required majority of 379. Sherman's delegates could swing the nomination to either Grant or Blaine, but he refused to release them through twenty-eight ballots in the hope that the anti-Grant forces would desert Blaine and flock to him. Eventually, they did desert Blaine, but instead of Sherman they shifted their votes to Ohio Congressman James A. Garfield, and by the thirty-sixth ballot he had 399 votes, enough for victory.
Garfield placated the Stalwarts by endorsing Chester A. Arthur of New York, a Conkling loyalist, as nominee for vice president, but it was to Blaine and his delegates that Garfield owed his nomination. When Garfield was elected over Democrat Winfield Scott Hancock, he turned to Blaine to guide him in selection of his cabinet and offered him the preeminent position: Secretary of State. Blaine accepted, resigning from the Senate on March 4, 1881.
Blaine saw presiding over the cabinet as a chance to preside over the Washington social scene, as well, and soon ordered construction of a new, larger home near Dupont Circle. Although his foreign policy experience was minimal, Blaine quickly threw himself into his new duties. By 1881, Blaine had completely abandoned his protectionist leanings and now used his position as Secretary of State to promote freer trade, especially within the western hemisphere. His reasons were twofold: firstly, Blaine's old fear of British interference in the Americas was undiminished, and he saw increased trade with Latin America as the best way to keep Britain from dominating the region. Secondly, he believed that by encouraging exports, he could increase American prosperity, and by doing so position the Republican party as the author of that prosperity, ensuring continued electoral success. Garfield agreed with his Secretary of State's vision and Blaine called for a Pan-American conference in 1882 to mediate disputes among the Latin American nations and to serve as a forum for talks on increasing trade. At the same time, Blaine hoped to negotiate a peace in the War of the Pacific then being fought by Bolivia, Chile, and Peru. Blaine favored a resolution that would not result in Peru yielding any territory, but Chile, which had by 1881 occupied the Peruvian capital, rejected any negotiations that would gain them nothing. Blaine sought to expand American influence in other areas, calling for renegotiation of the Clayton–Bulwer Treaty to allow the United States to construct a canal through Panama without British involvement, as well as attempting to reduce British involvement in the strategically located Kingdom of Hawaii. His plans for the United States' involvement in the world stretched even beyond the Western Hemisphere, as he sought commercial treaties with Korea and Madagascar.
On July 2, 1881, Blaine and Garfield were walking through the Sixth Street Station of the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad in Washington when Garfield was shot by Charles J. Guiteau, a disgruntled lawyer and crazed office seeker who had made repeated demands for Blaine and other State Department officials to appoint him to various ambassadorships for which he was grossly unqualified or were already filled.
Guiteau, a self-professed Stalwart, believed that after assassinating the President, he would strike a blow to unite the two factions of the Republican Party, allowing him to ingratiate himself with Vice President Arthur and receive his coveted position. Guiteau was overpowered and arrested immediately, while Garfield lingered for two and a half months before he died on September 19, 1881. Guiteau was convicted of killing Garfield and hanged on June 30, 1882.
Garfield's death was not just a personal tragedy for Blaine; it also meant the end of his dominance of the cabinet, and the end of his foreign policy initiatives. With Arthur's ascent to the presidency, the Stalwart faction now held sway, and Blaine's days at the State Department were numbered. While Arthur asked all of the cabinet members to postpone their resignations until Congress recessed that December, Blaine nonetheless tendered his resignation on October 19, 1881, but he agreed to remain in office until December 19, when his successor would be in place.
Blaine's replacement was Frederick T. Frelinghuysen, a New Jersey Stalwart; while Arthur and Frelinghuysen undid much of Blaine's work, cancelling the call for a Pan-American conference and stopping the effort to end the War of the Pacific, they did continue the drive for tariff reductions, signing a reciprocity treaty with Mexico in 1882.
Blaine began the year 1882 without a political office for the first time since 1859. Troubled by poor health, he sought no employment other than the completion of the first volume of his memoir, Twenty Years of Congress. Friends in Maine petitioned Blaine to run for Congress in the 1882 elections, but he declined, preferring to spend his time writing and supervising the move to the new home. His income from mining and railroad investments was sufficient to sustain the family's lifestyle and to allow for the construction of a vacation cottage, "Stanwood" on Mount Desert Island, Maine, designed by Frank Furness. Blaine appeared before Congress in 1882 during an investigation into his War of the Pacific diplomacy, defending himself against allegations that he owned an interest in the Peruvian guano deposits being occupied by Chile, but otherwise stayed away from the Capitol. The publication of the first volume of Twenty Years in early 1884 added to Blaine's financial security and thrust him back into the political spotlight. As the 1884 campaign loomed, Blaine's name was being circulated once more as a potential nominee, and despite some reservations, he soon found himself back in the hunt for the presidency.
In the months leading up to the 1884 convention, Blaine was once more considered the favorite for the nomination, but President Arthur was contemplating a run for election in his own right. George Edmunds was again the favored candidate among reformers and John Sherman had a few delegates pledged to him, but neither was expected to command much support at the convention. John A. Logan of Illinois hoped to attract Stalwart votes if Arthur's campaign was unsuccessful. Blaine was unsure he wanted to try for the nomination for the third time and even encouraged General William T. Sherman, John Sherman's older brother, to accept it if it came to him, but ultimately Blaine agreed to be a candidate again.
William H. West of Ohio nominated Blaine with an enthusiastic speech and after the first ballot, Blaine led the count with 334½ votes. While short of the necessary 417 for nomination, Blaine had far more than any other candidate with Arthur in second place at 278 votes. Blaine was unacceptable to the Arthur delegates just as Blaine's own delegates would never vote for the President, so the contest was between the two for the delegates of the remaining candidates. Blaine's total steadily increased as Logan and Sherman withdrew in his favor and some of the Edmunds delegates defected to him. Unlike in previous conventions, the momentum for Blaine in 1884 would not be halted. On the fourth ballot, Blaine received 541 votes and was, at last, nominated. Logan was named vice presidential nominee on the first ballot, and the Republicans had their ticket.
The Democrats held their convention in Chicago the following month and nominated Governor Grover Cleveland of New York. Cleveland's time on the national scene was brief, but Democrats hoped that his reputation as a reformer and an opponent of corruption would attract Republicans dissatisfied with Blaine and his reputation for scandal. They were correct, as reform-minded Republicans (called "Mugwumps") denounced Blaine as corrupt and flocked to Cleveland. The Mugwumps, including such men as Carl Schurz and Henry Ward Beecher, were more concerned with morality than with party, and felt Cleveland was a kindred soul who would promote civil service reform and fight for efficiency in government. However, even as the Democrats gained support from the Mugwumps, they lost some blue-collar workers to the Greenback Party, led by Benjamin F. Butler, Blaine's antagonist from their early days in the House.
The campaign focused on the candidates' personalities, as each candidate's supporters cast aspersions on their opponents. Cleveland's supporters rehashed the old allegations from the Mulligan letters that Blaine had corruptly influenced legislation in favor of railroads, later profiting on the sale of bonds he owned in both companies. Although the stories of Blaine's favors to the railroads had made the rounds eight years earlier, this time more of his correspondence was discovered, making his earlier denials less plausible. Blaine acknowledged that the letters were genuine, but denied that anything in them impugned his integrity or contradicted his earlier explanations. Nevertheless, what Blaine described as "stale slander" served to focus the public's attention negatively on his character. On some of the most damaging correspondence, Blaine had written "Burn this letter," giving Democrats the last line to their rallying cry: "Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, the continental liar from the state of Maine, 'Burn this letter!'"
To counter Cleveland's image of superior morality, Republicans discovered reports that Cleveland had fathered an illegitimate child while he was a lawyer in Buffalo, New York, and chanted "Ma, Ma, where's my Pa?"—to which the Democrats, after Cleveland had been elected, appended, "Gone to the White House, Ha! Ha! Ha!" Cleveland admitted to paying child support in 1874 to Maria Crofts Halpin, the woman who claimed he fathered her child named Oscar Folsom Cleveland. Halpin was involved with several men at the time, including Cleveland's friend and law partner, Oscar Folsom, for whom the child was also named. Cleveland did not know which man was the father, and is believed to have assumed responsibility because he was the only bachelor among them. At the same time, Democratic operatives accused Blaine and his wife of not having been married when their eldest son, Stanwood, was born in 1851; this rumor was false, however, and caused little excitement in the campaign. Halpin disputed the claims of being involved with several men, accusing Cleveland of raping and impregnating her, then institutionalizing her against her will to gain control of their child.
Both candidates believed that the states of New York, New Jersey, Indiana, and Connecticut would determine the election. In New York, Blaine received less support than he anticipated when Arthur and Conkling, still powerful in the New York Republican party, failed to actively campaign for him. Blaine hoped that he would have more support from Irish Americans than Republicans typically did; while the Irish were mainly a Democratic constituency in the 19th century, Blaine's mother was Irish Catholic, and he believed his career-long opposition to the British government would resonate with the Irish. Blaine's hope for Irish defections to the Republican standard were dashed late in the campaign when one of his supporters, Samuel D. Burchard, gave a speech denouncing the Democrats as the party of "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion." The Democrats spread the word of this insult in the days before the election, and Cleveland narrowly won all four of the swing states, including New York by just over one thousand votes. While the popular vote total was close, with Cleveland winning by just one-quarter of a percent, the electoral votes gave Cleveland a majority of 219–182.
Blaine accepted his narrow defeat and spent most of the next year working on the second volume of Twenty Years of Congress. The book continued to earn him enough money to support his lavish household and pay off his debts. Although he spoke to friends of retiring from politics, Blaine still attended dinners and commented on the Cleveland administration's policies. By the time of the 1886 Congressional elections, Blaine was giving speeches and promoting Republican candidates, especially in his home state of Maine. Republicans were successful in Maine, and after the Maine elections in September, Blaine went on a speaking tour from Pennsylvania to Tennessee, hoping to boost the prospects of Republican candidates there. Republicans were less successful nationwide, gaining seats in the House while losing seats in the Senate, but Blaine's speeches kept him and his opinions in the spotlight.
Blaine and his wife and daughters sailed for Europe in June 1887, visiting England, Ireland, Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, and finally Scotland, where they stayed at the summer home of Andrew Carnegie. While in France, Blaine wrote a letter to the New-York Tribune criticizing Cleveland's plans to reduce the tariff, saying that free trade with Europe would impoverish American workers and farmers. The family returned to the United States in August 1887. His letter in the Tribune had raised his political profile even higher, and by 1888 Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, both former opponents, urged Blaine to run against Cleveland again. Opinion within the party was overwhelmingly in favor of renominating Blaine.
As the state conventions drew nearer, Blaine announced that he would not be a candidate. His supporters doubted his sincerity and continued to encourage him to run, but Blaine still demurred. Hoping to make his intentions clear, Blaine left the country and was staying with Carnegie in Scotland when the 1888 Republican National Convention began in Chicago. Carnegie encouraged Blaine to accept if the convention nominated him, but the delegates finally accepted Blaine's refusal. John Sherman was the most prominent candidate and sought to attract the Blaine supporters to his candidacy, but instead found them flocking to former senator Benjamin Harrison of Indiana after a telegram from Carnegie suggested that Blaine favored him. Blaine returned to the United States in August 1888 and visited Harrison at his home in October, where twenty-five thousand residents paraded in Blaine's honor. Harrison defeated Cleveland in a close election, and offered Blaine his former position as Secretary of State.
Harrison had developed his foreign policy based largely on Blaine's ideas, and at the start of his term, Harrison and Blaine had very similar views on the United States' place in the world. In spite of their shared worldview, however, the two men became personally unfriendly as the term went on. Harrison was conscious that his Secretary of State was more popular than he, and while he admired Blaine's gift for diplomacy, he grew displeased with Blaine's frequent absence from his post because of illness, and suspected that Blaine was angling for the presidential nomination in 1892. Harrison tried to limit how many "Blaine men" filled subordinate positions in the State Department and denied Blaine's request that his son, Walker, be appointed First Assistant Secretary, instead naming him Solicitor of the Department of State. Despite the growing personal rancor, the two men continued, with one exception, to agree on the foreign policy questions of the day.
Blaine and Harrison wished to see American power and trade expanded across the Pacific and were especially interested in securing rights to harbors in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and Pago Pago, Samoa. When Blaine entered office, the United States, Great Britain, and the German Empire were disputing their respective rights in Samoa. Thomas F. Bayard, Blaine's predecessor, had accepted an invitation to a three-party conference in Berlin aimed at resolving the dispute, and Blaine appointed American representatives to attend. The result was a treaty that created a condominium among the three powers, allowing all of them access to the harbor.
In Hawaii, Blaine worked to bind the kingdom more closely to the United States and to avoid its becoming a British protectorate. When the McKinley Tariff of 1890 eliminated the duty on sugar, Hawaiian sugar-growers looked for a way to retain their once-exclusive access to the American market. The Hawaiian minister to the United States, Henry A. P. Carter, tried to arrange for Hawaii to have complete trade reciprocity with the United States, but Blaine proposed instead that Hawaii become an American protectorate; Carter favored the idea, but the Hawaiian king, Kalākaua, rejected the infringement on his sovereignty. Blaine next procured the appointment of his former newspaper colleague John L. Stevens as minister to Hawaii. Stevens had long believed that the United States should annex Hawaii, and as minister he co-operated with Americans living in Hawaii in their efforts to bring about annexation. Their efforts ultimately culminated in a coup d'état against Kalākaua's successor, Liliuokalani, in 1893. Blaine's precise involvement is undocumented, but the results of Stevens' diplomacy were in accord with his ambitions for American power in the region. The new government petitioned the United States for annexation, but by that time Blaine was no longer in office.
Soon after taking office, Blaine revived his old idea of an international conference of western hemisphere nations. The result was the First International Conference of American States, which met in Washington in 1890. Blaine and Harrison had high hopes for the conference, including proposals for a customs union, a pan-American railroad line, and an arbitration process to settle disputes among member nations. Their overall goal was to extend trade and political influence over the entire hemisphere; some of the other nations understood this and were wary of deepening ties with the United States to the exclusion of European powers. Blaine said publicly that his only interest was in "annexation of trade," not annexation of territory, but privately he wrote to Harrison of a desire for some territorial enlargement of the United States:
I think there are only three places that are of value enough to be taken ... One is Hawaii and the others are Cuba and Porto Rico [sic]. Cuba and Porto Rico are not now imminent and will not be for a generation. Hawaii may come up for decision at an unexpected hour and I hope we shall be prepared to decide it in the affirmative.
Congress was not as enthusiastic about a customs union as Blaine and Harrison were, but tariff reciprocity provisions were ultimately included in the McKinley Tariff that reduced duties on some inter-American trade. Otherwise, the conference achieved none of Blaine's goals in the short-term, but did lead to further communication and what would eventually become the Organization of American States.
In 1891, a diplomatic crisis arose in Chile that drove a wedge between Harrison and Blaine. The American minister to Chile, Patrick Egan, a political friend of Blaine's, granted asylum to Chileans who were seeking refuge from the Chilean Civil War. Chile was already suspicious of Blaine because of his War of the Pacific diplomacy ten years earlier, and this incident raised tensions even further. When sailors from the Baltimore took shore leave in Valparaíso, a fight broke out, resulting in the deaths of two American sailors and three dozen arrested. When the news reached Washington, Blaine was in Bar Harbor recuperating from a bout of ill health and Harrison himself drafted a demand for reparations. The Chilean foreign minister, Manuel Antonio Matta, replied that Harrison's message was "erroneous or deliberately incorrect" and said that the Chilean government was treating the affair the same as any other criminal matter. Tensions increased as Harrison threatened to break off diplomatic relations unless the United States received a suitable apology. Blaine returned to the capital and made conciliatory overtures to the Chilean government, offering to submit the dispute to arbitration and recall Egan. Harrison still insisted on an apology and submitted a special message to Congress about the threat of war. Chile issued an apology for the incident, and the threat of war subsided.
Blaine's earliest expressions in the foreign policy sphere were those of a reactionary Anglophobe, but by the end of his career his relationship with the United Kingdom had become more moderate and nuanced. A dispute over seal hunting in the waters off Alaska was the cause of Blaine's first interaction with Britain as Harrison's Secretary of State. A law passed in 1889 required Harrison to ban seal hunting in Alaskan waters, but Canadian fishermen believed they had the right to continue fishing there. Soon thereafter, the United States Navy seized several Canadian ships near the Pribilof Islands. Blaine entered into negotiations with Britain and the two nations agreed to submit the dispute to arbitration by a neutral tribunal. Blaine was no longer in office when the tribunal began its work, but the result was to allow the hunting once more, albeit with some regulation, and to require the United States to pay damages of $473,151. Ultimately, the nations signed the North Pacific Fur Seal Convention of 1911, which outlawed open-water seal hunting.
At the same time as the Pribilof Islands dispute, an outbreak of mob violence in New Orleans became an international incident. After New Orleans police chief David Hennessy led a crackdown against local mafiosi, he was assassinated on October 14, 1890. After the alleged murderers were found not guilty on March 14, 1891, a mob stormed the jail and lynched eleven of them. Since many of those killed were Italian citizens the Italian minister, Saverio Fava, protested to Blaine. Blaine explained that federal officials could not control how state officials deal with criminal matters, and Fava announced that he would withdraw the legation back to Italy. Blaine and Harrison believed the Italians' response to be an overreaction, and did nothing. Tensions slowly cooled, and after nearly a year, the Italian minister returned to the United States to negotiate an indemnity. After some internal dispute—Blaine wanted conciliation with Italy, Harrison was reluctant to admit fault—the United States agreed to pay an indemnity of $25,000, and normal diplomatic relations resumed.
Blaine had always believed his health to be fragile, and by the time he joined Harrison's cabinet he truly was unwell. The years at the State Department also brought Blaine personal tragedy as two of his children, Walker and Alice, died suddenly in 1890. Another son, Emmons, died in 1892. With these family losses and his declining health, Blaine decided to retire and announced that he would resign from the cabinet on June 4, 1892. Because of their growing animosity, and because Blaine's resignation came three days before the 1892 Republican National Convention began, Harrison suspected that Blaine was preparing to run against him for the party's nomination for president.
Harrison was unpopular with the party and the country, and many of Blaine's old supporters encouraged him to run for the nomination. Blaine had denied any interest in the nomination months before his resignation, but some of his friends, including Senator Matthew Quay of Pennsylvania and James S. Clarkson, chairman of the Republican National Committee, took it for false modesty and worked for his nomination anyway. When Blaine resigned from the cabinet, his boosters were certain that he was a candidate, but the majority of the party stood by the incumbent. Harrison was renominated on the first ballot, but die-hard Blaine delegates still gave their champion 182 and 1/6 votes, good enough for second place.
Blaine spent the summer of 1892 at his Bar Harbor cottage, and did not involve himself in the presidential campaign other than to make a single speech in New York in October. Harrison was defeated soundly in his rematch against former president Cleveland and when Blaine returned to Washington at the close of 1892, he and Harrison were friendlier than they had been in years. Blaine's health declined rapidly in the winter of 1892–1893, and he died in his Washington home on January 27, 1893, four days before turning sixty-three. After a funeral at the Presbyterian Church of the Covenant, he was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington. He was later re-interred in Blaine Memorial Park, Augusta, Maine, in 1920.
A towering figure in the Republican party of his day, Blaine fell into obscurity fairly soon after his death. A 1905 biography by his wife's cousin, Edward Stanwood, was written when the question was still in doubt, but by the time David Saville Muzzey published his biography of Blaine in 1934, the subtitle "A Political Idol of Other Days" already spoke to its subject's fading place in the popular mind, perhaps because of the nine men the Republican Party nominated for the presidency from 1860 to 1912, Blaine is the only one who never became president. Although several authors studied Blaine's foreign policy career, including Edward P. Crapol's 2000 work, Muzzey's was the last full-scale biography of the man until Neil Rolde's 2006 book. Historian R. Hal Williams was working on a new biography of Blaine, tentatively titled James G. Blaine: A Life in Politics, until his death in 2016.
During the 2016 United States presidential election, both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were compared to Blaine for their controversies. Blaine's status as a former Secretary of State who sought to erase evidence of his personal corruption drew parallels to Clinton, while his appeals to anti-Chinese sentiment were compared to Trump's anti-Muslim rhetoric. Similarly, the Mugwumps who opposed Blaine in 1884 have been compared to the Never Trump movement. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "James Gillespie Blaine (January 31, 1830 – January 27, 1893) was an American statesman and Republican politician who represented Maine in the United States House of Representatives from 1863 to 1876, serving as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1869 to 1875, and then in the United States Senate from 1876 to 1881.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Blaine twice served as Secretary of State, first in 1881 under President James A. Garfield and Chester A. Arthur, and then from 1889 to 1892 under President Benjamin Harrison. He is one of only two U.S. Secretaries of State to hold the position under three separate presidents, the other being Daniel Webster. Blaine unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for President in 1876 and 1880 before being nominated in 1884. In the 1884 general election, he was narrowly defeated by Democratic nominee Grover Cleveland. Blaine was one of the late 19th century's leading Republicans and a champion of the party's moderate reformist faction, later known as the \"Half-Breeds\".",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Blaine was born in the western Pennsylvania town of West Brownsville and moved to Maine after completing college where he became a newspaper editor. Nicknamed \"the Magnetic Man\", he was a charismatic speaker in an era that prized oratory. He began his political career as an early supporter of Republican Abraham Lincoln and the Union war effort in the American Civil War. During Reconstruction, Blaine was a supporter of black suffrage, but opposed some of the more coercive measures of the Radical Republicans. Initially in favor of high tariffs, he later worked to lower tariffs and expand international trade. Railroad promotion and construction were important issues in his time and, as a result of his interest and support, Blaine was widely suspected of corruption in awarding railroad charters, especially with the emergence of the Mulligan letters. Though no evidence of corruption ever surfaced from these allegations, they nevertheless plagued his 1884 presidential candidacy.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "As Secretary of State, Blaine was a transitional figure, marking the end of an isolationist era in foreign policy and foreshadowing the rise of the American Century that would begin with the Spanish–American War. His efforts to expand U.S. trade and influence began the nation's shift to a more active American foreign policy. Blaine was a pioneer of tariff reciprocity and urged greater involvement in Latin American affairs. An expansionist, Blaine's policies would lead in less than a decade to the establishment of the U.S. acquisition of Pacific colonies and dominance in the Caribbean.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "James Gillespie Blaine was born January 31, 1830, in West Brownsville, Pennsylvania, the third child of Ephraim Lyon Blaine and his wife Maria (Gillespie) Blaine. He had two older sisters, Harriet and Margaret. Blaine's father was a western Pennsylvania businessman and landowner, and the family lived in relative comfort. On his father's side, Blaine was descended from Scotch-Irish settlers who first emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1745. His great-grandfather Ephraim Blaine served as a Commissary-General under George Washington in the American Revolutionary War. Blaine's mother and her forebears were Irish Catholics who immigrated to Pennsylvania in the 1780s. Blaine's parents were married in 1820 in a Catholic ceremony, although Blaine's father remained a Presbyterian. Following a common compromise of the era, the Blaines agreed that their daughters would be raised in their mother's Catholic faith while their sons would be brought up in their father's religion. James Blaine's cousin, Angela Gillespie, was a nun and founded the American branch of the Sisters of the Holy Cross. In politics, Blaine's father supported the Whig Party.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Blaine's biographers describe his childhood as \"harmonious,\" and note that the boy took an early interest in history and literature. At the age of thirteen, Blaine enrolled in his father's alma mater, Washington College (now Washington & Jefferson College), in nearby Washington, Pennsylvania. There, he was a member of the Washington Literary Society, one of the college's debating societies. Blaine succeeded academically, graduating near the top of his class and delivering the salutatory address in June 1847. After graduation, Blaine considered attending Yale Law School, but ultimately decided against it, instead moving west to find a job.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In 1848, Blaine was hired as a professor of mathematics and ancient languages at the Western Military Institute in Georgetown, Kentucky. Although he was only 18 years old and younger than many of his students, Blaine adapted well to his new profession. Blaine grew to enjoy life in his adopted state and became an admirer of Kentucky Senator Henry Clay. He also made the acquaintance of Harriet Stanwood, a teacher at the nearby Millersburg Female College and native of Maine. On June 30, 1850, the two wed. Blaine once again considered taking up the study of law, but instead took his new bride to visit his family in Pennsylvania. They next lived with Harriet Blaine's family in Augusta, Maine, for several months, where their first child, Stanwood Blaine, was born in 1851. The young family soon moved again, this time to Philadelphia where Blaine took a job at the Pennsylvania Institution for the Instruction of the Blind (now Overbrook School for the Blind) in 1852, teaching science and literature.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Philadelphia's law libraries gave Blaine the chance to at last begin to study the law, but in 1853 he received a more tempting offer: to become editor and co-owner of the Kennebec Journal. Blaine had spent several vacations in his wife's native state of Maine and had become friendly with the Journal's editors. When the newspaper's founder, Luther Severance, retired, Blaine was invited to purchase the publication along with co-editor Joseph Baker. He quickly accepted, borrowing the purchase price from his wife's brothers. In 1854, Baker sold his share to John L. Stevens, a local minister. The Journal had been a staunchly Whig newspaper, which coincided with Blaine's and Stevens' political opinions. The decision to become a newspaperman, unexpected as it was, started Blaine on the road to a lifelong career in politics. Blaine's purchase of the Journal coincided with the demise of the Whig party and birth of the Republican party, and Blaine and Stevens actively promoted the new party in their newspaper. The newspaper was financially successful, and Blaine was soon able to invest his profits in coal mines in Pennsylvania and Virginia, forming the basis of his future wealth.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Blaine's career as a Republican newspaperman led naturally to involvement in party politics. In 1856, he was selected as a delegate to the first Republican National Convention. From the party's early days, Blaine identified with the conservative wing, supporting Supreme Court Justice John McLean for the presidential nomination over the more radical John C. Frémont, the eventual nominee. The following year, Blaine was offered the editorship of the Portland Daily Advertiser, which he accepted, selling his interest in the Journal soon thereafter. He still maintained his home in Augusta, however, with his growing family. Although Blaine's first son, Stanwood, died in infancy, he and Harriet had two more sons soon afterward: Walker, in 1855, and Emmons, in 1857. They would have four more children in years to come: Alice, James, Margaret, and Harriet. It was around this time that Blaine left the Presbyterian church of his childhood and joined his wife's new denomination, becoming a member of the South Parish Congregational Church in Augusta.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In 1858, Blaine ran for a seat in the Maine House of Representatives, and was elected. He ran for reelection in 1859, 1860, and 1861, and was successful each time by large majorities. The added responsibilities led Blaine to reduce his duties with the Advertiser in 1860, and he soon ceased editorial work altogether. Meanwhile, his political power was growing as he became chairman of the Republican state committee in 1859, replacing Stevens. Blaine was not a delegate to the Republican convention in 1860, but attended anyway as an enthusiastic supporter of Abraham Lincoln. Returning to Maine, he was elected Speaker of the Maine House of Representatives in 1861 and reelected in 1862. With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, he supported Lincoln's war effort and saw that the Maine Legislature voted to organize and equip units to join the Union Army.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Blaine had considered running for the United States House of Representatives from Maine's 4th district in 1860, but agreed to step aside when Anson P. Morrill, a former governor, announced his interest in the seat. Morrill was successful, but after redistricting placed Blaine in the 3rd district for the 1862 election, he allowed his name to be put forward. Running on a campaign of staunch support for the war effort, Blaine was elected by a wide margin; though nationwide, the Republican Party lost a significant number of seats in Congress as the Union war effort to date had been only weakly successful. By the time Blaine took his seat in December 1863, at the start of the 38th Congress, the Union Army had turned the tide of the war with victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg.",
"title": "House of Representatives, 1863–1876"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "As a first-term congressman, he initially said little, mostly following the administration's lead in supporting the continuing war effort. He did clash several times with the leader of the Republicans' radical faction, Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, firstly over payment of states' debts incurred in supporting the war, and again over monetary policy concerning the new greenback currency. Blaine also spoke in support of the commutation provision of the military draft law passed in 1863 and proposed a constitutional amendment allowing the federal government to impose taxes on exports, but it never passed.",
"title": "House of Representatives, 1863–1876"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Blaine was reelected in 1864 and, when the 39th Congress assembled in December 1865, the main issue was the Reconstruction of the defeated Confederate States. Although he was not a member of the committee charged with drafting what became the Fourteenth Amendment, Blaine did make his views on the subject known and believed that three-fourths of the non-seceded states would be needed to ratify it, rather than three-fourths of all states, an opinion that did not prevail and placed him, atypically, in the radical camp. The Republican Congress also played a role in the governance of the conquered South, dissolving the state governments President Andrew Johnson had installed and substituting military governments under Congress' control. Blaine voted in favor of these new, harsher measures, but also supported some leniency toward the former rebels when he opposed a bill that would have barred Southerners from attending the United States Military Academy. Blaine voted to impeach Johnson in 1868, although he had initially opposed the effort. Later, Blaine was more ambiguous about the validity of the charges against Johnson, writing that \"there was a very grave difference of opinion among those equally competent to decide,\" but he followed his party's leaders.",
"title": "House of Representatives, 1863–1876"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Continuing his earlier battle with Stevens, Blaine led the fight in Congress for a strong dollar. After the issuance of 150 million dollars in greenbacks—non-gold-backed currency—the value of the dollar stood at a low ebb. A bipartisan group of inflationists, led by Republican Benjamin F. Butler and Democrat George H. Pendleton, wished to preserve the status quo and allow the Treasury to continue to issue greenbacks and even to use them to pay the interest due on pre-war bonds. Blaine called this idea a repudiation of the nation's promise to investors, which was made when the only currency was gold. Speaking several times on the matter, Blaine said that the greenbacks had only ever been an emergency measure to avoid bankruptcy during the war. Blaine and his hard money allies were successful, but the issue remained alive until 1879, when all remaining greenbacks were made redeemable in gold by the Specie Payment Resumption Act of 1875.",
"title": "House of Representatives, 1863–1876"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "During his first three terms in Congress, Blaine had earned for himself a reputation as an expert of parliamentary procedure, and, aside from a growing feud with Roscoe Conkling of New York, had become popular among his fellow Republicans. In March 1869, when Speaker Schuyler Colfax resigned from office at the end of the 40th Congress to become vice president, the highly regarded Blaine was the unanimous choice of the Republican Congressional Caucus to become Speaker of the House for the 41st Congress. In the subsequent March 4, 1869, election for Speaker, Blaine easily defeated Democrat Michael C. Kerr of Indiana by a vote of 135 to 57. Republicans remained in control of the House in the 42nd and 43rd congresses, and Blaine was re-elected as speaker at the start of both of them. His time as speaker came to an end following the 1874-75 elections which produced a Democratic majority in the House for the 44th Congress.",
"title": "House of Representatives, 1863–1876"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Blaine was an effective Speaker with a magnetic personality. In the words of Washington journalist Benjamin Perley Poore, Blaine's \"graceful as well as powerful figure, his strong features, glowing with health, and his hearty, honest manner, made him an attractive speaker and an esteemed friend.\" Moreover, President Ulysses S. Grant valued his skill and loyalty in leading the House. He enjoyed the job and made his presence in Washington more permanent by buying a large residence on Fifteenth Street in the city. At the same time, the Blaine family moved to a mansion in Augusta.",
"title": "House of Representatives, 1863–1876"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "During Blaine's six-year tenure as Speaker his popularity continued to grow, and Republicans dissatisfied with Grant mentioned Blaine as a potential presidential candidate prior to the 1872 Republican National Convention. Instead, Blaine worked steadfastly for Grant's re-election. Blaine's growing fame brought growing opposition from the Democrats, as well, and during the 1872 campaign he was accused of receiving bribes in the Crédit Mobilier scandal. Blaine denied any part in the scandal, which involved railroad companies bribing federal officials to turn a blind eye to fraudulent railroad contracts that overcharged the government by millions of dollars. No one was able to satisfactorily prove Blaine's involvement. Though not an absolute defense, it is true that the law that made the fraud possible had been written before he was elected to Congress. But other Republicans were exposed by the accusations, including Vice President Colfax, who was dropped from the 1872 presidential ticket in favor of Henry Wilson.",
"title": "House of Representatives, 1863–1876"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Although he supported a general amnesty for former Confederates, Blaine opposed extending it to include Jefferson Davis, and he cooperated with Grant in helping to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1875 in response to increased violence and disenfranchisement of blacks in the South. He refrained from voting on the anti-third term resolution that overwhelmingly passed the House that same year, believing that to vote for it would look self-interested. Blaine was loyal to Grant, and the scandals of the Grant administration did not seem to affect how the public perceived him; according to his biographer, Blaine was never more popular than when he was Speaker. Liberal Republicans saw him as an alternative to the evident corruption of other Republican leaders, and some even urged him to form a new, reformist party. Although he remained a Republican, this base of moderate reformers remained loyal to Blaine and became known as the Half Breed faction of the party.",
"title": "House of Representatives, 1863–1876"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Once out of the speaker's chair, Blaine had more time to concentrate on his presidential ambitions, and to develop new policy ideas. One result was a foray into education policy. In late 1875, President Grant made several speeches on the importance of the separation of church and state and the duty of the states to provide free public education. Blaine saw in this an issue that would distract from the Grant administration scandals and let the Republican party regain the high moral ground. In December 1875, he proposed a joint resolution that became known as the Blaine Amendment.",
"title": "House of Representatives, 1863–1876"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The proposed amendment codified the church-state separation Blaine and Grant were promoting, stating that:",
"title": "House of Representatives, 1863–1876"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "No State shall make any law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; and no money raised by taxation in any State for the support of public schools, or derived from any public fund therefor, nor any public lands devoted thereto, shall ever be under the control of any religious sect; nor shall any money so raised or lands so devoted be divided between religious sects or denominations.",
"title": "House of Representatives, 1863–1876"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The effect was to prohibit the use of public funds by any religious school, although it did not advance Grant's other aim of requiring states to provide public education to all children. The bill passed the House but failed in the Senate. Although it never passed Congress, and left Blaine open to charges of anti-Catholicism, the proposed amendment served Blaine's purpose of rallying Protestants to the Republican party and promoting himself as one of the party's foremost leaders.",
"title": "House of Representatives, 1863–1876"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Blaine entered the 1876 presidential campaign as the favorite, but his chances were almost immediately harmed by the emergence of a scandal. Rumors had begun to spread in February that Blaine had been involved in a transaction with the Union Pacific Railroad which had paid Blaine $64,000 for some Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad bonds he owned even though they were nearly worthless. In essence, the alleged transaction was presented as a sham designed to bribe Blaine. Blaine denied the charges, as did the Union Pacific's directors. Blaine claimed that he never had any dealings with the Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad except to purchase bonds at market price and that he had lost money on the transaction. Democrats in the House of Representatives, however, demanded a congressional investigation. The testimony appeared to favor Blaine's version of events until May 31, when James Mulligan, a Boston clerk who had been employed by Blaine's brother-in-law, testified that the allegations were true, he had arranged the transaction, and he had letters to prove it. The letters ended with the damning phrase \"Kindly burn this letter.\" When the investigating committee recessed, Blaine met with Mulligan that night in his hotel room. What happened between the men is unclear, but Blaine acquired the letters or, as Mulligan told the committee, snatched them from Mulligan's hands and fled the room. In any event, Blaine had the letters and refused the committee's demand to turn them over.",
"title": "1876 presidential election"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Opinion swiftly turned against Blaine; the June 3 The New York Times carried the headline \"Blaine's Nomination Now Out of the Question.\" Blaine took his case to the House floor on June 5, theatrically proclaiming his innocence and calling the investigation a partisan attack by Southern Democrats in revenge for his exclusion of Jefferson Davis from the amnesty bill of the previous year. He read selected passages from the letters aloud and said, \"Thank God Almighty, I am not afraid to show them!\" Blaine even succeeded in extracting an apology from the committee chairman. The political tide turned anew in Blaine's favor, but the pressure had now begun to affect Blaine's health, and he collapsed while leaving church services on June 14. His opponents called the collapse a political stunt, with one Democratic newspaper reporting the event as \"Blaine Feigns a Faint.\" Rumors of Blaine's ill health combined with the lack of hard evidence against him garnered him sympathy among Republicans, and when the Republican convention began in Cincinnati later that month, he was again seen as the frontrunner.",
"title": "1876 presidential election"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Though he was damaged by the Mulligan letters, Blaine entered the convention as the favorite. Five other men were also considered serious candidates: Benjamin Bristow, the Kentucky-born Treasury Secretary; Roscoe Conkling, Blaine's old enemy and now a Senator from New York; Senator Oliver P. Morton of Indiana; Governor Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio; and Governor John F. Hartranft of Pennsylvania. Blaine was nominated by Illinois orator Robert G. Ingersoll in what became a famous speech:",
"title": "1876 presidential election"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "This is a grand year—a year filled with recollections of the Revolution ... a year in which the people call for the man who has torn from the throat of treason the tongue of slander, the man who has snatched the mask of Democracy from the hideous face of rebellion ... Like an armed warrior, like a plumed knight, James G. Blaine from the state of Maine marched down the halls of the American Congress and threw his shining lance full and fair against the brazen foreheads of every traitor to his country and every maligner of his fair reputation.",
"title": "1876 presidential election"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The speech was a success and Ingersoll's appellation of \"plumed knight\" remained a nickname for Blaine for years to come. On the first ballot, no candidate received the required majority of 378, but Blaine had the most votes, with 285 and no other candidate had more than 125. There were a few vote shifts in the next five ballots, and Blaine climbed to 308 votes, with his nearest competitor at just 111. On the seventh ballot the situation shifted drastically as anti-Blaine delegates began to coalesce around Hayes; by the time the balloting ended, Blaine's votes had risen to 351, but Hayes surpassed him at 384, a majority.",
"title": "1876 presidential election"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Blaine received the news at his home in Washington and telegraphed Hayes his congratulations. In the subsequent contest of 1876, Hayes was elected after a contentious compromise over disputed electoral votes. The results of the convention had further effects on Blaine's political career, as Bristow, having lost the nomination, also resigned as Treasury Secretary three days after the convention ended. President Grant selected Senator Lot M. Morrill of Maine to fill the cabinet post, and Maine's governor, Seldon Connor, appointed Blaine to the now-vacant Senate seat. When the Maine Legislature reconvened that autumn, they confirmed Blaine's appointment and elected him to the full six-year term that would begin on March 4, 1877.",
"title": "1876 presidential election"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Blaine was appointed to the Senate on July 10, 1876, but did not begin his duties there until the Senate convened in December of that year. While in the Senate, he served on the Appropriations Committee and held the chairmanship of the Committee on Civil Service and Retrenchment, but he never achieved the role of leadership that he had held as a member of the House. The Senate in the 45th Congress was controlled by a narrow Republican majority, but it was a majority often divided against itself and against the Hayes administration. Blaine did not number himself among the administration's defenders — later known as the Half-Breeds — but neither could he join the Republicans led by Conkling—later known as the Stalwarts — who opposed Hayes, because of the deep personal enmity between Blaine and Conkling. He opposed Hayes's withdrawal of federal troops from Southern capitals, which effectively ended the Reconstruction of the South, but to no avail. Blaine continued to antagonize Southern Democrats, voting against bills passed in the Democrat-controlled House that would reduce the Army's appropriation and repeal the post-war Enforcement Acts he had helped pass. Such bills passed Congress several times and Hayes vetoed them several times; ultimately, the Enforcement Acts remained in place, but the funds to enforce them dwindled. By 1879, there were only 1,155 soldiers stationed in the former Confederacy, and Blaine believed that this small force could never guarantee the civil and political rights of black Southerners—which would mean an end to the Republican party in the South.",
"title": "United States Senate, 1876–1881"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "On monetary issues, Blaine continued the advocacy for a strong dollar that he had begun as a Representative. This stance was in opposition to Senate Republican leadership, including Senate President Pro Tempore Thomas W. Ferry, who generally supported the greenback movement. The issue had shifted from debate over greenbacks to debate over which metal should back the dollar: gold and silver, or gold alone. The Coinage Act of 1873 stopped the coinage of silver for all coins worth a dollar or more, effectively tying the dollar to the value of gold. As a result, the money supply contracted and the effects of the Panic of 1873 grew worse, making it more expensive for debtors to pay debts they had entered into when currency was less valuable. Farmers and laborers, especially, clamored for the return of coinage in both metals, believing the increased money supply would restore wages and property values. Democratic Representative Richard P. Bland of Missouri proposed a bill, which passed the House, that required the United States to coin as much silver as miners could sell the government, thus increasing the money supply and aiding debtors. In the Senate, William B. Allison, a Republican from Iowa offered an amendment to limit the silver coinage to two to four million dollars per month. This was still too much for Blaine, and he denounced the bill and the proposed amendment, but the amended Bland–Allison Act passed the Senate by a 48 to 21 vote. Hayes vetoed the bill, but Congress mustered the two-thirds vote to pass it over his veto. Even after the Bland–Allison Act's passage, Blaine continued his opposition, making a series of speeches against it during the 1878 congressional campaign season.",
"title": "United States Senate, 1876–1881"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "His time in the Senate allowed Blaine to develop his foreign policy ideas. He advocated expansion of the American navy and merchant marine, which had been in decline since the Civil War. Blaine also bitterly opposed the results of the arbitration with Great Britain over American fishermen's right to fish in Canadian waters, which resulted in a $5.5 million award to Britain. Blaine's Anglophobia combined with his support of high tariffs. He had initially opposed a reciprocity treaty with Canada that would have reduced tariffs between the two nations, but by the end of his time in the Senate, he had changed his mind, believing that Americans had more to gain by increasing exports than they would lose by the risk of cheap imports.",
"title": "United States Senate, 1876–1881"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Hayes had announced early in his presidency that he would not seek another term, which meant that the contest for the Republican nomination in 1880 was open to all challengers—including Blaine. Blaine was among the early favorites for the nomination, as were former President Grant, Treasury Secretary John Sherman of Ohio, and Senator George F. Edmunds of Vermont. Although Grant did not actively promote his candidacy, his entry into the race re-energized the Stalwarts and when the convention met in Chicago in June 1880, they instantly polarized the delegates into Grant and anti-Grant factions, with Blaine the most popular choice of the latter group. Blaine was nominated by James Frederick Joy of Michigan, but in contrast to Ingersoll's exciting speech of 1876, Joy's lengthy oration was remembered only for its maladroitness. After the other candidates were nominated, the first ballot showed Grant leading with 304 votes and Blaine in second with 284; no other candidate had more than Sherman's 93, and none had the required majority of 379. Sherman's delegates could swing the nomination to either Grant or Blaine, but he refused to release them through twenty-eight ballots in the hope that the anti-Grant forces would desert Blaine and flock to him. Eventually, they did desert Blaine, but instead of Sherman they shifted their votes to Ohio Congressman James A. Garfield, and by the thirty-sixth ballot he had 399 votes, enough for victory.",
"title": "1880 presidential election"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Garfield placated the Stalwarts by endorsing Chester A. Arthur of New York, a Conkling loyalist, as nominee for vice president, but it was to Blaine and his delegates that Garfield owed his nomination. When Garfield was elected over Democrat Winfield Scott Hancock, he turned to Blaine to guide him in selection of his cabinet and offered him the preeminent position: Secretary of State. Blaine accepted, resigning from the Senate on March 4, 1881.",
"title": "1880 presidential election"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Blaine saw presiding over the cabinet as a chance to preside over the Washington social scene, as well, and soon ordered construction of a new, larger home near Dupont Circle. Although his foreign policy experience was minimal, Blaine quickly threw himself into his new duties. By 1881, Blaine had completely abandoned his protectionist leanings and now used his position as Secretary of State to promote freer trade, especially within the western hemisphere. His reasons were twofold: firstly, Blaine's old fear of British interference in the Americas was undiminished, and he saw increased trade with Latin America as the best way to keep Britain from dominating the region. Secondly, he believed that by encouraging exports, he could increase American prosperity, and by doing so position the Republican party as the author of that prosperity, ensuring continued electoral success. Garfield agreed with his Secretary of State's vision and Blaine called for a Pan-American conference in 1882 to mediate disputes among the Latin American nations and to serve as a forum for talks on increasing trade. At the same time, Blaine hoped to negotiate a peace in the War of the Pacific then being fought by Bolivia, Chile, and Peru. Blaine favored a resolution that would not result in Peru yielding any territory, but Chile, which had by 1881 occupied the Peruvian capital, rejected any negotiations that would gain them nothing. Blaine sought to expand American influence in other areas, calling for renegotiation of the Clayton–Bulwer Treaty to allow the United States to construct a canal through Panama without British involvement, as well as attempting to reduce British involvement in the strategically located Kingdom of Hawaii. His plans for the United States' involvement in the world stretched even beyond the Western Hemisphere, as he sought commercial treaties with Korea and Madagascar.",
"title": "Secretary of State, 1881"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "On July 2, 1881, Blaine and Garfield were walking through the Sixth Street Station of the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad in Washington when Garfield was shot by Charles J. Guiteau, a disgruntled lawyer and crazed office seeker who had made repeated demands for Blaine and other State Department officials to appoint him to various ambassadorships for which he was grossly unqualified or were already filled.",
"title": "Secretary of State, 1881"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Guiteau, a self-professed Stalwart, believed that after assassinating the President, he would strike a blow to unite the two factions of the Republican Party, allowing him to ingratiate himself with Vice President Arthur and receive his coveted position. Guiteau was overpowered and arrested immediately, while Garfield lingered for two and a half months before he died on September 19, 1881. Guiteau was convicted of killing Garfield and hanged on June 30, 1882.",
"title": "Secretary of State, 1881"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Garfield's death was not just a personal tragedy for Blaine; it also meant the end of his dominance of the cabinet, and the end of his foreign policy initiatives. With Arthur's ascent to the presidency, the Stalwart faction now held sway, and Blaine's days at the State Department were numbered. While Arthur asked all of the cabinet members to postpone their resignations until Congress recessed that December, Blaine nonetheless tendered his resignation on October 19, 1881, but he agreed to remain in office until December 19, when his successor would be in place.",
"title": "Secretary of State, 1881"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Blaine's replacement was Frederick T. Frelinghuysen, a New Jersey Stalwart; while Arthur and Frelinghuysen undid much of Blaine's work, cancelling the call for a Pan-American conference and stopping the effort to end the War of the Pacific, they did continue the drive for tariff reductions, signing a reciprocity treaty with Mexico in 1882.",
"title": "Secretary of State, 1881"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Blaine began the year 1882 without a political office for the first time since 1859. Troubled by poor health, he sought no employment other than the completion of the first volume of his memoir, Twenty Years of Congress. Friends in Maine petitioned Blaine to run for Congress in the 1882 elections, but he declined, preferring to spend his time writing and supervising the move to the new home. His income from mining and railroad investments was sufficient to sustain the family's lifestyle and to allow for the construction of a vacation cottage, \"Stanwood\" on Mount Desert Island, Maine, designed by Frank Furness. Blaine appeared before Congress in 1882 during an investigation into his War of the Pacific diplomacy, defending himself against allegations that he owned an interest in the Peruvian guano deposits being occupied by Chile, but otherwise stayed away from the Capitol. The publication of the first volume of Twenty Years in early 1884 added to Blaine's financial security and thrust him back into the political spotlight. As the 1884 campaign loomed, Blaine's name was being circulated once more as a potential nominee, and despite some reservations, he soon found himself back in the hunt for the presidency.",
"title": "Secretary of State, 1881"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "In the months leading up to the 1884 convention, Blaine was once more considered the favorite for the nomination, but President Arthur was contemplating a run for election in his own right. George Edmunds was again the favored candidate among reformers and John Sherman had a few delegates pledged to him, but neither was expected to command much support at the convention. John A. Logan of Illinois hoped to attract Stalwart votes if Arthur's campaign was unsuccessful. Blaine was unsure he wanted to try for the nomination for the third time and even encouraged General William T. Sherman, John Sherman's older brother, to accept it if it came to him, but ultimately Blaine agreed to be a candidate again.",
"title": "1884 presidential election"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "William H. West of Ohio nominated Blaine with an enthusiastic speech and after the first ballot, Blaine led the count with 334½ votes. While short of the necessary 417 for nomination, Blaine had far more than any other candidate with Arthur in second place at 278 votes. Blaine was unacceptable to the Arthur delegates just as Blaine's own delegates would never vote for the President, so the contest was between the two for the delegates of the remaining candidates. Blaine's total steadily increased as Logan and Sherman withdrew in his favor and some of the Edmunds delegates defected to him. Unlike in previous conventions, the momentum for Blaine in 1884 would not be halted. On the fourth ballot, Blaine received 541 votes and was, at last, nominated. Logan was named vice presidential nominee on the first ballot, and the Republicans had their ticket.",
"title": "1884 presidential election"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The Democrats held their convention in Chicago the following month and nominated Governor Grover Cleveland of New York. Cleveland's time on the national scene was brief, but Democrats hoped that his reputation as a reformer and an opponent of corruption would attract Republicans dissatisfied with Blaine and his reputation for scandal. They were correct, as reform-minded Republicans (called \"Mugwumps\") denounced Blaine as corrupt and flocked to Cleveland. The Mugwumps, including such men as Carl Schurz and Henry Ward Beecher, were more concerned with morality than with party, and felt Cleveland was a kindred soul who would promote civil service reform and fight for efficiency in government. However, even as the Democrats gained support from the Mugwumps, they lost some blue-collar workers to the Greenback Party, led by Benjamin F. Butler, Blaine's antagonist from their early days in the House.",
"title": "1884 presidential election"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The campaign focused on the candidates' personalities, as each candidate's supporters cast aspersions on their opponents. Cleveland's supporters rehashed the old allegations from the Mulligan letters that Blaine had corruptly influenced legislation in favor of railroads, later profiting on the sale of bonds he owned in both companies. Although the stories of Blaine's favors to the railroads had made the rounds eight years earlier, this time more of his correspondence was discovered, making his earlier denials less plausible. Blaine acknowledged that the letters were genuine, but denied that anything in them impugned his integrity or contradicted his earlier explanations. Nevertheless, what Blaine described as \"stale slander\" served to focus the public's attention negatively on his character. On some of the most damaging correspondence, Blaine had written \"Burn this letter,\" giving Democrats the last line to their rallying cry: \"Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, the continental liar from the state of Maine, 'Burn this letter!'\"",
"title": "1884 presidential election"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "To counter Cleveland's image of superior morality, Republicans discovered reports that Cleveland had fathered an illegitimate child while he was a lawyer in Buffalo, New York, and chanted \"Ma, Ma, where's my Pa?\"—to which the Democrats, after Cleveland had been elected, appended, \"Gone to the White House, Ha! Ha! Ha!\" Cleveland admitted to paying child support in 1874 to Maria Crofts Halpin, the woman who claimed he fathered her child named Oscar Folsom Cleveland. Halpin was involved with several men at the time, including Cleveland's friend and law partner, Oscar Folsom, for whom the child was also named. Cleveland did not know which man was the father, and is believed to have assumed responsibility because he was the only bachelor among them. At the same time, Democratic operatives accused Blaine and his wife of not having been married when their eldest son, Stanwood, was born in 1851; this rumor was false, however, and caused little excitement in the campaign. Halpin disputed the claims of being involved with several men, accusing Cleveland of raping and impregnating her, then institutionalizing her against her will to gain control of their child.",
"title": "1884 presidential election"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Both candidates believed that the states of New York, New Jersey, Indiana, and Connecticut would determine the election. In New York, Blaine received less support than he anticipated when Arthur and Conkling, still powerful in the New York Republican party, failed to actively campaign for him. Blaine hoped that he would have more support from Irish Americans than Republicans typically did; while the Irish were mainly a Democratic constituency in the 19th century, Blaine's mother was Irish Catholic, and he believed his career-long opposition to the British government would resonate with the Irish. Blaine's hope for Irish defections to the Republican standard were dashed late in the campaign when one of his supporters, Samuel D. Burchard, gave a speech denouncing the Democrats as the party of \"Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.\" The Democrats spread the word of this insult in the days before the election, and Cleveland narrowly won all four of the swing states, including New York by just over one thousand votes. While the popular vote total was close, with Cleveland winning by just one-quarter of a percent, the electoral votes gave Cleveland a majority of 219–182.",
"title": "1884 presidential election"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Blaine accepted his narrow defeat and spent most of the next year working on the second volume of Twenty Years of Congress. The book continued to earn him enough money to support his lavish household and pay off his debts. Although he spoke to friends of retiring from politics, Blaine still attended dinners and commented on the Cleveland administration's policies. By the time of the 1886 Congressional elections, Blaine was giving speeches and promoting Republican candidates, especially in his home state of Maine. Republicans were successful in Maine, and after the Maine elections in September, Blaine went on a speaking tour from Pennsylvania to Tennessee, hoping to boost the prospects of Republican candidates there. Republicans were less successful nationwide, gaining seats in the House while losing seats in the Senate, but Blaine's speeches kept him and his opinions in the spotlight.",
"title": "Party leader in exile"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Blaine and his wife and daughters sailed for Europe in June 1887, visiting England, Ireland, Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, and finally Scotland, where they stayed at the summer home of Andrew Carnegie. While in France, Blaine wrote a letter to the New-York Tribune criticizing Cleveland's plans to reduce the tariff, saying that free trade with Europe would impoverish American workers and farmers. The family returned to the United States in August 1887. His letter in the Tribune had raised his political profile even higher, and by 1888 Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, both former opponents, urged Blaine to run against Cleveland again. Opinion within the party was overwhelmingly in favor of renominating Blaine.",
"title": "Party leader in exile"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "As the state conventions drew nearer, Blaine announced that he would not be a candidate. His supporters doubted his sincerity and continued to encourage him to run, but Blaine still demurred. Hoping to make his intentions clear, Blaine left the country and was staying with Carnegie in Scotland when the 1888 Republican National Convention began in Chicago. Carnegie encouraged Blaine to accept if the convention nominated him, but the delegates finally accepted Blaine's refusal. John Sherman was the most prominent candidate and sought to attract the Blaine supporters to his candidacy, but instead found them flocking to former senator Benjamin Harrison of Indiana after a telegram from Carnegie suggested that Blaine favored him. Blaine returned to the United States in August 1888 and visited Harrison at his home in October, where twenty-five thousand residents paraded in Blaine's honor. Harrison defeated Cleveland in a close election, and offered Blaine his former position as Secretary of State.",
"title": "Party leader in exile"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Harrison had developed his foreign policy based largely on Blaine's ideas, and at the start of his term, Harrison and Blaine had very similar views on the United States' place in the world. In spite of their shared worldview, however, the two men became personally unfriendly as the term went on. Harrison was conscious that his Secretary of State was more popular than he, and while he admired Blaine's gift for diplomacy, he grew displeased with Blaine's frequent absence from his post because of illness, and suspected that Blaine was angling for the presidential nomination in 1892. Harrison tried to limit how many \"Blaine men\" filled subordinate positions in the State Department and denied Blaine's request that his son, Walker, be appointed First Assistant Secretary, instead naming him Solicitor of the Department of State. Despite the growing personal rancor, the two men continued, with one exception, to agree on the foreign policy questions of the day.",
"title": "Secretary of State, 1889–1892"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Blaine and Harrison wished to see American power and trade expanded across the Pacific and were especially interested in securing rights to harbors in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and Pago Pago, Samoa. When Blaine entered office, the United States, Great Britain, and the German Empire were disputing their respective rights in Samoa. Thomas F. Bayard, Blaine's predecessor, had accepted an invitation to a three-party conference in Berlin aimed at resolving the dispute, and Blaine appointed American representatives to attend. The result was a treaty that created a condominium among the three powers, allowing all of them access to the harbor.",
"title": "Secretary of State, 1889–1892"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "In Hawaii, Blaine worked to bind the kingdom more closely to the United States and to avoid its becoming a British protectorate. When the McKinley Tariff of 1890 eliminated the duty on sugar, Hawaiian sugar-growers looked for a way to retain their once-exclusive access to the American market. The Hawaiian minister to the United States, Henry A. P. Carter, tried to arrange for Hawaii to have complete trade reciprocity with the United States, but Blaine proposed instead that Hawaii become an American protectorate; Carter favored the idea, but the Hawaiian king, Kalākaua, rejected the infringement on his sovereignty. Blaine next procured the appointment of his former newspaper colleague John L. Stevens as minister to Hawaii. Stevens had long believed that the United States should annex Hawaii, and as minister he co-operated with Americans living in Hawaii in their efforts to bring about annexation. Their efforts ultimately culminated in a coup d'état against Kalākaua's successor, Liliuokalani, in 1893. Blaine's precise involvement is undocumented, but the results of Stevens' diplomacy were in accord with his ambitions for American power in the region. The new government petitioned the United States for annexation, but by that time Blaine was no longer in office.",
"title": "Secretary of State, 1889–1892"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Soon after taking office, Blaine revived his old idea of an international conference of western hemisphere nations. The result was the First International Conference of American States, which met in Washington in 1890. Blaine and Harrison had high hopes for the conference, including proposals for a customs union, a pan-American railroad line, and an arbitration process to settle disputes among member nations. Their overall goal was to extend trade and political influence over the entire hemisphere; some of the other nations understood this and were wary of deepening ties with the United States to the exclusion of European powers. Blaine said publicly that his only interest was in \"annexation of trade,\" not annexation of territory, but privately he wrote to Harrison of a desire for some territorial enlargement of the United States:",
"title": "Secretary of State, 1889–1892"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "I think there are only three places that are of value enough to be taken ... One is Hawaii and the others are Cuba and Porto Rico [sic]. Cuba and Porto Rico are not now imminent and will not be for a generation. Hawaii may come up for decision at an unexpected hour and I hope we shall be prepared to decide it in the affirmative.",
"title": "Secretary of State, 1889–1892"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Congress was not as enthusiastic about a customs union as Blaine and Harrison were, but tariff reciprocity provisions were ultimately included in the McKinley Tariff that reduced duties on some inter-American trade. Otherwise, the conference achieved none of Blaine's goals in the short-term, but did lead to further communication and what would eventually become the Organization of American States.",
"title": "Secretary of State, 1889–1892"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "In 1891, a diplomatic crisis arose in Chile that drove a wedge between Harrison and Blaine. The American minister to Chile, Patrick Egan, a political friend of Blaine's, granted asylum to Chileans who were seeking refuge from the Chilean Civil War. Chile was already suspicious of Blaine because of his War of the Pacific diplomacy ten years earlier, and this incident raised tensions even further. When sailors from the Baltimore took shore leave in Valparaíso, a fight broke out, resulting in the deaths of two American sailors and three dozen arrested. When the news reached Washington, Blaine was in Bar Harbor recuperating from a bout of ill health and Harrison himself drafted a demand for reparations. The Chilean foreign minister, Manuel Antonio Matta, replied that Harrison's message was \"erroneous or deliberately incorrect\" and said that the Chilean government was treating the affair the same as any other criminal matter. Tensions increased as Harrison threatened to break off diplomatic relations unless the United States received a suitable apology. Blaine returned to the capital and made conciliatory overtures to the Chilean government, offering to submit the dispute to arbitration and recall Egan. Harrison still insisted on an apology and submitted a special message to Congress about the threat of war. Chile issued an apology for the incident, and the threat of war subsided.",
"title": "Secretary of State, 1889–1892"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Blaine's earliest expressions in the foreign policy sphere were those of a reactionary Anglophobe, but by the end of his career his relationship with the United Kingdom had become more moderate and nuanced. A dispute over seal hunting in the waters off Alaska was the cause of Blaine's first interaction with Britain as Harrison's Secretary of State. A law passed in 1889 required Harrison to ban seal hunting in Alaskan waters, but Canadian fishermen believed they had the right to continue fishing there. Soon thereafter, the United States Navy seized several Canadian ships near the Pribilof Islands. Blaine entered into negotiations with Britain and the two nations agreed to submit the dispute to arbitration by a neutral tribunal. Blaine was no longer in office when the tribunal began its work, but the result was to allow the hunting once more, albeit with some regulation, and to require the United States to pay damages of $473,151. Ultimately, the nations signed the North Pacific Fur Seal Convention of 1911, which outlawed open-water seal hunting.",
"title": "Secretary of State, 1889–1892"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "At the same time as the Pribilof Islands dispute, an outbreak of mob violence in New Orleans became an international incident. After New Orleans police chief David Hennessy led a crackdown against local mafiosi, he was assassinated on October 14, 1890. After the alleged murderers were found not guilty on March 14, 1891, a mob stormed the jail and lynched eleven of them. Since many of those killed were Italian citizens the Italian minister, Saverio Fava, protested to Blaine. Blaine explained that federal officials could not control how state officials deal with criminal matters, and Fava announced that he would withdraw the legation back to Italy. Blaine and Harrison believed the Italians' response to be an overreaction, and did nothing. Tensions slowly cooled, and after nearly a year, the Italian minister returned to the United States to negotiate an indemnity. After some internal dispute—Blaine wanted conciliation with Italy, Harrison was reluctant to admit fault—the United States agreed to pay an indemnity of $25,000, and normal diplomatic relations resumed.",
"title": "Secretary of State, 1889–1892"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Blaine had always believed his health to be fragile, and by the time he joined Harrison's cabinet he truly was unwell. The years at the State Department also brought Blaine personal tragedy as two of his children, Walker and Alice, died suddenly in 1890. Another son, Emmons, died in 1892. With these family losses and his declining health, Blaine decided to retire and announced that he would resign from the cabinet on June 4, 1892. Because of their growing animosity, and because Blaine's resignation came three days before the 1892 Republican National Convention began, Harrison suspected that Blaine was preparing to run against him for the party's nomination for president.",
"title": "Retirement and death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Harrison was unpopular with the party and the country, and many of Blaine's old supporters encouraged him to run for the nomination. Blaine had denied any interest in the nomination months before his resignation, but some of his friends, including Senator Matthew Quay of Pennsylvania and James S. Clarkson, chairman of the Republican National Committee, took it for false modesty and worked for his nomination anyway. When Blaine resigned from the cabinet, his boosters were certain that he was a candidate, but the majority of the party stood by the incumbent. Harrison was renominated on the first ballot, but die-hard Blaine delegates still gave their champion 182 and 1/6 votes, good enough for second place.",
"title": "Retirement and death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Blaine spent the summer of 1892 at his Bar Harbor cottage, and did not involve himself in the presidential campaign other than to make a single speech in New York in October. Harrison was defeated soundly in his rematch against former president Cleveland and when Blaine returned to Washington at the close of 1892, he and Harrison were friendlier than they had been in years. Blaine's health declined rapidly in the winter of 1892–1893, and he died in his Washington home on January 27, 1893, four days before turning sixty-three. After a funeral at the Presbyterian Church of the Covenant, he was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington. He was later re-interred in Blaine Memorial Park, Augusta, Maine, in 1920.",
"title": "Retirement and death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "A towering figure in the Republican party of his day, Blaine fell into obscurity fairly soon after his death. A 1905 biography by his wife's cousin, Edward Stanwood, was written when the question was still in doubt, but by the time David Saville Muzzey published his biography of Blaine in 1934, the subtitle \"A Political Idol of Other Days\" already spoke to its subject's fading place in the popular mind, perhaps because of the nine men the Republican Party nominated for the presidency from 1860 to 1912, Blaine is the only one who never became president. Although several authors studied Blaine's foreign policy career, including Edward P. Crapol's 2000 work, Muzzey's was the last full-scale biography of the man until Neil Rolde's 2006 book. Historian R. Hal Williams was working on a new biography of Blaine, tentatively titled James G. Blaine: A Life in Politics, until his death in 2016.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "During the 2016 United States presidential election, both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were compared to Blaine for their controversies. Blaine's status as a former Secretary of State who sought to erase evidence of his personal corruption drew parallels to Clinton, while his appeals to anti-Chinese sentiment were compared to Trump's anti-Muslim rhetoric. Similarly, the Mugwumps who opposed Blaine in 1884 have been compared to the Never Trump movement.",
"title": "Legacy"
}
]
| James Gillespie Blaine was an American statesman and Republican politician who represented Maine in the United States House of Representatives from 1863 to 1876, serving as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1869 to 1875, and then in the United States Senate from 1876 to 1881. Blaine twice served as Secretary of State, first in 1881 under President James A. Garfield and Chester A. Arthur, and then from 1889 to 1892 under President Benjamin Harrison. He is one of only two U.S. Secretaries of State to hold the position under three separate presidents, the other being Daniel Webster. Blaine unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for President in 1876 and 1880 before being nominated in 1884. In the 1884 general election, he was narrowly defeated by Democratic nominee Grover Cleveland. Blaine was one of the late 19th century's leading Republicans and a champion of the party's moderate reformist faction, later known as the "Half-Breeds". Blaine was born in the western Pennsylvania town of West Brownsville and moved to Maine after completing college where he became a newspaper editor. Nicknamed "the Magnetic Man", he was a charismatic speaker in an era that prized oratory. He began his political career as an early supporter of Republican Abraham Lincoln and the Union war effort in the American Civil War. During Reconstruction, Blaine was a supporter of black suffrage, but opposed some of the more coercive measures of the Radical Republicans. Initially in favor of high tariffs, he later worked to lower tariffs and expand international trade. Railroad promotion and construction were important issues in his time and, as a result of his interest and support, Blaine was widely suspected of corruption in awarding railroad charters, especially with the emergence of the Mulligan letters. Though no evidence of corruption ever surfaced from these allegations, they nevertheless plagued his 1884 presidential candidacy. As Secretary of State, Blaine was a transitional figure, marking the end of an isolationist era in foreign policy and foreshadowing the rise of the American Century that would begin with the Spanish–American War. His efforts to expand U.S. trade and influence began the nation's shift to a more active American foreign policy. Blaine was a pioneer of tariff reciprocity and urged greater involvement in Latin American affairs. An expansionist, Blaine's policies would lead in less than a decade to the establishment of the U.S. acquisition of Pacific colonies and dominance in the Caribbean. | 2002-02-08T22:40:40Z | 2023-09-29T18:02:27Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_G._Blaine |
16,209 | Justinian I | Justinian I (/dʒʌˈstɪniən/ just-IN-ee-ən; Latin: Iustinianus, Classical Latin: [juːstiːniˈaːnʊs]; Greek: Ἰουστινιανός, translit. Ioustinianós, Medieval Greek: [i.ustini.aˈnos]; 482 – 14 November 565), also known as Justinian the Great, was Eastern Roman emperor from 527 to 565.
His reign was marked by the ambitious but only partly realized renovatio imperii, or "restoration of the Empire". This ambition was expressed by the partial recovery of the territories of the defunct Western Roman Empire. His general, Belisarius, swiftly conquered the Vandal Kingdom in North Africa. Subsequently, Belisarius, Narses, and other generals conquered the Ostrogothic kingdom, restoring Dalmatia, Sicily, Italy, and Rome to the empire after more than half a century of rule by the Ostrogoths. The praetorian prefect Liberius reclaimed the south of the Iberian Peninsula, establishing the province of Spania. These campaigns re-established Roman control over the western Mediterranean, increasing the Empire's annual revenue by over a million solidi. During his reign, Justinian also subdued the Tzani, a people on the east coast of the Black Sea that had never been under Roman rule before. He engaged the Sasanian Empire in the east during Kavad I's reign, and later again during Khosrow I's reign; this second conflict was partially initiated due to his ambitions in the west.
A still more resonant aspect of his legacy was the uniform rewriting of Roman law, the Corpus Juris Civilis, which is still the basis of civil law in many modern states. His reign also marked a blossoming of Eastern Roman (Byzantine) culture, and his building program yielded works such as the Hagia Sophia.
Justinian was born in Tauresium, Dardania, probably in 482. A native speaker of Latin (possibly the last Roman emperor to be one), he came from a peasant family believed to have been of Illyro-Roman or Thraco-Roman origin. The name Iustinianus, which he took later, is indicative of adoption by his uncle Justin. During his reign, he founded Justiniana Prima not far from his birthplace. His mother was Vigilantia, the sister of Justin. Justin, who was commander of one of the imperial guard units (the Excubitors) before he became emperor, adopted Justinian, brought him to Constantinople, and ensured the boy's education. As a result, Justinian was well educated in jurisprudence, theology, and Roman history. Justinian served as a candidatus, one of 40 men selected from the scholae palatinae to serve as the emperor's personal bodyguard. The chronicler John Malalas, who lived during the reign of Justinian, describes his appearance as short, fair-skinned, curly-haired, round-faced, and handsome. Another contemporary historian, Procopius, compares Justinian's appearance to that of tyrannical Emperor Domitian, although this is probably slander.
When Emperor Anastasius died in 518, Justin was proclaimed the new emperor with significant help from Justinian. Justinian showed a lot of ambition, and several sources claim that he was functioning as virtual regent long before Justin made him associate emperor, although there is no conclusive evidence of this. As Justin became senile near the end of his reign, Justinian became the de facto ruler. Following the general Vitalian's assassination in 520 (orchestrated by Justinian and Justin), Justinian was appointed consul and commander of the army of the east. Justinian remained Justin's close confidant, and in 525 was granted the titles of nobilissimus and caesar (heir-apparent). He was crowned co-emperor on 1 April 527, and became sole ruler after Justin's death on 1 August 527.
As a ruler, Justinian showed great energy. He was known as "the emperor who never sleeps" for his work habits. Nevertheless, he seems to have been amiable and easy to approach. Around 525, he married his mistress, Theodora, in Constantinople. She was by profession an actress and some twenty years his junior. In earlier times, Justinian could not have married her owing to her class, but his uncle, Emperor Justin I, had passed a law lifting restrictions on marriages with ex-actresses. Though the marriage caused a scandal, Theodora would become very influential in the politics of the Empire. Other talented individuals included Tribonian, his legal adviser; Peter the Patrician, the diplomat and long-time head of the palace bureaucracy; Justinian's finance ministers John the Cappadocian and Peter Barsymes, who managed to collect taxes more efficiently than any before, thereby funding Justinian's wars; and finally, his prodigiously talented generals, Belisarius and Narses.
Justinian's rule was not universally popular; early in his reign he nearly lost his throne during the Nika riots, and a conspiracy against the emperor's life by dissatisfied entrepreneurs was discovered as late as 562. Justinian was struck by the plague in the early 540s but recovered. Theodora died in 548 at a relatively young age, possibly of cancer; Justinian outlived her by nearly twenty years. Justinian, who had always had a keen interest in theological matters and actively participated in debates on Christian doctrine, became even more devoted to religion during the later years of his life. He died on 14 November 565, childless. He was succeeded by Justin II, who was the son of his sister Vigilantia and married to Sophia, the niece of Theodora. Justinian's body was entombed in a specially built mausoleum in the Church of the Holy Apostles until it was desecrated and robbed during the pillage of the city in 1204 by the Latin States of the Fourth Crusade.
Justinian achieved lasting fame through his judicial reforms, particularly through the complete revision of all Roman law, something that had not previously been attempted. The total of Justinian's legislation is known today as the Corpus juris civilis. It consists of the Codex Justinianeus, the Digesta or Pandectae, the Institutiones, and the Novellae.
Early in his reign, Justinian had appointed the quaestor Tribonian to oversee this task. The first draft of the Codex Justinianeus, a codification of imperial constitutions from the 2nd century onward, was issued on 7 April 529. (The final version appeared in 534.) It was followed by the Digesta (or Pandectae), a compilation of older legal texts, in 533, and by the Institutiones, a textbook explaining the principles of law. The Novellae, a collection of new laws issued during Justinian's reign, supplements the Corpus. As opposed to the rest of the corpus, the Novellae appeared in Greek, the common language of the Eastern Empire.
The Corpus forms the basis of Latin jurisprudence (including ecclesiastical Canon Law) and, for historians, provides a valuable insight into the concerns and activities of the later Roman Empire. As a collection it gathers together the many sources in which the leges (laws) and the other rules were expressed or published: proper laws, senatorial consults (senatusconsulta), imperial decrees, case law, and jurists' opinions and interpretations (responsa prudentium). Tribonian's code ensured the survival of Roman law. It formed the basis of later Byzantine law, as expressed in the Basilika of Basil I and Leo VI the Wise. The only western province where the Justinianic code was introduced was Italy (after the conquest by the so-called Pragmatic Sanction of 554), from where it was to pass to Western Europe in the 12th century and become the basis of much Continental European law code, which was eventually spread by European empires to the Americas and beyond in the Age of Discovery. It eventually passed to Eastern Europe where it appeared in Slavic editions, and it also passed on to Russia. It remains influential to this day.
He passed laws to protect prostitutes from exploitation and women from being forced into prostitution. Rapists were treated severely. Further, by his policies: women charged with major crimes should be guarded by other women to prevent sexual abuse; if a woman was widowed, her dowry should be returned; and a husband could not take on a major debt without his wife giving her consent twice.
Family legislation also revealed a greater concern for the interests of children. This was particularly so with respect to children born out of wedlock. The law under Justinian also reveals a striking interest in child neglect issues. Justinian protected the rights of children whose parents remarried and produced more offspring, or who simply separated and abandoned their offspring, forcing them to beg.
Justinian discontinued the regular appointment of Consuls in 541.
In Constantinople, under Justinian, hospitals were built for and free medical care provided to the many poor residents of the city. In addition, public baths were free for all residents and 20 state bakeries provided free bread to those who needed it. According to one study, “The empire’s social welfare programs ensured that no one went hungry.”
Justinian's habit of choosing efficient but unpopular advisers nearly cost him his throne early in his reign. In January 532, partisans of the chariot racing factions in Constantinople, normally rivals, united against Justinian in a revolt that has become known as the Nika riots. They forced him to dismiss Tribonian and two of his other ministers, and then attempted to overthrow Justinian himself and replace him with the senator Hypatius, who was a nephew of the late emperor Anastasius. While the crowd was rioting in the streets, Justinian considered fleeing the capital by sea, but eventually decided to stay, apparently on the prompting of his wife Theodora, who refused to leave. In the next two days, he ordered the brutal suppression of the riots by his generals Belisarius and Mundus. Procopius relates that 30,000 unarmed civilians were killed in the Hippodrome. On Theodora's insistence, and apparently against his own judgment, Justinian had Anastasius' nephews executed.
The destruction that took place during the revolt provided Justinian with an opportunity to tie his name to a series of splendid new buildings, most notably the architectural innovation of the domed Hagia Sophia.
One of the most spectacular features of Justinian's reign was the recovery of large stretches of land around the Western Mediterranean basin that had slipped out of Imperial control in the 5th century. As a Christian Roman emperor, Justinian considered it his divine duty to restore the Roman Empire to its ancient boundaries. Although he never personally took part in military campaigns, he boasted of his successes in the prefaces to his laws and had them commemorated in art. The re-conquests were in large part carried out by his general Belisarius.
From his uncle, Justinian inherited ongoing hostilities with the Sassanid Empire. In 530 the Persian forces suffered a double defeat at Dara and Satala, but the next year saw the defeat of Roman forces under Belisarius near Callinicum. Justinian then tried to make alliance with the Axumites of Ethiopia and the Himyarites of Yemen against the Persians, but this failed. When king Kavadh I of Persia died (September 531), Justinian concluded an "Eternal Peace" (which cost him 11,000 pounds of gold) with his successor Khosrau I (532). Having thus secured his eastern frontier, Justinian turned his attention to the West, where Germanic kingdoms had been established in the territories of the former Western Roman Empire.
The first of the western kingdoms Justinian attacked was that of the Vandals in North Africa. King Hilderic, who had maintained good relations with Justinian and the North African Catholic clergy, had been overthrown by his cousin Gelimer in 530 AD. Imprisoned, the deposed king appealed to Justinian. Justinian protested Gelimer's actions, demanding that Gelimer return the kingdom to Hilderic. Gelimer replied, in effect, that Justinian had no authority to make these demands. Angered at this response, Justinian quickly concluded his ongoing war with the Sassanian Empire and prepared an expedition against the Vandals in 533.
In 533, Belisarius sailed to Africa with a fleet of 92 dromons, escorting 500 transports carrying an army of about 15,000 men, as well as a number of barbarian troops. They landed at Caput Vada (modern Ras Kaboudia) in modern Tunisia. They defeated the Vandals, who were caught completely off guard, at Ad Decimum on 14 September 533 and Tricamarum in December; Belisarius took Carthage. King Gelimer fled to Mount Pappua in Numidia, but surrendered the next spring. He was taken to Constantinople, where he was paraded in a triumph. Sardinia and Corsica, the Balearic Islands, and the stronghold Septem Fratres near Mons Calpe (later named Gibraltar) were recovered in the same campaign.
In this war, the contemporary Procopius remarks that Africa was so entirely depopulated that a person might travel several days without meeting a human being, and he adds, "it is no exaggeration to say, that in the course of the war 5,000,000 perished by the sword, and famine, and pestilence."
An African prefecture, centered in Carthage, was established in April 534, but it would teeter on the brink of collapse during the next 15 years, amidst warfare with the Moors and military mutinies. The area was not completely pacified until 548, but remained peaceful thereafter and enjoyed a measure of prosperity. The recovery of Africa cost the empire about 100,000 pounds of gold.
As in Africa, dynastic struggles in Ostrogothic Italy provided an opportunity for intervention. The young king Athalaric had died on 2 October 534, and a usurper, Theodahad, had imprisoned queen Amalasuintha, Theodoric's daughter and mother of Athalaric, on the island of Martana in Lake Bolsena, where he had her assassinated in 535. Thereupon Belisarius, with 7,500 men, invaded Sicily (535) and advanced into Italy, sacking Naples and capturing Rome on 9 December 536. By that time Theodahad had been deposed by the Ostrogothic army, who had elected Vitigis as their new king. He gathered a large army and besieged Rome from February 537 to March 538 without being able to retake the city.
Justinian sent another general, Narses, to Italy, but tensions between Narses and Belisarius hampered the progress of the campaign. Milan was taken, but was soon recaptured and razed by the Ostrogoths. Justinian recalled Narses in 539. By then the military situation had turned in favour of the Romans, and in 540 Belisarius reached the Ostrogothic capital Ravenna. There he was offered the title of Western Roman Emperor by the Ostrogoths at the same time that envoys of Justinian were arriving to negotiate a peace that would leave the region north of the Po River in Gothic hands. Belisarius feigned acceptance of the offer, entered the city in May 540, and reclaimed it for the Empire. Then, having been recalled by Justinian, Belisarius returned to Constantinople, taking the captured Vitigis and his wife Matasuntha with him.
Belisarius had been recalled in the face of renewed hostilities by the Persians. Following a revolt against the Empire in Armenia in the late 530s and possibly motivated by the pleas of Ostrogothic ambassadors, King Khosrau I broke the "Eternal Peace" and invaded Roman territory in the spring of 540. He first sacked Beroea and then Antioch (allowing the garrison of 6,000 men to leave the city), besieged Daras, and then went on to attack the Byzantine base in the small but strategically significant satellite kingdom of Lazica near the Black Sea as requested by its discontented king Gubazes, exacting tribute from the towns he passed along his way. He forced Justinian I to pay him 5,000 pounds of gold, plus 500 pounds of gold more each year.
Belisarius arrived in the East in 541, but after some success, was again recalled to Constantinople in 542. The reasons for his withdrawal are not known, but it may have been instigated by rumours of his disloyalty reaching the court. The outbreak of the plague coupled with a rebellion in Persia brought Khosrow I's offensives to a halt. Exploiting this, Justinian ordered all the forces in the East to invade Persian Armenia, but the 30,000-strong Byzantine force was defeated by a small force at Anglon. The next year, Khosrau unsuccessfully besieged the major city of Edessa. Both parties made little headway, and in 545 a truce was agreed upon for the southern part of the Roman-Persian frontier. After that, the Lazic War in the North continued for several years: the Lazic king switched to the Byzantine side, and in 549 Justinian sent Dagisthaeus to recapture Petra, but he faced heavy resistance and the siege was relieved by Sasanian reinforcements. Justinian replaced him with Bessas, who was under a cloud after the loss of Rome in 546, but he managed to capture and dismantle Petra in 551. The war continued for several years until a second truce in 557, followed by a Fifty Years' Peace in 562. Under its terms, the Persians agreed to abandon Lazica in exchange for an annual tribute of 400 or 500 pounds of gold (30,000 solidi) to be paid by the Romans.
While military efforts were directed to the East, the situation in Italy took a turn for the worse. Under their respective kings Ildibad and Eraric (both murdered in 541) and especially Totila, the Ostrogoths made quick gains. After a victory at Faenza in 542, they reconquered the major cities of Southern Italy and soon held almost the entire Italian Peninsula. Belisarius was sent back to Italy late in 544 but lacked sufficient troops and supplies. Making no headway, he was relieved of his command in 548. Belisarius succeeded in defeating a Gothic fleet of 200 ships. During this period the city of Rome changed hands three more times, first taken and depopulated by the Ostrogoths in December 546, then reconquered by the Byzantines in 547, and then again by the Goths in January 550. Totila also plundered Sicily and attacked Greek coastlines.
Finally, Justinian dispatched a force of approximately 35,000 men (2,000 men were detached and sent to invade southern Visigothic Hispania) under the command of Narses. The army reached Ravenna in June 552 and defeated the Ostrogoths decisively within a month at the battle of Busta Gallorum in the Apennines, where Totila was slain. After a second battle at Mons Lactarius in October that year, the resistance of the Ostrogoths was finally broken. In 554, a large-scale Frankish invasion was defeated at Casilinum, and Italy was secured for the Empire, though it would take Narses several years to reduce the remaining Gothic strongholds. At the end of the war, Italy was garrisoned with an army of 16,000 men. The recovery of Italy cost the empire about 300,000 pounds of gold. Procopius estimated 15,000,000 Goths died.
In addition to the other conquests, the Empire established a presence in Visigothic Hispania, when the usurper Athanagild requested assistance in his rebellion against King Agila I. In 552, Justinian dispatched a force of 2,000 men; according to the historian Jordanes, this army was led by the octogenarian Liberius. The Byzantines took Cartagena and other cities on the southeastern coast and founded the new province of Spania before being checked by their former ally Athanagild, who had by now become king. This campaign marked the apogee of Byzantine expansion.
During Justinian's reign, the Balkans suffered from several incursions by the Turkic and Slavic peoples who lived north of the Danube. Here, Justinian resorted mainly to a combination of diplomacy and a system of defensive works. In 559 a particularly dangerous invasion of Sklavinoi and Kutrigurs under their khan Zabergan threatened Constantinople, but they were repulsed by the aged general Belisarius.
Justinian's ambition to restore the Roman Empire to its former glory was only partly realized, with only noteworthy sustainable conquests in Africa. In the West, the brilliant early military successes of the 530s were followed by years of stagnation. The dragging war with the Goths was a disaster for Italy, even though its long-lasting effects may have been less severe than is sometimes thought. The heavy taxes that the administration imposed upon Italian population were deeply resented.
The final victory in Italy and the conquest of Africa and the coast of southern Hispania significantly enlarged the area of Byzantine influence and eliminated all naval threats to the empire, which in 555 reached its territorial zenith. Despite losing much of Italy soon after Justinian's death, the empire retained several important cities, including Rome, Naples, and Ravenna, leaving the Lombards as a regional threat. The newly founded province of Spania kept the Visigoths as a threat to Hispania alone and not to the western Mediterranean and Africa.
Events of the later years of his reign showed that Constantinople itself was not safe from barbarian incursions from the north, and even the relatively benevolent historian Menander Protector felt the need to attribute the Emperor's failure to protect the capital to the weakness of his body in his old age. In his efforts to renew the Roman Empire, Justinian dangerously stretched its resources while failing to take into account the changed realities of 6th-century Europe.
Justinian saw the orthodoxy of his empire threatened by diverging religious currents, especially Monophysitism, which had many adherents in the eastern provinces of Syria and Egypt. Monophysite doctrine, which maintains that Jesus Christ had one divine nature rather than a synthesis of divine and human nature, had been condemned as a heresy by the Council of Chalcedon in 451, and the tolerant policies towards Monophysitism of Zeno and Anastasius I had been a source of tension in the relationship with the bishops of Rome.
Justin reversed this trend and confirmed the Chalcedonian doctrine, openly condemning the Monophysites. Justinian, who continued this policy, tried to impose religious unity on his subjects by forcing them to accept doctrinal compromises that might appeal to all parties, a policy that proved unsuccessful as he satisfied none of them.
Near the end of his life, Justinian became ever more inclined towards the Monophysite doctrine, especially in the form of Aphthartodocetism, but he died before being able to issue any legislation. The empress Theodora sympathized with the Monophysites and is said to have been a constant source of pro-Monophysite intrigues at the court in Constantinople in the earlier years. In the course of his reign, Justinian, who had a genuine interest in matters of theology, authored a small number of theological treatises.
As in his secular administration, despotism appeared also in the Emperor's ecclesiastical policy. He regulated everything, both in religion and in law. At the very beginning of his reign, he deemed it proper to promulgate by law the Church's belief in the Trinity and the Incarnation, and to threaten all heretics with the appropriate penalties, whereas he subsequently declared that he intended to deprive all disturbers of orthodoxy of the opportunity for such offense by due process of law. He made the Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan creed the sole symbol of the Church and accorded legal force to the canons of the four ecumenical councils. The bishops in attendance at the Council of Constantinople (536) recognized that nothing could be done in the Church contrary to the emperor's will and command, while, on his side, the emperor, in the case of the Patriarch Anthimus, reinforced the ban of the Church with temporal proscription. Justinian protected the purity of the church by suppressing heretics. He neglected no opportunity to secure the rights of the Church and clergy, and to protect and extend monasticism. He granted the monks the right to inherit property from private citizens and the right to receive solemnia, or annual gifts, from the Imperial treasury or from the taxes of certain provinces and he prohibited lay confiscation of monastic estates.
Although the despotic character of his measures is contrary to modern sensibilities, he was a "nursing father" of the Church. Both the Codex and the Novellae contain many enactments regarding donations, foundations, and the administration of ecclesiastical property; election and rights of bishops, priests and abbots; monastic life, residential obligations of the clergy, conduct of divine service, episcopal jurisdiction, etc. Justinian also rebuilt the Church of Hagia Sophia (which cost 20,000 pounds of gold), the original site having been destroyed during the Nika riots. The new Hagia Sophia, with its numerous chapels and shrines, gilded octagonal dome, and mosaics, became the centre and most visible monument of Eastern Orthodoxy in Constantinople.
From the middle of the 5th century onward, increasingly arduous tasks confronted the emperors of the East in ecclesiastical matters. Justinian entered the arena of ecclesiastical statecraft shortly after his uncle's accession in 518, and put an end to the Acacian schism. Previous Emperors had tried to alleviate theological conflicts by declarations that deemphasized the Council of Chalcedon, which had condemned Monophysitism, which had strongholds in Egypt and Syria, and by tolerating the appointment of Monophysites to church offices. The Popes reacted by severing ties with the Patriarch of Constantinople who supported these policies. Emperors Justin I (and later Justinian himself) rescinded these policies and reestablished the union between Constantinople and Rome. After this, Justinian also felt entitled to settle disputes in papal elections, as he did when he favored Vigilius and had his rival Silverius deported.
This new-found unity between East and West did not, however, solve the ongoing disputes in the east. Justinian's policies switched between attempts to force Monophysites and Miaphysites (who were mistaken to be adherers of Monophysitism) to accept the Chalcedonian creed by persecuting their bishops and monks – thereby embittering their sympathizers in Egypt and other provinces – and attempts at a compromise that would win over the Monophysites without surrendering the Chalcedonian faith. Such an approach was supported by the Empress Theodora, who favoured the Miaphysites unreservedly. In the condemnation of the Three Chapters, three theologians that had opposed Monophysitism before and after the Council of Chalcedon, Justinian tried to win over the opposition. At the Fifth Ecumenical Council, most of the Eastern church yielded to the Emperor's demands, and Pope Vigilius, who was forcibly brought to Constantinople and besieged at a chapel, finally also gave his assent. However, the condemnation was received unfavourably in the west, where it led to new (albeit temporal) schism, and failed to reach its goal in the east, as the Monophysites remained unsatisfied – all the more bitter for him because during his last years he took an even greater interest in theological matters.
Justinian's religious policy reflected the Imperial conviction that the unity of the Empire presupposed unity of faith, and it appeared to him obvious that this faith could only be the orthodoxy (Chalcedonian). Those of a different belief were subjected to persecution, which imperial legislation had effected from the time of Constantius II and which would now vigorously continue. The Codex contained two statutes that decreed the total destruction of paganism, even in private life; these provisions were zealously enforced. Contemporary sources (John Malalas, Theophanes, and John of Ephesus) tell of severe persecutions, even of men in high position.
The original Academy of Plato had been destroyed by the Roman dictator Sulla in 86 BC. Several centuries later, in 410 AD, a Neoplatonic Academy was established that had no institutional continuity with Plato's Academy, and which served as a center for Neoplatonism and mysticism. It persisted until 529 AD when it was finally closed by Justinian I. Other schools in Constantinople, Antioch, and Alexandria, which were the centers of Justinian's empire, continued.
In Asia Minor alone, John of Ephesus was reported to have converted 70,000 pagans, which was probably an exaggerated number. Other peoples also accepted Christianity: the Heruli, the Huns dwelling near the Don, the Abasgi, and the Tzanni in Caucasia.
The worship of Amun at the oasis of Awjila in the Libyan desert was abolished, and so were the remnants of the worship of Isis on the island of Philae, at the first cataract of the Nile. The Presbyter Julian and the Bishop Longinus conducted a mission among the Nabataeans, and Justinian attempted to strengthen Christianity in Yemen by dispatching a bishop from Egypt.
The civil rights of Jews were restricted and their religious privileges threatened. Justinian also interfered in the internal affairs of the synagogue and encouraged the Jews to use the Greek Septuagint in their synagogues in Constantinople.
The Emperor faced significant opposition from the Samaritans, who resisted conversion to Christianity and were repeatedly in insurrection. He persecuted them with rigorous edicts, but could not prevent reprisals towards Christians from taking place in Samaria toward the close of his reign. The consistency of Justinian's policy meant that the Manicheans too suffered persecution, experiencing both exile and threat of capital punishment. At Constantinople, on one occasion, not a few Manicheans, after strict inquisition, were executed in the emperor's very presence: some by burning, others by drowning.
Justinian was a prolific builder; the historian Procopius bears witness to his activities in this area. Under Justinian's reign, the San Vitale in Ravenna, which features two famous mosaics representing Justinian and Theodora, was completed under the sponsorship of Julius Argentarius. Most notably, he had the Hagia Sophia, originally a basilica-style church that had been burnt down during the Nika riots, splendidly rebuilt according to a completely different ground plan, under the architectural supervision of Isidore of Miletus and Anthemius of Tralles. On 26 December 537, according to Pseudo-Codinus, Justinian stated at the completion of this edifice: "Solomon, I have outdone thee" (in reference to the first Jewish temple). The church had a second inauguration on 24 December 562, after several reworks made by Isidore the Younger. This new cathedral, with its magnificent dome filled with mosaics, remained the centre of eastern Christianity for centuries.
Another prominent church in the capital, the Church of the Holy Apostles, which had been in a very poor state near the end of the 5th century, was likewise rebuilt. The Church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, later renamed Little Hagia Sophia, was also built between 532 and 536 by the imperial couple. Works of embellishment were not confined to churches alone: excavations at the site of the Great Palace of Constantinople have yielded several high-quality mosaics dating from Justinian's reign, and a column topped by a bronze statue of Justinian on horseback and dressed in a military costume was erected in the Augustaeum in Constantinople in 543. Rivalry with other, more established patrons from the Constantinopolitan and exiled Roman aristocracy might have enforced Justinian's building activities in the capital as a means of strengthening his dynasty's prestige.
Justinian also strengthened the borders of the Empire from Africa to the East through the construction of fortifications and ensured Constantinople of its water supply through construction of underground cisterns (see Basilica Cistern). To prevent floods from damaging the strategically important border town Dara, an advanced arch dam was built. During his reign the large Sangarius Bridge was built in Bithynia, securing a major military supply route to the east. Furthermore, Justinian restored cities damaged by earthquake or war and built a new city near his place of birth called Justiniana Prima, which was intended to replace Thessalonica as the political and religious centre of Illyricum.
In Justinian's reign, and partly under his patronage, Byzantine culture produced noteworthy historians, including Procopius and Agathias, and poets such as Paul the Silentiary and Romanus the Melodist flourished. On the other hand, centres of learning such as the Neoplatonic Academy in Athens and the famous Law School of Berytus lost their importance during his reign.
As was the case under Justinian's predecessors, the Empire's economic health rested primarily on agriculture. In addition, long-distance trade flourished, reaching as far north as Cornwall where tin was exchanged for Roman wheat. Within the Empire, convoys sailing from Alexandria provided Constantinople with wheat and grains. Justinian made the traffic more efficient by building a large granary on the island of Tenedos for storage and further transport to Constantinople. Justinian also tried to find new routes for the eastern trade, which was suffering badly from the wars with the Persians.
One important luxury product was silk, which was imported and then processed in the Empire. In order to protect the manufacture of silk products, Justinian granted a monopoly to the imperial factories in 541. In order to bypass the Persian landroute, Justinian established friendly relations with the Abyssinians, whom he wanted to act as trade mediators by transporting Indian silk to the Empire; the Abyssinians, however, were unable to compete with the Persian merchants in India. Then, in the early 550s, two monks succeeded in smuggling eggs of silk worms from Central Asia back to Constantinople, and silk became an indigenous product.
Gold and silver were mined in the Balkans, Anatolia, Armenia, Cyprus, Egypt and Nubia.
At the start of Justinian I's reign he had inherited a surplus 28,800,000 solidi (400,000 pounds of gold) in the imperial treasury from Anastasius I and Justin I. Under Justinian's rule, measures were taken to counter corruption in the provinces and to make tax collection more efficient. Greater administrative power was given to both the leaders of the prefectures and of the provinces, while power was taken away from the vicariates of the dioceses, of which a number were abolished. The overall trend was towards a simplification of administrative infrastructure. According to Brown (1971), the increased professionalization of tax collection did much to destroy the traditional structures of provincial life, as it weakened the autonomy of the town councils in the Greek towns. It has been estimated that before Justinian I's reconquests the state had an annual revenue of 5,000,000 solidi in AD 530, but after his reconquests, the annual revenue was increased to 6,000,000 solidi in AD 550.
Throughout Justinian's reign, the cities and villages of the East thrived, although Antioch was struck by two earthquakes (526, 528) and sacked and evacuated by the Persians (540). Justinian had the city rebuilt, but on a slightly smaller scale.
Despite all these measures, the Empire suffered several major setbacks in the course of the 6th century. The first one was the plague, which lasted from 541 to 543 and, by decimating the Empire's population, probably created a scarcity of labor and a rising of wages. The lack of manpower also led to a significant increase in the number of "barbarians" in the Byzantine armies after the early 540s. The protracted war in Italy and the wars with the Persians themselves laid a heavy burden on the Empire's resources, and Justinian was criticized for curtailing the government-run post service, which he limited to only one eastern route of military importance.
During the 530s, it seemed to many that God had abandoned the Christian Roman Empire. There were noxious fumes in the air and the Sun, while still providing daylight, refused to give much heat. The extreme weather events of 535–536 led to a famine such as had not been recorded before, affecting both Europe and the Middle East. These events may have been caused by an atmospheric dust veil resulting from a large volcanic eruption.
The historian Procopius recorded in 536 in his work on the Vandalic War "during this year a most dread portent took place. For the sun gave forth its light without brightness … and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear".
The causes of these disasters are not precisely known, but volcanoes at the Rabaul caldera, Lake Ilopango, Krakatoa, or, according to a recent finding, in Iceland are suspected.
Seven years later in 542, a devastating outbreak of Bubonic Plague, known as the Plague of Justinian and second only to Black Death of the 14th century, killed tens of millions. Justinian and members of his court, physically unaffected by the previous 535–536 famine, were afflicted, with Justinian himself contracting and surviving the pestilence. The impact of this outbreak of plague has recently been disputed, since evidence for tens of millions dying is uncertain.
In July 551, the eastern Mediterranean was rocked by the 551 Beirut earthquake, which triggered a tsunami. The combined fatalities of both events likely exceeded 30,000, with tremors felt from Antioch to Alexandria.
In the Paradiso section of the Divine Comedy, Canto (chapter) VI, by Dante Alighieri, Justinian I is prominently featured as a spirit residing on the sphere of Mercury. The latter holds in Heaven the souls of those whose acts were righteous, yet meant to achieve fame and honor. Justinian's legacy is elaborated on, and he is portrayed as a defender of the Christian faith and the restorer of Rome to the Empire. Justinian confesses that he was partially motivated by fame rather than duty to God, which tainted the justice of his rule in spite of his proud accomplishments. In his introduction, "Cesare fui e son Iustinïano" ("Caesar I was, and am Justinian"), his mortal title is contrasted with his immortal soul, to emphasize that "glory in life is ephemeral, while contributing to God's glory is eternal", according to Dorothy L. Sayers. Dante also uses Justinian to criticize the factious politics of his 14th-century Italy, divided between Ghibellines and Guelphs, in contrast to the unified Italy of the Roman Empire.
Justinian is a major character in the 1938 novel Count Belisarius, by Robert Graves. He is depicted as a jealous and conniving Emperor obsessed with creating and maintaining his own historical legacy.
Justinian appears as a character in the 1939 time-travel novel Lest Darkness Fall, by L. Sprague de Camp.
The Glittering Horn: Secret Memoirs of the Court of Justinian was a novel written by Pierson Dixon in 1958 about the court of Justinian.
Justinian occasionally appears in the comic strip Prince Valiant, usually as a nemesis of the title character.
Justinian is played by Innokenty Smoktunovsky in the 1985 Soviet film Primary Russia.
Justinian's Crown is a historical artifact claimed by the Byzantine Empire in the popular 2020 computer strategy game Crusader Kings 3, by Paradox Development Studio.
Procopius provides the primary source for the history of Justinian's reign, but his opinion is tainted by a feeling of betrayal when Justinian became more pragmatic and less idealistic (Justinian and the Later Roman Empire by John W. Barker). He became very bitter towards Justinian and his empress, Theodora. In various Eastern Orthodox Churches, including the Orthodox Church in America, Justinian and his empress Theodora are commemorated on the anniversary of his death, 14 November. Some denominations translate the Julian calendar date to 27 November on the Gregorian calendar. The Calendar of Saints of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod and the Lutheran Church–Canada also remember Justinian on 14 November. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Justinian I (/dʒʌˈstɪniən/ just-IN-ee-ən; Latin: Iustinianus, Classical Latin: [juːstiːniˈaːnʊs]; Greek: Ἰουστινιανός, translit. Ioustinianós, Medieval Greek: [i.ustini.aˈnos]; 482 – 14 November 565), also known as Justinian the Great, was Eastern Roman emperor from 527 to 565.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "His reign was marked by the ambitious but only partly realized renovatio imperii, or \"restoration of the Empire\". This ambition was expressed by the partial recovery of the territories of the defunct Western Roman Empire. His general, Belisarius, swiftly conquered the Vandal Kingdom in North Africa. Subsequently, Belisarius, Narses, and other generals conquered the Ostrogothic kingdom, restoring Dalmatia, Sicily, Italy, and Rome to the empire after more than half a century of rule by the Ostrogoths. The praetorian prefect Liberius reclaimed the south of the Iberian Peninsula, establishing the province of Spania. These campaigns re-established Roman control over the western Mediterranean, increasing the Empire's annual revenue by over a million solidi. During his reign, Justinian also subdued the Tzani, a people on the east coast of the Black Sea that had never been under Roman rule before. He engaged the Sasanian Empire in the east during Kavad I's reign, and later again during Khosrow I's reign; this second conflict was partially initiated due to his ambitions in the west.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "A still more resonant aspect of his legacy was the uniform rewriting of Roman law, the Corpus Juris Civilis, which is still the basis of civil law in many modern states. His reign also marked a blossoming of Eastern Roman (Byzantine) culture, and his building program yielded works such as the Hagia Sophia.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Justinian was born in Tauresium, Dardania, probably in 482. A native speaker of Latin (possibly the last Roman emperor to be one), he came from a peasant family believed to have been of Illyro-Roman or Thraco-Roman origin. The name Iustinianus, which he took later, is indicative of adoption by his uncle Justin. During his reign, he founded Justiniana Prima not far from his birthplace. His mother was Vigilantia, the sister of Justin. Justin, who was commander of one of the imperial guard units (the Excubitors) before he became emperor, adopted Justinian, brought him to Constantinople, and ensured the boy's education. As a result, Justinian was well educated in jurisprudence, theology, and Roman history. Justinian served as a candidatus, one of 40 men selected from the scholae palatinae to serve as the emperor's personal bodyguard. The chronicler John Malalas, who lived during the reign of Justinian, describes his appearance as short, fair-skinned, curly-haired, round-faced, and handsome. Another contemporary historian, Procopius, compares Justinian's appearance to that of tyrannical Emperor Domitian, although this is probably slander.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "When Emperor Anastasius died in 518, Justin was proclaimed the new emperor with significant help from Justinian. Justinian showed a lot of ambition, and several sources claim that he was functioning as virtual regent long before Justin made him associate emperor, although there is no conclusive evidence of this. As Justin became senile near the end of his reign, Justinian became the de facto ruler. Following the general Vitalian's assassination in 520 (orchestrated by Justinian and Justin), Justinian was appointed consul and commander of the army of the east. Justinian remained Justin's close confidant, and in 525 was granted the titles of nobilissimus and caesar (heir-apparent). He was crowned co-emperor on 1 April 527, and became sole ruler after Justin's death on 1 August 527.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "As a ruler, Justinian showed great energy. He was known as \"the emperor who never sleeps\" for his work habits. Nevertheless, he seems to have been amiable and easy to approach. Around 525, he married his mistress, Theodora, in Constantinople. She was by profession an actress and some twenty years his junior. In earlier times, Justinian could not have married her owing to her class, but his uncle, Emperor Justin I, had passed a law lifting restrictions on marriages with ex-actresses. Though the marriage caused a scandal, Theodora would become very influential in the politics of the Empire. Other talented individuals included Tribonian, his legal adviser; Peter the Patrician, the diplomat and long-time head of the palace bureaucracy; Justinian's finance ministers John the Cappadocian and Peter Barsymes, who managed to collect taxes more efficiently than any before, thereby funding Justinian's wars; and finally, his prodigiously talented generals, Belisarius and Narses.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Justinian's rule was not universally popular; early in his reign he nearly lost his throne during the Nika riots, and a conspiracy against the emperor's life by dissatisfied entrepreneurs was discovered as late as 562. Justinian was struck by the plague in the early 540s but recovered. Theodora died in 548 at a relatively young age, possibly of cancer; Justinian outlived her by nearly twenty years. Justinian, who had always had a keen interest in theological matters and actively participated in debates on Christian doctrine, became even more devoted to religion during the later years of his life. He died on 14 November 565, childless. He was succeeded by Justin II, who was the son of his sister Vigilantia and married to Sophia, the niece of Theodora. Justinian's body was entombed in a specially built mausoleum in the Church of the Holy Apostles until it was desecrated and robbed during the pillage of the city in 1204 by the Latin States of the Fourth Crusade.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Justinian achieved lasting fame through his judicial reforms, particularly through the complete revision of all Roman law, something that had not previously been attempted. The total of Justinian's legislation is known today as the Corpus juris civilis. It consists of the Codex Justinianeus, the Digesta or Pandectae, the Institutiones, and the Novellae.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Early in his reign, Justinian had appointed the quaestor Tribonian to oversee this task. The first draft of the Codex Justinianeus, a codification of imperial constitutions from the 2nd century onward, was issued on 7 April 529. (The final version appeared in 534.) It was followed by the Digesta (or Pandectae), a compilation of older legal texts, in 533, and by the Institutiones, a textbook explaining the principles of law. The Novellae, a collection of new laws issued during Justinian's reign, supplements the Corpus. As opposed to the rest of the corpus, the Novellae appeared in Greek, the common language of the Eastern Empire.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The Corpus forms the basis of Latin jurisprudence (including ecclesiastical Canon Law) and, for historians, provides a valuable insight into the concerns and activities of the later Roman Empire. As a collection it gathers together the many sources in which the leges (laws) and the other rules were expressed or published: proper laws, senatorial consults (senatusconsulta), imperial decrees, case law, and jurists' opinions and interpretations (responsa prudentium). Tribonian's code ensured the survival of Roman law. It formed the basis of later Byzantine law, as expressed in the Basilika of Basil I and Leo VI the Wise. The only western province where the Justinianic code was introduced was Italy (after the conquest by the so-called Pragmatic Sanction of 554), from where it was to pass to Western Europe in the 12th century and become the basis of much Continental European law code, which was eventually spread by European empires to the Americas and beyond in the Age of Discovery. It eventually passed to Eastern Europe where it appeared in Slavic editions, and it also passed on to Russia. It remains influential to this day.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "He passed laws to protect prostitutes from exploitation and women from being forced into prostitution. Rapists were treated severely. Further, by his policies: women charged with major crimes should be guarded by other women to prevent sexual abuse; if a woman was widowed, her dowry should be returned; and a husband could not take on a major debt without his wife giving her consent twice.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Family legislation also revealed a greater concern for the interests of children. This was particularly so with respect to children born out of wedlock. The law under Justinian also reveals a striking interest in child neglect issues. Justinian protected the rights of children whose parents remarried and produced more offspring, or who simply separated and abandoned their offspring, forcing them to beg.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Justinian discontinued the regular appointment of Consuls in 541.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In Constantinople, under Justinian, hospitals were built for and free medical care provided to the many poor residents of the city. In addition, public baths were free for all residents and 20 state bakeries provided free bread to those who needed it. According to one study, “The empire’s social welfare programs ensured that no one went hungry.”",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Justinian's habit of choosing efficient but unpopular advisers nearly cost him his throne early in his reign. In January 532, partisans of the chariot racing factions in Constantinople, normally rivals, united against Justinian in a revolt that has become known as the Nika riots. They forced him to dismiss Tribonian and two of his other ministers, and then attempted to overthrow Justinian himself and replace him with the senator Hypatius, who was a nephew of the late emperor Anastasius. While the crowd was rioting in the streets, Justinian considered fleeing the capital by sea, but eventually decided to stay, apparently on the prompting of his wife Theodora, who refused to leave. In the next two days, he ordered the brutal suppression of the riots by his generals Belisarius and Mundus. Procopius relates that 30,000 unarmed civilians were killed in the Hippodrome. On Theodora's insistence, and apparently against his own judgment, Justinian had Anastasius' nephews executed.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The destruction that took place during the revolt provided Justinian with an opportunity to tie his name to a series of splendid new buildings, most notably the architectural innovation of the domed Hagia Sophia.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "One of the most spectacular features of Justinian's reign was the recovery of large stretches of land around the Western Mediterranean basin that had slipped out of Imperial control in the 5th century. As a Christian Roman emperor, Justinian considered it his divine duty to restore the Roman Empire to its ancient boundaries. Although he never personally took part in military campaigns, he boasted of his successes in the prefaces to his laws and had them commemorated in art. The re-conquests were in large part carried out by his general Belisarius.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "From his uncle, Justinian inherited ongoing hostilities with the Sassanid Empire. In 530 the Persian forces suffered a double defeat at Dara and Satala, but the next year saw the defeat of Roman forces under Belisarius near Callinicum. Justinian then tried to make alliance with the Axumites of Ethiopia and the Himyarites of Yemen against the Persians, but this failed. When king Kavadh I of Persia died (September 531), Justinian concluded an \"Eternal Peace\" (which cost him 11,000 pounds of gold) with his successor Khosrau I (532). Having thus secured his eastern frontier, Justinian turned his attention to the West, where Germanic kingdoms had been established in the territories of the former Western Roman Empire.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The first of the western kingdoms Justinian attacked was that of the Vandals in North Africa. King Hilderic, who had maintained good relations with Justinian and the North African Catholic clergy, had been overthrown by his cousin Gelimer in 530 AD. Imprisoned, the deposed king appealed to Justinian. Justinian protested Gelimer's actions, demanding that Gelimer return the kingdom to Hilderic. Gelimer replied, in effect, that Justinian had no authority to make these demands. Angered at this response, Justinian quickly concluded his ongoing war with the Sassanian Empire and prepared an expedition against the Vandals in 533.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In 533, Belisarius sailed to Africa with a fleet of 92 dromons, escorting 500 transports carrying an army of about 15,000 men, as well as a number of barbarian troops. They landed at Caput Vada (modern Ras Kaboudia) in modern Tunisia. They defeated the Vandals, who were caught completely off guard, at Ad Decimum on 14 September 533 and Tricamarum in December; Belisarius took Carthage. King Gelimer fled to Mount Pappua in Numidia, but surrendered the next spring. He was taken to Constantinople, where he was paraded in a triumph. Sardinia and Corsica, the Balearic Islands, and the stronghold Septem Fratres near Mons Calpe (later named Gibraltar) were recovered in the same campaign.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In this war, the contemporary Procopius remarks that Africa was so entirely depopulated that a person might travel several days without meeting a human being, and he adds, \"it is no exaggeration to say, that in the course of the war 5,000,000 perished by the sword, and famine, and pestilence.\"",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "An African prefecture, centered in Carthage, was established in April 534, but it would teeter on the brink of collapse during the next 15 years, amidst warfare with the Moors and military mutinies. The area was not completely pacified until 548, but remained peaceful thereafter and enjoyed a measure of prosperity. The recovery of Africa cost the empire about 100,000 pounds of gold.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "As in Africa, dynastic struggles in Ostrogothic Italy provided an opportunity for intervention. The young king Athalaric had died on 2 October 534, and a usurper, Theodahad, had imprisoned queen Amalasuintha, Theodoric's daughter and mother of Athalaric, on the island of Martana in Lake Bolsena, where he had her assassinated in 535. Thereupon Belisarius, with 7,500 men, invaded Sicily (535) and advanced into Italy, sacking Naples and capturing Rome on 9 December 536. By that time Theodahad had been deposed by the Ostrogothic army, who had elected Vitigis as their new king. He gathered a large army and besieged Rome from February 537 to March 538 without being able to retake the city.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Justinian sent another general, Narses, to Italy, but tensions between Narses and Belisarius hampered the progress of the campaign. Milan was taken, but was soon recaptured and razed by the Ostrogoths. Justinian recalled Narses in 539. By then the military situation had turned in favour of the Romans, and in 540 Belisarius reached the Ostrogothic capital Ravenna. There he was offered the title of Western Roman Emperor by the Ostrogoths at the same time that envoys of Justinian were arriving to negotiate a peace that would leave the region north of the Po River in Gothic hands. Belisarius feigned acceptance of the offer, entered the city in May 540, and reclaimed it for the Empire. Then, having been recalled by Justinian, Belisarius returned to Constantinople, taking the captured Vitigis and his wife Matasuntha with him.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Belisarius had been recalled in the face of renewed hostilities by the Persians. Following a revolt against the Empire in Armenia in the late 530s and possibly motivated by the pleas of Ostrogothic ambassadors, King Khosrau I broke the \"Eternal Peace\" and invaded Roman territory in the spring of 540. He first sacked Beroea and then Antioch (allowing the garrison of 6,000 men to leave the city), besieged Daras, and then went on to attack the Byzantine base in the small but strategically significant satellite kingdom of Lazica near the Black Sea as requested by its discontented king Gubazes, exacting tribute from the towns he passed along his way. He forced Justinian I to pay him 5,000 pounds of gold, plus 500 pounds of gold more each year.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Belisarius arrived in the East in 541, but after some success, was again recalled to Constantinople in 542. The reasons for his withdrawal are not known, but it may have been instigated by rumours of his disloyalty reaching the court. The outbreak of the plague coupled with a rebellion in Persia brought Khosrow I's offensives to a halt. Exploiting this, Justinian ordered all the forces in the East to invade Persian Armenia, but the 30,000-strong Byzantine force was defeated by a small force at Anglon. The next year, Khosrau unsuccessfully besieged the major city of Edessa. Both parties made little headway, and in 545 a truce was agreed upon for the southern part of the Roman-Persian frontier. After that, the Lazic War in the North continued for several years: the Lazic king switched to the Byzantine side, and in 549 Justinian sent Dagisthaeus to recapture Petra, but he faced heavy resistance and the siege was relieved by Sasanian reinforcements. Justinian replaced him with Bessas, who was under a cloud after the loss of Rome in 546, but he managed to capture and dismantle Petra in 551. The war continued for several years until a second truce in 557, followed by a Fifty Years' Peace in 562. Under its terms, the Persians agreed to abandon Lazica in exchange for an annual tribute of 400 or 500 pounds of gold (30,000 solidi) to be paid by the Romans.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "While military efforts were directed to the East, the situation in Italy took a turn for the worse. Under their respective kings Ildibad and Eraric (both murdered in 541) and especially Totila, the Ostrogoths made quick gains. After a victory at Faenza in 542, they reconquered the major cities of Southern Italy and soon held almost the entire Italian Peninsula. Belisarius was sent back to Italy late in 544 but lacked sufficient troops and supplies. Making no headway, he was relieved of his command in 548. Belisarius succeeded in defeating a Gothic fleet of 200 ships. During this period the city of Rome changed hands three more times, first taken and depopulated by the Ostrogoths in December 546, then reconquered by the Byzantines in 547, and then again by the Goths in January 550. Totila also plundered Sicily and attacked Greek coastlines.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Finally, Justinian dispatched a force of approximately 35,000 men (2,000 men were detached and sent to invade southern Visigothic Hispania) under the command of Narses. The army reached Ravenna in June 552 and defeated the Ostrogoths decisively within a month at the battle of Busta Gallorum in the Apennines, where Totila was slain. After a second battle at Mons Lactarius in October that year, the resistance of the Ostrogoths was finally broken. In 554, a large-scale Frankish invasion was defeated at Casilinum, and Italy was secured for the Empire, though it would take Narses several years to reduce the remaining Gothic strongholds. At the end of the war, Italy was garrisoned with an army of 16,000 men. The recovery of Italy cost the empire about 300,000 pounds of gold. Procopius estimated 15,000,000 Goths died.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In addition to the other conquests, the Empire established a presence in Visigothic Hispania, when the usurper Athanagild requested assistance in his rebellion against King Agila I. In 552, Justinian dispatched a force of 2,000 men; according to the historian Jordanes, this army was led by the octogenarian Liberius. The Byzantines took Cartagena and other cities on the southeastern coast and founded the new province of Spania before being checked by their former ally Athanagild, who had by now become king. This campaign marked the apogee of Byzantine expansion.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "During Justinian's reign, the Balkans suffered from several incursions by the Turkic and Slavic peoples who lived north of the Danube. Here, Justinian resorted mainly to a combination of diplomacy and a system of defensive works. In 559 a particularly dangerous invasion of Sklavinoi and Kutrigurs under their khan Zabergan threatened Constantinople, but they were repulsed by the aged general Belisarius.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Justinian's ambition to restore the Roman Empire to its former glory was only partly realized, with only noteworthy sustainable conquests in Africa. In the West, the brilliant early military successes of the 530s were followed by years of stagnation. The dragging war with the Goths was a disaster for Italy, even though its long-lasting effects may have been less severe than is sometimes thought. The heavy taxes that the administration imposed upon Italian population were deeply resented.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The final victory in Italy and the conquest of Africa and the coast of southern Hispania significantly enlarged the area of Byzantine influence and eliminated all naval threats to the empire, which in 555 reached its territorial zenith. Despite losing much of Italy soon after Justinian's death, the empire retained several important cities, including Rome, Naples, and Ravenna, leaving the Lombards as a regional threat. The newly founded province of Spania kept the Visigoths as a threat to Hispania alone and not to the western Mediterranean and Africa.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Events of the later years of his reign showed that Constantinople itself was not safe from barbarian incursions from the north, and even the relatively benevolent historian Menander Protector felt the need to attribute the Emperor's failure to protect the capital to the weakness of his body in his old age. In his efforts to renew the Roman Empire, Justinian dangerously stretched its resources while failing to take into account the changed realities of 6th-century Europe.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Justinian saw the orthodoxy of his empire threatened by diverging religious currents, especially Monophysitism, which had many adherents in the eastern provinces of Syria and Egypt. Monophysite doctrine, which maintains that Jesus Christ had one divine nature rather than a synthesis of divine and human nature, had been condemned as a heresy by the Council of Chalcedon in 451, and the tolerant policies towards Monophysitism of Zeno and Anastasius I had been a source of tension in the relationship with the bishops of Rome.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Justin reversed this trend and confirmed the Chalcedonian doctrine, openly condemning the Monophysites. Justinian, who continued this policy, tried to impose religious unity on his subjects by forcing them to accept doctrinal compromises that might appeal to all parties, a policy that proved unsuccessful as he satisfied none of them.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Near the end of his life, Justinian became ever more inclined towards the Monophysite doctrine, especially in the form of Aphthartodocetism, but he died before being able to issue any legislation. The empress Theodora sympathized with the Monophysites and is said to have been a constant source of pro-Monophysite intrigues at the court in Constantinople in the earlier years. In the course of his reign, Justinian, who had a genuine interest in matters of theology, authored a small number of theological treatises.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "As in his secular administration, despotism appeared also in the Emperor's ecclesiastical policy. He regulated everything, both in religion and in law. At the very beginning of his reign, he deemed it proper to promulgate by law the Church's belief in the Trinity and the Incarnation, and to threaten all heretics with the appropriate penalties, whereas he subsequently declared that he intended to deprive all disturbers of orthodoxy of the opportunity for such offense by due process of law. He made the Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan creed the sole symbol of the Church and accorded legal force to the canons of the four ecumenical councils. The bishops in attendance at the Council of Constantinople (536) recognized that nothing could be done in the Church contrary to the emperor's will and command, while, on his side, the emperor, in the case of the Patriarch Anthimus, reinforced the ban of the Church with temporal proscription. Justinian protected the purity of the church by suppressing heretics. He neglected no opportunity to secure the rights of the Church and clergy, and to protect and extend monasticism. He granted the monks the right to inherit property from private citizens and the right to receive solemnia, or annual gifts, from the Imperial treasury or from the taxes of certain provinces and he prohibited lay confiscation of monastic estates.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Although the despotic character of his measures is contrary to modern sensibilities, he was a \"nursing father\" of the Church. Both the Codex and the Novellae contain many enactments regarding donations, foundations, and the administration of ecclesiastical property; election and rights of bishops, priests and abbots; monastic life, residential obligations of the clergy, conduct of divine service, episcopal jurisdiction, etc. Justinian also rebuilt the Church of Hagia Sophia (which cost 20,000 pounds of gold), the original site having been destroyed during the Nika riots. The new Hagia Sophia, with its numerous chapels and shrines, gilded octagonal dome, and mosaics, became the centre and most visible monument of Eastern Orthodoxy in Constantinople.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "From the middle of the 5th century onward, increasingly arduous tasks confronted the emperors of the East in ecclesiastical matters. Justinian entered the arena of ecclesiastical statecraft shortly after his uncle's accession in 518, and put an end to the Acacian schism. Previous Emperors had tried to alleviate theological conflicts by declarations that deemphasized the Council of Chalcedon, which had condemned Monophysitism, which had strongholds in Egypt and Syria, and by tolerating the appointment of Monophysites to church offices. The Popes reacted by severing ties with the Patriarch of Constantinople who supported these policies. Emperors Justin I (and later Justinian himself) rescinded these policies and reestablished the union between Constantinople and Rome. After this, Justinian also felt entitled to settle disputes in papal elections, as he did when he favored Vigilius and had his rival Silverius deported.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "This new-found unity between East and West did not, however, solve the ongoing disputes in the east. Justinian's policies switched between attempts to force Monophysites and Miaphysites (who were mistaken to be adherers of Monophysitism) to accept the Chalcedonian creed by persecuting their bishops and monks – thereby embittering their sympathizers in Egypt and other provinces – and attempts at a compromise that would win over the Monophysites without surrendering the Chalcedonian faith. Such an approach was supported by the Empress Theodora, who favoured the Miaphysites unreservedly. In the condemnation of the Three Chapters, three theologians that had opposed Monophysitism before and after the Council of Chalcedon, Justinian tried to win over the opposition. At the Fifth Ecumenical Council, most of the Eastern church yielded to the Emperor's demands, and Pope Vigilius, who was forcibly brought to Constantinople and besieged at a chapel, finally also gave his assent. However, the condemnation was received unfavourably in the west, where it led to new (albeit temporal) schism, and failed to reach its goal in the east, as the Monophysites remained unsatisfied – all the more bitter for him because during his last years he took an even greater interest in theological matters.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Justinian's religious policy reflected the Imperial conviction that the unity of the Empire presupposed unity of faith, and it appeared to him obvious that this faith could only be the orthodoxy (Chalcedonian). Those of a different belief were subjected to persecution, which imperial legislation had effected from the time of Constantius II and which would now vigorously continue. The Codex contained two statutes that decreed the total destruction of paganism, even in private life; these provisions were zealously enforced. Contemporary sources (John Malalas, Theophanes, and John of Ephesus) tell of severe persecutions, even of men in high position.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The original Academy of Plato had been destroyed by the Roman dictator Sulla in 86 BC. Several centuries later, in 410 AD, a Neoplatonic Academy was established that had no institutional continuity with Plato's Academy, and which served as a center for Neoplatonism and mysticism. It persisted until 529 AD when it was finally closed by Justinian I. Other schools in Constantinople, Antioch, and Alexandria, which were the centers of Justinian's empire, continued.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "In Asia Minor alone, John of Ephesus was reported to have converted 70,000 pagans, which was probably an exaggerated number. Other peoples also accepted Christianity: the Heruli, the Huns dwelling near the Don, the Abasgi, and the Tzanni in Caucasia.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "The worship of Amun at the oasis of Awjila in the Libyan desert was abolished, and so were the remnants of the worship of Isis on the island of Philae, at the first cataract of the Nile. The Presbyter Julian and the Bishop Longinus conducted a mission among the Nabataeans, and Justinian attempted to strengthen Christianity in Yemen by dispatching a bishop from Egypt.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The civil rights of Jews were restricted and their religious privileges threatened. Justinian also interfered in the internal affairs of the synagogue and encouraged the Jews to use the Greek Septuagint in their synagogues in Constantinople.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The Emperor faced significant opposition from the Samaritans, who resisted conversion to Christianity and were repeatedly in insurrection. He persecuted them with rigorous edicts, but could not prevent reprisals towards Christians from taking place in Samaria toward the close of his reign. The consistency of Justinian's policy meant that the Manicheans too suffered persecution, experiencing both exile and threat of capital punishment. At Constantinople, on one occasion, not a few Manicheans, after strict inquisition, were executed in the emperor's very presence: some by burning, others by drowning.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Justinian was a prolific builder; the historian Procopius bears witness to his activities in this area. Under Justinian's reign, the San Vitale in Ravenna, which features two famous mosaics representing Justinian and Theodora, was completed under the sponsorship of Julius Argentarius. Most notably, he had the Hagia Sophia, originally a basilica-style church that had been burnt down during the Nika riots, splendidly rebuilt according to a completely different ground plan, under the architectural supervision of Isidore of Miletus and Anthemius of Tralles. On 26 December 537, according to Pseudo-Codinus, Justinian stated at the completion of this edifice: \"Solomon, I have outdone thee\" (in reference to the first Jewish temple). The church had a second inauguration on 24 December 562, after several reworks made by Isidore the Younger. This new cathedral, with its magnificent dome filled with mosaics, remained the centre of eastern Christianity for centuries.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Another prominent church in the capital, the Church of the Holy Apostles, which had been in a very poor state near the end of the 5th century, was likewise rebuilt. The Church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, later renamed Little Hagia Sophia, was also built between 532 and 536 by the imperial couple. Works of embellishment were not confined to churches alone: excavations at the site of the Great Palace of Constantinople have yielded several high-quality mosaics dating from Justinian's reign, and a column topped by a bronze statue of Justinian on horseback and dressed in a military costume was erected in the Augustaeum in Constantinople in 543. Rivalry with other, more established patrons from the Constantinopolitan and exiled Roman aristocracy might have enforced Justinian's building activities in the capital as a means of strengthening his dynasty's prestige.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Justinian also strengthened the borders of the Empire from Africa to the East through the construction of fortifications and ensured Constantinople of its water supply through construction of underground cisterns (see Basilica Cistern). To prevent floods from damaging the strategically important border town Dara, an advanced arch dam was built. During his reign the large Sangarius Bridge was built in Bithynia, securing a major military supply route to the east. Furthermore, Justinian restored cities damaged by earthquake or war and built a new city near his place of birth called Justiniana Prima, which was intended to replace Thessalonica as the political and religious centre of Illyricum.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "In Justinian's reign, and partly under his patronage, Byzantine culture produced noteworthy historians, including Procopius and Agathias, and poets such as Paul the Silentiary and Romanus the Melodist flourished. On the other hand, centres of learning such as the Neoplatonic Academy in Athens and the famous Law School of Berytus lost their importance during his reign.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "As was the case under Justinian's predecessors, the Empire's economic health rested primarily on agriculture. In addition, long-distance trade flourished, reaching as far north as Cornwall where tin was exchanged for Roman wheat. Within the Empire, convoys sailing from Alexandria provided Constantinople with wheat and grains. Justinian made the traffic more efficient by building a large granary on the island of Tenedos for storage and further transport to Constantinople. Justinian also tried to find new routes for the eastern trade, which was suffering badly from the wars with the Persians.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "One important luxury product was silk, which was imported and then processed in the Empire. In order to protect the manufacture of silk products, Justinian granted a monopoly to the imperial factories in 541. In order to bypass the Persian landroute, Justinian established friendly relations with the Abyssinians, whom he wanted to act as trade mediators by transporting Indian silk to the Empire; the Abyssinians, however, were unable to compete with the Persian merchants in India. Then, in the early 550s, two monks succeeded in smuggling eggs of silk worms from Central Asia back to Constantinople, and silk became an indigenous product.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Gold and silver were mined in the Balkans, Anatolia, Armenia, Cyprus, Egypt and Nubia.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "At the start of Justinian I's reign he had inherited a surplus 28,800,000 solidi (400,000 pounds of gold) in the imperial treasury from Anastasius I and Justin I. Under Justinian's rule, measures were taken to counter corruption in the provinces and to make tax collection more efficient. Greater administrative power was given to both the leaders of the prefectures and of the provinces, while power was taken away from the vicariates of the dioceses, of which a number were abolished. The overall trend was towards a simplification of administrative infrastructure. According to Brown (1971), the increased professionalization of tax collection did much to destroy the traditional structures of provincial life, as it weakened the autonomy of the town councils in the Greek towns. It has been estimated that before Justinian I's reconquests the state had an annual revenue of 5,000,000 solidi in AD 530, but after his reconquests, the annual revenue was increased to 6,000,000 solidi in AD 550.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Throughout Justinian's reign, the cities and villages of the East thrived, although Antioch was struck by two earthquakes (526, 528) and sacked and evacuated by the Persians (540). Justinian had the city rebuilt, but on a slightly smaller scale.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Despite all these measures, the Empire suffered several major setbacks in the course of the 6th century. The first one was the plague, which lasted from 541 to 543 and, by decimating the Empire's population, probably created a scarcity of labor and a rising of wages. The lack of manpower also led to a significant increase in the number of \"barbarians\" in the Byzantine armies after the early 540s. The protracted war in Italy and the wars with the Persians themselves laid a heavy burden on the Empire's resources, and Justinian was criticized for curtailing the government-run post service, which he limited to only one eastern route of military importance.",
"title": "Reign"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "During the 530s, it seemed to many that God had abandoned the Christian Roman Empire. There were noxious fumes in the air and the Sun, while still providing daylight, refused to give much heat. The extreme weather events of 535–536 led to a famine such as had not been recorded before, affecting both Europe and the Middle East. These events may have been caused by an atmospheric dust veil resulting from a large volcanic eruption.",
"title": "Natural disasters"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "The historian Procopius recorded in 536 in his work on the Vandalic War \"during this year a most dread portent took place. For the sun gave forth its light without brightness … and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear\".",
"title": "Natural disasters"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "The causes of these disasters are not precisely known, but volcanoes at the Rabaul caldera, Lake Ilopango, Krakatoa, or, according to a recent finding, in Iceland are suspected.",
"title": "Natural disasters"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Seven years later in 542, a devastating outbreak of Bubonic Plague, known as the Plague of Justinian and second only to Black Death of the 14th century, killed tens of millions. Justinian and members of his court, physically unaffected by the previous 535–536 famine, were afflicted, with Justinian himself contracting and surviving the pestilence. The impact of this outbreak of plague has recently been disputed, since evidence for tens of millions dying is uncertain.",
"title": "Natural disasters"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "In July 551, the eastern Mediterranean was rocked by the 551 Beirut earthquake, which triggered a tsunami. The combined fatalities of both events likely exceeded 30,000, with tremors felt from Antioch to Alexandria.",
"title": "Natural disasters"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "In the Paradiso section of the Divine Comedy, Canto (chapter) VI, by Dante Alighieri, Justinian I is prominently featured as a spirit residing on the sphere of Mercury. The latter holds in Heaven the souls of those whose acts were righteous, yet meant to achieve fame and honor. Justinian's legacy is elaborated on, and he is portrayed as a defender of the Christian faith and the restorer of Rome to the Empire. Justinian confesses that he was partially motivated by fame rather than duty to God, which tainted the justice of his rule in spite of his proud accomplishments. In his introduction, \"Cesare fui e son Iustinïano\" (\"Caesar I was, and am Justinian\"), his mortal title is contrasted with his immortal soul, to emphasize that \"glory in life is ephemeral, while contributing to God's glory is eternal\", according to Dorothy L. Sayers. Dante also uses Justinian to criticize the factious politics of his 14th-century Italy, divided between Ghibellines and Guelphs, in contrast to the unified Italy of the Roman Empire.",
"title": "Cultural depictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Justinian is a major character in the 1938 novel Count Belisarius, by Robert Graves. He is depicted as a jealous and conniving Emperor obsessed with creating and maintaining his own historical legacy.",
"title": "Cultural depictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Justinian appears as a character in the 1939 time-travel novel Lest Darkness Fall, by L. Sprague de Camp.",
"title": "Cultural depictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "The Glittering Horn: Secret Memoirs of the Court of Justinian was a novel written by Pierson Dixon in 1958 about the court of Justinian.",
"title": "Cultural depictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Justinian occasionally appears in the comic strip Prince Valiant, usually as a nemesis of the title character.",
"title": "Cultural depictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Justinian is played by Innokenty Smoktunovsky in the 1985 Soviet film Primary Russia.",
"title": "Cultural depictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Justinian's Crown is a historical artifact claimed by the Byzantine Empire in the popular 2020 computer strategy game Crusader Kings 3, by Paradox Development Studio.",
"title": "Cultural depictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Procopius provides the primary source for the history of Justinian's reign, but his opinion is tainted by a feeling of betrayal when Justinian became more pragmatic and less idealistic (Justinian and the Later Roman Empire by John W. Barker). He became very bitter towards Justinian and his empress, Theodora. In various Eastern Orthodox Churches, including the Orthodox Church in America, Justinian and his empress Theodora are commemorated on the anniversary of his death, 14 November. Some denominations translate the Julian calendar date to 27 November on the Gregorian calendar. The Calendar of Saints of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod and the Lutheran Church–Canada also remember Justinian on 14 November.",
"title": "Historical sources"
}
]
| Justinian I, also known as Justinian the Great, was Eastern Roman emperor from 527 to 565. His reign was marked by the ambitious but only partly realized renovatio imperii, or "restoration of the Empire". This ambition was expressed by the partial recovery of the territories of the defunct Western Roman Empire. His general, Belisarius, swiftly conquered the Vandal Kingdom in North Africa. Subsequently, Belisarius, Narses, and other generals conquered the Ostrogothic kingdom, restoring Dalmatia, Sicily, Italy, and Rome to the empire after more than half a century of rule by the Ostrogoths. The praetorian prefect Liberius reclaimed the south of the Iberian Peninsula, establishing the province of Spania. These campaigns re-established Roman control over the western Mediterranean, increasing the Empire's annual revenue by over a million solidi. During his reign, Justinian also subdued the Tzani, a people on the east coast of the Black Sea that had never been under Roman rule before. He engaged the Sasanian Empire in the east during Kavad I's reign, and later again during Khosrow I's reign; this second conflict was partially initiated due to his ambitions in the west. A still more resonant aspect of his legacy was the uniform rewriting of Roman law, the Corpus Juris Civilis, which is still the basis of civil law in many modern states. His reign also marked a blossoming of Eastern Roman (Byzantine) culture, and his building program yielded works such as the Hagia Sophia. | 2001-10-13T20:06:02Z | 2023-12-29T15:06:49Z | [
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16,211 | John Martyn | David Nigel McGeachy OBE (11 September 1948 – 29 January 2009), known professionally as John Martyn, was a British singer-songwriter and guitarist. Over a 40-year career, he released 23 studio albums, and received frequent critical acclaim. The Times described him as "an electrifying guitarist and singer whose music blurred the boundaries between folk, jazz, rock and blues".
Martyn began his career at age 17 as a key member of the Scottish folk music scene, drawing inspiration from American blues and English traditional music, and signed with Island Records. By the 1970s he had begun incorporating jazz and rock into his sound on albums such as Solid Air (1973) and One World (1977), as well as experimenting with guitar effects and tape delay machines such as Echoplex. Domestic and substance abuse problems marked his personal life throughout the 1970s and 1980s, though he continued to release albums while collaborating with figures such as Phil Collins and Maeve Aubele, Carolyn Woolham and Lee "Scratch" Perry. He remained active until his death in 2009.
Martyn was born in Beechcroft Avenue, New Malden, Surrey, to Belgian Jewish mother Beatrice "Betty" Ethel (née Jewitt) and Greenock-born Scottish father Thomas Paterson "Tommy" McGeachy. His parents, both opera singers, divorced when he was five and he spent his childhood alternating between Scotland and England. Most of this time was spent in the care of his father and grandmother, Janet, in Shawlands, Glasgow, part of his holidays each year spent on his mother's houseboat. He adapted his accent depending on context or company, changing between broad or refined Glaswegian and southern English accents, and continued to do so throughout his life. He attended Shawlands Academy in Glasgow. At school, he was a keen rugby player. On leaving school he attended Glasgow School of Art, but left to pursue his musical aspirations.
Mentored by Hamish Imlach, Martyn began his professional musical career when he was 17, playing a fusion of blues and folk resulting in a distinctive style which made him a key figure in the British folk scene during the mid-1960s. He signed to Chris Blackwell's Island Records in 1967 and released his first album, London Conversation, the same year. Released in 1968, his second album, The Tumbler, was moving towards jazz.
By 1970 Martyn had developed a wholly original and idiosyncratic sound: acoustic guitar run through a fuzzbox, phase shifter and Echoplex. This sound was first apparent on Stormbringer! released in February 1970.
Stormbringer! was written and performed by Martyn and his then-wife Beverley, who had previously recorded solo as Beverley Kutner. Their second duo album, The Road to Ruin, was released in November 1970. Island Records felt that it would be more successful to market Martyn as a solo act and this was how subsequent albums were produced, although Beverley continued to make appearances as a backing singer as well as continuing as a solo artist herself.
Released in 1971, Bless the Weather was Martyn's third solo album. In February 1973, Martyn released the album Solid Air, the title song a tribute to the singer-songwriter Nick Drake, a close friend and label-mate who would die in 1974 from an overdose of antidepressants. In 2009, a double CD Deluxe edition of Solid Air was released featuring unreleased songs and out-takes, and sleeve notes by Record Collector's Daryl Easlea. On Bless the Weather and on Solid Air Martyn collaborated with jazz bassist Danny Thompson, with whom he proceeded to have a musical partnership which continued until his death.
Following the commercial success of Solid Air, later on in 1973 Martyn quickly recorded and released the experimental Inside Out, an album with emphasis placed on feel and improvisation rather than song structure. In 1975, he followed this with Sunday's Child, a more song-based collection that includes "My Baby Girl" and "Spencer the Rover", which are references to his young family. Martyn subsequently described this period as 'very happy'. In September 1975, he released a live album, Live at Leeds — Martyn had been unable to persuade Island to release the record, and resorted to selling individually signed copies by mail from his home in Hastings. Live at Leeds features Danny Thompson and drummer John Stevens. In 2010, a 2CD Deluxe version of Live at Leeds was released, and it was discovered that not all of the songs on the original album were from the Leeds concert. After releasing Live at Leeds, Martyn took a sabbatical, including a visit to Jamaica, spending time with reggae producer Lee "Scratch" Perry.
In 1977, he released One World, which led some commentators to describe Martyn as the "Father of Trip-Hop". It included tracks such as "Small Hours" and "Big Muff", a collaboration with Lee "Scratch" Perry. Small Hours was recorded outside; the microphones picked up ambient sounds, such as geese from a nearby lake. In 1978, he played guitar on the album Harmony of the Spheres by Neil Ardley.
Martyn's marriage broke down at the end of the 1970s and "John hit the self destruct button" (although other biographers, including The Times obituary writer, attribute the break-up of his marriage to his already being addicted to drink and drugs). In her autobiography, Beverley also alleges protracted domestic violence. Out of this period, described by Martyn as "a very dark period in my life", came the album Grace and Danger. Released in October 1980, the album had been held up for a year by Chris Blackwell. He was a close friend of John and Beverley, and found the album too openly disturbing to release. Only after intense and sustained pressure from Martyn did Blackwell agree to release the album. Commenting on that period, Martyn said, "I was in a dreadful emotional state over that record. I was hardly in control of my own actions. The reason they finally released it was because I freaked: Please get it out! I don't give a damn about how sad it makes you feel—it's what I'm about: the direct communication of emotion. Grace and Danger was very cathartic, and it really hurt."
In the late 1980s, Martyn cited Grace and Danger as his favourite album, and said that it was "probably the most specific piece of autobiography I've written. Some people keep diaries, I make records." The album has since become one of his highest-regarded, prompting a deluxe double-disc issue in 2007, containing the original album remastered.
Phil Collins played drums and sang backing vocals on Grace and Danger and subsequently played drums on and produced Martyn's next album, Glorious Fool, in 1981. Martyn left Island records in 1981, and recorded Glorious Fool and Well Kept Secret for WEA achieving his first Top 30 album. In 1983 Martyn released a live album, Philentropy, and married Annie Furlong but the couple, who had lived in Scotland, later separated. Returning to Island records, he recorded Sapphire (1984), Piece by Piece (1986) and the live Foundations (1987) before leaving the label in 1988.
Martyn released The Apprentice in 1990 and Cooltide in 1991 for Permanent Records, and reunited with Phil Collins for No Little Boy (1993), which featured rerecorded versions of some of his classic tracks. The similar 1992 release Couldn't Love You More was unauthorised and disowned by Martyn. Material from these recordings and his two Permanent albums have been recycled on many releases. Permanent Records also released a live 2-CD set called "Live" in 1994. And (1996) came out on Go! Discs and saw Martyn draw heavily on trip-hop textures, a direction which saw more complete expression on 2000's Glasgow Walker. The Church with One Bell (1998) is a covers album of blues classics, which draws on songs by other artists, including Portishead and Ben Harper. In 2001, Martyn appeared on the track "Deliver Me" by Faithless keyboard player and DJ Sister Bliss.
In July 2006, the documentary Johnny Too Bad was screened by the BBC. The programme documented the period surrounding the operation to amputate Martyn's right leg below the knee (the result of a burst cyst that had led to septicaemia) and the writing and recording of On the Cobbles (2004), an album described by Peter Marsh on the BBC Music website as "the strongest, most consistent set he's come up with in years." Much of Cobbles was a revisiting of his acoustic-based sound. Martyn's last concerts were in November 2008, reprising Grace and Danger.
In collaboration with his keyboard player Spenser Cozens, Martyn wrote and performed the score for Strangebrew (Robert Wallace 2007), which won the Fortean Times Award at the London Short Film Festival in the same year. The film concept being a strong influence of the album design of Martyn's Heaven and Earth (2011). On 4 February 2008, Martyn received the lifetime achievement award at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. The award was presented by his friend Phil Collins. The BBC website stated Martyn's "heartfelt performances have either suggested or fully demonstrated an idiosyncratic genius." Eric Clapton was quoted saying that Martyn was "so far ahead of everything, it's almost inconceivable."
To mark Martyn's 60th birthday, Island released a 4 CD boxed set, Ain't No Saint, on 1 September 2008. The set includes unreleased studio material and rare live recordings.
Martyn was appointed OBE in the 2009 New Year Honours and died a few weeks later. His partner Theresa Walsh collected the award at Buckingham Palace. Martyn had recorded new material before he died and his final studio album, Heaven and Earth, was completed and released posthumously in May 2011. The sleeve note says, "all the tracks on this recording were kept as John wished — in their entirety".
Martyn died on 29 January 2009, at a hospital in Thomastown, County Kilkenny, Ireland, from acute respiratory distress syndrome. He had been living in Thomastown with his partner Theresa Walsh. Martyn's health was affected by his life-long abuse of drugs and alcohol. He was survived by his partner and his children, Mhairi, Wesley and Spencer McGeachy.
Following Martyn's death, Rolling Stone lauded his "progressive folk invention and improvising sorcery". Friend and collaborator Phil Collins paid tribute to him, saying, "John's passing is terribly, terribly sad. I had worked with and known him since the late 1970s and he was a great friend. He was uncompromising, which made him infuriating to some people, but he was unique and we'll never see the likes of him again. I loved him dearly and will miss him very much."
Mike Harding introduced an hour-long tribute to Martyn in his BBC Radio 2 programme on 25 February 2009. A tribute album, Johnny Boy Would Love This, was released on 15 August 2011, comprising cover versions of his songs by various artists.
The "Grace & Danger: A Celebration of John Martyn" tribute concert held on 27 January 2019 at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall marked the tenth anniversary of his passing. Curated and hosted by Danny Thompson, artists including Eddi Reader, Eric Bibb and Paul Weller performed "to do full justice to a selection of Martyn's finest songs and channel some of the great man's spirit". | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "David Nigel McGeachy OBE (11 September 1948 – 29 January 2009), known professionally as John Martyn, was a British singer-songwriter and guitarist. Over a 40-year career, he released 23 studio albums, and received frequent critical acclaim. The Times described him as \"an electrifying guitarist and singer whose music blurred the boundaries between folk, jazz, rock and blues\".",
"title": ""
},
{
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"text": "Martyn began his career at age 17 as a key member of the Scottish folk music scene, drawing inspiration from American blues and English traditional music, and signed with Island Records. By the 1970s he had begun incorporating jazz and rock into his sound on albums such as Solid Air (1973) and One World (1977), as well as experimenting with guitar effects and tape delay machines such as Echoplex. Domestic and substance abuse problems marked his personal life throughout the 1970s and 1980s, though he continued to release albums while collaborating with figures such as Phil Collins and Maeve Aubele, Carolyn Woolham and Lee \"Scratch\" Perry. He remained active until his death in 2009.",
"title": ""
},
{
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"text": "Martyn was born in Beechcroft Avenue, New Malden, Surrey, to Belgian Jewish mother Beatrice \"Betty\" Ethel (née Jewitt) and Greenock-born Scottish father Thomas Paterson \"Tommy\" McGeachy. His parents, both opera singers, divorced when he was five and he spent his childhood alternating between Scotland and England. Most of this time was spent in the care of his father and grandmother, Janet, in Shawlands, Glasgow, part of his holidays each year spent on his mother's houseboat. He adapted his accent depending on context or company, changing between broad or refined Glaswegian and southern English accents, and continued to do so throughout his life. He attended Shawlands Academy in Glasgow. At school, he was a keen rugby player. On leaving school he attended Glasgow School of Art, but left to pursue his musical aspirations.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Mentored by Hamish Imlach, Martyn began his professional musical career when he was 17, playing a fusion of blues and folk resulting in a distinctive style which made him a key figure in the British folk scene during the mid-1960s. He signed to Chris Blackwell's Island Records in 1967 and released his first album, London Conversation, the same year. Released in 1968, his second album, The Tumbler, was moving towards jazz.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "By 1970 Martyn had developed a wholly original and idiosyncratic sound: acoustic guitar run through a fuzzbox, phase shifter and Echoplex. This sound was first apparent on Stormbringer! released in February 1970.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Stormbringer! was written and performed by Martyn and his then-wife Beverley, who had previously recorded solo as Beverley Kutner. Their second duo album, The Road to Ruin, was released in November 1970. Island Records felt that it would be more successful to market Martyn as a solo act and this was how subsequent albums were produced, although Beverley continued to make appearances as a backing singer as well as continuing as a solo artist herself.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Released in 1971, Bless the Weather was Martyn's third solo album. In February 1973, Martyn released the album Solid Air, the title song a tribute to the singer-songwriter Nick Drake, a close friend and label-mate who would die in 1974 from an overdose of antidepressants. In 2009, a double CD Deluxe edition of Solid Air was released featuring unreleased songs and out-takes, and sleeve notes by Record Collector's Daryl Easlea. On Bless the Weather and on Solid Air Martyn collaborated with jazz bassist Danny Thompson, with whom he proceeded to have a musical partnership which continued until his death.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Following the commercial success of Solid Air, later on in 1973 Martyn quickly recorded and released the experimental Inside Out, an album with emphasis placed on feel and improvisation rather than song structure. In 1975, he followed this with Sunday's Child, a more song-based collection that includes \"My Baby Girl\" and \"Spencer the Rover\", which are references to his young family. Martyn subsequently described this period as 'very happy'. In September 1975, he released a live album, Live at Leeds — Martyn had been unable to persuade Island to release the record, and resorted to selling individually signed copies by mail from his home in Hastings. Live at Leeds features Danny Thompson and drummer John Stevens. In 2010, a 2CD Deluxe version of Live at Leeds was released, and it was discovered that not all of the songs on the original album were from the Leeds concert. After releasing Live at Leeds, Martyn took a sabbatical, including a visit to Jamaica, spending time with reggae producer Lee \"Scratch\" Perry.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In 1977, he released One World, which led some commentators to describe Martyn as the \"Father of Trip-Hop\". It included tracks such as \"Small Hours\" and \"Big Muff\", a collaboration with Lee \"Scratch\" Perry. Small Hours was recorded outside; the microphones picked up ambient sounds, such as geese from a nearby lake. In 1978, he played guitar on the album Harmony of the Spheres by Neil Ardley.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Martyn's marriage broke down at the end of the 1970s and \"John hit the self destruct button\" (although other biographers, including The Times obituary writer, attribute the break-up of his marriage to his already being addicted to drink and drugs). In her autobiography, Beverley also alleges protracted domestic violence. Out of this period, described by Martyn as \"a very dark period in my life\", came the album Grace and Danger. Released in October 1980, the album had been held up for a year by Chris Blackwell. He was a close friend of John and Beverley, and found the album too openly disturbing to release. Only after intense and sustained pressure from Martyn did Blackwell agree to release the album. Commenting on that period, Martyn said, \"I was in a dreadful emotional state over that record. I was hardly in control of my own actions. The reason they finally released it was because I freaked: Please get it out! I don't give a damn about how sad it makes you feel—it's what I'm about: the direct communication of emotion. Grace and Danger was very cathartic, and it really hurt.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In the late 1980s, Martyn cited Grace and Danger as his favourite album, and said that it was \"probably the most specific piece of autobiography I've written. Some people keep diaries, I make records.\" The album has since become one of his highest-regarded, prompting a deluxe double-disc issue in 2007, containing the original album remastered.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Phil Collins played drums and sang backing vocals on Grace and Danger and subsequently played drums on and produced Martyn's next album, Glorious Fool, in 1981. Martyn left Island records in 1981, and recorded Glorious Fool and Well Kept Secret for WEA achieving his first Top 30 album. In 1983 Martyn released a live album, Philentropy, and married Annie Furlong but the couple, who had lived in Scotland, later separated. Returning to Island records, he recorded Sapphire (1984), Piece by Piece (1986) and the live Foundations (1987) before leaving the label in 1988.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Martyn released The Apprentice in 1990 and Cooltide in 1991 for Permanent Records, and reunited with Phil Collins for No Little Boy (1993), which featured rerecorded versions of some of his classic tracks. The similar 1992 release Couldn't Love You More was unauthorised and disowned by Martyn. Material from these recordings and his two Permanent albums have been recycled on many releases. Permanent Records also released a live 2-CD set called \"Live\" in 1994. And (1996) came out on Go! Discs and saw Martyn draw heavily on trip-hop textures, a direction which saw more complete expression on 2000's Glasgow Walker. The Church with One Bell (1998) is a covers album of blues classics, which draws on songs by other artists, including Portishead and Ben Harper. In 2001, Martyn appeared on the track \"Deliver Me\" by Faithless keyboard player and DJ Sister Bliss.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In July 2006, the documentary Johnny Too Bad was screened by the BBC. The programme documented the period surrounding the operation to amputate Martyn's right leg below the knee (the result of a burst cyst that had led to septicaemia) and the writing and recording of On the Cobbles (2004), an album described by Peter Marsh on the BBC Music website as \"the strongest, most consistent set he's come up with in years.\" Much of Cobbles was a revisiting of his acoustic-based sound. Martyn's last concerts were in November 2008, reprising Grace and Danger.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In collaboration with his keyboard player Spenser Cozens, Martyn wrote and performed the score for Strangebrew (Robert Wallace 2007), which won the Fortean Times Award at the London Short Film Festival in the same year. The film concept being a strong influence of the album design of Martyn's Heaven and Earth (2011). On 4 February 2008, Martyn received the lifetime achievement award at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. The award was presented by his friend Phil Collins. The BBC website stated Martyn's \"heartfelt performances have either suggested or fully demonstrated an idiosyncratic genius.\" Eric Clapton was quoted saying that Martyn was \"so far ahead of everything, it's almost inconceivable.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "To mark Martyn's 60th birthday, Island released a 4 CD boxed set, Ain't No Saint, on 1 September 2008. The set includes unreleased studio material and rare live recordings.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Martyn was appointed OBE in the 2009 New Year Honours and died a few weeks later. His partner Theresa Walsh collected the award at Buckingham Palace. Martyn had recorded new material before he died and his final studio album, Heaven and Earth, was completed and released posthumously in May 2011. The sleeve note says, \"all the tracks on this recording were kept as John wished — in their entirety\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Martyn died on 29 January 2009, at a hospital in Thomastown, County Kilkenny, Ireland, from acute respiratory distress syndrome. He had been living in Thomastown with his partner Theresa Walsh. Martyn's health was affected by his life-long abuse of drugs and alcohol. He was survived by his partner and his children, Mhairi, Wesley and Spencer McGeachy.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Following Martyn's death, Rolling Stone lauded his \"progressive folk invention and improvising sorcery\". Friend and collaborator Phil Collins paid tribute to him, saying, \"John's passing is terribly, terribly sad. I had worked with and known him since the late 1970s and he was a great friend. He was uncompromising, which made him infuriating to some people, but he was unique and we'll never see the likes of him again. I loved him dearly and will miss him very much.\"",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Mike Harding introduced an hour-long tribute to Martyn in his BBC Radio 2 programme on 25 February 2009. A tribute album, Johnny Boy Would Love This, was released on 15 August 2011, comprising cover versions of his songs by various artists.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The \"Grace & Danger: A Celebration of John Martyn\" tribute concert held on 27 January 2019 at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall marked the tenth anniversary of his passing. Curated and hosted by Danny Thompson, artists including Eddi Reader, Eric Bibb and Paul Weller performed \"to do full justice to a selection of Martyn's finest songs and channel some of the great man's spirit\".",
"title": "Death"
}
]
| David Nigel McGeachy, known professionally as John Martyn, was a British singer-songwriter and guitarist. Over a 40-year career, he released 23 studio albums, and received frequent critical acclaim. The Times described him as "an electrifying guitarist and singer whose music blurred the boundaries between folk, jazz, rock and blues". Martyn began his career at age 17 as a key member of the Scottish folk music scene, drawing inspiration from American blues and English traditional music, and signed with Island Records. By the 1970s he had begun incorporating jazz and rock into his sound on albums such as Solid Air (1973) and One World (1977), as well as experimenting with guitar effects and tape delay machines such as Echoplex. Domestic and substance abuse problems marked his personal life throughout the 1970s and 1980s, though he continued to release albums while collaborating with figures such as Phil Collins and Maeve Aubele, Carolyn Woolham and Lee "Scratch" Perry. He remained active until his death in 2009. | 2001-10-13T23:34:26Z | 2023-12-26T03:36:20Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Martyn |
16,215 | John Milton | John Milton (9 December 1608 – 8 November 1674) was an English poet and intellectual. His 1667 epic poem Paradise Lost, written in blank verse and including over ten chapters, was written in a time of immense religious flux and political upheaval. It addressed the fall of man, including the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and God's expulsion of them from the Garden of Eden. Paradise Lost elevated Milton's reputation as one of history's greatest poets. He also served as a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under its Council of State and later under Oliver Cromwell.
Milton achieved fame and recognition during his lifetime; his celebrated Areopagitica (1644), written in condemnation of pre-publication censorship, is among history's most influential and impassioned defences of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. His desire for freedom extended beyond his philosophy and was reflected in his style, which included his introduction of new words (coined from Latin and Ancient Greek) to the English language. He was the first modern writer to employ unrhymed verse outside of the theatre or translations.
Milton is described as the "greatest English author" by biographer William Hayley, and he remains generally regarded "as one of the preeminent writers in the English language", though critical reception has oscillated in the centuries since his death often on account of his republicanism. Samuel Johnson praised Paradise Lost as "a poem which...with respect to design may claim the first place, and with respect to performance, the second, among the productions of the human mind", though he (a Tory) described Milton's politics as those of an "acrimonious and surly republican". Milton was revered by poets such as William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Thomas Hardy.
Phases of Milton's life parallel the major historical and political divisions in Stuart England at the time. In his early years, Milton studied at Christ's College, Cambridge, and then travelled, wrote poetry mostly for private circulation, and launched a career as pamphleteer and publicist under Charles I's increasingly autocratic rule and Britain's breakdown into constitutional confusion and ultimately civil war. While once considered dangerously radical and heretical, Milton contributed to a seismic shift in accepted public opinions during his life that ultimately elevated him to public office in England. The Restoration of 1660 and his loss of vision later deprived Milton much of his public platform, but he used the period to develop many of his major works.
Milton's views developed from extensive reading, travel, and experience that began with his days as a student at Cambridge in the 1620s and continued through the English Civil War, which started in 1642 and continued until 1651. By the time of his death in 1674, Milton was impoverished and on the margins of English intellectual life but famous throughout Europe and unrepentant for political choices that placed him at odds with governing authorities.
John Milton was born in Bread Street, London, on 9 December 1608, the son of composer John Milton and his wife Sarah Jeffrey. The senior John Milton (1562–1647) moved to London around 1583 after being disinherited by his devout Catholic father Richard "the Ranger" Milton for embracing Protestantism. In London, the senior John Milton married Sarah Jeffrey (1572–1637) and found lasting financial success as a scrivener. He lived in and worked from a house in Cheapside at Bread Street, where the Mermaid Tavern was located. The elder Milton was noted for his skill as a composer of music, and this talent left his son with a lifelong appreciation for music and friendships with musicians such as Henry Lawes.
The prosperity of Milton's father allowed his eldest son to obtain a private tutor, Thomas Young, a Scottish Presbyterian with an MA from the University of St Andrews. Young's influence also served as the poet's introduction to religious radicalism. After Young's tutorship, Milton attended St Paul's School in London, where he began the study of Latin and Greek; the classical languages left an imprint on both his poetry and prose in English (he also wrote in Latin and Italian).
Milton's first datable compositions are two psalms written at age 15 at Long Bennington. One contemporary source is Brief Lives of John Aubrey, an uneven compilation including first-hand reports. In the work, Aubrey quotes Christopher, Milton's younger brother: "When he was young, he studied very hard and sat up very late, commonly till twelve or one o'clock at night". Aubrey adds, "His complexion exceeding faire—he was so faire that they called him the Lady of Christ's College."
In 1625, Milton gained entry to Christ's College at the University of Cambridge, where he graduated with a BA in 1629, ranking fourth of 24 honours graduates that year in the University of Cambridge. Preparing, at that time, to become an Anglican priest, he stayed on at Cambridge where he received his MA on 3 July 1632.
Milton may have been rusticated (suspended) in his first year at Cambridge for quarrelling with his tutor, Bishop William Chappell. He was certainly at home in London in the Lent Term 1626; there he wrote Elegia Prima, his first Latin elegy, to Charles Diodati, a friend from St Paul's. Based on remarks of John Aubrey, Chappell "whipt" Milton. This story is now disputed, though certainly Milton disliked Chappell. Historian Christopher Hill notes that Milton was apparently rusticated, and that the differences between Chappell and Milton may have been either religious or personal. It is also possible that, like Isaac Newton four decades later, Milton was sent home from Cambridge because of the plague, which impacted Cambridge significantly in 1625.
At Cambridge, Milton was on good terms with Edward King; he later dedicated "Lycidas" to him. Milton also befriended Anglo-American dissident and theologian Roger Williams. Milton tutored Williams in Hebrew in exchange for lessons in Dutch. Despite developing a reputation for poetic skill and general erudition, Milton suffered from alienation among his peers during his time at Cambridge. Having once watched his fellow students attempting comedy upon the college stage, he later observed, "they thought themselves gallant men, and I thought them fools".
Milton also was disdainful of the university curriculum, which consisted of stilted formal debates conducted in Latin on abstruse topics. His own corpus is not devoid of humour, notably his sixth prolusion and his epitaphs on the death of Thomas Hobson. While at Cambridge, he wrote a number of his well-known shorter English poems, including "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity", "Epitaph on the admirable Dramaticke Poet, W. Shakespeare" (his first poem to appear in print), L'Allegro, and Il Penseroso.
It appears in all his writings that he had the usual concomitant of great abilities, a lofty and steady confidence in himself, perhaps not without some contempt of others; for scarcely any man ever wrote so much, and praised so few. Of his praise he was very frugal; as he set its value high, and considered his mention of a name as a security against the waste of time, and a certain preservative from oblivion.
— Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets
After receiving his MA, Milton moved to Hammersmith, his father's new home since the previous year. He also lived at Horton, Berkshire, from 1635 and undertook six years of self-directed private study. Hill argues that this was not retreat into a rural idyll; Hammersmith was then a "suburban village" falling into the orbit of London, and even Horton was becoming deforested and suffered from the plague. He read both ancient and modern works of theology, philosophy, history, politics, literature, and science in preparation for a prospective poetical career. Milton's intellectual development can be charted via entries in his commonplace book (like a scrapbook), now in the British Library. As a result of such intensive study, Milton is considered to be among the most learned of all English poets. In addition to his years of private study, Milton had command of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, and Italian from his school and undergraduate days; he also added Old English to his linguistic repertoire in the 1650s while researching his History of Britain, and probably acquired proficiency in Dutch soon after.
Milton continued to write poetry during this period of study; his Arcades and Comus were both commissioned for masques composed for noble patrons, connections of the Egerton family, and performed in 1632 and 1634 respectively. Comus argues for the virtuousness of temperance and chastity. He contributed his pastoral elegy Lycidas to a memorial collection for one of his fellow-students at Cambridge. Drafts of these poems are preserved in Milton's poetry notebook, known as the Trinity Manuscript, because it is now kept at Trinity College, Cambridge.
In May 1638, accompanied by a manservant, Milton embarked upon a tour of France and Italy for 15 months that lasted until July or August 1639. His travels supplemented his study with new and direct experience of artistic and religious traditions, especially Roman Catholicism. He met famous theorists and intellectuals of the time and was able to display his poetic skills. For specific details of what happened within Milton's "grand tour", there appears to be just one primary source: Milton's own Defensio Secunda. There are other records, including some letters and some references in his other prose tracts, but the bulk of the information about the tour comes from a work that, according to Barbara Lewalski, "was not intended as autobiography but as rhetoric, designed to emphasise his sterling reputation with the learned of Europe."
He first went to Calais and then on to Paris, riding horseback, with a letter from diplomat Henry Wotton to ambassador John Scudamore. Through Scudamore, Milton met Hugo Grotius, a Dutch law philosopher, playwright, and poet. Milton left France soon after this meeting. He travelled south from Nice to Genoa, and then to Livorno and Pisa. He reached Florence in July 1638. While there, Milton enjoyed many of the sites and structures of the city. His candour of manner and erudite neo-Latin poetry earned him friends in Florentine intellectual circles, and he met the astronomer Galileo who was under house arrest at Arcetri, as well as others. Milton probably visited the Florentine Academy and the Accademia della Crusca along with smaller academies in the area, including the Apatisti and the Svogliati.
In [Florence], which I have always admired above all others because of the elegance, not just of its tongue, but also of its wit, I lingered for about two months. There I at once became the friend of many gentlemen eminent in rank and learning, whose private academies I frequented—a Florentine institution which deserves great praise not only for promoting humane studies but also for encouraging friendly intercourse.
— Milton's account of Florence in Defensio Secunda
He left Florence in September to continue to Rome. With the connections from Florence, Milton was able to have easy access to Rome's intellectual society. His poetic abilities impressed those like Giovanni Salzilli, who praised Milton within an epigram. In late October, Milton attended a dinner given by the English College, Rome, despite his dislike for the Society of Jesus, meeting English Catholics who were also guests—theologian Henry Holden and the poet Patrick Cary. He also attended musical events, including oratorios, operas, and melodramas. Milton left for Naples toward the end of November, where he stayed only for a month because of the Spanish control. During that time, he was introduced to Giovanni Battista Manso, patron to both Torquato Tasso and to Giambattista Marino.
Originally, Milton wanted to leave Naples in order to travel to Sicily and then on to Greece, but he returned to England during the summer of 1639 because of what he claimed in Defensio Secunda were "sad tidings of civil war in England." Matters became more complicated when Milton received word that his childhood friend Diodati had died. Milton in fact stayed another seven months on the continent and spent time at Geneva with Diodati's uncle after he returned to Rome. In Defensio Secunda, Milton proclaimed that he was warned against a return to Rome because of his frankness about religion, but he stayed in the city for two months and was able to experience Carnival and meet Lukas Holste, a Vatican librarian who guided Milton through its collection. He was introduced to Cardinal Francesco Barberini who invited Milton to an opera hosted by the Cardinal. Around March, Milton travelled once again to Florence, staying there for two months, attending further meetings of the academies, and spending time with friends. After leaving Florence, he travelled through Lucca, Bologna, and Ferrara before coming to Venice. In Venice, Milton was exposed to a model of Republicanism, later important in his political writings, but he soon found another model when he travelled to Geneva. From Switzerland, Milton travelled to Paris and then to Calais before finally arriving back in England in either July or August 1639.
On returning to England where the Bishops' Wars presaged further armed conflict, Milton began to write prose tracts against episcopacy, in the service of the Puritan and Parliamentary cause. Milton's first foray into polemics was Of Reformation touching Church Discipline in England (1641), followed by Of Prelatical Episcopacy, the two defences of Smectymnuus (a group of Presbyterian divines named from their initials; the "TY" belonged to Milton's old tutor Thomas Young), and The Reason of Church-Government Urged against Prelaty. He vigorously attacked the High-church party of the Church of England and their leader William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, with frequent passages of real eloquence lighting up the rough controversial style of the period, and deploying a wide knowledge of church history.
He was supported by his father's investments, but Milton became a private schoolmaster at this time, educating his nephews and other children of the well-to-do. This experience and discussions with educational reformer Samuel Hartlib led him to write his short tract Of Education in 1644, urging a reform of the national universities.
In June 1642, Milton paid a visit to the manor house at Forest Hill, Oxfordshire, and, aged 34, married the 17-year-old Mary Powell. The marriage got off to a poor start as Mary did not adapt to Milton's austere lifestyle or get along with his nephews. Milton found her intellectually unsatisfying and disliked the royalist views she had absorbed from her family. It is also speculated that she refused to consummate the marriage. Mary soon returned home to her parents and did not come back until 1645, partly because of the outbreak of the Civil War.
In the meantime, her desertion prompted Milton to publish a series of pamphlets over the next three years arguing for the legality and morality of divorce beyond grounds of adultery. (Anna Beer, author of a 2008 biography of Milton, points to a lack of evidence and the dangers of cynicism in urging that it was not necessarily the case that the private life so animated the public polemicising.) In 1643, Milton had a brush with the authorities over these writings, in parallel with Hezekiah Woodward, who had more trouble. It was the hostile response accorded the divorce tracts that spurred Milton to write Areopagitica; A speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc'd Printing, to the Parlament of England, his celebrated attack on pre-printing censorship. In Areopagitica, Milton aligns himself with the parliamentary cause, and he also begins to synthesize the ideal of neo-Roman liberty with that of Christian liberty. Milton also courted another woman during this time; we know nothing of her except that her name was Davis and she turned him down. However, it was enough to induce Mary Powell into returning to him which she did unexpectedly by begging him to take her back. They had two daughters in quick succession following their reconciliation.
With the Parliamentary victory in the Civil War, Milton used his pen in defence of the republican principles represented by the Commonwealth. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) defended the right of the people to hold their rulers to account, and implicitly sanctioned the regicide; Milton's political reputation got him appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues by the Council of State in March 1649. His main job description was to compose the English Republic's foreign correspondence in Latin and other languages, but he also was called upon to produce propaganda for the regime and to serve as a censor.
In October 1649, he published Eikonoklastes, an explicit defence of the regicide, in response to the Eikon Basilike, a phenomenal best-seller popularly attributed to Charles I that portrayed the King as an innocent Christian martyr. A month later the exiled Charles II and his party published the defence of monarchy Defensio Regia pro Carolo Primo, written by leading humanist Claudius Salmasius. By January of the following year, Milton was ordered to write a defence of the English people by the Council of State. Milton worked more slowly than usual, given the European audience and the English Republic's desire to establish diplomatic and cultural legitimacy, as he drew on the learning marshalled by his years of study to compose a riposte.
On 24 February 1652, Milton published his Latin defence of the English people Defensio pro Populo Anglicano, also known as the First Defence. Milton's pure Latin prose and evident learning exemplified in the First Defence quickly made him a European reputation, and the work ran to numerous editions. He addressed his Sonnet 16 to 'The Lord Generall Cromwell in May 1652' beginning "Cromwell, our chief of men...", although it was not published until 1654.
In 1654, Milton completed the second defence of the English nation Defensio secunda in response to an anonymous Royalist tract "Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Coelum Adversus Parricidas Anglicanos" [The Cry of the Royal Blood to Heaven Against the English Parricides], a work that made many personal attacks on Milton. The second defence praised Oliver Cromwell, now Lord Protector, while exhorting him to remain true to the principles of the Revolution. Alexander Morus, to whom Milton wrongly attributed the Clamor (in fact by Peter du Moulin), published an attack on Milton, in response to which Milton published the autobiographical Defensio pro se in 1655. Milton held the appointment of Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Commonwealth Council of State until 1660, although after he had become totally blind, most of the work was done by his deputies, Georg Rudolph Wecklein, then Philip Meadows, and from 1657 by the poet Andrew Marvell.
By 1652, Milton had become totally blind; the cause of his blindness is debated but bilateral retinal detachment or glaucoma are most likely. His blindness forced him to dictate his verse and prose to amanuenses who copied them out for him; one of these was Andrew Marvell. One of his best-known sonnets, When I Consider How My Light is Spent, titled by a later editor, John Newton, "On His Blindness", is presumed to date from this period.
Cromwell's death in 1658 caused the English Republic to collapse into feuding military and political factions. Milton, however, stubbornly clung to the beliefs that had originally inspired him to write for the Commonwealth. In 1659, he published A Treatise of Civil Power, attacking the concept of a state-dominated church (the position known as Erastianism), as well as Considerations touching the likeliest means to remove hirelings, denouncing corrupt practises in church governance. As the Republic disintegrated, Milton wrote several proposals to retain a non-monarchical government against the wishes of parliament, soldiers, and the people.
Upon the Restoration in May 1660, Milton, fearing for his life, went into hiding, while a warrant was issued for his arrest and his writings were burnt. He re-emerged after a general pardon was issued, but was nevertheless arrested and briefly imprisoned before influential friends intervened, such as Marvell, now an MP. Milton married for a third and final time on 24 February 1663, marrying Elizabeth (Betty) Minshull, aged 24, a native of Wistaston, Cheshire. He spent the remaining decade of his life living quietly in London, only retiring to a cottage during the Great Plague of London—Milton's Cottage in Chalfont St. Giles, his only extant home.
During this period, Milton published several minor prose works, such as the grammar textbook Art of Logic and a History of Britain. His only explicitly political tracts were the 1672 Of True Religion, arguing for toleration (except for Catholics), and a translation of a Polish tract advocating an elective monarchy. Both these works were referred to in the Exclusion debate, the attempt to exclude the heir presumptive from the throne of England—James, Duke of York—because he was Roman Catholic. That debate preoccupied politics in the 1670s and 1680s and precipitated the formation of the Whig party and the Glorious Revolution.
Milton died on 8 November 1674 and was buried in the church of St Giles-without-Cripplegate, Fore Street, London. However, sources differ as to whether the cause of death was consumption or gout. According to an early biographer, his funeral was attended by "his learned and great Friends in London, not without a friendly concourse of the Vulgar." A monument was added in 1793, sculpted by John Bacon the Elder.
Milton and his first wife Mary Powell (1625–1652) had four children:
Mary Powell died on 5 May 1652 from complications following Deborah's birth. Milton's daughters survived to adulthood, but he always had a strained relationship with them.
On 12 November 1656, Milton was married to Katherine Woodcock at St Margaret's, Westminster. She died on 3 February 1658, less than four months after giving birth to her daughter Katherine, who also died.
Milton married for a third time on 24 February 1663 to Elizabeth Mynshull or Minshull (1638–1728), the niece of Thomas Mynshull, a wealthy apothecary and philanthropist in Manchester. The marriage took place at St Mary Aldermary in the City of London. Despite a 31-year age gap, the marriage seemed happy, according to John Aubrey, and lasted more than 12 years until Milton's death. (A plaque on the wall of Mynshull's House in Manchester describes Elizabeth as Milton's "3rd and Best wife".) Samuel Johnson, however, claims that Mynshull was "a domestic companion and attendant" and Milton's nephew Edward Phillips relates that Mynshull "oppressed his children in his lifetime, and cheated them at his death".
His nephews, Edward and John Phillips (sons of Milton's sister Anne), were educated by Milton and became writers themselves. John acted as a secretary, and Edward was Milton's first biographer.
Milton's poetry was slow to see the light of day, at least under his name. His first published poem was "On Shakespeare" (1630), anonymously included in the Second Folio edition of William Shakespeare's plays in 1632. An annotated copy of the First Folio has been suggested to contain marginal notes by Milton. Milton collected his work in 1645 Poems in the midst of the excitement attending the possibility of establishing a new English government. The anonymous edition of Comus was published in 1637, and the publication of Lycidas in 1638 in Justa Edouardo King Naufrago was signed J. M. Otherwise. The 1645 collection was the only poetry of his to see print until Paradise Lost appeared in 1667.
Milton's magnum opus, the blank-verse epic poem Paradise Lost, was composed by the blind and impoverished Milton from 1658 to 1664 (first edition), with small but significant revisions published in 1674 (second edition). As a blind poet, Milton dictated his verse to a series of aides in his employ. It has been argued that the poem reflects his personal despair at the failure of the Revolution yet affirms an ultimate optimism in human potential. Some literary critics have argued that Milton encoded many references to his unyielding support for the "Good Old Cause".
On 27 April 1667, Milton sold the publication rights for Paradise Lost to publisher Samuel Simmons for £5 (equivalent to approximately £770 in 2015 purchasing power), with a further £5 to be paid if and when each print run sold out of between 1,300 and 1,500 copies. The first run was a quarto edition priced at three shillings per copy (about £23 in 2015 purchasing power equivalent), published in August 1667, and it sold out in eighteen months.
Milton followed up the publication Paradise Lost with its sequel Paradise Regained, which was published alongside the tragedy Samson Agonistes in 1671. Both of these works also reflect Milton's post-Restoration political situation. Just before his death in 1674, Milton supervised a second edition of Paradise Lost, accompanied by an explanation of "why the poem rhymes not", and prefatory verses by Andrew Marvell. In 1673, Milton republished his 1645 Poems, as well as a collection of his letters and the Latin prolusions from his Cambridge days.
An unfinished religious manifesto, De doctrina christiana, probably written by Milton, lays out many of his heterodox theological views, and was not discovered and published until 1823. Milton's key beliefs were idiosyncratic, not those of an identifiable group or faction, and often they go well beyond the orthodoxy of the time. Their tone, however, stemmed from the Puritan emphasis on the centrality and inviolability of conscience. He was his own man, but he was anticipated by Henry Robinson in Areopagitica.
While Milton's beliefs are generally considered to be consistent with Protestant Christianity, Stephen Fallon argues that by the late 1650s, Milton may have at least toyed with the idea of monism or animist materialism, the notion that a single material substance which is "animate, self-active, and free" composes everything in the universe: from stones and trees and bodies to minds, souls, angels, and God. Fallon claims that Milton devised this position to avoid the mind-body dualism of Plato and Descartes as well as the mechanistic determinism of Hobbes. According to Fallon, Milton's monism is most notably reflected in Paradise Lost when he has angels eat (5.433–439) and apparently engage in sexual intercourse (8.622–629) and the De Doctrina, where he denies the dual natures of man and argues for a theory of Creation ex Deo.
Milton was a "passionately individual Christian Humanist poet." He appears on the pages of seventeenth century English Puritanism, an age characterized as "the world turned upside down." He was a Puritan and yet was unwilling to surrender conscience to party positions on public policy. Thus, Milton's political thought, driven by competing convictions, a Reformed faith and a Humanist spirit, led to enigmatic outcomes.
Milton's apparently contradictory stance on the vital problems of his age, arose from religious contestations, to the questions of the divine rights of kings. In both the cases, he seems in control, taking stock of the situation arising from the polarization of the English society on religious and political lines. He fought with the Puritans against the Cavaliers i.e. the King's party, and helped win the day. But the very same constitutional and republican polity, when tried to curtail freedom of speech, Milton, given his humanistic zeal, wrote Areopagitica . . . [sic]
Areopagitica was written in response to the Licensing Order, in November 1644.
Milton's political thought may be best categorized according to respective periods in his life and times. The years 1641–42 were dedicated to church politics and the struggle against episcopacy. After his divorce writings, Areopagitica, and a gap, he wrote in 1649–54 in the aftermath of the execution of Charles I, and in polemic justification of the regicide and the existing Parliamentarian regime. Then in 1659–60 he foresaw the Restoration and wrote to head it off.
Milton's own beliefs were in some cases unpopular, particularly his commitment to republicanism. In coming centuries, Milton would be claimed as an early apostle of liberalism. According to James Tully:
... with Locke as with Milton, republican and contraction conceptions of political freedom join hands in common opposition to the disengaged and passive subjection offered by absolutists such as Hobbes and Robert Filmer.
A friend and ally in the pamphlet wars was Marchamont Nedham. Austin Woolrych considers that although they were quite close, there is "little real affinity, beyond a broad republicanism", between their approaches. Blair Worden remarks that both Milton and Nedham, with others such as Andrew Marvell and James Harrington, would have taken their problem with the Rump Parliament to be not the republic itself, but the fact that it was not a proper republic. Woolrych speaks of "the gulf between Milton's vision of the Commonwealth's future and the reality". In the early version of his History of Britain, begun in 1649, Milton was already writing off the members of the Long Parliament as incorrigible.
He praised Oliver Cromwell as the Protectorate was set up; though subsequently he had major reservations. When Cromwell seemed to be backsliding as a revolutionary, after a couple of years in power, Milton moved closer to the position of Sir Henry Vane, to whom he wrote a sonnet in 1652. The group of disaffected republicans included, besides Vane, John Bradshaw, John Hutchinson, Edmund Ludlow, Henry Marten, Robert Overton, Edward Sexby and John Streater; but not Marvell, who remained with Cromwell's party. Milton had already commended Overton, along with Edmund Whalley and Bulstrode Whitelocke, in Defensio Secunda. Nigel Smith writes that
... John Streater, and the form of republicanism he stood for, was a fulfilment of Milton's most optimistic ideas of free speech and of public heroism [...]
As Richard Cromwell fell from power, he envisaged a step towards a freer republic or "free commonwealth", writing in the hope of this outcome in early 1660. Milton had argued for an awkward position, in the Ready and Easy Way, because he wanted to invoke the Good Old Cause and gain the support of the republicans, but without offering a democratic solution of any kind. His proposal, backed by reference (amongst other reasons) to the oligarchical Dutch and Venetian constitutions, was for a council with perpetual membership. This attitude cut right across the grain of popular opinion of the time, which swung decisively behind the restoration of the Stuart monarchy that took place later in the year. Milton, an associate of and advocate on behalf of the regicides, was silenced on political matters as Charles II returned.
John Milton was neither a clergyman nor a theologian; however, theology, and particularly English Calvinism, formed the palette on which he created his greatest thoughts. Milton wrestled with the great doctrines of the Church amidst the theological crosswinds of his age. The great poet was undoubtedly Reformed (though his grandfather, Richard "the Ranger" Milton had been Roman Catholic). However, Milton's Calvinism had to find expression in a broad-spirited Humanism. Like many Renaissance artists before him, Milton attempted to integrate Christian theology with classical modes. In his early poems, the poet narrator expresses a tension between vice and virtue, the latter invariably related to Protestantism. In Comus, Milton may make ironic use of the Caroline court masque by elevating notions of purity and virtue over the conventions of court revelry and superstition. In his later poems, Milton's theological concerns become more explicit.
His use of biblical citation was wide-ranging; Harris Fletcher, standing at the beginning of the intensification of the study of the use of scripture in Milton's work (poetry and prose, in all languages Milton mastered), notes that typically Milton clipped and adapted biblical quotations to suit the purpose, giving precise chapter and verse only in texts for a more specialized readership. As for the plenitude of Milton's quotations from scripture, Fletcher comments, "For this work, I have in all actually collated about twenty-five hundred of the five to ten thousand direct Biblical quotations which appear therein". Milton's customary English Bible was the Authorized King James. When citing and writing in other languages, he usually employed the Latin translation by Immanuel Tremellius, though "he was equipped to read the Bible in Latin, in Greek, and in Hebrew, including the Targumim or Aramaic paraphrases of the Old Testament, and the Syriac version of the New, together with the available commentaries of those several versions".
Milton embraced many heterodox Christian theological views. He has been accused of rejecting the Trinity, believing instead that the Son was subordinate to the Father, a position known as Arianism; and his sympathy or curiosity was probably engaged by Socinianism: in August 1650 he licensed for publication by William Dugard the Racovian Catechism, based on a non-trinitarian creed. Milton's alleged Arianism, like much of his theology, is still subject of debate and controversy. Rufus Wilmot Griswold argued that "In none of his great works is there a passage from which it can be inferred that he was an Arian; and in the very last of his writings he declares that "the doctrine of the Trinity is a plain doctrine in Scripture." In Areopagitica, Milton classified Arians and Socinians as "errorists" and "schismatics" alongside Arminians and Anabaptists. A source has interpreted him as broadly Protestant, if not always easy to locate in a more precise religious category. In 2019, John Rogers stated, "Heretics both, John Milton and Isaac Newton were, as most scholars now agree, Arians."
In his 1641 treatise, Of Reformation, Milton expressed his dislike for Catholicism and episcopacy, presenting Rome as a modern Babylon, and bishops as Egyptian taskmasters. These analogies conform to Milton's puritanical preference for Old Testament imagery. He knew at least four commentaries on Genesis: those of John Calvin, Paulus Fagius, David Pareus and Andreus Rivetus.
Through the Interregnum, Milton often presents England, rescued from the trappings of a worldly monarchy, as an elect nation akin to the Old Testament Israel, and shows its leader, Oliver Cromwell, as a latter-day Moses. These views were bound up in Protestant views of the Millennium, which some sects, such as the Fifth Monarchists predicted would arrive in England. Milton, however, would later criticise the "worldly" millenarian views of these and others, and expressed orthodox ideas on the prophecy of the Four Empires.
The Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 began a new phase in Milton's work. In Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, Milton mourns the end of the godly Commonwealth. The Garden of Eden may allegorically reflect Milton's view of England's recent Fall from Grace, while Samson's blindness and captivity—mirroring Milton's own lost sight—may be a metaphor for England's blind acceptance of Charles II as king. Illustrated by Paradise Lost is mortalism, the belief that the soul lies dormant after the body dies.
Despite the Restoration of the monarchy, Milton did not lose his personal faith; Samson shows how the loss of national salvation did not necessarily preclude the salvation of the individual, while Paradise Regained expresses Milton's continuing belief in the promise of Christian salvation through Jesus Christ.
Though he maintained his personal faith in spite of the defeats suffered by his cause, the Dictionary of National Biography recounted how he had been alienated from the Church of England by Archbishop William Laud, and then moved similarly from the Dissenters by their denunciation of religious tolerance in England.
Milton had come to stand apart from all sects, though apparently finding the Quakers most congenial. He never went to any religious services in his later years. When a servant brought back accounts of sermons from nonconformist meetings, Milton became so sarcastic that the man at last gave up his place.
Writing of the enigmatic and often conflicting views of Milton in the Puritan age, David Daiches wrote,
"Christian and Humanist, Protestant, patriot and heir of the golden ages of Greece and Rome, he faced what appeared to him to be the birth-pangs of a new and regenerate England with high excitement and idealistic optimism."
A fair theological summary may be that John Milton was a Puritan, though his tendency to press further for liberty of conscience, sometimes out of conviction and often out of mere intellectual curiosity, made the great man, at least, a vital if not uncomfortable ally in the broader Puritan movement.
Milton called in the Areopagitica for "the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties" to the conflicting Protestant denominations. According to American historian William Hunter, "Milton argued for disestablishment as the only effective way of achieving broad toleration. Rather than force a man's conscience, government should recognise the persuasive force of the gospel."
Milton wrote The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce in 1643, at the beginning of the English Civil War. In August of that year, he presented his thoughts to the Westminster Assembly of Divines, which had been created by the Long Parliament to bring greater reform to the Church of England. The Assembly convened on 1 July against the will of King Charles I.
Milton's thinking on divorce caused him considerable trouble with the authorities. An orthodox Presbyterian view of the time was that Milton's views on divorce constituted a one-man heresy:
The fervently Presbyterian Edwards had included Milton's divorce tracts in his list in Gangraena of heretical publications that threatened the religious and moral fabric of the nation; Milton responded by mocking him as "shallow Edwards" in the satirical sonnet "On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament", usually dated to the latter half of 1646.
Even here, though, his originality is qualified: Thomas Gataker had already identified "mutual solace" as a principal goal in marriage. Milton abandoned his campaign to legitimise divorce after 1645, but he expressed support for polygamy in the De Doctrina Christiana, the theological treatise that provides the clearest evidence for his views.
Milton wrote during a period when thoughts about divorce were anything but simplistic; rather, there was active debate among thinkers and intellectuals at the time. However, Milton's basic approval of divorce within strict parameters set by the biblical witness was typical of many influential Christian intellectuals, particularly the Westminster divines. Milton addressed the Assembly on the matter of divorce in August 1643, at a moment when the Assembly was beginning to form its opinion on the matter. In the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Milton argued that divorce was a private matter, not a legal or ecclesiastical one. Neither the Assembly nor Parliament condemned Milton or his ideas. In fact, when the Westminster Assembly wrote the Westminster Confession of Faith they allowed for divorce ('Of Marriage and Divorce,' Chapter 24, Section 5) in cases of infidelity or abandonment. Thus, the Christian community, at least a majority within the 'Puritan' sub-set, approved of Milton's views.
Nevertheless, reaction among Puritans to Milton's views on divorce was mixed. Herbert Palmer, a member of the Westminster Assembly, condemned Milton in the strongest possible language:
If any plead Conscience ... for divorce for other causes than Christ and His Apostles mention; Of which a wicked booke is abroad and uncensured, though deserving to be burnt, whose Author, hath been so impudent as to set his Name to it, and dedicate it to your selves ... will you grant a Toleration for all this?
Palmer expressed his disapproval in a sermon addressed to the Westminster Assembly. The Scottish commissioner Robert Baillie described Palmer's sermon as one "of the most Scottish and free sermons that ever I heard any where."
History was particularly important for the political class of the period, and Lewalski considers that Milton "more than most illustrates" a remark of Thomas Hobbes on the weight placed at the time on the classical Latin historical writers Tacitus, Livy, Sallust and Cicero, and their republican attitudes. Milton himself wrote that "Worthy deeds are not often destitute of worthy relaters", in Book II of his History of Britain. A sense of history mattered greatly to him:
The course of human history, the immediate impact of the civil disorders, and his own traumatic personal life, are all regarded by Milton as typical of the predicament he describes as "the misery that has bin since Adam".
Once Paradise Lost was published, Milton's stature as epic poet was immediately recognised. He cast a formidable shadow over English poetry in the 18th and 19th centuries; he was often judged equal or superior to all other English poets, including Shakespeare. Very early on, though, he was championed by Whigs, and decried by Tories: with the regicide Edmund Ludlow he was claimed as an early Whig, while the High Tory Anglican minister Luke Milbourne lumped Milton in with other "Agents of Darkness" such as John Knox, George Buchanan, Richard Baxter, Algernon Sidney and John Locke. The political ideas of Milton, Locke, Sidney, and James Harrington strongly influenced the Radical Whigs, whose ideology in turn was central to the American Revolution. Modern scholars of Milton's life, politics, and work are known as Miltonists: "his work is the subject of a very large amount of academic scholarship".
In 2008, John Milton Passage, a short passage by Bread Street into St Mary-le-Bow Churchyard in London, was unveiled.
John Dryden, an early enthusiast, in 1677 began the trend of describing Milton as the poet of the sublime. Dryden's The State of Innocence and the Fall of Man: an Opera (1677) is evidence of an immediate cultural influence. In 1695, Patrick Hume became the first editor of Paradise Lost, providing an extensive apparatus of annotation and commentary, particularly chasing down allusions.
In 1732, the classical scholar Richard Bentley offered a corrected version of Paradise Lost. Bentley was considered presumptuous and was attacked in the following year by Zachary Pearce. Christopher Ricks judges that, as critic, Bentley was both acute and wrong-headed, and "incorrigibly eccentric"; William Empson also finds Pearce to be more sympathetic to Bentley's underlying line of thought than is warranted.
There was an early, partial translation of Paradise Lost into German by Theodore Haak and based on that a standard verse translation by Ernest Gottlieb von Berge. A subsequent prose translation by Johann Jakob Bodmer was very popular; it influenced Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. The German-language Milton tradition returned to England in the person of the artist Henry Fuseli.
Many Enlightenment thinkers of the 18th century revered and commented on Milton's poetry and non-poetical works. In addition to John Dryden, among them were Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison, Thomas Newton, and Samuel Johnson. For example, in The Spectator, Joseph Addison wrote extensive notes, annotations, and interpretations of certain passages of Paradise Lost. Jonathan Richardson, senior, and Jonathan Richardson, the younger, co-wrote a book of criticism. In 1749, Thomas Newton published an extensive edition of Milton's poetical works with annotations provided by himself, Dryden, Pope, Addison, the Richardsons (father and son) and others. Newton's edition of Milton was a culmination of the honour bestowed upon Milton by early Enlightenment thinkers; it may also have been prompted by Richard Bentley's infamous edition, described above. Samuel Johnson wrote numerous essays on Paradise Lost, and Milton was included in his Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779–1781). In The Age of Louis XIV, Voltaire said "Milton remains the glory and the wonder (l'admiration) of England."
William Blake considered Milton the major English poet. Blake placed Edmund Spenser as Milton's precursor, and saw himself as Milton's poetical son. In his Milton: A Poem in Two Books, Blake uses Milton as a character.
Edmund Burke was a theorist of the sublime, and he regarded Milton's description of Hell as exemplary of sublimity as an aesthetic concept. For Burke, it was to set alongside mountain-tops, a storm at sea, and infinity. In The Beautiful and the Sublime, he wrote: "No person seems better to have understood the secret of heightening, or of setting terrible things, if I may use the expression, in their strongest light, by the force of a judicious obscurity than Milton."
The Romantic poets valued his exploration of blank verse, but for the most part rejected his religiosity. William Wordsworth began his sonnet "London, 1802" with "Milton! thou should'st be living at this hour" and modelled The Prelude, his own blank verse epic, on Paradise Lost. John Keats found the yoke of Milton's style uncongenial; he exclaimed that "Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful or rather artist's humour." Keats felt that Paradise Lost was a "beautiful and grand curiosity", but his own unfinished attempt at epic poetry, Hyperion, was unsatisfactory to the author because, amongst other things, it had too many "Miltonic inversions". In The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar note that Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein is, in the view of many critics, "one of the key 'Romantic' readings of Paradise Lost."
The Victorian age witnessed a continuation of Milton's influence. Thomas Carlyle declared him the "moral king of English literature," while George Eliot and Thomas Hardy were particularly inspired by Milton's poetry and biography. Hostile 20th-century criticism by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound did not reduce Milton's stature. F. R. Leavis, in The Common Pursuit, responded to the points made by Eliot, in particular the claim that "the study of Milton could be of no help: it was only a hindrance", by arguing, "As if it were a matter of deciding not to study Milton! The problem, rather, was to escape from an influence that was so difficult to escape from because it was unrecognized, belonging, as it did, to the climate of the habitual and 'natural'." Harold Bloom, in The Anxiety of Influence, wrote that "Milton is the central problem in any theory and history of poetic influence in English [...]".
Milton's Areopagitica is still cited as relevant to the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. A quotation from Areopagitica—"A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life"—is displayed in many public libraries, including the New York Public Library.
The title of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy is derived from a quotation, "His dark materials to create more worlds", line 915 of Book II in Paradise Lost. Pullman was concerned to produce a version of Milton's poem accessible to teenagers, and has spoken of Milton as "our greatest public poet".
Titles of a number of other well-known literary works are also derived from Milton's writings. Examples include Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel, Aldous Huxley's Eyeless in Gaza, Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, and William Golding's Darkness Visible.
T. S. Eliot believed that "of no other poet is it so difficult to consider the poetry simply as poetry, without our theological and political dispositions... making unlawful entry".
Milton's use of blank verse, in addition to his stylistic innovations (such as grandiloquence of voice and vision, peculiar diction and phraseology) influenced later poets. At the time, poetic blank verse was considered distinct from its use in verse drama, and Paradise Lost was taken as a unique exemplar. Said Isaac Watts in 1734, "Mr. Milton is esteemed the parent and author of blank verse among us". "Miltonic verse" might be synonymous for a century with blank verse as poetry, a new poetic terrain independent from both the drama and the heroic couplet.
Lack of rhyme was sometimes taken as Milton's defining innovation. He himself considered the rhymeless quality of Paradise Lost to be an extension of his own personal liberty:
This neglect then of Rhime ... is to be esteem'd an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recover'd to heroic Poem from the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing.
This pursuit of freedom was largely a reaction against conservative values entrenched within the rigid heroic couplet. Within a dominant culture that stressed elegance and finish, he granted primacy to freedom, breadth and imaginative suggestiveness, eventually developed into the romantic vision of sublime terror. Reaction to Milton's poetic worldview included, grudgingly, acknowledgement of the poet's resemblance to classical writers (Greek and Roman poetry being unrhymed). Blank verse came to be a recognised medium for religious works and for translations of the classics. Unrhymed lyrics like Collins' Ode to Evening (in the meter of Milton's translation of Horace's Ode to Pyrrha) were not uncommon after 1740.
A second aspect of Milton's blank verse was the use of unconventional rhythm:
His blank-verse paragraph, and his audacious and victorious attempt to combine blank and rhymed verse with paragraphic effect in Lycidas, lay down indestructible models and patterns of English verse-rhythm, as distinguished from the narrower and more strait-laced forms of English metre.
Before Milton, "the sense of regular rhythm ... had been knocked into the English head so securely that it was part of their nature". The "Heroick measure", according to Samuel Johnson, "is pure ... when the accent rests upon every second syllable through the whole line ... The repetition of this sound or percussion at equal times, is the most complete harmony of which a single verse is capable". Caesural pauses, most agreed, were best placed at the middle and the end of the line. In order to support this symmetry, lines were most often octo- or deca-syllabic, with no enjambed endings. To this schema Milton introduced modifications, which included hypermetrical syllables (trisyllabic feet), inversion or slighting of stresses, and the shifting of pauses to all parts of the line. Milton deemed these features to be reflective of "the transcendental union of order and freedom". Admirers remained hesitant to adopt such departures from traditional metrical schemes: "The English ... had been writing separate lines for so long that they could not rid themselves of the habit". Isaac Watts preferred his lines distinct from each other, as did Oliver Goldsmith, Henry Pemberton, and Scott of Amwell, whose general opinion it was that Milton's frequent omission of the initial unaccented foot was "displeasing to a nice ear". It was not until the late 18th century that poets (beginning with Gray) began to appreciate "the composition of Milton's harmony ... how he loved to vary his pauses, his measures, and his feet, which gives that enchanting air of freedom and wilderness to his versification". By the 20th century, American poet and critic John Hollander would go so far as to say that Milton "was able, by plying that most remarkable instrument of English meter ... to invent a new mode of image-making in English poetry."
Milton's pursuit of liberty extended into his vocabulary as well. It included many Latinate neologisms, as well as obsolete words already dropped from popular usage so completely that their meanings were no longer understood. In 1740, Francis Peck identified some examples of Milton's "old" words (now popular). The "Miltonian dialect", as it was called, was emulated by later poets; Pope used the diction of Paradise Lost in his Homer translation, while the lyric poetry of Gray and Collins was frequently criticised for their use of "obsolete words out of Spenser and Milton". The language of Thomson's finest poems (e.g. The Seasons, The Castle of Indolence) was self-consciously modelled after the Miltonian dialect, with the same tone and sensibilities as Paradise Lost. Following to Milton, English poetry from Pope to John Keats exhibited a steadily increasing attention to the connotative, the imaginative and poetic, value of words.
Milton's ode At a solemn Musick was set for choir and orchestra as Blest Pair of Sirens by Hubert Parry (1848–1918), and Milton's poem On the Morning of Christ's Nativity was set as a large-scale choral work by Cyril Rootham (1875–1938). Milton also wrote the hymn Let us with a gladsome mind, a versification of Psalm 136. His 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso', with additional material, were magnificently set by Handel (1740). | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "John Milton (9 December 1608 – 8 November 1674) was an English poet and intellectual. His 1667 epic poem Paradise Lost, written in blank verse and including over ten chapters, was written in a time of immense religious flux and political upheaval. It addressed the fall of man, including the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and God's expulsion of them from the Garden of Eden. Paradise Lost elevated Milton's reputation as one of history's greatest poets. He also served as a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under its Council of State and later under Oliver Cromwell.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Milton achieved fame and recognition during his lifetime; his celebrated Areopagitica (1644), written in condemnation of pre-publication censorship, is among history's most influential and impassioned defences of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. His desire for freedom extended beyond his philosophy and was reflected in his style, which included his introduction of new words (coined from Latin and Ancient Greek) to the English language. He was the first modern writer to employ unrhymed verse outside of the theatre or translations.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Milton is described as the \"greatest English author\" by biographer William Hayley, and he remains generally regarded \"as one of the preeminent writers in the English language\", though critical reception has oscillated in the centuries since his death often on account of his republicanism. Samuel Johnson praised Paradise Lost as \"a poem which...with respect to design may claim the first place, and with respect to performance, the second, among the productions of the human mind\", though he (a Tory) described Milton's politics as those of an \"acrimonious and surly republican\". Milton was revered by poets such as William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Thomas Hardy.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Phases of Milton's life parallel the major historical and political divisions in Stuart England at the time. In his early years, Milton studied at Christ's College, Cambridge, and then travelled, wrote poetry mostly for private circulation, and launched a career as pamphleteer and publicist under Charles I's increasingly autocratic rule and Britain's breakdown into constitutional confusion and ultimately civil war. While once considered dangerously radical and heretical, Milton contributed to a seismic shift in accepted public opinions during his life that ultimately elevated him to public office in England. The Restoration of 1660 and his loss of vision later deprived Milton much of his public platform, but he used the period to develop many of his major works.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Milton's views developed from extensive reading, travel, and experience that began with his days as a student at Cambridge in the 1620s and continued through the English Civil War, which started in 1642 and continued until 1651. By the time of his death in 1674, Milton was impoverished and on the margins of English intellectual life but famous throughout Europe and unrepentant for political choices that placed him at odds with governing authorities.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "John Milton was born in Bread Street, London, on 9 December 1608, the son of composer John Milton and his wife Sarah Jeffrey. The senior John Milton (1562–1647) moved to London around 1583 after being disinherited by his devout Catholic father Richard \"the Ranger\" Milton for embracing Protestantism. In London, the senior John Milton married Sarah Jeffrey (1572–1637) and found lasting financial success as a scrivener. He lived in and worked from a house in Cheapside at Bread Street, where the Mermaid Tavern was located. The elder Milton was noted for his skill as a composer of music, and this talent left his son with a lifelong appreciation for music and friendships with musicians such as Henry Lawes.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The prosperity of Milton's father allowed his eldest son to obtain a private tutor, Thomas Young, a Scottish Presbyterian with an MA from the University of St Andrews. Young's influence also served as the poet's introduction to religious radicalism. After Young's tutorship, Milton attended St Paul's School in London, where he began the study of Latin and Greek; the classical languages left an imprint on both his poetry and prose in English (he also wrote in Latin and Italian).",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Milton's first datable compositions are two psalms written at age 15 at Long Bennington. One contemporary source is Brief Lives of John Aubrey, an uneven compilation including first-hand reports. In the work, Aubrey quotes Christopher, Milton's younger brother: \"When he was young, he studied very hard and sat up very late, commonly till twelve or one o'clock at night\". Aubrey adds, \"His complexion exceeding faire—he was so faire that they called him the Lady of Christ's College.\"",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In 1625, Milton gained entry to Christ's College at the University of Cambridge, where he graduated with a BA in 1629, ranking fourth of 24 honours graduates that year in the University of Cambridge. Preparing, at that time, to become an Anglican priest, he stayed on at Cambridge where he received his MA on 3 July 1632.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Milton may have been rusticated (suspended) in his first year at Cambridge for quarrelling with his tutor, Bishop William Chappell. He was certainly at home in London in the Lent Term 1626; there he wrote Elegia Prima, his first Latin elegy, to Charles Diodati, a friend from St Paul's. Based on remarks of John Aubrey, Chappell \"whipt\" Milton. This story is now disputed, though certainly Milton disliked Chappell. Historian Christopher Hill notes that Milton was apparently rusticated, and that the differences between Chappell and Milton may have been either religious or personal. It is also possible that, like Isaac Newton four decades later, Milton was sent home from Cambridge because of the plague, which impacted Cambridge significantly in 1625.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "At Cambridge, Milton was on good terms with Edward King; he later dedicated \"Lycidas\" to him. Milton also befriended Anglo-American dissident and theologian Roger Williams. Milton tutored Williams in Hebrew in exchange for lessons in Dutch. Despite developing a reputation for poetic skill and general erudition, Milton suffered from alienation among his peers during his time at Cambridge. Having once watched his fellow students attempting comedy upon the college stage, he later observed, \"they thought themselves gallant men, and I thought them fools\".",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Milton also was disdainful of the university curriculum, which consisted of stilted formal debates conducted in Latin on abstruse topics. His own corpus is not devoid of humour, notably his sixth prolusion and his epitaphs on the death of Thomas Hobson. While at Cambridge, he wrote a number of his well-known shorter English poems, including \"On the Morning of Christ's Nativity\", \"Epitaph on the admirable Dramaticke Poet, W. Shakespeare\" (his first poem to appear in print), L'Allegro, and Il Penseroso.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "It appears in all his writings that he had the usual concomitant of great abilities, a lofty and steady confidence in himself, perhaps not without some contempt of others; for scarcely any man ever wrote so much, and praised so few. Of his praise he was very frugal; as he set its value high, and considered his mention of a name as a security against the waste of time, and a certain preservative from oblivion.",
"title": "Study, poetry, and travel"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "— Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets",
"title": "Study, poetry, and travel"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "After receiving his MA, Milton moved to Hammersmith, his father's new home since the previous year. He also lived at Horton, Berkshire, from 1635 and undertook six years of self-directed private study. Hill argues that this was not retreat into a rural idyll; Hammersmith was then a \"suburban village\" falling into the orbit of London, and even Horton was becoming deforested and suffered from the plague. He read both ancient and modern works of theology, philosophy, history, politics, literature, and science in preparation for a prospective poetical career. Milton's intellectual development can be charted via entries in his commonplace book (like a scrapbook), now in the British Library. As a result of such intensive study, Milton is considered to be among the most learned of all English poets. In addition to his years of private study, Milton had command of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, and Italian from his school and undergraduate days; he also added Old English to his linguistic repertoire in the 1650s while researching his History of Britain, and probably acquired proficiency in Dutch soon after.",
"title": "Study, poetry, and travel"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Milton continued to write poetry during this period of study; his Arcades and Comus were both commissioned for masques composed for noble patrons, connections of the Egerton family, and performed in 1632 and 1634 respectively. Comus argues for the virtuousness of temperance and chastity. He contributed his pastoral elegy Lycidas to a memorial collection for one of his fellow-students at Cambridge. Drafts of these poems are preserved in Milton's poetry notebook, known as the Trinity Manuscript, because it is now kept at Trinity College, Cambridge.",
"title": "Study, poetry, and travel"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In May 1638, accompanied by a manservant, Milton embarked upon a tour of France and Italy for 15 months that lasted until July or August 1639. His travels supplemented his study with new and direct experience of artistic and religious traditions, especially Roman Catholicism. He met famous theorists and intellectuals of the time and was able to display his poetic skills. For specific details of what happened within Milton's \"grand tour\", there appears to be just one primary source: Milton's own Defensio Secunda. There are other records, including some letters and some references in his other prose tracts, but the bulk of the information about the tour comes from a work that, according to Barbara Lewalski, \"was not intended as autobiography but as rhetoric, designed to emphasise his sterling reputation with the learned of Europe.\"",
"title": "Study, poetry, and travel"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "He first went to Calais and then on to Paris, riding horseback, with a letter from diplomat Henry Wotton to ambassador John Scudamore. Through Scudamore, Milton met Hugo Grotius, a Dutch law philosopher, playwright, and poet. Milton left France soon after this meeting. He travelled south from Nice to Genoa, and then to Livorno and Pisa. He reached Florence in July 1638. While there, Milton enjoyed many of the sites and structures of the city. His candour of manner and erudite neo-Latin poetry earned him friends in Florentine intellectual circles, and he met the astronomer Galileo who was under house arrest at Arcetri, as well as others. Milton probably visited the Florentine Academy and the Accademia della Crusca along with smaller academies in the area, including the Apatisti and the Svogliati.",
"title": "Study, poetry, and travel"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In [Florence], which I have always admired above all others because of the elegance, not just of its tongue, but also of its wit, I lingered for about two months. There I at once became the friend of many gentlemen eminent in rank and learning, whose private academies I frequented—a Florentine institution which deserves great praise not only for promoting humane studies but also for encouraging friendly intercourse.",
"title": "Study, poetry, and travel"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "— Milton's account of Florence in Defensio Secunda",
"title": "Study, poetry, and travel"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "He left Florence in September to continue to Rome. With the connections from Florence, Milton was able to have easy access to Rome's intellectual society. His poetic abilities impressed those like Giovanni Salzilli, who praised Milton within an epigram. In late October, Milton attended a dinner given by the English College, Rome, despite his dislike for the Society of Jesus, meeting English Catholics who were also guests—theologian Henry Holden and the poet Patrick Cary. He also attended musical events, including oratorios, operas, and melodramas. Milton left for Naples toward the end of November, where he stayed only for a month because of the Spanish control. During that time, he was introduced to Giovanni Battista Manso, patron to both Torquato Tasso and to Giambattista Marino.",
"title": "Study, poetry, and travel"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Originally, Milton wanted to leave Naples in order to travel to Sicily and then on to Greece, but he returned to England during the summer of 1639 because of what he claimed in Defensio Secunda were \"sad tidings of civil war in England.\" Matters became more complicated when Milton received word that his childhood friend Diodati had died. Milton in fact stayed another seven months on the continent and spent time at Geneva with Diodati's uncle after he returned to Rome. In Defensio Secunda, Milton proclaimed that he was warned against a return to Rome because of his frankness about religion, but he stayed in the city for two months and was able to experience Carnival and meet Lukas Holste, a Vatican librarian who guided Milton through its collection. He was introduced to Cardinal Francesco Barberini who invited Milton to an opera hosted by the Cardinal. Around March, Milton travelled once again to Florence, staying there for two months, attending further meetings of the academies, and spending time with friends. After leaving Florence, he travelled through Lucca, Bologna, and Ferrara before coming to Venice. In Venice, Milton was exposed to a model of Republicanism, later important in his political writings, but he soon found another model when he travelled to Geneva. From Switzerland, Milton travelled to Paris and then to Calais before finally arriving back in England in either July or August 1639.",
"title": "Study, poetry, and travel"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "On returning to England where the Bishops' Wars presaged further armed conflict, Milton began to write prose tracts against episcopacy, in the service of the Puritan and Parliamentary cause. Milton's first foray into polemics was Of Reformation touching Church Discipline in England (1641), followed by Of Prelatical Episcopacy, the two defences of Smectymnuus (a group of Presbyterian divines named from their initials; the \"TY\" belonged to Milton's old tutor Thomas Young), and The Reason of Church-Government Urged against Prelaty. He vigorously attacked the High-church party of the Church of England and their leader William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, with frequent passages of real eloquence lighting up the rough controversial style of the period, and deploying a wide knowledge of church history.",
"title": "Civil war, prose tracts, and marriage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "He was supported by his father's investments, but Milton became a private schoolmaster at this time, educating his nephews and other children of the well-to-do. This experience and discussions with educational reformer Samuel Hartlib led him to write his short tract Of Education in 1644, urging a reform of the national universities.",
"title": "Civil war, prose tracts, and marriage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In June 1642, Milton paid a visit to the manor house at Forest Hill, Oxfordshire, and, aged 34, married the 17-year-old Mary Powell. The marriage got off to a poor start as Mary did not adapt to Milton's austere lifestyle or get along with his nephews. Milton found her intellectually unsatisfying and disliked the royalist views she had absorbed from her family. It is also speculated that she refused to consummate the marriage. Mary soon returned home to her parents and did not come back until 1645, partly because of the outbreak of the Civil War.",
"title": "Civil war, prose tracts, and marriage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In the meantime, her desertion prompted Milton to publish a series of pamphlets over the next three years arguing for the legality and morality of divorce beyond grounds of adultery. (Anna Beer, author of a 2008 biography of Milton, points to a lack of evidence and the dangers of cynicism in urging that it was not necessarily the case that the private life so animated the public polemicising.) In 1643, Milton had a brush with the authorities over these writings, in parallel with Hezekiah Woodward, who had more trouble. It was the hostile response accorded the divorce tracts that spurred Milton to write Areopagitica; A speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc'd Printing, to the Parlament of England, his celebrated attack on pre-printing censorship. In Areopagitica, Milton aligns himself with the parliamentary cause, and he also begins to synthesize the ideal of neo-Roman liberty with that of Christian liberty. Milton also courted another woman during this time; we know nothing of her except that her name was Davis and she turned him down. However, it was enough to induce Mary Powell into returning to him which she did unexpectedly by begging him to take her back. They had two daughters in quick succession following their reconciliation.",
"title": "Civil war, prose tracts, and marriage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "With the Parliamentary victory in the Civil War, Milton used his pen in defence of the republican principles represented by the Commonwealth. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) defended the right of the people to hold their rulers to account, and implicitly sanctioned the regicide; Milton's political reputation got him appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues by the Council of State in March 1649. His main job description was to compose the English Republic's foreign correspondence in Latin and other languages, but he also was called upon to produce propaganda for the regime and to serve as a censor.",
"title": "Secretary for Foreign Tongues"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In October 1649, he published Eikonoklastes, an explicit defence of the regicide, in response to the Eikon Basilike, a phenomenal best-seller popularly attributed to Charles I that portrayed the King as an innocent Christian martyr. A month later the exiled Charles II and his party published the defence of monarchy Defensio Regia pro Carolo Primo, written by leading humanist Claudius Salmasius. By January of the following year, Milton was ordered to write a defence of the English people by the Council of State. Milton worked more slowly than usual, given the European audience and the English Republic's desire to establish diplomatic and cultural legitimacy, as he drew on the learning marshalled by his years of study to compose a riposte.",
"title": "Secretary for Foreign Tongues"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "On 24 February 1652, Milton published his Latin defence of the English people Defensio pro Populo Anglicano, also known as the First Defence. Milton's pure Latin prose and evident learning exemplified in the First Defence quickly made him a European reputation, and the work ran to numerous editions. He addressed his Sonnet 16 to 'The Lord Generall Cromwell in May 1652' beginning \"Cromwell, our chief of men...\", although it was not published until 1654.",
"title": "Secretary for Foreign Tongues"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In 1654, Milton completed the second defence of the English nation Defensio secunda in response to an anonymous Royalist tract \"Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Coelum Adversus Parricidas Anglicanos\" [The Cry of the Royal Blood to Heaven Against the English Parricides], a work that made many personal attacks on Milton. The second defence praised Oliver Cromwell, now Lord Protector, while exhorting him to remain true to the principles of the Revolution. Alexander Morus, to whom Milton wrongly attributed the Clamor (in fact by Peter du Moulin), published an attack on Milton, in response to which Milton published the autobiographical Defensio pro se in 1655. Milton held the appointment of Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Commonwealth Council of State until 1660, although after he had become totally blind, most of the work was done by his deputies, Georg Rudolph Wecklein, then Philip Meadows, and from 1657 by the poet Andrew Marvell.",
"title": "Secretary for Foreign Tongues"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "By 1652, Milton had become totally blind; the cause of his blindness is debated but bilateral retinal detachment or glaucoma are most likely. His blindness forced him to dictate his verse and prose to amanuenses who copied them out for him; one of these was Andrew Marvell. One of his best-known sonnets, When I Consider How My Light is Spent, titled by a later editor, John Newton, \"On His Blindness\", is presumed to date from this period.",
"title": "Secretary for Foreign Tongues"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Cromwell's death in 1658 caused the English Republic to collapse into feuding military and political factions. Milton, however, stubbornly clung to the beliefs that had originally inspired him to write for the Commonwealth. In 1659, he published A Treatise of Civil Power, attacking the concept of a state-dominated church (the position known as Erastianism), as well as Considerations touching the likeliest means to remove hirelings, denouncing corrupt practises in church governance. As the Republic disintegrated, Milton wrote several proposals to retain a non-monarchical government against the wishes of parliament, soldiers, and the people.",
"title": "The Restoration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Upon the Restoration in May 1660, Milton, fearing for his life, went into hiding, while a warrant was issued for his arrest and his writings were burnt. He re-emerged after a general pardon was issued, but was nevertheless arrested and briefly imprisoned before influential friends intervened, such as Marvell, now an MP. Milton married for a third and final time on 24 February 1663, marrying Elizabeth (Betty) Minshull, aged 24, a native of Wistaston, Cheshire. He spent the remaining decade of his life living quietly in London, only retiring to a cottage during the Great Plague of London—Milton's Cottage in Chalfont St. Giles, his only extant home.",
"title": "The Restoration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "During this period, Milton published several minor prose works, such as the grammar textbook Art of Logic and a History of Britain. His only explicitly political tracts were the 1672 Of True Religion, arguing for toleration (except for Catholics), and a translation of a Polish tract advocating an elective monarchy. Both these works were referred to in the Exclusion debate, the attempt to exclude the heir presumptive from the throne of England—James, Duke of York—because he was Roman Catholic. That debate preoccupied politics in the 1670s and 1680s and precipitated the formation of the Whig party and the Glorious Revolution.",
"title": "The Restoration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Milton died on 8 November 1674 and was buried in the church of St Giles-without-Cripplegate, Fore Street, London. However, sources differ as to whether the cause of death was consumption or gout. According to an early biographer, his funeral was attended by \"his learned and great Friends in London, not without a friendly concourse of the Vulgar.\" A monument was added in 1793, sculpted by John Bacon the Elder.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Milton and his first wife Mary Powell (1625–1652) had four children:",
"title": "Family"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Mary Powell died on 5 May 1652 from complications following Deborah's birth. Milton's daughters survived to adulthood, but he always had a strained relationship with them.",
"title": "Family"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "On 12 November 1656, Milton was married to Katherine Woodcock at St Margaret's, Westminster. She died on 3 February 1658, less than four months after giving birth to her daughter Katherine, who also died.",
"title": "Family"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Milton married for a third time on 24 February 1663 to Elizabeth Mynshull or Minshull (1638–1728), the niece of Thomas Mynshull, a wealthy apothecary and philanthropist in Manchester. The marriage took place at St Mary Aldermary in the City of London. Despite a 31-year age gap, the marriage seemed happy, according to John Aubrey, and lasted more than 12 years until Milton's death. (A plaque on the wall of Mynshull's House in Manchester describes Elizabeth as Milton's \"3rd and Best wife\".) Samuel Johnson, however, claims that Mynshull was \"a domestic companion and attendant\" and Milton's nephew Edward Phillips relates that Mynshull \"oppressed his children in his lifetime, and cheated them at his death\".",
"title": "Family"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "His nephews, Edward and John Phillips (sons of Milton's sister Anne), were educated by Milton and became writers themselves. John acted as a secretary, and Edward was Milton's first biographer.",
"title": "Family"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Milton's poetry was slow to see the light of day, at least under his name. His first published poem was \"On Shakespeare\" (1630), anonymously included in the Second Folio edition of William Shakespeare's plays in 1632. An annotated copy of the First Folio has been suggested to contain marginal notes by Milton. Milton collected his work in 1645 Poems in the midst of the excitement attending the possibility of establishing a new English government. The anonymous edition of Comus was published in 1637, and the publication of Lycidas in 1638 in Justa Edouardo King Naufrago was signed J. M. Otherwise. The 1645 collection was the only poetry of his to see print until Paradise Lost appeared in 1667.",
"title": "Poetry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Milton's magnum opus, the blank-verse epic poem Paradise Lost, was composed by the blind and impoverished Milton from 1658 to 1664 (first edition), with small but significant revisions published in 1674 (second edition). As a blind poet, Milton dictated his verse to a series of aides in his employ. It has been argued that the poem reflects his personal despair at the failure of the Revolution yet affirms an ultimate optimism in human potential. Some literary critics have argued that Milton encoded many references to his unyielding support for the \"Good Old Cause\".",
"title": "Poetry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "On 27 April 1667, Milton sold the publication rights for Paradise Lost to publisher Samuel Simmons for £5 (equivalent to approximately £770 in 2015 purchasing power), with a further £5 to be paid if and when each print run sold out of between 1,300 and 1,500 copies. The first run was a quarto edition priced at three shillings per copy (about £23 in 2015 purchasing power equivalent), published in August 1667, and it sold out in eighteen months.",
"title": "Poetry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Milton followed up the publication Paradise Lost with its sequel Paradise Regained, which was published alongside the tragedy Samson Agonistes in 1671. Both of these works also reflect Milton's post-Restoration political situation. Just before his death in 1674, Milton supervised a second edition of Paradise Lost, accompanied by an explanation of \"why the poem rhymes not\", and prefatory verses by Andrew Marvell. In 1673, Milton republished his 1645 Poems, as well as a collection of his letters and the Latin prolusions from his Cambridge days.",
"title": "Poetry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "An unfinished religious manifesto, De doctrina christiana, probably written by Milton, lays out many of his heterodox theological views, and was not discovered and published until 1823. Milton's key beliefs were idiosyncratic, not those of an identifiable group or faction, and often they go well beyond the orthodoxy of the time. Their tone, however, stemmed from the Puritan emphasis on the centrality and inviolability of conscience. He was his own man, but he was anticipated by Henry Robinson in Areopagitica.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "While Milton's beliefs are generally considered to be consistent with Protestant Christianity, Stephen Fallon argues that by the late 1650s, Milton may have at least toyed with the idea of monism or animist materialism, the notion that a single material substance which is \"animate, self-active, and free\" composes everything in the universe: from stones and trees and bodies to minds, souls, angels, and God. Fallon claims that Milton devised this position to avoid the mind-body dualism of Plato and Descartes as well as the mechanistic determinism of Hobbes. According to Fallon, Milton's monism is most notably reflected in Paradise Lost when he has angels eat (5.433–439) and apparently engage in sexual intercourse (8.622–629) and the De Doctrina, where he denies the dual natures of man and argues for a theory of Creation ex Deo.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Milton was a \"passionately individual Christian Humanist poet.\" He appears on the pages of seventeenth century English Puritanism, an age characterized as \"the world turned upside down.\" He was a Puritan and yet was unwilling to surrender conscience to party positions on public policy. Thus, Milton's political thought, driven by competing convictions, a Reformed faith and a Humanist spirit, led to enigmatic outcomes.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Milton's apparently contradictory stance on the vital problems of his age, arose from religious contestations, to the questions of the divine rights of kings. In both the cases, he seems in control, taking stock of the situation arising from the polarization of the English society on religious and political lines. He fought with the Puritans against the Cavaliers i.e. the King's party, and helped win the day. But the very same constitutional and republican polity, when tried to curtail freedom of speech, Milton, given his humanistic zeal, wrote Areopagitica . . . [sic]",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Areopagitica was written in response to the Licensing Order, in November 1644.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Milton's political thought may be best categorized according to respective periods in his life and times. The years 1641–42 were dedicated to church politics and the struggle against episcopacy. After his divorce writings, Areopagitica, and a gap, he wrote in 1649–54 in the aftermath of the execution of Charles I, and in polemic justification of the regicide and the existing Parliamentarian regime. Then in 1659–60 he foresaw the Restoration and wrote to head it off.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Milton's own beliefs were in some cases unpopular, particularly his commitment to republicanism. In coming centuries, Milton would be claimed as an early apostle of liberalism. According to James Tully:",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "... with Locke as with Milton, republican and contraction conceptions of political freedom join hands in common opposition to the disengaged and passive subjection offered by absolutists such as Hobbes and Robert Filmer.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "A friend and ally in the pamphlet wars was Marchamont Nedham. Austin Woolrych considers that although they were quite close, there is \"little real affinity, beyond a broad republicanism\", between their approaches. Blair Worden remarks that both Milton and Nedham, with others such as Andrew Marvell and James Harrington, would have taken their problem with the Rump Parliament to be not the republic itself, but the fact that it was not a proper republic. Woolrych speaks of \"the gulf between Milton's vision of the Commonwealth's future and the reality\". In the early version of his History of Britain, begun in 1649, Milton was already writing off the members of the Long Parliament as incorrigible.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "He praised Oliver Cromwell as the Protectorate was set up; though subsequently he had major reservations. When Cromwell seemed to be backsliding as a revolutionary, after a couple of years in power, Milton moved closer to the position of Sir Henry Vane, to whom he wrote a sonnet in 1652. The group of disaffected republicans included, besides Vane, John Bradshaw, John Hutchinson, Edmund Ludlow, Henry Marten, Robert Overton, Edward Sexby and John Streater; but not Marvell, who remained with Cromwell's party. Milton had already commended Overton, along with Edmund Whalley and Bulstrode Whitelocke, in Defensio Secunda. Nigel Smith writes that",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "... John Streater, and the form of republicanism he stood for, was a fulfilment of Milton's most optimistic ideas of free speech and of public heroism [...]",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "As Richard Cromwell fell from power, he envisaged a step towards a freer republic or \"free commonwealth\", writing in the hope of this outcome in early 1660. Milton had argued for an awkward position, in the Ready and Easy Way, because he wanted to invoke the Good Old Cause and gain the support of the republicans, but without offering a democratic solution of any kind. His proposal, backed by reference (amongst other reasons) to the oligarchical Dutch and Venetian constitutions, was for a council with perpetual membership. This attitude cut right across the grain of popular opinion of the time, which swung decisively behind the restoration of the Stuart monarchy that took place later in the year. Milton, an associate of and advocate on behalf of the regicides, was silenced on political matters as Charles II returned.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "John Milton was neither a clergyman nor a theologian; however, theology, and particularly English Calvinism, formed the palette on which he created his greatest thoughts. Milton wrestled with the great doctrines of the Church amidst the theological crosswinds of his age. The great poet was undoubtedly Reformed (though his grandfather, Richard \"the Ranger\" Milton had been Roman Catholic). However, Milton's Calvinism had to find expression in a broad-spirited Humanism. Like many Renaissance artists before him, Milton attempted to integrate Christian theology with classical modes. In his early poems, the poet narrator expresses a tension between vice and virtue, the latter invariably related to Protestantism. In Comus, Milton may make ironic use of the Caroline court masque by elevating notions of purity and virtue over the conventions of court revelry and superstition. In his later poems, Milton's theological concerns become more explicit.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "His use of biblical citation was wide-ranging; Harris Fletcher, standing at the beginning of the intensification of the study of the use of scripture in Milton's work (poetry and prose, in all languages Milton mastered), notes that typically Milton clipped and adapted biblical quotations to suit the purpose, giving precise chapter and verse only in texts for a more specialized readership. As for the plenitude of Milton's quotations from scripture, Fletcher comments, \"For this work, I have in all actually collated about twenty-five hundred of the five to ten thousand direct Biblical quotations which appear therein\". Milton's customary English Bible was the Authorized King James. When citing and writing in other languages, he usually employed the Latin translation by Immanuel Tremellius, though \"he was equipped to read the Bible in Latin, in Greek, and in Hebrew, including the Targumim or Aramaic paraphrases of the Old Testament, and the Syriac version of the New, together with the available commentaries of those several versions\".",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Milton embraced many heterodox Christian theological views. He has been accused of rejecting the Trinity, believing instead that the Son was subordinate to the Father, a position known as Arianism; and his sympathy or curiosity was probably engaged by Socinianism: in August 1650 he licensed for publication by William Dugard the Racovian Catechism, based on a non-trinitarian creed. Milton's alleged Arianism, like much of his theology, is still subject of debate and controversy. Rufus Wilmot Griswold argued that \"In none of his great works is there a passage from which it can be inferred that he was an Arian; and in the very last of his writings he declares that \"the doctrine of the Trinity is a plain doctrine in Scripture.\" In Areopagitica, Milton classified Arians and Socinians as \"errorists\" and \"schismatics\" alongside Arminians and Anabaptists. A source has interpreted him as broadly Protestant, if not always easy to locate in a more precise religious category. In 2019, John Rogers stated, \"Heretics both, John Milton and Isaac Newton were, as most scholars now agree, Arians.\"",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "In his 1641 treatise, Of Reformation, Milton expressed his dislike for Catholicism and episcopacy, presenting Rome as a modern Babylon, and bishops as Egyptian taskmasters. These analogies conform to Milton's puritanical preference for Old Testament imagery. He knew at least four commentaries on Genesis: those of John Calvin, Paulus Fagius, David Pareus and Andreus Rivetus.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Through the Interregnum, Milton often presents England, rescued from the trappings of a worldly monarchy, as an elect nation akin to the Old Testament Israel, and shows its leader, Oliver Cromwell, as a latter-day Moses. These views were bound up in Protestant views of the Millennium, which some sects, such as the Fifth Monarchists predicted would arrive in England. Milton, however, would later criticise the \"worldly\" millenarian views of these and others, and expressed orthodox ideas on the prophecy of the Four Empires.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "The Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 began a new phase in Milton's work. In Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, Milton mourns the end of the godly Commonwealth. The Garden of Eden may allegorically reflect Milton's view of England's recent Fall from Grace, while Samson's blindness and captivity—mirroring Milton's own lost sight—may be a metaphor for England's blind acceptance of Charles II as king. Illustrated by Paradise Lost is mortalism, the belief that the soul lies dormant after the body dies.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Despite the Restoration of the monarchy, Milton did not lose his personal faith; Samson shows how the loss of national salvation did not necessarily preclude the salvation of the individual, while Paradise Regained expresses Milton's continuing belief in the promise of Christian salvation through Jesus Christ.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Though he maintained his personal faith in spite of the defeats suffered by his cause, the Dictionary of National Biography recounted how he had been alienated from the Church of England by Archbishop William Laud, and then moved similarly from the Dissenters by their denunciation of religious tolerance in England.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Milton had come to stand apart from all sects, though apparently finding the Quakers most congenial. He never went to any religious services in his later years. When a servant brought back accounts of sermons from nonconformist meetings, Milton became so sarcastic that the man at last gave up his place.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Writing of the enigmatic and often conflicting views of Milton in the Puritan age, David Daiches wrote,",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "\"Christian and Humanist, Protestant, patriot and heir of the golden ages of Greece and Rome, he faced what appeared to him to be the birth-pangs of a new and regenerate England with high excitement and idealistic optimism.\"",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "A fair theological summary may be that John Milton was a Puritan, though his tendency to press further for liberty of conscience, sometimes out of conviction and often out of mere intellectual curiosity, made the great man, at least, a vital if not uncomfortable ally in the broader Puritan movement.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Milton called in the Areopagitica for \"the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties\" to the conflicting Protestant denominations. According to American historian William Hunter, \"Milton argued for disestablishment as the only effective way of achieving broad toleration. Rather than force a man's conscience, government should recognise the persuasive force of the gospel.\"",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Milton wrote The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce in 1643, at the beginning of the English Civil War. In August of that year, he presented his thoughts to the Westminster Assembly of Divines, which had been created by the Long Parliament to bring greater reform to the Church of England. The Assembly convened on 1 July against the will of King Charles I.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Milton's thinking on divorce caused him considerable trouble with the authorities. An orthodox Presbyterian view of the time was that Milton's views on divorce constituted a one-man heresy:",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "The fervently Presbyterian Edwards had included Milton's divorce tracts in his list in Gangraena of heretical publications that threatened the religious and moral fabric of the nation; Milton responded by mocking him as \"shallow Edwards\" in the satirical sonnet \"On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament\", usually dated to the latter half of 1646.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Even here, though, his originality is qualified: Thomas Gataker had already identified \"mutual solace\" as a principal goal in marriage. Milton abandoned his campaign to legitimise divorce after 1645, but he expressed support for polygamy in the De Doctrina Christiana, the theological treatise that provides the clearest evidence for his views.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Milton wrote during a period when thoughts about divorce were anything but simplistic; rather, there was active debate among thinkers and intellectuals at the time. However, Milton's basic approval of divorce within strict parameters set by the biblical witness was typical of many influential Christian intellectuals, particularly the Westminster divines. Milton addressed the Assembly on the matter of divorce in August 1643, at a moment when the Assembly was beginning to form its opinion on the matter. In the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Milton argued that divorce was a private matter, not a legal or ecclesiastical one. Neither the Assembly nor Parliament condemned Milton or his ideas. In fact, when the Westminster Assembly wrote the Westminster Confession of Faith they allowed for divorce ('Of Marriage and Divorce,' Chapter 24, Section 5) in cases of infidelity or abandonment. Thus, the Christian community, at least a majority within the 'Puritan' sub-set, approved of Milton's views.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Nevertheless, reaction among Puritans to Milton's views on divorce was mixed. Herbert Palmer, a member of the Westminster Assembly, condemned Milton in the strongest possible language:",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "If any plead Conscience ... for divorce for other causes than Christ and His Apostles mention; Of which a wicked booke is abroad and uncensured, though deserving to be burnt, whose Author, hath been so impudent as to set his Name to it, and dedicate it to your selves ... will you grant a Toleration for all this?",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Palmer expressed his disapproval in a sermon addressed to the Westminster Assembly. The Scottish commissioner Robert Baillie described Palmer's sermon as one \"of the most Scottish and free sermons that ever I heard any where.\"",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "History was particularly important for the political class of the period, and Lewalski considers that Milton \"more than most illustrates\" a remark of Thomas Hobbes on the weight placed at the time on the classical Latin historical writers Tacitus, Livy, Sallust and Cicero, and their republican attitudes. Milton himself wrote that \"Worthy deeds are not often destitute of worthy relaters\", in Book II of his History of Britain. A sense of history mattered greatly to him:",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "The course of human history, the immediate impact of the civil disorders, and his own traumatic personal life, are all regarded by Milton as typical of the predicament he describes as \"the misery that has bin since Adam\".",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Once Paradise Lost was published, Milton's stature as epic poet was immediately recognised. He cast a formidable shadow over English poetry in the 18th and 19th centuries; he was often judged equal or superior to all other English poets, including Shakespeare. Very early on, though, he was championed by Whigs, and decried by Tories: with the regicide Edmund Ludlow he was claimed as an early Whig, while the High Tory Anglican minister Luke Milbourne lumped Milton in with other \"Agents of Darkness\" such as John Knox, George Buchanan, Richard Baxter, Algernon Sidney and John Locke. The political ideas of Milton, Locke, Sidney, and James Harrington strongly influenced the Radical Whigs, whose ideology in turn was central to the American Revolution. Modern scholars of Milton's life, politics, and work are known as Miltonists: \"his work is the subject of a very large amount of academic scholarship\".",
"title": "Legacy and influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "In 2008, John Milton Passage, a short passage by Bread Street into St Mary-le-Bow Churchyard in London, was unveiled.",
"title": "Legacy and influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "John Dryden, an early enthusiast, in 1677 began the trend of describing Milton as the poet of the sublime. Dryden's The State of Innocence and the Fall of Man: an Opera (1677) is evidence of an immediate cultural influence. In 1695, Patrick Hume became the first editor of Paradise Lost, providing an extensive apparatus of annotation and commentary, particularly chasing down allusions.",
"title": "Legacy and influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "In 1732, the classical scholar Richard Bentley offered a corrected version of Paradise Lost. Bentley was considered presumptuous and was attacked in the following year by Zachary Pearce. Christopher Ricks judges that, as critic, Bentley was both acute and wrong-headed, and \"incorrigibly eccentric\"; William Empson also finds Pearce to be more sympathetic to Bentley's underlying line of thought than is warranted.",
"title": "Legacy and influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "There was an early, partial translation of Paradise Lost into German by Theodore Haak and based on that a standard verse translation by Ernest Gottlieb von Berge. A subsequent prose translation by Johann Jakob Bodmer was very popular; it influenced Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. The German-language Milton tradition returned to England in the person of the artist Henry Fuseli.",
"title": "Legacy and influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Many Enlightenment thinkers of the 18th century revered and commented on Milton's poetry and non-poetical works. In addition to John Dryden, among them were Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison, Thomas Newton, and Samuel Johnson. For example, in The Spectator, Joseph Addison wrote extensive notes, annotations, and interpretations of certain passages of Paradise Lost. Jonathan Richardson, senior, and Jonathan Richardson, the younger, co-wrote a book of criticism. In 1749, Thomas Newton published an extensive edition of Milton's poetical works with annotations provided by himself, Dryden, Pope, Addison, the Richardsons (father and son) and others. Newton's edition of Milton was a culmination of the honour bestowed upon Milton by early Enlightenment thinkers; it may also have been prompted by Richard Bentley's infamous edition, described above. Samuel Johnson wrote numerous essays on Paradise Lost, and Milton was included in his Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779–1781). In The Age of Louis XIV, Voltaire said \"Milton remains the glory and the wonder (l'admiration) of England.\"",
"title": "Legacy and influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "William Blake considered Milton the major English poet. Blake placed Edmund Spenser as Milton's precursor, and saw himself as Milton's poetical son. In his Milton: A Poem in Two Books, Blake uses Milton as a character.",
"title": "Legacy and influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "Edmund Burke was a theorist of the sublime, and he regarded Milton's description of Hell as exemplary of sublimity as an aesthetic concept. For Burke, it was to set alongside mountain-tops, a storm at sea, and infinity. In The Beautiful and the Sublime, he wrote: \"No person seems better to have understood the secret of heightening, or of setting terrible things, if I may use the expression, in their strongest light, by the force of a judicious obscurity than Milton.\"",
"title": "Legacy and influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "The Romantic poets valued his exploration of blank verse, but for the most part rejected his religiosity. William Wordsworth began his sonnet \"London, 1802\" with \"Milton! thou should'st be living at this hour\" and modelled The Prelude, his own blank verse epic, on Paradise Lost. John Keats found the yoke of Milton's style uncongenial; he exclaimed that \"Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful or rather artist's humour.\" Keats felt that Paradise Lost was a \"beautiful and grand curiosity\", but his own unfinished attempt at epic poetry, Hyperion, was unsatisfactory to the author because, amongst other things, it had too many \"Miltonic inversions\". In The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar note that Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein is, in the view of many critics, \"one of the key 'Romantic' readings of Paradise Lost.\"",
"title": "Legacy and influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "The Victorian age witnessed a continuation of Milton's influence. Thomas Carlyle declared him the \"moral king of English literature,\" while George Eliot and Thomas Hardy were particularly inspired by Milton's poetry and biography. Hostile 20th-century criticism by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound did not reduce Milton's stature. F. R. Leavis, in The Common Pursuit, responded to the points made by Eliot, in particular the claim that \"the study of Milton could be of no help: it was only a hindrance\", by arguing, \"As if it were a matter of deciding not to study Milton! The problem, rather, was to escape from an influence that was so difficult to escape from because it was unrecognized, belonging, as it did, to the climate of the habitual and 'natural'.\" Harold Bloom, in The Anxiety of Influence, wrote that \"Milton is the central problem in any theory and history of poetic influence in English [...]\".",
"title": "Legacy and influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Milton's Areopagitica is still cited as relevant to the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. A quotation from Areopagitica—\"A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life\"—is displayed in many public libraries, including the New York Public Library.",
"title": "Legacy and influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "The title of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy is derived from a quotation, \"His dark materials to create more worlds\", line 915 of Book II in Paradise Lost. Pullman was concerned to produce a version of Milton's poem accessible to teenagers, and has spoken of Milton as \"our greatest public poet\".",
"title": "Legacy and influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "Titles of a number of other well-known literary works are also derived from Milton's writings. Examples include Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel, Aldous Huxley's Eyeless in Gaza, Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, and William Golding's Darkness Visible.",
"title": "Legacy and influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "T. S. Eliot believed that \"of no other poet is it so difficult to consider the poetry simply as poetry, without our theological and political dispositions... making unlawful entry\".",
"title": "Legacy and influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "Milton's use of blank verse, in addition to his stylistic innovations (such as grandiloquence of voice and vision, peculiar diction and phraseology) influenced later poets. At the time, poetic blank verse was considered distinct from its use in verse drama, and Paradise Lost was taken as a unique exemplar. Said Isaac Watts in 1734, \"Mr. Milton is esteemed the parent and author of blank verse among us\". \"Miltonic verse\" might be synonymous for a century with blank verse as poetry, a new poetic terrain independent from both the drama and the heroic couplet.",
"title": "Legacy and influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "Lack of rhyme was sometimes taken as Milton's defining innovation. He himself considered the rhymeless quality of Paradise Lost to be an extension of his own personal liberty:",
"title": "Legacy and influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "This neglect then of Rhime ... is to be esteem'd an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recover'd to heroic Poem from the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing.",
"title": "Legacy and influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "This pursuit of freedom was largely a reaction against conservative values entrenched within the rigid heroic couplet. Within a dominant culture that stressed elegance and finish, he granted primacy to freedom, breadth and imaginative suggestiveness, eventually developed into the romantic vision of sublime terror. Reaction to Milton's poetic worldview included, grudgingly, acknowledgement of the poet's resemblance to classical writers (Greek and Roman poetry being unrhymed). Blank verse came to be a recognised medium for religious works and for translations of the classics. Unrhymed lyrics like Collins' Ode to Evening (in the meter of Milton's translation of Horace's Ode to Pyrrha) were not uncommon after 1740.",
"title": "Legacy and influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "A second aspect of Milton's blank verse was the use of unconventional rhythm:",
"title": "Legacy and influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "His blank-verse paragraph, and his audacious and victorious attempt to combine blank and rhymed verse with paragraphic effect in Lycidas, lay down indestructible models and patterns of English verse-rhythm, as distinguished from the narrower and more strait-laced forms of English metre.",
"title": "Legacy and influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "Before Milton, \"the sense of regular rhythm ... had been knocked into the English head so securely that it was part of their nature\". The \"Heroick measure\", according to Samuel Johnson, \"is pure ... when the accent rests upon every second syllable through the whole line ... The repetition of this sound or percussion at equal times, is the most complete harmony of which a single verse is capable\". Caesural pauses, most agreed, were best placed at the middle and the end of the line. In order to support this symmetry, lines were most often octo- or deca-syllabic, with no enjambed endings. To this schema Milton introduced modifications, which included hypermetrical syllables (trisyllabic feet), inversion or slighting of stresses, and the shifting of pauses to all parts of the line. Milton deemed these features to be reflective of \"the transcendental union of order and freedom\". Admirers remained hesitant to adopt such departures from traditional metrical schemes: \"The English ... had been writing separate lines for so long that they could not rid themselves of the habit\". Isaac Watts preferred his lines distinct from each other, as did Oliver Goldsmith, Henry Pemberton, and Scott of Amwell, whose general opinion it was that Milton's frequent omission of the initial unaccented foot was \"displeasing to a nice ear\". It was not until the late 18th century that poets (beginning with Gray) began to appreciate \"the composition of Milton's harmony ... how he loved to vary his pauses, his measures, and his feet, which gives that enchanting air of freedom and wilderness to his versification\". By the 20th century, American poet and critic John Hollander would go so far as to say that Milton \"was able, by plying that most remarkable instrument of English meter ... to invent a new mode of image-making in English poetry.\"",
"title": "Legacy and influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "Milton's pursuit of liberty extended into his vocabulary as well. It included many Latinate neologisms, as well as obsolete words already dropped from popular usage so completely that their meanings were no longer understood. In 1740, Francis Peck identified some examples of Milton's \"old\" words (now popular). The \"Miltonian dialect\", as it was called, was emulated by later poets; Pope used the diction of Paradise Lost in his Homer translation, while the lyric poetry of Gray and Collins was frequently criticised for their use of \"obsolete words out of Spenser and Milton\". The language of Thomson's finest poems (e.g. The Seasons, The Castle of Indolence) was self-consciously modelled after the Miltonian dialect, with the same tone and sensibilities as Paradise Lost. Following to Milton, English poetry from Pope to John Keats exhibited a steadily increasing attention to the connotative, the imaginative and poetic, value of words.",
"title": "Legacy and influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "Milton's ode At a solemn Musick was set for choir and orchestra as Blest Pair of Sirens by Hubert Parry (1848–1918), and Milton's poem On the Morning of Christ's Nativity was set as a large-scale choral work by Cyril Rootham (1875–1938). Milton also wrote the hymn Let us with a gladsome mind, a versification of Psalm 136. His 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso', with additional material, were magnificently set by Handel (1740).",
"title": "Legacy and influence"
}
]
| John Milton was an English poet and intellectual. His 1667 epic poem Paradise Lost, written in blank verse and including over ten chapters, was written in a time of immense religious flux and political upheaval. It addressed the fall of man, including the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and God's expulsion of them from the Garden of Eden. Paradise Lost elevated Milton's reputation as one of history's greatest poets. He also served as a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under its Council of State and later under Oliver Cromwell. Milton achieved fame and recognition during his lifetime; his celebrated Areopagitica (1644), written in condemnation of pre-publication censorship, is among history's most influential and impassioned defences of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. His desire for freedom extended beyond his philosophy and was reflected in his style, which included his introduction of new words to the English language. He was the first modern writer to employ unrhymed verse outside of the theatre or translations. Milton is described as the "greatest English author" by biographer William Hayley, and he remains generally regarded "as one of the preeminent writers in the English language", though critical reception has oscillated in the centuries since his death often on account of his republicanism. Samuel Johnson praised Paradise Lost as "a poem which...with respect to design may claim the first place, and with respect to performance, the second, among the productions of the human mind", though he described Milton's politics as those of an "acrimonious and surly republican". Milton was revered by poets such as William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Thomas Hardy. Phases of Milton's life parallel the major historical and political divisions in Stuart England at the time. In his early years, Milton studied at Christ's College, Cambridge, and then travelled, wrote poetry mostly for private circulation, and launched a career as pamphleteer and publicist under Charles I's increasingly autocratic rule and Britain's breakdown into constitutional confusion and ultimately civil war. While once considered dangerously radical and heretical, Milton contributed to a seismic shift in accepted public opinions during his life that ultimately elevated him to public office in England. The Restoration of 1660 and his loss of vision later deprived Milton much of his public platform, but he used the period to develop many of his major works. Milton's views developed from extensive reading, travel, and experience that began with his days as a student at Cambridge in the 1620s and continued through the English Civil War, which started in 1642 and continued until 1651. By the time of his death in 1674, Milton was impoverished and on the margins of English intellectual life but famous throughout Europe and unrepentant for political choices that placed him at odds with governing authorities. | 2001-10-15T08:43:19Z | 2023-12-24T18:32:29Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Milton |
16,216 | Joris Ivens | Georg Henri Anton "Joris" Ivens (18 November 1898 – 28 June 1989) was a Dutch documentary filmmaker. Among the notable films he directed or co-directed are A Tale of the Wind, The Spanish Earth, Rain, ...A Valparaiso, Misère au Borinage (Borinage), 17th Parallel: Vietnam in War, The Seine Meets Paris, Far from Vietnam, Pour le Mistral and How Yukong Moved the Mountains.
Born Georg Henri Anton Ivens into a wealthy family, Ivens went to work in one of his father's photo supply shops and from there developed an interest in film. Under the direction of his father, he completed his first film at 13; in college he studied economics with the goal of continuing his father's business, but an interest in class issues distracted him from that path. He met photographer Germaine Krull in Berlin in 1923, and entered into a marriage of convenience with her between 1927 and 1943 so that Krull could hold a Dutch passport and could have a "veneer of married respectability without sacrificing her autonomy."
Originally his work focused on technique, especially in Rain (Regen, 1929), a 10-minute short filmed over 2 years, and in The Bridge (De Brug, 1928). Around this time, along with Menno ter Braak and others, he was involved in the creation of the Dutch Film League (De Nederlandsche Filmliga) based in Amsterdam. The League drew foreign filmmakers to the Netherlands such as Alberto Cavalcanti, René Clair, Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Dziga Vertov, who also became his friends.
In 1929, Ivens went to the Soviet Union and was invited to direct a film on a topic of his own choosing which was the new industrial city of Magnitogorsk. Before commencing work, he returned to the Netherlands to make Industrial Symphony for Philips Electric which is considered to be a film of great technical beauty. He returned to the Soviet Union to make the film about Magnitogorsk, Song of Heroes in 1931 with music composed by Hanns Eisler. This was the first film on which Ivens and Eisler worked together. It was a propaganda film about this new industrial city where masses of laborers and communist youth worked for Stalin's Five Year Plan. With Henri Storck, Ivens made Misère au Borinage (Borinage, 1933), a documentary on life in a coal mining region. In 1943, he also directed two Allied propaganda films for the National Film Board of Canada, including Action Stations, about the Royal Canadian Navy's escorting of convoys in the Battle of the Atlantic.
From 1936 to 1945, Ivens was based in the United States. For Pare Lorentz's U.S. Film Service, in the year 1940, he made a documentary film on rural electrification called Power and the Land. It focused on a family, the Parkinsons, who ran a business providing milk for their community. The film showed the problem in the lack of electricity and the way the problem was fixed. Ivens was, however, known for his anti-fascist and other propaganda films, including The Spanish Earth, for the Spanish Republicans, co-written with Ernest Hemingway and music by Marc Blitzstein and Virgil Thomson. Jean Renoir did the French narration for the film and Hemingway did the English version only after Orson Welles' sounded too theatrical.. This film was financed by Archibald MacLeish, Fredric March, Florence Eldridge, Lillian Hellman, Luise Rainer, Dudley Nichols, Franchot Tone and other Hollywood movie stars, moguls, and writers who composed a group known as the Contemporary Historians. Spanish Earth was shown at the White House on 8 July 1937 after Ivens, Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, had had dinner with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins. The Roosevelts loved the film but said that it needed more propaganda. This 1937 documentary was considered his masterpiece.
In 1938 he traveled to China. The 400 Million (1939) depicted the history of modern China and the Chinese resistance during the Second Sino-Japanese War, including dramatic shots of the Battle of Taierzhuang. Robert Capa did camerawork, Sidney Lumet worked on the film as a reader, Hanns Eisler wrote the musical score, and Fredric March provided the narration. It, too, had been financed by the same people as those of Spanish Earth. Its chief fundraiser was Luise Rainer, recipient of the best actress Oscar two years in a row; and the entire group called themselves this time, History Today, Inc . The Kuomintang government censored the film, fearing that it would give too much credit to left-wing forces. Ivens was also suspected of being a friend of Mao Zedong and especially Zhou Enlai.
In early 1943, Frank Capra hired Ivens to supervise the production of Know Your Enemy: Japan for his U.S. War Department film series Why We Fight. The film's commentary was written largely by Carl Foreman. Capra fired Ivens from the project because he felt that his approach was too sympathetic toward the Japanese. The film's release was held up because there were concerns that Emperor Hirohito was being depicted as a war criminal, and there was a policy shift to portray the Emperor more favorably after the war as a means of maintaining order in post-war Japan.
With the emerging "Red Scare" of the late 1940s, Ivens was forced to leave the country in the early months of the Truman administration. Ivens' leftist politics also put a stop to his first feature film project which was to have starred Greta Garbo. In fact, Walter Wanger, the film's producer, was adamant about "running [Ivens] out of town."
In 1946, commissioned to make a Dutch film about Indonesian 'independence', Ivens resigned in protest over what he considered ongoing imperialism; the Dutch were in his view resisting decolonization. Instead, Ivens filmed Indonesia Calling in secret, for which he received funding from the International Workers Order. For around a decade Ivens lived in Eastern Europe, working for several studios there. His position concerning Indonesia and his taking sides for the Eastern Bloc in the Cold War annoyed the Dutch government. Over a period of many years, he was obliged to renew his passport every three or four months. According to later mythology however, he lost his passport for ten years, which is not true, as demonstrated by the fact that he was able to travel to New York City to sit by the bedside of his old friend Paul Robeson when he was ill.
From 1965 to 1970 he worked on two documentary films about North Vietnam during the war: he made 17e parallèle: La guerre du peuple (17th Parallel: Vietnam in War) and he participated in the collective work Loin du Vietnam (Far from Vietnam). He was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize for the year 1967.
From 1971 to 1977, he shot How Yukong Moved the Mountains, a 763-minute documentary about the Cultural Revolution in China. He was given unprecedented access because of his pro-communist views and his old personal friendships with Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong.
He spoke to Radio Netherlands about his life and work in a wide-ranging interview.
In 1988 Ivens received the Golden Lion Honorary Award at the Venice Film Festival. He then received the Order of the Netherlands Lion in January 1989, and died on 28 June that year. Shortly before his death he released the last of more than 40 films Une histoire de vent (A Tale of the Wind). A statue of Ivens by sculptor Bryan McCormack was erected in the Parc de Saint-Cloud in Paris in 2010. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Georg Henri Anton \"Joris\" Ivens (18 November 1898 – 28 June 1989) was a Dutch documentary filmmaker. Among the notable films he directed or co-directed are A Tale of the Wind, The Spanish Earth, Rain, ...A Valparaiso, Misère au Borinage (Borinage), 17th Parallel: Vietnam in War, The Seine Meets Paris, Far from Vietnam, Pour le Mistral and How Yukong Moved the Mountains.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Born Georg Henri Anton Ivens into a wealthy family, Ivens went to work in one of his father's photo supply shops and from there developed an interest in film. Under the direction of his father, he completed his first film at 13; in college he studied economics with the goal of continuing his father's business, but an interest in class issues distracted him from that path. He met photographer Germaine Krull in Berlin in 1923, and entered into a marriage of convenience with her between 1927 and 1943 so that Krull could hold a Dutch passport and could have a \"veneer of married respectability without sacrificing her autonomy.\"",
"title": "Early life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Originally his work focused on technique, especially in Rain (Regen, 1929), a 10-minute short filmed over 2 years, and in The Bridge (De Brug, 1928). Around this time, along with Menno ter Braak and others, he was involved in the creation of the Dutch Film League (De Nederlandsche Filmliga) based in Amsterdam. The League drew foreign filmmakers to the Netherlands such as Alberto Cavalcanti, René Clair, Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Dziga Vertov, who also became his friends.",
"title": "Early life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In 1929, Ivens went to the Soviet Union and was invited to direct a film on a topic of his own choosing which was the new industrial city of Magnitogorsk. Before commencing work, he returned to the Netherlands to make Industrial Symphony for Philips Electric which is considered to be a film of great technical beauty. He returned to the Soviet Union to make the film about Magnitogorsk, Song of Heroes in 1931 with music composed by Hanns Eisler. This was the first film on which Ivens and Eisler worked together. It was a propaganda film about this new industrial city where masses of laborers and communist youth worked for Stalin's Five Year Plan. With Henri Storck, Ivens made Misère au Borinage (Borinage, 1933), a documentary on life in a coal mining region. In 1943, he also directed two Allied propaganda films for the National Film Board of Canada, including Action Stations, about the Royal Canadian Navy's escorting of convoys in the Battle of the Atlantic.",
"title": "Early life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "From 1936 to 1945, Ivens was based in the United States. For Pare Lorentz's U.S. Film Service, in the year 1940, he made a documentary film on rural electrification called Power and the Land. It focused on a family, the Parkinsons, who ran a business providing milk for their community. The film showed the problem in the lack of electricity and the way the problem was fixed. Ivens was, however, known for his anti-fascist and other propaganda films, including The Spanish Earth, for the Spanish Republicans, co-written with Ernest Hemingway and music by Marc Blitzstein and Virgil Thomson. Jean Renoir did the French narration for the film and Hemingway did the English version only after Orson Welles' sounded too theatrical.. This film was financed by Archibald MacLeish, Fredric March, Florence Eldridge, Lillian Hellman, Luise Rainer, Dudley Nichols, Franchot Tone and other Hollywood movie stars, moguls, and writers who composed a group known as the Contemporary Historians. Spanish Earth was shown at the White House on 8 July 1937 after Ivens, Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, had had dinner with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins. The Roosevelts loved the film but said that it needed more propaganda. This 1937 documentary was considered his masterpiece.",
"title": "U.S. and World War II-era career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In 1938 he traveled to China. The 400 Million (1939) depicted the history of modern China and the Chinese resistance during the Second Sino-Japanese War, including dramatic shots of the Battle of Taierzhuang. Robert Capa did camerawork, Sidney Lumet worked on the film as a reader, Hanns Eisler wrote the musical score, and Fredric March provided the narration. It, too, had been financed by the same people as those of Spanish Earth. Its chief fundraiser was Luise Rainer, recipient of the best actress Oscar two years in a row; and the entire group called themselves this time, History Today, Inc . The Kuomintang government censored the film, fearing that it would give too much credit to left-wing forces. Ivens was also suspected of being a friend of Mao Zedong and especially Zhou Enlai.",
"title": "U.S. and World War II-era career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In early 1943, Frank Capra hired Ivens to supervise the production of Know Your Enemy: Japan for his U.S. War Department film series Why We Fight. The film's commentary was written largely by Carl Foreman. Capra fired Ivens from the project because he felt that his approach was too sympathetic toward the Japanese. The film's release was held up because there were concerns that Emperor Hirohito was being depicted as a war criminal, and there was a policy shift to portray the Emperor more favorably after the war as a means of maintaining order in post-war Japan.",
"title": "U.S. and World War II-era career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "With the emerging \"Red Scare\" of the late 1940s, Ivens was forced to leave the country in the early months of the Truman administration. Ivens' leftist politics also put a stop to his first feature film project which was to have starred Greta Garbo. In fact, Walter Wanger, the film's producer, was adamant about \"running [Ivens] out of town.\"",
"title": "U.S. and World War II-era career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In 1946, commissioned to make a Dutch film about Indonesian 'independence', Ivens resigned in protest over what he considered ongoing imperialism; the Dutch were in his view resisting decolonization. Instead, Ivens filmed Indonesia Calling in secret, for which he received funding from the International Workers Order. For around a decade Ivens lived in Eastern Europe, working for several studios there. His position concerning Indonesia and his taking sides for the Eastern Bloc in the Cold War annoyed the Dutch government. Over a period of many years, he was obliged to renew his passport every three or four months. According to later mythology however, he lost his passport for ten years, which is not true, as demonstrated by the fact that he was able to travel to New York City to sit by the bedside of his old friend Paul Robeson when he was ill.",
"title": "Return to Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "From 1965 to 1970 he worked on two documentary films about North Vietnam during the war: he made 17e parallèle: La guerre du peuple (17th Parallel: Vietnam in War) and he participated in the collective work Loin du Vietnam (Far from Vietnam). He was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize for the year 1967.",
"title": "Return to Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "From 1971 to 1977, he shot How Yukong Moved the Mountains, a 763-minute documentary about the Cultural Revolution in China. He was given unprecedented access because of his pro-communist views and his old personal friendships with Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong.",
"title": "Return to Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "He spoke to Radio Netherlands about his life and work in a wide-ranging interview.",
"title": "Return to Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In 1988 Ivens received the Golden Lion Honorary Award at the Venice Film Festival. He then received the Order of the Netherlands Lion in January 1989, and died on 28 June that year. Shortly before his death he released the last of more than 40 films Une histoire de vent (A Tale of the Wind). A statue of Ivens by sculptor Bryan McCormack was erected in the Parc de Saint-Cloud in Paris in 2010.",
"title": "Return to Europe"
}
]
| Georg Henri Anton "Joris" Ivens was a Dutch documentary filmmaker. Among the notable films he directed or co-directed are A Tale of the Wind, The Spanish Earth, Rain, ...A Valparaiso, Misère au Borinage (Borinage), 17th Parallel: Vietnam in War, The Seine Meets Paris, Far from Vietnam, Pour le Mistral and How Yukong Moved the Mountains. | 2001-10-16T04:38:27Z | 2023-12-21T20:03:11Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joris_Ivens |
16,217 | Jaguar | The jaguar (Panthera onca) is a large cat species and the only living member of the genus Panthera native to the Americas. With a body length of up to 1.85 m (6 ft 1 in) and a weight of up to 158 kg (348 lb), it is the biggest cat species in the Americas and the third largest in the world. Its distinctively marked coat features pale yellow to tan colored fur covered by spots that transition to rosettes on the sides, although a melanistic black coat appears in some individuals. The jaguar's powerful bite allows it to pierce the carapaces of turtles and tortoises, and to employ an unusual killing method: it bites directly through the skull of mammalian prey between the ears to deliver a fatal blow to the brain.
The modern jaguar's ancestors probably entered the Americas from Eurasia during the Early Pleistocene via the land bridge that once spanned the Bering Strait. Today, the jaguar's range extends from the Southwestern United States across Mexico and much of Central America, the Amazon rainforest and south to Paraguay and northern Argentina. It inhabits a variety of forested and open terrains, but its preferred habitat is tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forest, wetlands and wooded regions. It is adept at swimming and is largely a solitary, opportunistic, stalk-and-ambush apex predator. As a keystone species, it plays an important role in stabilizing ecosystems and in regulating prey populations.
The jaguar is threatened by habitat loss, habitat fragmentation, poaching for trade with its body parts and killings in human–wildlife conflict situations, particularly with ranchers in Central and South America. It has been listed as Near Threatened on the IUCN Red List since 2002. The wild population is thought to have declined since the late 1990s. Priority areas for jaguar conservation comprise 51 Jaguar Conservation Units (JCUs), defined as large areas inhabited by at least 50 breeding jaguars. The JCUs are located in 36 geographic regions ranging from Mexico to Argentina.
The jaguar has featured prominently in the mythology of indigenous peoples of the Americas, including those of the Aztec and Maya civilizations.
The word "jaguar" is possibly derived from the Tupi-Guarani word yaguara meaning 'wild beast that overcomes its prey at a bound'. In North America, the word is pronounced disyllabic /ˈdʒæɡwɑːr/, while in British English, it is pronounced with three syllables /ˈdʒæɡjuːər/. Because that word also applies to other animals, indigenous peoples in Guyana call it jaguareté, with the added sufix eté, meaning "true beast". "Onca" is derived from the Portuguese name onça for a spotted cat that is larger than a lynx; cf. ounce. The word "panther" is derived from classical Latin panthēra, itself from the ancient Greek πάνθηρ (pánthēr).
In 1758, Carl Linnaeus described the jaguar in his work Systema Naturae and gave it the scientific name Felis onca.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, several jaguar type specimens formed the basis for descriptions of subspecies. In 1939, Reginald Innes Pocock recognized eight subspecies based on the geographic origins and skull morphology of these specimens. Pocock did not have access to sufficient zoological specimens to critically evaluate their subspecific status but expressed doubt about the status of several. Later consideration of his work suggested only three subspecies should be recognized. The description of P. o. palustris was based on a fossil skull.
By 2005, nine subspecies were considered to be valid taxa:
Reginald Innes Pocock placed the jaguar in the genus Panthera and observed that it shares several morphological features with the leopard (P. pardus). He, therefore, concluded that they are most closely related to each other. Results of morphological and genetic research indicate a clinal north–south variation between populations, but no evidence for subspecific differentiation. DNA analysis of 84 jaguar samples from South America revealed that the gene flow between jaguar populations in Colombia was high in the past. Since 2017, the jaguar is considered to be a monotypic taxon, though the modern Panthera onca onca is still distinguished from two fossil subspecies, Panthera onca augusta and Panthera onca mesembrina.
The Panthera lineage is estimated to have genetically diverged from the common ancestor of the Felidae around 9.32 to 4.47 million years ago to 11.75 to 0.97 million years ago, and the geographic origin of the genus is most likely northern Central Asia. Some genetic analyses place the jaguar as a sister species to the lion with which it diverged 3.46 to 1.22 million years ago, but other studies place the lion closer to the leopard.
The lineage of the jaguar appears to have originated in Africa and spread to Eurasia 1.95–1.77 mya. The modern species may have descended from Panthera gombaszoegensis, which is thought to have entered the American continent via Beringia, the land bridge that once spanned the Bering Strait. Fossils of modern jaguars have been found in North America dating to over 850,000 years ago. Results of mitochondrial DNA analysis of 37 jaguars indicate that current populations evolved between 510,000 and 280,000 years ago in northern South America and subsequently recolonized North and Central America after the extinction of jaguars there during the Late Pleistocene.
Two extinct subspecies of jaguar are recognized in the fossil record: the North American P. o. augusta and South American P. o. mesembrina.
The jaguar is a compact and muscular animal. It is the largest cat native to the Americas and the third largest in the world, exceeded in size only by the tiger and the lion. It stands 57 to 81 cm (22.4 to 31.9 in) tall at the shoulders. Its size and weight vary considerably depending on sex and region: weights in most regions are normally in the range of 56–96 kg (123–212 lb). Exceptionally big males have been recorded to weigh as much as 158 kg (348 lb). The smallest females from Middle America weigh about 36 kg (79 lb). It is sexually dimorphic, with females typically being 10–20% smaller than males. The length from the nose to the base of the tail varies from 1.12 to 1.85 m (3 ft 8 in to 6 ft 1 in). The tail is 45 to 75 cm (18 to 30 in) long and the shortest of any big cat. Its muscular legs are shorter than the legs of other Panthera species with similar body weight.
Size tends to increase from north to south. Jaguars in the Chamela-Cuixmala Biosphere Reserve on the Pacific coast of central Mexico weighed around 50 kg (110 lb). Jaguars in Venezuela and Brazil are much larger, with average weights of about 95 kg (209 lb) in males and of about 56–78 kg (123–172 lb) in females.
The jaguar's coat ranges from pale yellow to tan or reddish-yellow, with a whitish underside and covered in black spots. The spots and their shapes vary: on the sides, they become rosettes which may include one or several dots. The spots on the head and neck are generally solid, as are those on the tail where they may merge to form bands near the end and create a black tip. They are elongated on the middle of the back, often connecting to create a median stripe, and blotchy on the belly. These patterns serve as camouflage in areas with dense vegetation and patchy shadows. Jaguars living in forests are often darker and considerably smaller than those living in open areas, possibly due to the smaller numbers of large, herbivorous prey in forest areas.
The jaguar closely resembles the leopard but is generally more robust, with stockier limbs and a more square head. The rosettes on a jaguar's coat are larger, darker, fewer in number and have thicker lines, with a small spot in the middle. It has powerful jaws with the third-highest bite force of all felids, after the tiger and the lion. It has an average bite force at the canine tip of 887.0 Newton and a bite force quotient at the canine tip of 118.6. A 100 kg (220 lb) jaguar can bite with a force of 4.939 kN (1,110 lbf) with the canine teeth and 6.922 kN (1,556 lbf) at the carnassial notch.
Melanistic jaguars are also known as black panthers. The black morph is less common than the spotted one. Black jaguars have been documented in Central and South America. Melanism in the jaguar is caused by deletions in the melanocortin 1 receptor gene and inherited through a dominant allele. Black jaguars occur at higher densities in tropical rainforest and are more active during the daytime. This suggests that melanism provides camouflage in dense vegetation with high illumination.
In 2004, a camera trap in the Sierra Madre Occidental mountains photographed the first documented black jaguar in Northern Mexico. Black jaguars were also photographed in Costa Rica's Alberto Manuel Brenes Biological Reserve, in the mountains of the Cordillera de Talamanca, in Barbilla National Park and in eastern Panama.
In 1999, the jaguar's historic range at the turn of the 20th century was estimated at 19,000,000 km (7,300,000 sq mi), stretching from the southern United States through Central America to southern Argentina. By the turn of the 21st century, its global range had decreased to about 8,750,000 km (3,380,000 sq mi), with most declines in the southern United States, northern Mexico, northern Brazil, and southern Argentina. Its present range extends from Mexico through Central America to South America comprising Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, particularly on the Osa Peninsula, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina. It is considered to be locally extinct in El Salvador and Uruguay.
Jaguars have been occasionally sighted in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. Between 2012 and 2015, a male vagrant jaguar was recorded in 23 locations in the Santa Rita Mountains.
The jaguar prefers dense forest and typically inhabits dry deciduous forests, tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests, rainforests and cloud forests in Central and South America; open, seasonally flooded wetlands, dry grassland and historically also oak forests in the United States. It has been recorded at elevations up to 3,800 m (12,500 ft) but avoids montane forests. It favors riverine habitat and swamps with dense vegetation cover. In the Mayan forests of Mexico and Guatemala, 11 GPS-collared jaguars preferred undisturbed dense habitat away from roads; females avoided even areas with low levels of human activity, whereas males appeared less disturbed by human population density. A young male jaguar was also recorded in the semi-arid Sierra de San Carlos at a waterhole.
In the 19th century, the jaguar was still sighted at the North Platte River 48–80 km (30–50 mi) north of Longs Peak in Colorado, in coastal Louisiana, northern Arizona and New Mexico. Multiple verified zoological reports of the jaguar are known in California, two as far north as Monterey in 1814 and 1826. The only record of an active jaguar den with breeding adults and kittens in the United States was in the Tehachapi Mountains of California prior to 1860. The jaguar persisted in California until about 1860. The last confirmed jaguar in Texas was shot in 1948, 4.8 km (3 mi) southeast of Kingsville, Texas. In Arizona, a female was shot in the White Mountains in 1963. By the late 1960s, the jaguar was thought to have been extirpated in the United States. Arizona outlawed jaguar hunting in 1969, but by then no females remained, and over the next 25 years only two males were sighted and killed in the state. In 1996, a rancher and hunting guide from Douglas, Arizona came across a jaguar in the Peloncillo Mountains and became a researcher on jaguars, placing trail cameras, which recorded four more jaguars.
The jaguar is mostly active at night and during twilight. However, jaguars living in densely forested regions of the Amazon Rainforest and the Pantanal are largely active by day, whereas jaguars in the Atlantic Forest are primarily active by night. The activity pattern of the jaguar coincides with the activity of its main prey species. Jaguars are good swimmers and play and hunt in the water, possibly more than tigers. They have been recorded moving between islands and the shore. Jaguars are also good at climbing trees but do so less often than cougars.
The adult jaguar is an apex predator, meaning it is at the top of the food chain and is not preyed upon in the wild. The jaguar has also been termed a keystone species, as it is assumed that it controls the population levels of prey such as herbivorous and seed-eating mammals and thus maintains the structural integrity of forest systems. However, field work has shown this may be natural variability, and the population increases may not be sustained. Thus, the keystone predator hypothesis is not accepted by all scientists.
The jaguar is sympatric with the cougar (Puma concolor). In central Mexico, both prey on white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), which makes up 54% and 66% of jaguar and cougar's prey, respectively. In northern Mexico, the jaguar and the cougar share the same habitat, and their diet overlaps dependent on prey availability. Jaguars seemed to prefer deer and calves. In Mexico and Central America, neither of the two cats are considered to be the dominant predator. In South America, the jaguar is larger than the cougar and tends to take larger prey, usually over 22 kg (49 lb). The cougar's prey usually weighs between 2 and 22 kg (4 and 49 lb), which is thought to be the reason for its smaller size. This situation may be advantageous to the cougar. Its broader prey niche, including its ability to take smaller prey, may give it an advantage over the jaguar in human-altered landscapes.
The jaguar is an obligate carnivore and depends solely on flesh for its nutrient requirements. An analysis of 53 studies documenting the diet of the jaguar revealed that its prey ranges in weight from 1 to 130 kg (2.2 to 286.6 lb); it prefers prey weighing 45–85 kg (99–187 lb), with the capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris) and the giant anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla) being the most selected. When available, it also preys on marsh deer (Blastocerus dichotomus), southern tamandua (Tamandua tetradactyla), collared peccary (Dicotyles tajacu) and black agouti (Dasyprocta fuliginosa). In floodplains, jaguars opportunistically take reptiles such as turtles and caimans. Consumption of reptiles appears to be more frequent in jaguars than in other big cats. One remote population in the Brazilian Pantanal is recorded to primarily feed on aquatic reptiles and fish. The jaguar also preys on livestock in cattle ranching areas where wild prey is scarce. The daily food requirement of a captive jaguar weighing 34 kg (75 lb) was estimated at 1.4 kg (3.1 lb) of meat.
The jaguar's bite force allows it to pierce the carapaces of the yellow-spotted Amazon river turtle (Podocnemis unifilis) and the yellow-footed tortoise (Chelonoidis denticulatus). It employs an unusual killing method: it bites mammalian prey directly through the skull between the ears to deliver a fatal bite to the brain. It kills capybara by piercing its canine teeth through the temporal bones of its skull, breaking its zygomatic arch and mandible and penetrating its brain, often through the ears. It has been hypothesized to be an adaptation to cracking open turtle shells; armored reptiles may have formed an abundant prey base for the jaguar following the late Pleistocene extinctions. However, this is disputed, as even in areas where jaguars prey on reptiles, they are still taken relatively infrequently compared to mammals in spite of their greater abundance.
Between October 2001 and April 2004, 10 jaguars were monitored in the southern Pantanal. In the dry season from April to September, they killed prey at intervals ranging from one to seven days; and ranging from one to 16 days in the wet season from October to March.
The jaguar uses a stalk-and-ambush strategy when hunting rather than chasing prey. The cat will slowly walk down forest paths, listening for and stalking prey before rushing or ambushing. The jaguar attacks from cover and usually from a target's blind spot with a quick pounce; the species' ambushing abilities are considered nearly peerless in the animal kingdom by both indigenous people and field researchers and are probably a product of its role as an apex predator in several different environments. The ambush may include leaping into water after prey, as a jaguar is quite capable of carrying a large kill while swimming; its strength is such that carcasses as large as a heifer can be hauled up a tree to avoid flood levels. After killing prey, the jaguar will drag the carcass to a thicket or other secluded spot. It begins eating at the neck and chest. The heart and lungs are consumed, followed by the shoulders.
The jaguar is generally solitary except for females with cubs. In 1977, groups consisting of a male, female and cubs, and two females with two males were sighted several times in a study area in the Paraguay River valley. In some areas, males may form paired coalitions which together mark, defend and invade territories, find and mate with the same females and search for and share prey. A radio-collared female moved in a home range of 25–38 km (9.7–14.7 sq mi), which partly overlapped with another female. The home range of the male in this study area overlapped with several females.
The jaguar uses scrape marks, urine, and feces to mark its territory. The size of home ranges depends on the level of deforestation and human population density. The home ranges of females vary from 15.3 km (5.9 sq mi) in the Pantanal to 53.6 km (20.7 sq mi) in the Amazon to 233.5 km (90.2 sq mi) in the Atlantic Forest. Male jaguar home ranges vary from 25 km (9.7 sq mi) in the Pantanal to 180.3 km (69.6 sq mi) in the Amazon to 591.4 km (228.3 sq mi) in the Atlantic Forest and 807.4 km (311.7 sq mi) in the Cerrado. Studies employing GPS telemetry in 2003 and 2004 found densities of only six to seven jaguars per 100 km (62 mi) in the Pantanal region, compared with 10 to 11 using traditional methods; this suggests the widely used sampling methods may inflate the actual numbers of individuals in a sampling area. Fights between males occur but are rare, and avoidance behavior has been observed in the wild. In one wetland population with degraded territorial boundaries and more social proximity, adults of the same sex are more tolerant of each other and engage in more friendly and co-operative interactions.
The jaguar roars/grunts for long-distance communication; intensive bouts of counter-calling between individuals have been observed in the wild. This vocalization is described as "hoarse" with five or six guttural notes. Chuffing is produced by individuals when greeting, during courting, or by a mother comforting her cubs. This sound is described as low intensity snorts, possibly intended to signal tranquility and passivity. Cubs have been recorded bleating, gurgling and mewing.
In captivity, the female jaguar is recorded to reach sexual maturity at the age of about 2.5 years. Estrus lasts 7–15 days with an estrus cycle of 41.8 to 52.6 days. During estrus, she exhibits increased restlessness with rolling and prolonged vocalizations. She is an induced ovulator but can also ovulate spontaneously. Gestation lasts 91 to 111 days. The male is sexually mature at the age of three to four years. His mean ejaculate volume is 8.6±1.3 ml. Generation length of the jaguar is 9.8 years.
In the Pantanal, breeding pairs were observed to stay together for up to five days. Females had one to two cubs. The young are born with closed eyes but open them after two weeks. Cubs are weaned at the age of three months but remain in the birth den for six months before leaving to accompany their mother on hunts. Jaguars remain with their mothers for up to two years. They appear to rarely live beyond 11 years, but captive individuals may live 22 years.
In 2001, a male jaguar killed and partially consumed two cubs in Emas National Park. DNA paternity testing of blood samples revealed that the male was the father of the cubs. Two more cases of infanticide were documented in the northern Pantanal in 2013. To defend against infanticide, the female may hide her cubs and distract the male with courtship behavior.
The Spanish conquistadors feared the jaguar. According to Charles Darwin, the indigenous peoples of South America stated that people did not need to fear the jaguar as long as capybaras were abundant. The first official record of a jaguar killing a human in Brazil dates to June 2008. Two children were attacked by jaguars in Guyana. The majority of known attacks on people happened when it had been cornered or wounded.
The jaguar is threatened by loss and fragmentation of habitat, illegal killing in retaliation for livestock depredation and for illegal trade in jaguar body parts. It is listed as Near Threatened on the IUCN Red List since 2002, as the jaguar population has probably declined by 20–25% since the mid-1990s. Deforestation is a major threat to the jaguar across its range. Habitat loss was most rapid in drier regions such as the Argentine pampas, the arid grasslands of Mexico and the southwestern United States.
In 2002, it was estimated that the range of the jaguar had declined to about 46% of its range in the early 20th century. In 2018, it was estimated that its range had declined by 55% in the last century. The only remaining stronghold is the Amazon rainforest, a region that is rapidly being fragmented by deforestation. Between 2000 and 2012, forest loss in the jaguar range amounted to 83.759 km (32.340 sq mi), with fragmentation increasing in particular in corridors between Jaguar Conservation Units (JCUs). By 2014, direct linkages between two JCUs in Bolivia were lost, and two JCUs in northern Argentina became completely isolated due to deforestation.
In Mexico, the jaguar is primarily threatened by poaching. Its habitat is fragmented in northern Mexico, in the Gulf of Mexico and the Yucatán Peninsula, caused by changes in land use, construction of roads and tourism infrastructure. In Panama, 220 of 230 jaguars were killed in retaliation for predation on livestock between 1998 and 2014. In Venezuela, the jaguar was extirpated in about 26% of its range in the country since 1940, mostly in dry savannas and unproductive scrubland in the northeastern region of Anzoátegui. In Ecuador, the jaguar is threatened by reduced prey availability in areas where the expansion of the road network facilitated access of human hunters to forests. In the Alto Paraná Atlantic forests, at least 117 jaguars were killed in Iguaçu National Park and the adjacent Misiones Province between 1995 and 2008. Some Afro-Colombians in the Colombian Chocó Department hunt jaguars for consumption and sale of meat. Between 2008 and 2012, at least 15 jaguars were killed by livestock farmers in central Belize.
The international trade of jaguar skins boomed between the end of the Second World War and the early 1970s. Significant declines occurred in the 1960s, as more than 15,000 jaguars were yearly killed for their skins in the Brazilian Amazon alone; the trade in jaguar skins decreased since 1973 when the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species was enacted. Interview surveys with 533 people in the northwestern Bolivian Amazon revealed that local people killed jaguars out of fear, in retaliation, and for trade. Between August 2016 and August 2019, jaguar skins and body parts were seen for sale in tourist markets in the Peruvian cities of Lima, Iquitos and Pucallpa. Human-wildlife conflict, opportunistic hunting and hunting for trade in domestic markets are key drivers for killing jaguars in Belize and Guatemala. Seizure reports indicate that at least 857 jaguars were involved in trade between 2012 and 2018, including 482 individuals in Bolivia alone; 31 jaguars were seized in China. Between 2014 and early 2019, 760 jaguar fangs were seized that originated in Bolivia and were destined for China. Undercover investigations revealed that the smuggling of jaguar body parts is run by Chinese residents in Bolivia.
The jaguar is listed on CITES Appendix I, which means that all international commercial trade in jaguars or their body parts is prohibited. Hunting jaguars is prohibited in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, French Guiana, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname, the United States, and Venezuela. Hunting jaguars is restricted in Guatemala and Peru. In Ecuador, hunting jaguars is prohibited, and it is classified as threatened with extinction. In Guyana, it is protected as an endangered species, and hunting it is illegal.
In 1986, the Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary was established in Belize as the world's first protected area for jaguar conservation.
In 1999, field scientists from 18 jaguar range countries determined the most important areas for long-term jaguar conservation based on the status of jaguar population units, stability of prey base and quality of habitat. These areas, called "Jaguar Conservation Units" (JCUs), are large enough for at least 50 breeding individuals and range in size from 566 to 67,598 km (219 to 26,100 sq mi); 51 JCUs were designated in 36 geographic regions including:
Optimal routes of travel between core jaguar population units were identified across its range in 2010 to implement wildlife corridors that connect JCUs. These corridors represent areas with the shortest distance between jaguar breeding populations, require the least possible energy input of dispersing individuals and pose a low mortality risk. They cover an area of 2,600,000 km (1,000,000 sq mi) and range in length from 3 to 1,102 km (1.9 to 684.8 mi) in Mexico and Central America and from 489.14 to 1,607 km (303.94 to 998.54 mi) in South America. Cooperation with local landowners and municipal, state, or federal agencies is essential to maintain connected populations and prevent fragmentation in both JCUs and corridors. Seven of 13 corridors in Mexico are functioning with a width of at least 14.25 km (8.85 mi) and a length of no more than 320 km (200 mi). The other corridors may hamper passage, as they are narrower and longer.
In August 2012, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service set aside 3,392.20 km (838,232 acres) in Arizona and New Mexico for the protection of the jaguar. The Jaguar Recovery Plan was published in April 2019, in which Interstate 10 is considered to form the northern boundary of the Jaguar Recovery Unit in Arizona and New Mexico.
In Mexico, a national conservation strategy was developed from 2005 on and published in 2016. The Mexican jaguar population increased from an estimated 4,000 individuals in 2010 to about 4,800 individuals in 2018. This increase is seen as a positive effect of conservation measures that were implemented in cooperation with governmental and non-governmental institutions and landowners.
An evaluation of JCUs from Mexico to Argentina revealed that they overlap with high-quality habitats of about 1,500 mammals to varying degrees. Since co-occurring mammals benefit from the JCU approach, the jaguar has been called an umbrella species. Central American JCUs overlap with the habitat of 187 of 304 regional endemic amphibian and reptile species, of which 19 amphibians occur only in the jaguar range.
In setting up protected reserves, efforts generally also have to be focused on the surrounding areas, as jaguars are unlikely to confine themselves to the bounds of a reservation, especially if the population is increasing in size. Human attitudes in the areas surrounding reserves and laws and regulations to prevent poaching are essential to make conservation areas effective.
To estimate population sizes within specific areas and to keep track of individual jaguars, camera trapping and wildlife tracking telemetry are widely used, and feces are sought out with the help of detection dogs to study jaguar health and diet.
Current conservation efforts often focus on educating ranch owners and promoting ecotourism. Ecotourism setups are being used to generate public interest in charismatic animals such as the jaguar while at the same time generating revenue that can be used in conservation efforts. A key concern in jaguar ecotourism is the considerable habitat space the species requires. If ecotourism is used to aid in jaguar conservation, some considerations need to be made as to how existing ecosystems will be kept intact, or how new ecosystems will be put into place that are large enough to support a growing jaguar population.
Conservationists and professionals in Mexico and the United States have established the 56,000 acres (23,000 ha) Northern Jaguar Reserve in northern Mexico. Advocacy for reintroduction of the jaguar to its former range in Arizona and New Mexico have been supported by documentation of natural migrations by individual jaguars into the southern reaches of both states, the recency of extirpation from those regions by human action, and supportive arguments pertaining to biodiversity, ecological, human, and practical considerations.
In the pre-Columbian Americas, the jaguar was a symbol of power and strength. In the Andes, a jaguar cult disseminated by the early Chavín culture became accepted over most of today's Peru by 900 BC. The later Moche culture in northern Peru used the jaguar as a symbol of power in many of their ceramics. In the Muisca religion in Altiplano Cundiboyacense, the jaguar was considered a sacred animal, and people dressed in jaguar skins during religious rituals. The skins were traded with peoples in the nearby Orinoquía Region. The name of the Muisca ruler Nemequene was derived from the Chibcha words nymy and quyne, meaning "force of the jaguar".
Sculptures with "Olmec were-jaguar" motifs were found on the Yucatán Peninsula in Veracruz and Tabasco; they show stylized jaguars with half-human faces. In the later Maya civilization, the jaguar was believed to facilitate communication between the living and the dead and to protect the royal household. The Maya saw these powerful felines as their companions in the spiritual world, and several Maya rulers bore names that incorporated the Mayan word for jaguar b'alam in many of the Mayan languages. Balam remains a common Maya surname, and it is also the name of Chilam Balam, a legendary author to whom are attributed 17th and 18th-centuries Maya miscellanies preserving much important knowledge. Remains of jaguar bones were discovered in a burial site in Guatemala, which indicates that Mayans may have kept jaguars as pets.
The Aztec civilization shared this image of the jaguar as the representative of the ruler and as a warrior. The Aztecs formed an elite warrior class known as the Jaguar warrior. In Aztec mythology, the jaguar was considered to be the totem animal of the powerful deities Tezcatlipoca and Tepeyollotl.
A conch shell gorget depicting a jaguar was found in a burial mound in Benton County, Missouri. The gorget shows evenly-engraved lines and measures 104 mm × 98 mm (4.1 in × 3.9 in). Rock drawings made by the Hopi, Anasazi and Pueblo all over the desert and chaparral regions of the American Southwest show an explicitly spotted cat, presumably a jaguar, as it is drawn much larger than an ocelot.
The jaguar is also used as a symbol in contemporary culture. It is the national animal of Guyana and is featured in its coat of arms. The flag of the Department of Amazonas features a black jaguar silhouette leaping towards a hunter. The crest of the Argentine Rugby Union features a jaguar. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The jaguar (Panthera onca) is a large cat species and the only living member of the genus Panthera native to the Americas. With a body length of up to 1.85 m (6 ft 1 in) and a weight of up to 158 kg (348 lb), it is the biggest cat species in the Americas and the third largest in the world. Its distinctively marked coat features pale yellow to tan colored fur covered by spots that transition to rosettes on the sides, although a melanistic black coat appears in some individuals. The jaguar's powerful bite allows it to pierce the carapaces of turtles and tortoises, and to employ an unusual killing method: it bites directly through the skull of mammalian prey between the ears to deliver a fatal blow to the brain.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The modern jaguar's ancestors probably entered the Americas from Eurasia during the Early Pleistocene via the land bridge that once spanned the Bering Strait. Today, the jaguar's range extends from the Southwestern United States across Mexico and much of Central America, the Amazon rainforest and south to Paraguay and northern Argentina. It inhabits a variety of forested and open terrains, but its preferred habitat is tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forest, wetlands and wooded regions. It is adept at swimming and is largely a solitary, opportunistic, stalk-and-ambush apex predator. As a keystone species, it plays an important role in stabilizing ecosystems and in regulating prey populations.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The jaguar is threatened by habitat loss, habitat fragmentation, poaching for trade with its body parts and killings in human–wildlife conflict situations, particularly with ranchers in Central and South America. It has been listed as Near Threatened on the IUCN Red List since 2002. The wild population is thought to have declined since the late 1990s. Priority areas for jaguar conservation comprise 51 Jaguar Conservation Units (JCUs), defined as large areas inhabited by at least 50 breeding jaguars. The JCUs are located in 36 geographic regions ranging from Mexico to Argentina.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The jaguar has featured prominently in the mythology of indigenous peoples of the Americas, including those of the Aztec and Maya civilizations.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The word \"jaguar\" is possibly derived from the Tupi-Guarani word yaguara meaning 'wild beast that overcomes its prey at a bound'. In North America, the word is pronounced disyllabic /ˈdʒæɡwɑːr/, while in British English, it is pronounced with three syllables /ˈdʒæɡjuːər/. Because that word also applies to other animals, indigenous peoples in Guyana call it jaguareté, with the added sufix eté, meaning \"true beast\". \"Onca\" is derived from the Portuguese name onça for a spotted cat that is larger than a lynx; cf. ounce. The word \"panther\" is derived from classical Latin panthēra, itself from the ancient Greek πάνθηρ (pánthēr).",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In 1758, Carl Linnaeus described the jaguar in his work Systema Naturae and gave it the scientific name Felis onca.",
"title": "Taxonomy and evolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In the 19th and 20th centuries, several jaguar type specimens formed the basis for descriptions of subspecies. In 1939, Reginald Innes Pocock recognized eight subspecies based on the geographic origins and skull morphology of these specimens. Pocock did not have access to sufficient zoological specimens to critically evaluate their subspecific status but expressed doubt about the status of several. Later consideration of his work suggested only three subspecies should be recognized. The description of P. o. palustris was based on a fossil skull.",
"title": "Taxonomy and evolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "By 2005, nine subspecies were considered to be valid taxa:",
"title": "Taxonomy and evolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Reginald Innes Pocock placed the jaguar in the genus Panthera and observed that it shares several morphological features with the leopard (P. pardus). He, therefore, concluded that they are most closely related to each other. Results of morphological and genetic research indicate a clinal north–south variation between populations, but no evidence for subspecific differentiation. DNA analysis of 84 jaguar samples from South America revealed that the gene flow between jaguar populations in Colombia was high in the past. Since 2017, the jaguar is considered to be a monotypic taxon, though the modern Panthera onca onca is still distinguished from two fossil subspecies, Panthera onca augusta and Panthera onca mesembrina.",
"title": "Taxonomy and evolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The Panthera lineage is estimated to have genetically diverged from the common ancestor of the Felidae around 9.32 to 4.47 million years ago to 11.75 to 0.97 million years ago, and the geographic origin of the genus is most likely northern Central Asia. Some genetic analyses place the jaguar as a sister species to the lion with which it diverged 3.46 to 1.22 million years ago, but other studies place the lion closer to the leopard.",
"title": "Taxonomy and evolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The lineage of the jaguar appears to have originated in Africa and spread to Eurasia 1.95–1.77 mya. The modern species may have descended from Panthera gombaszoegensis, which is thought to have entered the American continent via Beringia, the land bridge that once spanned the Bering Strait. Fossils of modern jaguars have been found in North America dating to over 850,000 years ago. Results of mitochondrial DNA analysis of 37 jaguars indicate that current populations evolved between 510,000 and 280,000 years ago in northern South America and subsequently recolonized North and Central America after the extinction of jaguars there during the Late Pleistocene.",
"title": "Taxonomy and evolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Two extinct subspecies of jaguar are recognized in the fossil record: the North American P. o. augusta and South American P. o. mesembrina.",
"title": "Taxonomy and evolution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The jaguar is a compact and muscular animal. It is the largest cat native to the Americas and the third largest in the world, exceeded in size only by the tiger and the lion. It stands 57 to 81 cm (22.4 to 31.9 in) tall at the shoulders. Its size and weight vary considerably depending on sex and region: weights in most regions are normally in the range of 56–96 kg (123–212 lb). Exceptionally big males have been recorded to weigh as much as 158 kg (348 lb). The smallest females from Middle America weigh about 36 kg (79 lb). It is sexually dimorphic, with females typically being 10–20% smaller than males. The length from the nose to the base of the tail varies from 1.12 to 1.85 m (3 ft 8 in to 6 ft 1 in). The tail is 45 to 75 cm (18 to 30 in) long and the shortest of any big cat. Its muscular legs are shorter than the legs of other Panthera species with similar body weight.",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Size tends to increase from north to south. Jaguars in the Chamela-Cuixmala Biosphere Reserve on the Pacific coast of central Mexico weighed around 50 kg (110 lb). Jaguars in Venezuela and Brazil are much larger, with average weights of about 95 kg (209 lb) in males and of about 56–78 kg (123–172 lb) in females.",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The jaguar's coat ranges from pale yellow to tan or reddish-yellow, with a whitish underside and covered in black spots. The spots and their shapes vary: on the sides, they become rosettes which may include one or several dots. The spots on the head and neck are generally solid, as are those on the tail where they may merge to form bands near the end and create a black tip. They are elongated on the middle of the back, often connecting to create a median stripe, and blotchy on the belly. These patterns serve as camouflage in areas with dense vegetation and patchy shadows. Jaguars living in forests are often darker and considerably smaller than those living in open areas, possibly due to the smaller numbers of large, herbivorous prey in forest areas.",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The jaguar closely resembles the leopard but is generally more robust, with stockier limbs and a more square head. The rosettes on a jaguar's coat are larger, darker, fewer in number and have thicker lines, with a small spot in the middle. It has powerful jaws with the third-highest bite force of all felids, after the tiger and the lion. It has an average bite force at the canine tip of 887.0 Newton and a bite force quotient at the canine tip of 118.6. A 100 kg (220 lb) jaguar can bite with a force of 4.939 kN (1,110 lbf) with the canine teeth and 6.922 kN (1,556 lbf) at the carnassial notch.",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Melanistic jaguars are also known as black panthers. The black morph is less common than the spotted one. Black jaguars have been documented in Central and South America. Melanism in the jaguar is caused by deletions in the melanocortin 1 receptor gene and inherited through a dominant allele. Black jaguars occur at higher densities in tropical rainforest and are more active during the daytime. This suggests that melanism provides camouflage in dense vegetation with high illumination.",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In 2004, a camera trap in the Sierra Madre Occidental mountains photographed the first documented black jaguar in Northern Mexico. Black jaguars were also photographed in Costa Rica's Alberto Manuel Brenes Biological Reserve, in the mountains of the Cordillera de Talamanca, in Barbilla National Park and in eastern Panama.",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In 1999, the jaguar's historic range at the turn of the 20th century was estimated at 19,000,000 km (7,300,000 sq mi), stretching from the southern United States through Central America to southern Argentina. By the turn of the 21st century, its global range had decreased to about 8,750,000 km (3,380,000 sq mi), with most declines in the southern United States, northern Mexico, northern Brazil, and southern Argentina. Its present range extends from Mexico through Central America to South America comprising Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, particularly on the Osa Peninsula, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina. It is considered to be locally extinct in El Salvador and Uruguay.",
"title": "Distribution and habitat"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Jaguars have been occasionally sighted in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. Between 2012 and 2015, a male vagrant jaguar was recorded in 23 locations in the Santa Rita Mountains.",
"title": "Distribution and habitat"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The jaguar prefers dense forest and typically inhabits dry deciduous forests, tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests, rainforests and cloud forests in Central and South America; open, seasonally flooded wetlands, dry grassland and historically also oak forests in the United States. It has been recorded at elevations up to 3,800 m (12,500 ft) but avoids montane forests. It favors riverine habitat and swamps with dense vegetation cover. In the Mayan forests of Mexico and Guatemala, 11 GPS-collared jaguars preferred undisturbed dense habitat away from roads; females avoided even areas with low levels of human activity, whereas males appeared less disturbed by human population density. A young male jaguar was also recorded in the semi-arid Sierra de San Carlos at a waterhole.",
"title": "Distribution and habitat"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In the 19th century, the jaguar was still sighted at the North Platte River 48–80 km (30–50 mi) north of Longs Peak in Colorado, in coastal Louisiana, northern Arizona and New Mexico. Multiple verified zoological reports of the jaguar are known in California, two as far north as Monterey in 1814 and 1826. The only record of an active jaguar den with breeding adults and kittens in the United States was in the Tehachapi Mountains of California prior to 1860. The jaguar persisted in California until about 1860. The last confirmed jaguar in Texas was shot in 1948, 4.8 km (3 mi) southeast of Kingsville, Texas. In Arizona, a female was shot in the White Mountains in 1963. By the late 1960s, the jaguar was thought to have been extirpated in the United States. Arizona outlawed jaguar hunting in 1969, but by then no females remained, and over the next 25 years only two males were sighted and killed in the state. In 1996, a rancher and hunting guide from Douglas, Arizona came across a jaguar in the Peloncillo Mountains and became a researcher on jaguars, placing trail cameras, which recorded four more jaguars.",
"title": "Distribution and habitat"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The jaguar is mostly active at night and during twilight. However, jaguars living in densely forested regions of the Amazon Rainforest and the Pantanal are largely active by day, whereas jaguars in the Atlantic Forest are primarily active by night. The activity pattern of the jaguar coincides with the activity of its main prey species. Jaguars are good swimmers and play and hunt in the water, possibly more than tigers. They have been recorded moving between islands and the shore. Jaguars are also good at climbing trees but do so less often than cougars.",
"title": "Behavior and ecology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The adult jaguar is an apex predator, meaning it is at the top of the food chain and is not preyed upon in the wild. The jaguar has also been termed a keystone species, as it is assumed that it controls the population levels of prey such as herbivorous and seed-eating mammals and thus maintains the structural integrity of forest systems. However, field work has shown this may be natural variability, and the population increases may not be sustained. Thus, the keystone predator hypothesis is not accepted by all scientists.",
"title": "Behavior and ecology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The jaguar is sympatric with the cougar (Puma concolor). In central Mexico, both prey on white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), which makes up 54% and 66% of jaguar and cougar's prey, respectively. In northern Mexico, the jaguar and the cougar share the same habitat, and their diet overlaps dependent on prey availability. Jaguars seemed to prefer deer and calves. In Mexico and Central America, neither of the two cats are considered to be the dominant predator. In South America, the jaguar is larger than the cougar and tends to take larger prey, usually over 22 kg (49 lb). The cougar's prey usually weighs between 2 and 22 kg (4 and 49 lb), which is thought to be the reason for its smaller size. This situation may be advantageous to the cougar. Its broader prey niche, including its ability to take smaller prey, may give it an advantage over the jaguar in human-altered landscapes.",
"title": "Behavior and ecology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The jaguar is an obligate carnivore and depends solely on flesh for its nutrient requirements. An analysis of 53 studies documenting the diet of the jaguar revealed that its prey ranges in weight from 1 to 130 kg (2.2 to 286.6 lb); it prefers prey weighing 45–85 kg (99–187 lb), with the capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris) and the giant anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla) being the most selected. When available, it also preys on marsh deer (Blastocerus dichotomus), southern tamandua (Tamandua tetradactyla), collared peccary (Dicotyles tajacu) and black agouti (Dasyprocta fuliginosa). In floodplains, jaguars opportunistically take reptiles such as turtles and caimans. Consumption of reptiles appears to be more frequent in jaguars than in other big cats. One remote population in the Brazilian Pantanal is recorded to primarily feed on aquatic reptiles and fish. The jaguar also preys on livestock in cattle ranching areas where wild prey is scarce. The daily food requirement of a captive jaguar weighing 34 kg (75 lb) was estimated at 1.4 kg (3.1 lb) of meat.",
"title": "Behavior and ecology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The jaguar's bite force allows it to pierce the carapaces of the yellow-spotted Amazon river turtle (Podocnemis unifilis) and the yellow-footed tortoise (Chelonoidis denticulatus). It employs an unusual killing method: it bites mammalian prey directly through the skull between the ears to deliver a fatal bite to the brain. It kills capybara by piercing its canine teeth through the temporal bones of its skull, breaking its zygomatic arch and mandible and penetrating its brain, often through the ears. It has been hypothesized to be an adaptation to cracking open turtle shells; armored reptiles may have formed an abundant prey base for the jaguar following the late Pleistocene extinctions. However, this is disputed, as even in areas where jaguars prey on reptiles, they are still taken relatively infrequently compared to mammals in spite of their greater abundance.",
"title": "Behavior and ecology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Between October 2001 and April 2004, 10 jaguars were monitored in the southern Pantanal. In the dry season from April to September, they killed prey at intervals ranging from one to seven days; and ranging from one to 16 days in the wet season from October to March.",
"title": "Behavior and ecology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The jaguar uses a stalk-and-ambush strategy when hunting rather than chasing prey. The cat will slowly walk down forest paths, listening for and stalking prey before rushing or ambushing. The jaguar attacks from cover and usually from a target's blind spot with a quick pounce; the species' ambushing abilities are considered nearly peerless in the animal kingdom by both indigenous people and field researchers and are probably a product of its role as an apex predator in several different environments. The ambush may include leaping into water after prey, as a jaguar is quite capable of carrying a large kill while swimming; its strength is such that carcasses as large as a heifer can be hauled up a tree to avoid flood levels. After killing prey, the jaguar will drag the carcass to a thicket or other secluded spot. It begins eating at the neck and chest. The heart and lungs are consumed, followed by the shoulders.",
"title": "Behavior and ecology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The jaguar is generally solitary except for females with cubs. In 1977, groups consisting of a male, female and cubs, and two females with two males were sighted several times in a study area in the Paraguay River valley. In some areas, males may form paired coalitions which together mark, defend and invade territories, find and mate with the same females and search for and share prey. A radio-collared female moved in a home range of 25–38 km (9.7–14.7 sq mi), which partly overlapped with another female. The home range of the male in this study area overlapped with several females.",
"title": "Behavior and ecology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The jaguar uses scrape marks, urine, and feces to mark its territory. The size of home ranges depends on the level of deforestation and human population density. The home ranges of females vary from 15.3 km (5.9 sq mi) in the Pantanal to 53.6 km (20.7 sq mi) in the Amazon to 233.5 km (90.2 sq mi) in the Atlantic Forest. Male jaguar home ranges vary from 25 km (9.7 sq mi) in the Pantanal to 180.3 km (69.6 sq mi) in the Amazon to 591.4 km (228.3 sq mi) in the Atlantic Forest and 807.4 km (311.7 sq mi) in the Cerrado. Studies employing GPS telemetry in 2003 and 2004 found densities of only six to seven jaguars per 100 km (62 mi) in the Pantanal region, compared with 10 to 11 using traditional methods; this suggests the widely used sampling methods may inflate the actual numbers of individuals in a sampling area. Fights between males occur but are rare, and avoidance behavior has been observed in the wild. In one wetland population with degraded territorial boundaries and more social proximity, adults of the same sex are more tolerant of each other and engage in more friendly and co-operative interactions.",
"title": "Behavior and ecology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The jaguar roars/grunts for long-distance communication; intensive bouts of counter-calling between individuals have been observed in the wild. This vocalization is described as \"hoarse\" with five or six guttural notes. Chuffing is produced by individuals when greeting, during courting, or by a mother comforting her cubs. This sound is described as low intensity snorts, possibly intended to signal tranquility and passivity. Cubs have been recorded bleating, gurgling and mewing.",
"title": "Behavior and ecology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In captivity, the female jaguar is recorded to reach sexual maturity at the age of about 2.5 years. Estrus lasts 7–15 days with an estrus cycle of 41.8 to 52.6 days. During estrus, she exhibits increased restlessness with rolling and prolonged vocalizations. She is an induced ovulator but can also ovulate spontaneously. Gestation lasts 91 to 111 days. The male is sexually mature at the age of three to four years. His mean ejaculate volume is 8.6±1.3 ml. Generation length of the jaguar is 9.8 years.",
"title": "Behavior and ecology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "In the Pantanal, breeding pairs were observed to stay together for up to five days. Females had one to two cubs. The young are born with closed eyes but open them after two weeks. Cubs are weaned at the age of three months but remain in the birth den for six months before leaving to accompany their mother on hunts. Jaguars remain with their mothers for up to two years. They appear to rarely live beyond 11 years, but captive individuals may live 22 years.",
"title": "Behavior and ecology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In 2001, a male jaguar killed and partially consumed two cubs in Emas National Park. DNA paternity testing of blood samples revealed that the male was the father of the cubs. Two more cases of infanticide were documented in the northern Pantanal in 2013. To defend against infanticide, the female may hide her cubs and distract the male with courtship behavior.",
"title": "Behavior and ecology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The Spanish conquistadors feared the jaguar. According to Charles Darwin, the indigenous peoples of South America stated that people did not need to fear the jaguar as long as capybaras were abundant. The first official record of a jaguar killing a human in Brazil dates to June 2008. Two children were attacked by jaguars in Guyana. The majority of known attacks on people happened when it had been cornered or wounded.",
"title": "Behavior and ecology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The jaguar is threatened by loss and fragmentation of habitat, illegal killing in retaliation for livestock depredation and for illegal trade in jaguar body parts. It is listed as Near Threatened on the IUCN Red List since 2002, as the jaguar population has probably declined by 20–25% since the mid-1990s. Deforestation is a major threat to the jaguar across its range. Habitat loss was most rapid in drier regions such as the Argentine pampas, the arid grasslands of Mexico and the southwestern United States.",
"title": "Threats"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "In 2002, it was estimated that the range of the jaguar had declined to about 46% of its range in the early 20th century. In 2018, it was estimated that its range had declined by 55% in the last century. The only remaining stronghold is the Amazon rainforest, a region that is rapidly being fragmented by deforestation. Between 2000 and 2012, forest loss in the jaguar range amounted to 83.759 km (32.340 sq mi), with fragmentation increasing in particular in corridors between Jaguar Conservation Units (JCUs). By 2014, direct linkages between two JCUs in Bolivia were lost, and two JCUs in northern Argentina became completely isolated due to deforestation.",
"title": "Threats"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "In Mexico, the jaguar is primarily threatened by poaching. Its habitat is fragmented in northern Mexico, in the Gulf of Mexico and the Yucatán Peninsula, caused by changes in land use, construction of roads and tourism infrastructure. In Panama, 220 of 230 jaguars were killed in retaliation for predation on livestock between 1998 and 2014. In Venezuela, the jaguar was extirpated in about 26% of its range in the country since 1940, mostly in dry savannas and unproductive scrubland in the northeastern region of Anzoátegui. In Ecuador, the jaguar is threatened by reduced prey availability in areas where the expansion of the road network facilitated access of human hunters to forests. In the Alto Paraná Atlantic forests, at least 117 jaguars were killed in Iguaçu National Park and the adjacent Misiones Province between 1995 and 2008. Some Afro-Colombians in the Colombian Chocó Department hunt jaguars for consumption and sale of meat. Between 2008 and 2012, at least 15 jaguars were killed by livestock farmers in central Belize.",
"title": "Threats"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The international trade of jaguar skins boomed between the end of the Second World War and the early 1970s. Significant declines occurred in the 1960s, as more than 15,000 jaguars were yearly killed for their skins in the Brazilian Amazon alone; the trade in jaguar skins decreased since 1973 when the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species was enacted. Interview surveys with 533 people in the northwestern Bolivian Amazon revealed that local people killed jaguars out of fear, in retaliation, and for trade. Between August 2016 and August 2019, jaguar skins and body parts were seen for sale in tourist markets in the Peruvian cities of Lima, Iquitos and Pucallpa. Human-wildlife conflict, opportunistic hunting and hunting for trade in domestic markets are key drivers for killing jaguars in Belize and Guatemala. Seizure reports indicate that at least 857 jaguars were involved in trade between 2012 and 2018, including 482 individuals in Bolivia alone; 31 jaguars were seized in China. Between 2014 and early 2019, 760 jaguar fangs were seized that originated in Bolivia and were destined for China. Undercover investigations revealed that the smuggling of jaguar body parts is run by Chinese residents in Bolivia.",
"title": "Threats"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "The jaguar is listed on CITES Appendix I, which means that all international commercial trade in jaguars or their body parts is prohibited. Hunting jaguars is prohibited in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, French Guiana, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname, the United States, and Venezuela. Hunting jaguars is restricted in Guatemala and Peru. In Ecuador, hunting jaguars is prohibited, and it is classified as threatened with extinction. In Guyana, it is protected as an endangered species, and hunting it is illegal.",
"title": "Conservation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "In 1986, the Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary was established in Belize as the world's first protected area for jaguar conservation.",
"title": "Conservation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "In 1999, field scientists from 18 jaguar range countries determined the most important areas for long-term jaguar conservation based on the status of jaguar population units, stability of prey base and quality of habitat. These areas, called \"Jaguar Conservation Units\" (JCUs), are large enough for at least 50 breeding individuals and range in size from 566 to 67,598 km (219 to 26,100 sq mi); 51 JCUs were designated in 36 geographic regions including:",
"title": "Conservation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Optimal routes of travel between core jaguar population units were identified across its range in 2010 to implement wildlife corridors that connect JCUs. These corridors represent areas with the shortest distance between jaguar breeding populations, require the least possible energy input of dispersing individuals and pose a low mortality risk. They cover an area of 2,600,000 km (1,000,000 sq mi) and range in length from 3 to 1,102 km (1.9 to 684.8 mi) in Mexico and Central America and from 489.14 to 1,607 km (303.94 to 998.54 mi) in South America. Cooperation with local landowners and municipal, state, or federal agencies is essential to maintain connected populations and prevent fragmentation in both JCUs and corridors. Seven of 13 corridors in Mexico are functioning with a width of at least 14.25 km (8.85 mi) and a length of no more than 320 km (200 mi). The other corridors may hamper passage, as they are narrower and longer.",
"title": "Conservation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "In August 2012, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service set aside 3,392.20 km (838,232 acres) in Arizona and New Mexico for the protection of the jaguar. The Jaguar Recovery Plan was published in April 2019, in which Interstate 10 is considered to form the northern boundary of the Jaguar Recovery Unit in Arizona and New Mexico.",
"title": "Conservation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "In Mexico, a national conservation strategy was developed from 2005 on and published in 2016. The Mexican jaguar population increased from an estimated 4,000 individuals in 2010 to about 4,800 individuals in 2018. This increase is seen as a positive effect of conservation measures that were implemented in cooperation with governmental and non-governmental institutions and landowners.",
"title": "Conservation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "An evaluation of JCUs from Mexico to Argentina revealed that they overlap with high-quality habitats of about 1,500 mammals to varying degrees. Since co-occurring mammals benefit from the JCU approach, the jaguar has been called an umbrella species. Central American JCUs overlap with the habitat of 187 of 304 regional endemic amphibian and reptile species, of which 19 amphibians occur only in the jaguar range.",
"title": "Conservation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "In setting up protected reserves, efforts generally also have to be focused on the surrounding areas, as jaguars are unlikely to confine themselves to the bounds of a reservation, especially if the population is increasing in size. Human attitudes in the areas surrounding reserves and laws and regulations to prevent poaching are essential to make conservation areas effective.",
"title": "Conservation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "To estimate population sizes within specific areas and to keep track of individual jaguars, camera trapping and wildlife tracking telemetry are widely used, and feces are sought out with the help of detection dogs to study jaguar health and diet.",
"title": "Conservation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Current conservation efforts often focus on educating ranch owners and promoting ecotourism. Ecotourism setups are being used to generate public interest in charismatic animals such as the jaguar while at the same time generating revenue that can be used in conservation efforts. A key concern in jaguar ecotourism is the considerable habitat space the species requires. If ecotourism is used to aid in jaguar conservation, some considerations need to be made as to how existing ecosystems will be kept intact, or how new ecosystems will be put into place that are large enough to support a growing jaguar population.",
"title": "Conservation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Conservationists and professionals in Mexico and the United States have established the 56,000 acres (23,000 ha) Northern Jaguar Reserve in northern Mexico. Advocacy for reintroduction of the jaguar to its former range in Arizona and New Mexico have been supported by documentation of natural migrations by individual jaguars into the southern reaches of both states, the recency of extirpation from those regions by human action, and supportive arguments pertaining to biodiversity, ecological, human, and practical considerations.",
"title": "Conservation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "In the pre-Columbian Americas, the jaguar was a symbol of power and strength. In the Andes, a jaguar cult disseminated by the early Chavín culture became accepted over most of today's Peru by 900 BC. The later Moche culture in northern Peru used the jaguar as a symbol of power in many of their ceramics. In the Muisca religion in Altiplano Cundiboyacense, the jaguar was considered a sacred animal, and people dressed in jaguar skins during religious rituals. The skins were traded with peoples in the nearby Orinoquía Region. The name of the Muisca ruler Nemequene was derived from the Chibcha words nymy and quyne, meaning \"force of the jaguar\".",
"title": "In culture and mythology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Sculptures with \"Olmec were-jaguar\" motifs were found on the Yucatán Peninsula in Veracruz and Tabasco; they show stylized jaguars with half-human faces. In the later Maya civilization, the jaguar was believed to facilitate communication between the living and the dead and to protect the royal household. The Maya saw these powerful felines as their companions in the spiritual world, and several Maya rulers bore names that incorporated the Mayan word for jaguar b'alam in many of the Mayan languages. Balam remains a common Maya surname, and it is also the name of Chilam Balam, a legendary author to whom are attributed 17th and 18th-centuries Maya miscellanies preserving much important knowledge. Remains of jaguar bones were discovered in a burial site in Guatemala, which indicates that Mayans may have kept jaguars as pets.",
"title": "In culture and mythology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "The Aztec civilization shared this image of the jaguar as the representative of the ruler and as a warrior. The Aztecs formed an elite warrior class known as the Jaguar warrior. In Aztec mythology, the jaguar was considered to be the totem animal of the powerful deities Tezcatlipoca and Tepeyollotl.",
"title": "In culture and mythology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "A conch shell gorget depicting a jaguar was found in a burial mound in Benton County, Missouri. The gorget shows evenly-engraved lines and measures 104 mm × 98 mm (4.1 in × 3.9 in). Rock drawings made by the Hopi, Anasazi and Pueblo all over the desert and chaparral regions of the American Southwest show an explicitly spotted cat, presumably a jaguar, as it is drawn much larger than an ocelot.",
"title": "In culture and mythology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The jaguar is also used as a symbol in contemporary culture. It is the national animal of Guyana and is featured in its coat of arms. The flag of the Department of Amazonas features a black jaguar silhouette leaping towards a hunter. The crest of the Argentine Rugby Union features a jaguar.",
"title": "In culture and mythology"
}
]
| The jaguar is a large cat species and the only living member of the genus Panthera native to the Americas. With a body length of up to 1.85 m and a weight of up to 158 kg (348 lb), it is the biggest cat species in the Americas and the third largest in the world. Its distinctively marked coat features pale yellow to tan colored fur covered by spots that transition to rosettes on the sides, although a melanistic black coat appears in some individuals. The jaguar's powerful bite allows it to pierce the carapaces of turtles and tortoises, and to employ an unusual killing method: it bites directly through the skull of mammalian prey between the ears to deliver a fatal blow to the brain. The modern jaguar's ancestors probably entered the Americas from Eurasia during the Early Pleistocene via the land bridge that once spanned the Bering Strait. Today, the jaguar's range extends from the Southwestern United States across Mexico and much of Central America, the Amazon rainforest and south to Paraguay and northern Argentina. It inhabits a variety of forested and open terrains, but its preferred habitat is tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forest, wetlands and wooded regions. It is adept at swimming and is largely a solitary, opportunistic, stalk-and-ambush apex predator. As a keystone species, it plays an important role in stabilizing ecosystems and in regulating prey populations. The jaguar is threatened by habitat loss, habitat fragmentation, poaching for trade with its body parts and killings in human–wildlife conflict situations, particularly with ranchers in Central and South America. It has been listed as Near Threatened on the IUCN Red List since 2002. The wild population is thought to have declined since the late 1990s. Priority areas for jaguar conservation comprise 51 Jaguar Conservation Units (JCUs), defined as large areas inhabited by at least 50 breeding jaguars. The JCUs are located in 36 geographic regions ranging from Mexico to Argentina. The jaguar has featured prominently in the mythology of indigenous peoples of the Americas, including those of the Aztec and Maya civilizations. | 2001-10-16T12:27:02Z | 2023-12-27T09:22:28Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaguar |
16,218 | Jeffrey Dahmer | Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer (/ˈdɑːmər/; May 21, 1960 – November 28, 1994), also known as the Milwaukee Cannibal or the Milwaukee Monster, was an American serial killer and sex offender who killed and dismembered seventeen males between 1978 and 1991. Many of his later murders involved necrophilia, cannibalism, and the permanent preservation of body parts—typically all or part of the skeleton.
Although he was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD), schizotypal personality disorder (StPD), and a psychotic disorder, Dahmer was found to be legally sane at his trial. He was convicted of fifteen of the sixteen homicides he had committed in Wisconsin and was sentenced to fifteen terms of life imprisonment on February 17, 1992. Dahmer was later sentenced to a sixteenth term of life imprisonment for an additional homicide committed in Ohio in 1978.
On November 28, 1994, Dahmer was beaten to death by Christopher Scarver, a fellow inmate at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin.
Jeffrey Dahmer was born on May 21, 1960, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the first of two sons to Lionel Herbert Dahmer, a Marquette University chemistry student and later a research chemist, and Joyce Annette Dahmer (née Flint), a teletype machine instructor. Lionel was of German and Welsh ancestry, and Joyce was of Norwegian and Irish ancestry.
Some sources report Dahmer was deprived of attention as an infant. Other sources, however, suggest that Dahmer was generally doted upon as an infant and toddler by both parents, although his mother was known to be tense, greedy for both attention and pity, and argumentative with her husband and their neighbors.
As Dahmer entered first grade, Lionel's studies kept him away from home much of the time. When he was home, his wife—a hypochondriac who suffered from depression—demanded constant attention and spent an increasing amount of time in bed. On one occasion, she attempted suicide using Equanil. Consequently, neither parent devoted much time to their son, who later recollected that, from an early age, he felt "unsure of the solidity of the family", recalling extreme tension and numerous arguments between his parents during his early years.
Dahmer had been an "energetic and happy child" but became notably subdued after double hernia surgery shortly before his fourth birthday. At elementary school, Dahmer was regarded as quiet and timid; one teacher recollected she detected early signs of abandonment due to his father's absence and mother's illnesses, the symptoms of which increased when she became pregnant with her second child. In elementary school, Dahmer had a small number of friends.
In October 1966, the family moved to Doylestown, Ohio. When Joyce gave birth in December, Dahmer was allowed to choose the name of his new baby brother; he chose the name David. The same year, Lionel earned his degree and started work as an analytical chemist in nearby Akron, Ohio.
From an early age, Dahmer manifested an interest in dead animals. His fascination with dead animals may have begun when, at the age of four, he saw his father removing animal bones from beneath the family home. According to Lionel, Dahmer was "oddly thrilled" by the sound the bones made, and became preoccupied with animal bones, which he initially called his "fiddlesticks". He occasionally searched beneath and around the family home for additional bones, and explored the bodies of live animals to discover where their bones were located.
In May 1968, the family moved to Bath Township, Summit County, Ohio. This address was their third in two years, and the Dahmers' sixth address since marriage. The home stood in one and a half acres of woodland, with a small hut only a short walk from the house where Dahmer began collecting large insects and the skeletons of small animals, such as chipmunks and squirrels. Some of these remains were preserved in jars of formaldehyde and stowed within the hut.
Two years later, during a chicken dinner, Dahmer asked Lionel what would happen if the chicken bones were placed in bleach. Lionel, pleased by what he believed to be his son's scientific curiosity, demonstrated how to safely bleach and preserve animal bones. Dahmer incorporated these preserving techniques into his bone collecting. He also began collecting dead animals—including roadkill—which he would dissect and bury beside the hut, with the skulls occasionally placed atop makeshift crosses.
According to one friend, Dahmer explained to him that he was curious as to how animals "fit together". In one instance in 1975, Dahmer decapitated the carcass of a dog before nailing the body to a tree and impaling the skull upon a stick in the woodland behind his house. As a "prank", he later invited a friend to view the display, claiming he had discovered the remains by chance. The same year Lionel taught his son how to preserve animal bones, Joyce began increasing her daily consumption of Equanil, laxatives and sleeping pills, further minimizing her tangible contact with her husband and children.
From his freshman year at Revere High School, Dahmer was seen as an outcast. By age 14, he had begun drinking beer and hard alcohol in the daylight hours, frequently concealing his liquor inside the jacket he wore to school. Dahmer mentioned to one classmate who inquired why he was drinking Scotch in a morning history class that the alcohol he consumed was "my medicine". Although largely uncommunicative, in his freshman year Dahmer was seen by staff as polite and highly intelligent but with average grades. He was a competitive tennis player and played briefly in the high school band.
When he reached puberty, Dahmer discovered he was gay; he did not tell his parents. In his early teens, he had a brief relationship with another teenage boy, although they never had intercourse. By Dahmer's admission, he began fantasizing about dominating and controlling a completely submissive male partner in his early to mid-teens, and his masturbatory fantasies gradually evolved to his focusing on chests and torsos. These fantasies gradually became intertwined with dissection. When he was about 16, Dahmer conceived a fantasy of rendering unconscious a particular male jogger he found attractive, and then making sexual use of his body. On one occasion, Dahmer concealed himself in bushes with a baseball bat to lie in wait for this man. However, the jogger did not pass by on that particular day. Dahmer later admitted this was his first attempt to attack and render an individual submissive to him.
Dahmer was seen by his high school peers as a class clown who often staged pranks, which became known as "Doing a Dahmer"; these included bleating and simulating epileptic seizures or cerebral palsy at school and local stores. Occasionally, Dahmer would perform these antics for money to purchase alcohol.
By 1977, Dahmer's grades had declined. His parents hired a private tutor, with limited success. The same year, in an attempt to save their marriage, his parents attended counseling sessions. They continued to quarrel frequently. When Lionel discovered Joyce had engaged in a brief affair in September 1977, they decided to divorce, telling their sons they wished to do so amicably. The process of their divorce soon became increasingly bitter and acrimonious, and Lionel moved out of the house in early 1978, temporarily residing in a motel on North Cleveland Massillon Road.
In May 1978, Dahmer graduated from high school. A few weeks before his graduation, one of his teachers observed Dahmer sitting close to the school parking lot, drinking several cans of beer. When the teacher threatened to report the matter, Dahmer informed him he was experiencing "a lot of problems" at home and that the school's guidance counselor was aware of them. That spring, Joyce–contrary to a court order and without informing Lionel–moved out of the family home with David to live with relatives in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Dahmer had just turned 18 and remained in the family home. Dahmer's parents' divorce was finalized on July 24, 1978. Joyce was awarded custody of her younger son and alimony payments.
Dahmer committed his first murder in 1978, three weeks after his graduation. On June 18, Dahmer picked up a hitchhiker named Steven Mark Hicks, who was almost 19. Dahmer lured Hicks to his house on the pretext of drinking. Hicks, who had been hitchhiking to a rock concert at Chippewa Lake Park, Ohio, agreed to accompany Dahmer to his house upon the promise of "a few beers" with Dahmer as he had the house to himself.
According to Dahmer, the sight of the bare-chested Hicks standing at the roadside stirred his sexual feelings, although when Hicks began talking about girls, he knew any sexual passes he made would be rebuffed. After several hours of talking, drinking and listening to music, Hicks "wanted to leave and I didn't want him to leave." Dahmer bludgeoned Hicks with a 10-pound (4.5 kg) dumbbell. He later stated he struck Hicks twice from behind with the dumbbell as Hicks sat upon a chair. When Hicks fell unconscious, Dahmer strangled him to death with the bar of the dumbbell, then stripped the clothes from Hicks' body before exploring his chest with his hands, then masturbating as he stood above the corpse. Hours later, Dahmer dragged the body to the basement.
The following day, Dahmer dissected Hicks' body in his basement. He later buried the remains in a shallow grave in his back yard. Several weeks later, he unearthed the remains and pared the flesh from the bones. He dissolved the flesh in acid before flushing the solution down the toilet; he crushed the bones with a sledgehammer and scattered them in the woodland behind the family home. Hicks' necklace and the knife used to dismember him were thrown from the West Bath Road bridge into the Cuyahoga River.
Six weeks after the murder of Hicks, Dahmer's father and his fiancée returned to his home, where they discovered Dahmer living alone. That August, Dahmer enrolled at Ohio State University (OSU), hoping to major in business. Dahmer's sole term at OSU was completely unproductive, largely because of his persistent alcohol abuse. He received failing grades in Introduction to Anthropology, Classical Civilizations, and Administrative Science. The only course Dahmer was successful at was Riflery, having received a B− grade. His overall GPA was 0.45/4.0. On one occasion, Lionel paid a surprise visit to his son, only to find his room strewn with empty liquor bottles. Despite his father having paid in advance for the second term, Dahmer dropped out of OSU after just three months.
In January 1979, on his father's urging, Dahmer enlisted in the United States Army. He underwent basic training at Fort McClellan in Anniston, Alabama, before training as a medical specialist at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. He was occasionally reprimanded for intoxication while stationed at Fort Sam Houston. On one occasion, an instance of insubordination resulted in his entire platoon being punished, earning Dahmer a severe beating from his fellow recruits.
On July 13, 1979, Dahmer was deployed to Baumholder, West Germany, where he served as a combat medic in the 2nd Battalion, 68th Armored Regiment, 8th Infantry Division. According to published reports, in Dahmer's first year of service, he was an "average or slightly above average" soldier.
Owing to Dahmer's alcohol abuse, his performance deteriorated and, in March 1981, he was deemed unsuitable for military service and was later discharged from the Army. He received an honorable discharge, as his superiors did not believe that any problems Dahmer had in the Army would be applicable to civilian life.
On March 24, 1981, Dahmer was sent to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, for debriefing and provided with a plane ticket to travel anywhere in the country. Dahmer later told police he felt he could not return home to face his father, so he opted to travel to Miami Beach, Florida, both because he was "tired of the cold" and in an attempt to live by his own means. In Florida, Dahmer found a job at a delicatessen and rented a room in a nearby motel. He spent most of his salary on alcohol and was soon evicted from the motel for non-payment. Dahmer initially spent his evenings on the beach as he continued to work at the sandwich shop until phoning his father and asking to return to Ohio in September of the same year.
After his return to Ohio, Dahmer initially lived with his father and stepmother and insisted on being delegated numerous chores to occupy his time while he looked for work. He continued to drink heavily, and two weeks after his return, was arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct. He was fined $60 and given a suspended 10-day jail sentence. Dahmer's father tried unsuccessfully to wean his son off alcohol. In December 1981, he and Dahmer's stepmother sent him to live with his grandmother in West Allis, Wisconsin. Dahmer's grandmother was the only family member to whom Dahmer displayed any affection. They hoped that her influence, plus the change of location, might persuade Dahmer to quit drinking, find a job, and live responsibly.
Initially, Dahmer's living arrangements with his grandmother were harmonious: he accompanied her to church, willingly undertook chores, actively sought work and abided by most of her house rules (although he continued to drink and smoke). In early 1982, he found employment as a phlebotomist at the Milwaukee Blood Plasma Center. He held this job for a total of ten months before being laid off. Dahmer remained unemployed for over two years, during which he lived upon whatever money his grandmother gave him.
Shortly before losing his job, Dahmer was arrested for indecent exposure. On August 8, 1982, at Wisconsin State Fair Park, he was observed exposing himself "on the south side of the Coliseum in which 25 people were present including women and children." For this incident, he was convicted and fined $50 plus court costs.
In January 1985, Dahmer was hired as a mixer at the Milwaukee Ambrosia Chocolate Factory, where he worked from 11 p.m to 7 a.m. six nights per week, with Saturday evenings off. Shortly after he found this job, an incident occurred in which Dahmer was propositioned by another man while reading in the West Allis Public Library. The stranger threw Dahmer a note offering to perform fellatio upon him. Although Dahmer did not respond to this proposition, the incident stirred in his mind the fantasies of control and dominance he had developed as a teenager, and he began to familiarize himself with Milwaukee's gay bars, gay bathhouses, and bookstores. He also stole a male mannequin from a store, which he briefly used for sexual stimulation, until his grandmother discovered the item stowed in a closet and demanded that he discard it.
By late 1985, Dahmer had begun to regularly frequent the bathhouses, which he later described as being "relaxing places", but during his sexual encounters, he became frustrated at his partners' moving during the act. Following his arrest, he stated: "I trained myself to view people as objects of pleasure instead of [as] people". For this reason, beginning in June 1986, he administered sleeping pills to his partners, giving them liquor laced with sedatives. He then waited for his partner to fall asleep before performing various sexual acts. To maintain an adequate supply of this medication, Dahmer informed doctors he worked nights and required the tablets to adjust to that schedule. After approximately 12 such instances, the bathhouses' administration revoked Dahmer's membership, and he began to use hotel rooms to continue this practice.
Shortly after his bathhouse memberships were revoked, Dahmer read a report in a newspaper regarding the upcoming funeral of an 18-year-old male. He conceived the idea of stealing the freshly interred corpse and taking it home. According to Dahmer, he attempted to dig up the coffin from the ground, but found the soil too hard and abandoned the plan.
On September 8, 1986, Dahmer was arrested upon a charge of lewd and lascivious behavior for masturbating in the presence of two 12-year-old boys as he stood close to the Kinnickinnic River. He initially claimed he had merely been urinating, unaware that there were witnesses, but soon admitted the offense. The charge was changed to disorderly conduct and, on March 10, 1987, Dahmer was sentenced to one year of probation, with additional instructions to undergo counseling.
On November 20, 1987, Dahmer, at the time residing with his grandmother in West Allis, encountered a 25-year-old man from Ontonagon, Michigan, named Steven Tuomi at a bar and persuaded him to return to the Ambassador Hotel in Milwaukee, where Dahmer had rented a room for the evening. According to Dahmer, he had no intention of killing Tuomi, but intended to simply drug him and lie beside him as he explored his body. The following morning, Dahmer awoke to find Tuomi lying beneath him on the bed, his chest "crushed in" and "black and blue" with bruises. Blood was seeping from the corner of his mouth, and Dahmer's fists and one forearm were extensively bruised. Dahmer later said he had no memory of having killed Tuomi, and that he "could not believe this had happened".
Dahmer purchased a large suitcase, in which he transported Tuomi's body to his grandmother's residence. One week later, he severed the head, arms, and legs, then filleted the bones from the body before cutting the flesh into pieces small enough to handle. Dahmer placed the flesh inside plastic garbage bags. He wrapped the bones inside a sheet and pounded them into splinters with a sledgehammer. The dismemberment process took Dahmer approximately two hours. He disposed of all of Tuomi's remains, excluding the head, in the trash.
For two weeks following Tuomi's killing, Dahmer retained Tuomi's head wrapped in a blanket. After two weeks, Dahmer boiled the head in a mixture of Soilax (an alkali-based industrial detergent) and bleach in an effort to retain the skull, which he then used as stimulus for masturbation. Eventually, the skull became too brittle by this bleaching process, so Dahmer pulverized and disposed of it.
According to Dahmer, Tuomi's murder was a pivotal incident after which he did not try to control his compulsions. He began to actively seek victims, most of whom he encountered in or around gay bars and would typically lure them to his grandmother's home. He would drug his victim with triazolam or temazepam before or shortly after engaging in sexual activity with them. Once his victim was unconscious, he strangled them to death.
Two months after the Tuomi killing, Dahmer encountered a 14-year-old Native American prostitute, James Doxtator. Dahmer lured him to his grandmother's residence with an offer of $50 to pose for nude pictures. They engaged in sexual activity before Dahmer drugged Doxtator and strangled him on the floor of the cellar. Dahmer left the body in the cellar for one week before dismembering it in much the same manner as he had with Tuomi. He placed all of Doxtator's remains (excluding the skull) in the trash. The skull was boiled and cleansed in bleach before Dahmer found that it, too, had been rendered brittle by the process. He pulverized the skull two weeks later.
On March 24, 1988, Dahmer met a 22-year-old bisexual man, Richard Guerrero, outside a gay bar called the Phoenix. Dahmer lured Guerrero to his grandmother's residence, offering him $50 to spend the night with him. He drugged Guerrero with sleeping pills, strangled him with a leather strap, and fellated the corpse. Dahmer dismembered Guerrero's body within 24 hours, again disposing of the remains in the trash and retaining the skull before pulverizing it several months later.
On April 23, Dahmer lured Ronald Flowers Jr. to his house; however, after giving Flowers a drugged coffee, both he and Flowers heard Dahmer's grandmother call, "Is that you, Jeff?" Although Dahmer replied in a manner that led his grandmother to believe he was alone, she observed that he was not alone. Because of this, Dahmer was unable to kill Flowers, instead waiting until he had become unconscious before taking him to the County General Hospital.
In September 1988, Dahmer's grandmother asked him to move out, largely because of his drinking, his habit of bringing young men to her house late at night and the foul smells emanating from the basement and the garage. Dahmer found a one-bedroom apartment at 808 North 24th Street and moved into his new residence on September 25. Two days later, he was arrested for drugging and sexually fondling a 13-year-old boy whom he had lured to his home on the pretext of posing nude for photographs.
Dahmer's father hired an attorney named Gerald Boyle to defend his son. At Boyle's request, Dahmer underwent a series of psychological evaluations prior to his court hearings. The evaluations found that Dahmer harbored deep feelings of alienation. A second evaluation two months later revealed Dahmer to be an impulsive individual, suspicious of others, and dismayed by his lack of accomplishments in life. His probation officer also referenced a 1987 diagnosis of Dahmer suffering from a schizoid personality disorder for presentation to the court.
On January 30, 1989, Dahmer pleaded guilty to the charges of second-degree sexual assault and of enticing a child for immoral purposes. Sentencing was suspended until May. On March 20, Dahmer commenced a ten-day Easter absence from work, during which he moved back into his grandmother's home.
Two months after his conviction and two months prior to his sentencing, Dahmer murdered his fifth victim, a 24-year-old mixed-race aspiring model, Anthony Sears, whom he met at a gay bar on March 25, 1989. According to Dahmer, on this particular occasion he was not looking to commit a crime; however, shortly before closing time that evening, Sears "just started talking to me". Dahmer lured Sears to his grandmother's home, where the pair engaged in oral sex before Dahmer drugged and strangled Sears.
The following morning, Dahmer placed the corpse in his grandmother's bathtub, where he decapitated the body before attempting to flay the corpse. He stripped the flesh from the body and pulverized the bones, which he disposed of in the trash. According to Dahmer, he found Sears "exceptionally attractive", and Sears was the first victim from whom he permanently retained any body parts: he preserved Sears' head and genitalia in acetone and stored them in a wooden box, which he later placed in his work locker. When he moved to a new address the following year, he took the remains there.
On May 23, 1989, Dahmer was sentenced to five years' probation and one year in the House of Correction, with work release permitted so he could keep his job. He was also required to register as a sex offender. Two months before his scheduled release, Dahmer was paroled from this regimen. His five years' probation imposed in 1989 began at this point. Dahmer temporarily moved back to his grandmother's home in West Allis.
On May 14, 1990, Dahmer moved out of his grandmother's house and into 924 North 25th Street, Apartment 213, taking Sears' mummified head and genitals with him. Although located in a high-crime area, Dahmer's new apartment was close to his workplace, was furnished, and at $300 per month inclusive of all bills excluding electricity, was economical. Within one week of his moving to this address, Dahmer killed his sixth victim, Raymond Smith. Smith was a 32-year-old prostitute whom Dahmer lured to his apartment with the promise of $50 for sex. Inside the apartment, he gave Smith a drink laced with seven sleeping pills, then manually strangled him.
The following day, Dahmer purchased a Polaroid camera, with which he took several pictures of Smith's body in suggestive positions before dismembering him in the bathroom. He boiled the legs, arms, and pelvis in a steel kettle with Soilax, which allowed him to rinse the bones in his sink. Dahmer dissolved the remainder of Smith's skeleton—excluding the skull—in a container filled with acid. He later spray-painted Smith's skull, which he placed alongside the skull of Sears upon a black towel inside a filing cabinet.
Approximately one week after the murder of Smith, on or about May 27, Dahmer lured another young man to his apartment. On this occasion, Dahmer accidentally consumed the drink laden with sedatives intended for his guest. When he awoke the following day, he discovered the man had stolen several items of clothing, $300 and a watch. Dahmer never reported this incident to the police, although on May 29, he divulged to his probation officer that he had been robbed.
In June 1990, Dahmer lured a 27-year-old acquaintance, Edward Smith, to his apartment, where he drugged and strangled him. On this occasion, rather than immediately acidifying the skeleton or repeating previous processes of bleaching, which had rendered previous victims' skulls brittle, Dahmer placed Smith's skeleton in his freezer for several months in the hope it would not retain moisture. Freezing the skeleton did not remove moisture, and the skeleton of this victim was acidified several months later. Dahmer accidentally destroyed the skull when he placed it in the oven to dry—a process that caused the skull to explode. Dahmer later informed police he had felt "rotten" about Smith's murder, as he had been unable to retain any parts of his body.
It was my way of remembering their appearance, their physical beauty. I also wanted to keep ... if I couldn't keep them there with me whole, I at least could keep their skeletons.
Jeffrey Dahmer, recollecting his motivations for both photographing his victims, and retaining sections of their skeletal structure. February 1993.
Less than three months after the murder of Edward Smith, Dahmer encountered a 22-year-old Chicago native named Ernest Miller outside a bookstore on the corner of North 27th Street. Miller agreed to accompany Dahmer to his apartment for $50 and further agreed to allow him to listen to his heart and stomach. When Dahmer attempted to perform oral sex upon Miller, he was informed, "That'll cost you extra", whereupon Dahmer gave Miller a drink laced with two sleeping pills.
On this occasion, Dahmer had only two sleeping pills to give his victim. Therefore, he killed Miller by slashing his carotid artery with the same knife he used to dissect his victims' bodies. Miller bled to death within minutes. Dahmer then posed the nude body for various suggestive Polaroid photographs before placing it in his bathtub for dismemberment. Dahmer repeatedly kissed and talked to the severed head while he dismembered the remainder of the body.
Dahmer wrapped Miller's heart, liver, biceps, and portions of flesh from the legs in plastic bags and placed them in the freezer for later consumption. He boiled the remaining flesh and organs into a "jelly-like substance" using Soilax, which enabled him to rinse the flesh off the skeleton, which he intended to retain. To preserve the skeleton, Dahmer placed the bones in a light bleach solution for 24 hours before allowing them to dry upon a cloth for one week. The severed head was initially placed in the refrigerator before being stripped of flesh, then painted and coated with enamel.
Three weeks after the murder of Miller, on September 24, Dahmer encountered a 22-year-old father of two named David Thomas at the Grand Avenue Mall. He persuaded him to return to his apartment for a few drinks, with additional money on offer if he would pose for photographs. In his statement to police after his arrest, Dahmer said that, after giving Thomas a drink laden with sedatives, he did not feel attracted to him, but was afraid to allow him to awaken, fearing that he would be angry over having been drugged. Therefore, he strangled him and dismembered the body—intentionally retaining no body parts whatsoever. He photographed the dismemberment process and retained these photographs, which later aided in Thomas's identification.
Following the murder of Thomas, Dahmer did not kill anyone for almost five months, although on a minimum of five occasions between October 1990 and February 1991, he unsuccessfully attempted to lure men to his apartment. He regularly complained of feelings of both anxiety and depression to his probation officer throughout 1990, with frequent references to his sexuality, his solitary lifestyle, financial difficulties, and—shortly before Thanksgiving—his apprehension regarding meeting and facing his father and younger brother. On several occasions, Dahmer also referred to harboring suicidal thoughts.
In February 1991, Dahmer observed a 17-year-old named Curtis Straughter standing at a bus stop near Marquette University. According to Dahmer, he lured Straughter into his apartment with an offer of money for posing for nude photos, with the added incentive of sexual intercourse. Dahmer drugged Straughter, cuffed his hands behind his back, then strangled him to death with a leather strap. He then dismembered Straughter, retaining his skull, hands, and genitals and photographing each stage of the dismemberment process.
Less than two months later, on April 7, Dahmer encountered a 19-year-old named Errol Lindsey walking to get a key cut. Dahmer lured Lindsey to his apartment where he drugged him, then drilled a hole in his skull through which he injected hydrochloric acid with a baster. According to Dahmer, Lindsey awoke after this experiment (which Dahmer had conceived in the hope of inducing a permanent, unresistant, submissive state), saying: "I have a headache. What time is it?" In response to this, Dahmer again drugged Lindsey, then strangled him. He decapitated Lindsey and retained his skull. He then flayed Lindsey's body, placing the skin in a solution of cold water and salt for several weeks in the hope of permanently retaining it. Reluctantly, he disposed of Lindsey's skin when he noted it had become too frayed and brittle.
By 1991, fellow residents of the Oxford Apartments had repeatedly complained to the building's manager, Sopa Princewill, of the foul smells emanating from Apartment 213, in addition to the sounds of falling objects and the occasional sound of a chainsaw. Princewill contacted Dahmer in response to these complaints on several occasions, although he initially excused the odors emanating from his apartment as being caused by his freezer breaking, causing the contents to become "spoiled". On later occasions, he informed Princewill that the reason for the resurgence of the odor was that several of his tropical fish had recently died, and that he would take care of the matter.
On May 24, 1991, Dahmer encountered 31-year-old aspiring model Tony Hughes at a nightclub. He was lured to Dahmer's apartment with an offer of money to pose for photographs. Hughes was drugged into unconsciousness before Dahmer injected hydrochloric acid into his skull in an effort to disable his will and render him submissive, although on this occasion, the drilling and injection proved fatal.
On the afternoon of May 26, 1991, Dahmer encountered a 14-year-old Lao teenager, Konerak Sinthasomphone, on Wisconsin Avenue. Unknown to Dahmer, Sinthasomphone was the younger brother of the boy he had molested in 1988. Dahmer offered Sinthasomphone money to accompany him to his apartment to pose for Polaroid pictures. According to Dahmer, Sinthasomphone was initially reluctant to the proposal, before changing his mind and accompanying him to his apartment, where he posed for two pictures in his underwear before Dahmer drugged him into unconsciousness and performed oral sex on him. Before Sinthasomphone fell unconscious, Dahmer led the boy into his bedroom, where the body of Tony Hughes, whom Dahmer had killed three days earlier, lay naked on the floor. According to Dahmer, he "believed [that Sinthasomphone] saw this body" yet did not react to seeing the bloated corpse—likely because of the effects of the sleeping pills he had ingested.
On this occasion, Dahmer drilled a single narrow hole into the crown of Sinthasomphone's skull, through which he injected hydrochloric acid into the frontal lobe. Dahmer then drank several beers while lying alongside Sinthasomphone before briefly falling asleep, then leaving his apartment to drink at a bar and purchase more alcohol.
In the early morning hours of May 27, Dahmer returned toward his apartment to discover Sinthasomphone sitting naked on the corner of 25th and State, talking in Lao, with three distressed young women standing near him. Dahmer approached the women and told them that Sinthasomphone (whom he referred to by the alias John Hmong) was his friend, and attempted to lead him to his apartment by the arm. The three women dissuaded Dahmer, explaining they had phoned 9-1-1.
Upon the arrival of two Milwaukee police officers, John Balcerzak and Joseph Gabrish, Dahmer's demeanor relaxed: he told the officers that Sinthasomphone was his 19-year-old boyfriend, that he had drunk too much following a quarrel, and that he frequently behaved in this manner when intoxicated. Dahmer added his lover had consumed Jack Daniel's whiskey that evening.
The three women were exasperated, and when one of the trio attempted to indicate to one of the officers—both of whom had observed no injuries beyond a scrape to Sinthasomphone's knee and believed him to be intoxicated—that Sinthasomphone had blood upon his testicles, was bleeding from his rectum and that he had seemingly struggled against Dahmer's attempts to walk him to his apartment prior to their arrival, the officer harshly informed her to "butt out", "shut the hell up" and to not interfere.
Shortly after the arrival of the Milwaukee police officers, three members of the Milwaukee Fire Department arrived at the scene. These individuals also examined Sinthasomphone for injuries and provided a yellow blanket for the police officers to cover Sinthasomphone. One of the three believed Sinthasomphone needed treatment, but the police officers directed the fire department personnel to leave. Shortly thereafter, officer Richard Porubcan arrived at the scene. He and Gabrish—followed by Balcerzak—escorted Dahmer and Sinthasomphone to Dahmer's apartment as Dahmer repeatedly commented on the general crime in the neighborhood and of his appreciation of the police.
Inside his apartment and in an effort to verify his claim that he and Sinthasomphone were lovers, Dahmer showed the officers the two semi-nude Polaroid pictures he had taken of Sinthasomphone the previous evening. Though Balcerzak said he smelled nothing unusual, Gabrish later stated he noted a strange scent reminiscent of excrement inside the apartment. This odor emanated from the decomposing body of Hughes. Dahmer stated that to investigate this odor, one officer simply "peeked his head around the bedroom, but really didn't take a good look." The officers then left, with a departing remark that Dahmer "take good care" of Sinthasomphone. This incident was listed by the officers as a "domestic dispute."
Upon the departure of the three officers from his apartment, Dahmer again injected hydrochloric acid into Sinthasomphone's brain. This second injection proved fatal. The following day, May 28, Dahmer took a day's leave from work to devote himself to the dismemberment of the bodies of Sinthasomphone and Hughes. He retained both victims' skulls.
On June 30, Dahmer traveled to Chicago, where he encountered a 20-year-old named Matt Turner at a bus station. Turner accepted Dahmer's offer to travel to Milwaukee for a professional photo shoot. At the apartment, Dahmer drugged, strangled and dismembered Turner and placed his head and internal organs in separate plastic bags in the freezer. Turner was not reported missing. Five days later, on July 5, Dahmer lured 23-year-old Jeremiah Weinberger from a Chicago bar to his apartment on the promise of spending the weekend with him. He drugged Weinberger and twice injected boiling water through his skull, sending him into a coma from which he died two days later.
On July 15, Dahmer encountered 24-year-old Oliver Lacy at the corner of 27th and Kilbourn. Lacy agreed to Dahmer's ruse of posing nude for photographs and accompanied him to his apartment, where the pair engaged in tentative sexual activity before Dahmer drugged Lacy. On this occasion, Dahmer intended to prolong the time he spent with Lacy while alive. After unsuccessfully attempting to render Lacy unconscious with chloroform, he phoned his workplace to request a day's absence; this was granted, although the next day, he was suspended.
After strangling Lacy, Dahmer had sex with the corpse before dismembering him. He placed Lacy's head and heart in the refrigerator and his skeleton in the freezer. Four days later, on July 19, Dahmer received word that he was dismissed. Upon receipt of this news, Dahmer lured 25-year-old Joseph Bradehoft to his apartment. Bradehoft was strangled and left lying on Dahmer's bed covered with a sheet for two days. On July 21, Dahmer removed the sheet to find the head covered in maggots. He decapitated the body, cleaned the head and placed it in the refrigerator. He later acidified Bradehoft's torso, along with those of two other victims killed within the previous month.
On July 22, 1991, Dahmer approached three men with an offer of $100 to accompany him to his apartment to pose for nude photographs, drink beer and simply keep him company. One of the trio, 32-year-old Tracy Edwards, agreed to accompany him to his apartment. Upon entering Dahmer's apartment, Edwards noted a foul odor and several boxes of hydrochloric acid on the floor, which Dahmer claimed to use for cleaning bricks. After some minor conversation, Edwards responded to Dahmer's request to turn his head and view his tropical fish, whereupon Dahmer placed a handcuff upon his wrist. When Edwards asked, "What's happening?" Dahmer unsuccessfully attempted to cuff his wrists together, then told Edwards to accompany him to the bedroom to pose for nude pictures. While inside the bedroom, Edwards noted nude male posters on the wall and that a videotape of The Exorcist III was playing. He also noted a blue 57-gallon drum in the corner, from which a strong odor emanated.
Dahmer then brandished a knife and informed Edwards he intended to take nude pictures of him. In an attempt to appease Dahmer, Edwards unbuttoned his shirt, saying he would allow him to do so if he would remove the handcuffs and put the knife away. In response to this promise, Dahmer simply turned his attention towards the TV. Edwards observed Dahmer rocking back and forth and chanting before turning his attention back to him. He placed his head on Edwards' chest, listened to his heartbeat and, with the knife pressed against his intended victim, informed Edwards he intended to eat his heart.
In continuous attempts to prevent Dahmer from attacking him, Edwards repeated that he was Dahmer's friend and that he was not going to run away. Edwards had decided he was going to either jump from a window or run through the unlocked front door upon the next available opportunity. When Edwards next stated he needed to use the bathroom, he asked if they could sit with a beer in the living room, where there was air conditioning. Dahmer consented, and the pair walked to the living room when Edwards exited the bathroom. Inside the living room, Edwards waited until he observed Dahmer have a momentary lapse of concentration before requesting to use the bathroom again. When Edwards rose from the couch, he noted Dahmer was not holding the handcuffs, whereupon Edwards punched him in the face, knocking Dahmer off balance, and ran out the front door.
At 11:30 p.m. on July 22, Edwards flagged down two Milwaukee police officers, Robert Rauth and Rolf Mueller, at the corner of North 25th Street. The officers noted Edwards had a handcuff attached to his wrist, whereupon he explained to the officers that a "freak" had placed the handcuffs upon him and asked if the police could remove them. When the officers' handcuff keys failed to fit the brand of handcuffs, Edwards agreed to accompany the officers to the apartment where, Edwards stated, he had spent the previous five hours before escaping.
When the officers and Edwards arrived at Apartment 213, Dahmer invited the trio inside and acknowledged he had placed the handcuffs upon Edwards, although he offered no explanation as to why he had done so. At this point, Edwards divulged to the officers that Dahmer had also brandished a large knife upon him and that this had happened in the bedroom. Dahmer made no comment to this revelation, indicating to one of the officers, Mueller, that the key to the handcuffs was in his bedside dresser. As Mueller entered the bedroom, Dahmer attempted to pass Mueller to retrieve the key himself, whereupon the second officer present, Rauth, informed him to "back off".
In the bedroom, Mueller noted there was a large knife beneath the bed. He saw an open drawer which, upon closer inspection, contained scores of Polaroid pictures—many of which were of human bodies in various stages of dismemberment. Mueller noted the decor indicated they had been taken in the same apartment in which they were standing. Mueller walked into the living room to show them to his partner, uttering the words, "These are for real."
When Dahmer saw that Mueller was holding several of his Polaroids, he fought with the officers in an effort to resist arrest. The officers quickly overpowered him, cuffed his hands behind his back, and called a second squad car for backup. At this point, Mueller opened the refrigerator to reveal the freshly severed head of a black male on the bottom shelf. As Dahmer lay pinned on the floor beneath Rauth, he turned his head towards the officers and muttered the words: "For what I did I should be dead."
A more detailed search of the apartment, conducted by the Milwaukee police's Criminal Investigation Bureau, revealed a total of four severed heads in Dahmer's kitchen. A total of seven skulls—some painted, some bleached—were found in Dahmer's bedroom and inside a closet. Investigators discovered collected blood drippings upon a tray at the bottom of Dahmer's refrigerator, plus two human hearts and a portion of arm muscle, each wrapped inside plastic bags upon the shelves. In Dahmer's freezer, investigators discovered an entire torso, plus a bag of human organs and flesh stuck to the ice at the bottom.
Elsewhere in Apartment 213, investigators discovered two entire skeletons, a pair of severed hands, two severed and preserved penises, a mummified scalp and, in the 57-gallon drum, three further dismembered torsos dissolving in the acid solution. A total of 74 Polaroid pictures detailing the dismemberment of Dahmer's victims were found. In reference to the recovery of body parts and artifacts at 924 North 25th Street, the chief medical examiner later stated: "It was more like dismantling someone's museum than an actual crime scene."
Beginning in the early hours of July 23, 1991, Dahmer was questioned by Detective Patrick Kennedy as to the murders he had committed and the evidence found at his apartment. Over the following two weeks, Kennedy and, later, Detective Dennis Murphy conducted numerous interviews with Dahmer which, when combined, totaled over 60 hours. Dahmer waived his right to have a lawyer present throughout his interrogations, adding he wished to confess all as he had "created this horror and it only makes sense I do everything to put an end to it." He readily admitted to having murdered sixteen young men in Wisconsin since 1987, with one further victim—Steven Hicks—killed in Ohio in 1978.
Most of Dahmer's victims had been rendered unconscious prior to their murder, although some had died as a result of having acid or boiling water injected into their brain. As he had no memory of the killing of his second victim, Steven Tuomi, he was unsure whether he was unconscious when beaten to death, although he did concede it was possible that his viewing the exposed chest of Tuomi while in a drunken stupor may have led him to unsuccessfully attempt to tear Tuomi's heart from his chest. Almost all the murders Dahmer committed after moving into the Oxford Apartments had involved a ritual of posing the victims' bodies in suggestive positions—typically with the chest thrust outwards—prior to dismemberment.
Dahmer readily admitted to engaging in necrophilia with several of his victims' bodies, including performing sexual acts with their viscera as he dismembered their bodies in his bathtub. Having noted that much of the blood pooled inside his victims' chest after death, Dahmer first removed their internal organs, then suspended the torso so the blood drained into his bathtub, before dicing any organs he did not wish to retain and paring the flesh from the body. The bones he wished to dispose of were pulverized or acidified, with Soilax and bleach solutions used to aid in the preservation of the skeletons and skulls he wished to keep. Dahmer confessed to having consumed the hearts, liver, biceps, and portions of thigh of three victims he had killed at the Oxford Apartments (Raymond Smith, Ernest Miller and Oliver Lacy), and to have retained the flesh and organs of other victims for intended consumption. Typically, Dahmer would tenderize the body parts he intended to consume prior to preparing meals flavored with various condiments.
Referencing his reasons for consuming his victims, Dahmer stated he had initially consumed portions of his victims due to "curiosity" before adding: "I suppose, in an odd way, it made me feel they were even more a permanent part of me."
Describing the increase in his rate of killing in the two months prior to his arrest, Dahmer stated he had been "completely swept along" with his compulsion to kill, adding: "It was an incessant and never-ending desire to be with someone at whatever cost. Someone good looking, really nice looking. It just filled my thoughts all day long." When asked as to why he had preserved a total of seven skulls and the entire skeletons of two victims, Dahmer stated he had been in the process of constructing a private altar of victims' skulls which he had intended to display on the black table located in his living room and upon which he had photographed the bodies of many of his victims.
This display of skulls was to be adorned at each side with the complete skeletons of Miller and Lacy. The four severed heads found in his kitchen were to have all flesh removed and used in this altar, as was the skull of at least one future victim. Incense sticks were to be placed at each end of the black table, above which Dahmer intended to place a large blue lamp with extending blue globe lights. The entire construction was to be placed before a window covered with a black, opaque shower curtain, in front of which Dahmer intended to sit in a black leather chair.
When asked in a November 18, 1991 interview to whom the altar was dedicated, Dahmer replied: "Myself ... It was a place where I could feel at home." He further described his intended altar as a "place for meditation", from where he believed he could draw a sense of power, adding: "If this [his arrest] had happened six months later, that's what they would have found."
On July 25, 1991, Dahmer was charged with four counts of first-degree murder. By August 22, he had been charged with a further eleven murders committed in Wisconsin. On September 14, investigators in Ohio, having uncovered hundreds of bone fragments in woodland behind the address in which Dahmer had confessed to killing his first victim, formally identified two molars and a vertebra with X-ray records of Hicks. Three days later, Dahmer was charged by authorities in Ohio with Hicks's murder.
Dahmer was not charged with the attempted murder of Edwards, nor with the murder of Tuomi. He was not charged with Tuomi's murder because the Milwaukee County District Attorney only brought charges where murder could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt and Dahmer had no memory of actually committing this particular murder, for which no physical evidence of the crime existed. At a scheduled preliminary hearing on January 13, 1992, Dahmer pleaded guilty but insane to 15 counts of murder.
Dahmer's trial began on January 30, 1992. He was tried in Milwaukee for the 15 counts of first-degree murder before Judge Laurence Gram. By pleading guilty on January 13 to the charges brought against him, Dahmer had waived his rights to a trial to establish guilt, as defined in Wisconsin law. Attorneys at Dahmer's trial debated whether he suffered from either a mental or a personality disorder. The prosecution claimed that any disorders did not deprive Dahmer of the ability to appreciate the criminality of his conduct or to deprive him of the ability to resist his impulses. The defense argued that Dahmer suffered from a mental disease and was driven by obsessions and impulses he was unable to control.
Defense experts argued that Dahmer was insane due to his necrophilic drive—his compulsion to have sexual encounters with corpses. Defense expert Fred Berlin testified that Dahmer was unable to conform his conduct at the time that he committed the crimes due to his paraphilia or, more specifically, necrophilia. Judith Becker, a professor of psychiatry and psychology, was the second expert witness for the defense. Becker diagnosed Dahmer as a necrophiliac, although she added Dahmer had informed her, he preferred comatose sexual partners to deceased ones "75 percent" of the time. The final defense expert to testify, forensic psychiatrist Carl Wahlstrom, diagnosed Dahmer with necrophilia, borderline personality disorder, schizotypal personality disorder, alcohol dependence, and a psychotic disorder.
On February 8, Fred Fosdal testified on behalf of the prosecution. Fosdal testified to his belief that Dahmer was without mental disease or defect at the time he committed the murders. He described Dahmer as a calculating and cunning individual, able to differentiate between right and wrong, with the ability to control his actions, and whose lust overpowered his morals. Although Fosdal did state his belief that Dahmer was a paraphiliac, his conclusion was that Dahmer was not a sadist.
The second and final witness to appear for the prosecution, forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz, began his testimony on February 12. Dietz testified that he did not believe Dahmer had any form of mental disease or defect at the time that he committed the crimes, stating that "Dahmer went to great lengths to be alone with his victim and to have no witnesses." He explained that there was ample evidence that Dahmer prepared in advance for each murder, therefore, his crimes were not impulsive. Although Dietz did concede any acquisition of a paraphilia was not a matter of personal choice, he stated his belief that Dahmer's habit of becoming intoxicated prior to committing each of the murders was significant; "If he had an impulse to kill or a compulsion to kill", Dietz testified, "he wouldn't have to drink alcohol to overcome it. He only has to drink alcohol to overcome it because he is inhibited against killing."
Dietz noted that Dahmer strongly identified with the villains of The Exorcist III and Return of the Jedi, particularly the level of power held by these characters. Expounding on the significance of these movies on Dahmer's psyche and many of the murders committed at the Oxford Apartments, Dietz explained that Dahmer occasionally viewed scenes from these films before searching for a victim. Dietz diagnosed Dahmer with substance use disorder, paraphilia, and schizotypal personality disorder.
Two court-appointed mental health professionals—testifying independently of either prosecution or defense—were forensic psychiatrist George Palermo and clinical psychologist Samuel Friedman. Palermo stated that the murders were the result of a "pent-up aggression within himself [Dahmer]. He killed those men because he wanted to kill the source of his homosexual attraction to them. In killing them, he killed what he hated in himself." Palermo concluded that Dahmer had a severe mixed personality disorder, with antisocial, obsessive-compulsive, sadistic, fetishistic, borderline and necrophilic features, but otherwise legally sane.
Friedman testified that it was a longing for companionship that caused Dahmer to kill and testified that Dahmer was not psychotic. He described Dahmer as "amiable, pleasant to be with, courteous, with a sense of humor, conventionally handsome, and charming in manner. He was, and still is, a bright young man." He diagnosed Dahmer with a personality disorder not otherwise specified featuring borderline, obsessive-compulsive, and sadistic traits.
The trial lasted two weeks. On February 14, both attorneys delivered their closing arguments to the jury. Each attorney was allowed to speak for two hours. Defense attorney Gerald Boyle argued first. Repeatedly referring to the testimony of the mental health professionals—almost all of whom had agreed Dahmer was afflicted with a mental disease—Boyle argued that Dahmer's compulsive killings had been a result of "a sickness he discovered, not chose." Boyle portrayed Dahmer as a desperately lonely and profoundly sick individual "so out of control he could not conform his conduct anymore."
Following the defense counsel's 75-minute closing argument, Michael McCann delivered his closing argument for the prosecution, describing Dahmer as a sane man, in full control of his actions, who simply strove to avoid detection. McCann described Dahmer as a calculating individual who killed to control his victims and retained their bodies "merely to afford" himself a prolonged period of sexual pleasure. McCann argued that by pleading guilty but insane to the charges, Dahmer was seeking to escape responsibility for his crimes.
On February 15, the court reconvened to hear the verdict: Dahmer was ruled to be sane and not suffering from a mental disorder at the time of each of the 15 murders for which he was tried, although in each count, two of the twelve jurors signified their dissent. Formal sentencing was postponed until February 17. On this date, Dahmer's attorney announced his client wished to address the court. Dahmer then approached a lectern and read from a statement prepared by himself and his defense as he faced the judge.
In this statement, Dahmer emphasized that he had never desired freedom following his arrest, and that he "frankly" wished for his own death. He further stressed that none of his murders had been motivated by hatred, that he understood that nothing he either said or did could "undo the terrible harm" he had caused to the families of his victims and the city of Milwaukee, and that he and his doctors believed his criminal behavior had been motivated by mental disorders. Dahmer added that this medical knowledge had given him "some peace", and that although he understood that society would never forgive him, he hoped God would. Dahmer closed his statement with: "I know my time in prison will be terrible, but I deserve whatever I get because of what I have done. Thank you, your honor, and I am prepared for your sentence, which I know will be the maximum. I ask for no consideration." He then returned to his seat to await formal sentencing.
Dahmer was then sentenced to life imprisonment plus ten years upon the first two counts. The remaining thirteen counts carried a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment plus seventy years. The death penalty was not an option for Judge Gram to consider at the penalty phase, as Wisconsin had abolished capital punishment in 1853.
Upon hearing of Dahmer's sentencing, his father Lionel and stepmother Shari requested to be allowed a ten-minute private meeting with their son before he was transferred to the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, to begin his sentence. This request was granted, and the trio exchanged hugs and well-wishes before Dahmer was escorted away.
Three months after his conviction in Milwaukee, Dahmer was extradited to Ohio to be tried for the murder of his first victim, Steven Hicks. In a court hearing lasting just 45 minutes, Dahmer again pleaded guilty to the charges and was sentenced to a 16th term of life imprisonment on May 1, 1992.
Upon sentencing, Dahmer was transferred to the Columbia Correctional Institution. For the first year of his incarceration, Dahmer was placed in solitary confinement due to concerns for his physical safety should he come into contact with fellow inmates. He received ample correspondence from individuals across the world, with several individuals donating money which he spent on items such as cassette recordings, stationery, cigarettes, and magazines. Upon Dahmer's request, after one year in solitary confinement, he was transferred to a less secure unit, where he was assigned a two-hour daily work detail cleaning the toilet block. This work detail later expanded to include cleaning the prison gymnasium.
Shortly after completing his lengthy confessions in 1991, Dahmer had requested to Detective Murphy that he be given a copy of the Bible. This request was granted and Dahmer gradually devoted himself to Christianity and became a born-again Christian. On his father's urging, he also read creationist books from the Institute for Creation Research. In May 1994, Dahmer was baptized by Roy Ratcliff, a minister in the Church of Christ and a graduate of Oklahoma Christian University whom he had met on April 20. This service was conducted in the prison whirlpool.
Following Dahmer's baptism, Ratcliff visited him on a weekly basis. The two regularly discussed the prospect of death, and Ratcliff later divulged that, in the months prior to his murder, Dahmer had questioned whether he was sinning against God by continuing to live. Referring to his crimes in a 1994 interview with Stone Phillips on Dateline NBC, Dahmer had stated: "If a person doesn't think that there is a God to be accountable to, then what's the point of trying to modify your behavior to keep it within acceptable ranges? That's how I thought anyway."
On July 3, 1994, a fellow inmate, Osvaldo Durruthy, attempted to slash Dahmer's throat with a razor embedded in a toothbrush as Dahmer sat in the prison chapel after the weekly church service was concluded. Dahmer received superficial wounds and was not seriously hurt in this incident. According to Dahmer's family, he had long been ready to die, and accepted any punishment which he might endure in prison. In addition to his father and stepmother maintaining regular contact, Dahmer's mother, Joyce, also maintained regular contact with her son. Prior to his arrest, the two had not seen each other since Christmas 1983. Joyce related that in her weekly phone calls, whenever she expressed concerns for her son's physical well-being, Dahmer responded with comments to the effect of: "It doesn't matter, Mom. I don't care if something happens to me."
On the morning of November 28, 1994, Dahmer left his cell to conduct his assigned work detail. Accompanying him were two fellow inmates, Jesse Anderson and Christopher Scarver. The trio were left unsupervised in the showers of the prison gym for approximately 20 minutes. At approximately 8:10 a.m. Dahmer was discovered on the floor of the bathrooms of the gym suffering from extreme head wounds; he had been severely bludgeoned about the head and face with a 20-inch (51-centimeter) metal bar. His head had also been repeatedly struck against the wall in the assault. Although Dahmer was still alive and was rushed to a nearby hospital, he was pronounced dead one hour later. Anderson had been beaten with the same instrument; he died from his wounds two days later.
Scarver, who was serving a life sentence for a murder committed in 1990, informed authorities he had first attacked Dahmer with the metal bar as Dahmer was cleaning a staff locker room, before attacking Anderson as Anderson cleaned an inmate locker room. According to Scarver, Dahmer did not yell or make any noise as he was attacked. Immediately after attacking both men, Scarver, who was thought to be schizophrenic, returned to his cell and informed a prison guard: "God told me to do it. Jesse Anderson and Jeffrey Dahmer are dead." Scarver was adamant he had not planned the attacks in advance, although he later divulged to investigators he had concealed the 20-inch iron bar used to kill both men in his clothing shortly before the killings.
Upon learning of his death, Dahmer's mother Joyce responded angrily to the media: "Now is everybody happy? Now that he's bludgeoned to death, is that good enough for everyone?" The response of the families of Dahmer's victims was mixed: some celebrated the news, while others were saddened. Catherine Lacy, the mother of victim Oliver Lacy, remarked: "The hurt is worse now, because he's not suffering like we are." The district attorney who prosecuted Dahmer cautioned against turning Scarver into a folk hero, saying that Dahmer's death was still murder. On May 15, 1995, Scarver was sentenced to two additional terms of life imprisonment for the murders of Dahmer and Anderson.
Dahmer had stated in his will that he wished for no services to be conducted and that he wished to be cremated. In September 1995, Dahmer's body was cremated, and his ashes divided between his parents. Owing to a disagreement between his parents as to whether Dahmer's brain should be retained for medical research, this organ was initially retained, but later cremated in December 1995.
On August 5, 1991, as the nature and scale of Dahmer's crimes initially came to light, a candlelight vigil to celebrate and heal the Milwaukee community was attended by more than 400 people. Present at the vigil were community leaders, gay rights activists, and family members of several of Dahmer's victims. Organizers stated the purpose of the vigil was to enable Milwaukeeans to "share their feelings of pain and anger over what happened".
Dahmer's murders were committed at a time of heightened racial tension in Milwaukee. A professor of community studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Walter Farrell, later stated race relations in the city had been "in a state of disrepair for nearly a decade" at the time of Dahmer's arrest. In an August 1991 interview given to the Christian Science Monitor, Farrell stated that news of the murders, as well as the conduct of Milwaukee police officers John Balcerzak and Joseph Gabrish with regards to victim Konerak Sinthasomphone, exacerbated and highlighted racial tensions within the city.
Milwaukee's gay scene was generally underground and transient in nature at the time of Dahmer's murders, with many sexually active gay men using aliases. Many in the city's gay community were nervous of the intentions of others after the extent of Dahmer's murders became known, although the fear and distrust generated by Dahmer's crimes was short-lived. As the 1990s progressed, the usage of aliases became less common among members of Milwaukee's gay community.
The Oxford Apartments at 924 North 25th Street, where Dahmer had killed twelve of his victims, were demolished in November 1992. The site is now a vacant lot. Alternate plans to convert the site into either a memorial garden, a playground, or to reconstruct new housing have failed to materialize.
Dahmer's estate was awarded to the families of eleven of his victims who had sued for damages. In 1996, Thomas Jacobson, a lawyer representing eight of the families, announced a planned auction of Dahmer's estate. Although victims' relatives stated the motivation was not greed, the announcement sparked controversy. A civic group, Milwaukee Civic Pride, was quickly established in an effort to raise the funds to purchase and destroy many of Dahmer's possessions. The group pledged $407,225, including a $100,000 gift by Milwaukee real estate developer Joseph Zilber, for purchase of Dahmer's estate; five of the eight families represented by Jacobson agreed to the terms, and Dahmer's possessions were subsequently destroyed and buried in an undisclosed Illinois landfill.
In 1994, Lionel published a book, A Father's Story, and donated a portion of the proceeds from his book to the victims' families. Most of the families showed support for Lionel and Shari, although three families subsequently sued Lionel: two for using their names in the book without obtaining prior consent, and a third family—that of Steven Hicks—filing a wrongful death suit against Lionel, Shari, and former wife Joyce, citing parental negligence as the cause for the claim.
Lionel Dahmer lived with his second wife, Shari, until her death in January 2023. He died of natural causes on December 5, 2023. Both refused to change their surname and professed their love of Dahmer in spite of his crimes.
Joyce Flint died of cancer on November 27, 2000. Prior to her death, she had attempted suicide on at least one occasion. Dahmer's younger brother, David, changed his surname and lives in anonymity.
Jeffrey Dahmer killed seventeen young men between 1978 and 1991. Twelve were killed in his North 25th Street apartment. Three victims were murdered and dismembered at his grandmother's West Allis residence. His first and second victims were murdered at his parents' home in Ohio and at the Ambassador Hotel in Milwaukee, respectively. A total of fourteen of Dahmer's victims were from various ethnic minority backgrounds, with nine victims being black. Dahmer was adamant that the race of his victims was incidental to him and that it was the body form of a potential victim that attracted his attention. These contentions have been supported via an independent forensic specialists' study of Dahmer's victim selection, the anthropological analysis of which revealed his victims shared a "morphological similarity" and suggesting Dahmer was "psychologically attracted to a certain anthropometric body type."
Most of Dahmer's victims were killed by strangulation after being drugged with sedatives. His first victim was killed by a combination of bludgeoning and strangulation and his second victim was battered to death, with one further victim killed in 1990, Ernest Miller, dying of a combination of shock and blood loss due to his carotid artery being cut. Four of Dahmer's victims killed in 1991 had holes bored into their skulls through which Dahmer injected hydrochloric acid or, later, boiling water, into the frontal lobes in an attempt to induce a permanent, submissive, unresistant state. This proved fatal, although on each occasion this was not Dahmer's intention. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer (/ˈdɑːmər/; May 21, 1960 – November 28, 1994), also known as the Milwaukee Cannibal or the Milwaukee Monster, was an American serial killer and sex offender who killed and dismembered seventeen males between 1978 and 1991. Many of his later murders involved necrophilia, cannibalism, and the permanent preservation of body parts—typically all or part of the skeleton.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Although he was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD), schizotypal personality disorder (StPD), and a psychotic disorder, Dahmer was found to be legally sane at his trial. He was convicted of fifteen of the sixteen homicides he had committed in Wisconsin and was sentenced to fifteen terms of life imprisonment on February 17, 1992. Dahmer was later sentenced to a sixteenth term of life imprisonment for an additional homicide committed in Ohio in 1978.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "On November 28, 1994, Dahmer was beaten to death by Christopher Scarver, a fellow inmate at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Jeffrey Dahmer was born on May 21, 1960, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the first of two sons to Lionel Herbert Dahmer, a Marquette University chemistry student and later a research chemist, and Joyce Annette Dahmer (née Flint), a teletype machine instructor. Lionel was of German and Welsh ancestry, and Joyce was of Norwegian and Irish ancestry.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Some sources report Dahmer was deprived of attention as an infant. Other sources, however, suggest that Dahmer was generally doted upon as an infant and toddler by both parents, although his mother was known to be tense, greedy for both attention and pity, and argumentative with her husband and their neighbors.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "As Dahmer entered first grade, Lionel's studies kept him away from home much of the time. When he was home, his wife—a hypochondriac who suffered from depression—demanded constant attention and spent an increasing amount of time in bed. On one occasion, she attempted suicide using Equanil. Consequently, neither parent devoted much time to their son, who later recollected that, from an early age, he felt \"unsure of the solidity of the family\", recalling extreme tension and numerous arguments between his parents during his early years.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Dahmer had been an \"energetic and happy child\" but became notably subdued after double hernia surgery shortly before his fourth birthday. At elementary school, Dahmer was regarded as quiet and timid; one teacher recollected she detected early signs of abandonment due to his father's absence and mother's illnesses, the symptoms of which increased when she became pregnant with her second child. In elementary school, Dahmer had a small number of friends.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In October 1966, the family moved to Doylestown, Ohio. When Joyce gave birth in December, Dahmer was allowed to choose the name of his new baby brother; he chose the name David. The same year, Lionel earned his degree and started work as an analytical chemist in nearby Akron, Ohio.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "From an early age, Dahmer manifested an interest in dead animals. His fascination with dead animals may have begun when, at the age of four, he saw his father removing animal bones from beneath the family home. According to Lionel, Dahmer was \"oddly thrilled\" by the sound the bones made, and became preoccupied with animal bones, which he initially called his \"fiddlesticks\". He occasionally searched beneath and around the family home for additional bones, and explored the bodies of live animals to discover where their bones were located.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In May 1968, the family moved to Bath Township, Summit County, Ohio. This address was their third in two years, and the Dahmers' sixth address since marriage. The home stood in one and a half acres of woodland, with a small hut only a short walk from the house where Dahmer began collecting large insects and the skeletons of small animals, such as chipmunks and squirrels. Some of these remains were preserved in jars of formaldehyde and stowed within the hut.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Two years later, during a chicken dinner, Dahmer asked Lionel what would happen if the chicken bones were placed in bleach. Lionel, pleased by what he believed to be his son's scientific curiosity, demonstrated how to safely bleach and preserve animal bones. Dahmer incorporated these preserving techniques into his bone collecting. He also began collecting dead animals—including roadkill—which he would dissect and bury beside the hut, with the skulls occasionally placed atop makeshift crosses.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "According to one friend, Dahmer explained to him that he was curious as to how animals \"fit together\". In one instance in 1975, Dahmer decapitated the carcass of a dog before nailing the body to a tree and impaling the skull upon a stick in the woodland behind his house. As a \"prank\", he later invited a friend to view the display, claiming he had discovered the remains by chance. The same year Lionel taught his son how to preserve animal bones, Joyce began increasing her daily consumption of Equanil, laxatives and sleeping pills, further minimizing her tangible contact with her husband and children.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "From his freshman year at Revere High School, Dahmer was seen as an outcast. By age 14, he had begun drinking beer and hard alcohol in the daylight hours, frequently concealing his liquor inside the jacket he wore to school. Dahmer mentioned to one classmate who inquired why he was drinking Scotch in a morning history class that the alcohol he consumed was \"my medicine\". Although largely uncommunicative, in his freshman year Dahmer was seen by staff as polite and highly intelligent but with average grades. He was a competitive tennis player and played briefly in the high school band.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "When he reached puberty, Dahmer discovered he was gay; he did not tell his parents. In his early teens, he had a brief relationship with another teenage boy, although they never had intercourse. By Dahmer's admission, he began fantasizing about dominating and controlling a completely submissive male partner in his early to mid-teens, and his masturbatory fantasies gradually evolved to his focusing on chests and torsos. These fantasies gradually became intertwined with dissection. When he was about 16, Dahmer conceived a fantasy of rendering unconscious a particular male jogger he found attractive, and then making sexual use of his body. On one occasion, Dahmer concealed himself in bushes with a baseball bat to lie in wait for this man. However, the jogger did not pass by on that particular day. Dahmer later admitted this was his first attempt to attack and render an individual submissive to him.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Dahmer was seen by his high school peers as a class clown who often staged pranks, which became known as \"Doing a Dahmer\"; these included bleating and simulating epileptic seizures or cerebral palsy at school and local stores. Occasionally, Dahmer would perform these antics for money to purchase alcohol.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "By 1977, Dahmer's grades had declined. His parents hired a private tutor, with limited success. The same year, in an attempt to save their marriage, his parents attended counseling sessions. They continued to quarrel frequently. When Lionel discovered Joyce had engaged in a brief affair in September 1977, they decided to divorce, telling their sons they wished to do so amicably. The process of their divorce soon became increasingly bitter and acrimonious, and Lionel moved out of the house in early 1978, temporarily residing in a motel on North Cleveland Massillon Road.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In May 1978, Dahmer graduated from high school. A few weeks before his graduation, one of his teachers observed Dahmer sitting close to the school parking lot, drinking several cans of beer. When the teacher threatened to report the matter, Dahmer informed him he was experiencing \"a lot of problems\" at home and that the school's guidance counselor was aware of them. That spring, Joyce–contrary to a court order and without informing Lionel–moved out of the family home with David to live with relatives in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Dahmer had just turned 18 and remained in the family home. Dahmer's parents' divorce was finalized on July 24, 1978. Joyce was awarded custody of her younger son and alimony payments.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Dahmer committed his first murder in 1978, three weeks after his graduation. On June 18, Dahmer picked up a hitchhiker named Steven Mark Hicks, who was almost 19. Dahmer lured Hicks to his house on the pretext of drinking. Hicks, who had been hitchhiking to a rock concert at Chippewa Lake Park, Ohio, agreed to accompany Dahmer to his house upon the promise of \"a few beers\" with Dahmer as he had the house to himself.",
"title": "Late teens and early 20s: first murder"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "According to Dahmer, the sight of the bare-chested Hicks standing at the roadside stirred his sexual feelings, although when Hicks began talking about girls, he knew any sexual passes he made would be rebuffed. After several hours of talking, drinking and listening to music, Hicks \"wanted to leave and I didn't want him to leave.\" Dahmer bludgeoned Hicks with a 10-pound (4.5 kg) dumbbell. He later stated he struck Hicks twice from behind with the dumbbell as Hicks sat upon a chair. When Hicks fell unconscious, Dahmer strangled him to death with the bar of the dumbbell, then stripped the clothes from Hicks' body before exploring his chest with his hands, then masturbating as he stood above the corpse. Hours later, Dahmer dragged the body to the basement.",
"title": "Late teens and early 20s: first murder"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The following day, Dahmer dissected Hicks' body in his basement. He later buried the remains in a shallow grave in his back yard. Several weeks later, he unearthed the remains and pared the flesh from the bones. He dissolved the flesh in acid before flushing the solution down the toilet; he crushed the bones with a sledgehammer and scattered them in the woodland behind the family home. Hicks' necklace and the knife used to dismember him were thrown from the West Bath Road bridge into the Cuyahoga River.",
"title": "Late teens and early 20s: first murder"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Six weeks after the murder of Hicks, Dahmer's father and his fiancée returned to his home, where they discovered Dahmer living alone. That August, Dahmer enrolled at Ohio State University (OSU), hoping to major in business. Dahmer's sole term at OSU was completely unproductive, largely because of his persistent alcohol abuse. He received failing grades in Introduction to Anthropology, Classical Civilizations, and Administrative Science. The only course Dahmer was successful at was Riflery, having received a B− grade. His overall GPA was 0.45/4.0. On one occasion, Lionel paid a surprise visit to his son, only to find his room strewn with empty liquor bottles. Despite his father having paid in advance for the second term, Dahmer dropped out of OSU after just three months.",
"title": "Late teens and early 20s: first murder"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In January 1979, on his father's urging, Dahmer enlisted in the United States Army. He underwent basic training at Fort McClellan in Anniston, Alabama, before training as a medical specialist at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. He was occasionally reprimanded for intoxication while stationed at Fort Sam Houston. On one occasion, an instance of insubordination resulted in his entire platoon being punished, earning Dahmer a severe beating from his fellow recruits.",
"title": "Late teens and early 20s: first murder"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "On July 13, 1979, Dahmer was deployed to Baumholder, West Germany, where he served as a combat medic in the 2nd Battalion, 68th Armored Regiment, 8th Infantry Division. According to published reports, in Dahmer's first year of service, he was an \"average or slightly above average\" soldier.",
"title": "Late teens and early 20s: first murder"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Owing to Dahmer's alcohol abuse, his performance deteriorated and, in March 1981, he was deemed unsuitable for military service and was later discharged from the Army. He received an honorable discharge, as his superiors did not believe that any problems Dahmer had in the Army would be applicable to civilian life.",
"title": "Late teens and early 20s: first murder"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "On March 24, 1981, Dahmer was sent to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, for debriefing and provided with a plane ticket to travel anywhere in the country. Dahmer later told police he felt he could not return home to face his father, so he opted to travel to Miami Beach, Florida, both because he was \"tired of the cold\" and in an attempt to live by his own means. In Florida, Dahmer found a job at a delicatessen and rented a room in a nearby motel. He spent most of his salary on alcohol and was soon evicted from the motel for non-payment. Dahmer initially spent his evenings on the beach as he continued to work at the sandwich shop until phoning his father and asking to return to Ohio in September of the same year.",
"title": "Late teens and early 20s: first murder"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "After his return to Ohio, Dahmer initially lived with his father and stepmother and insisted on being delegated numerous chores to occupy his time while he looked for work. He continued to drink heavily, and two weeks after his return, was arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct. He was fined $60 and given a suspended 10-day jail sentence. Dahmer's father tried unsuccessfully to wean his son off alcohol. In December 1981, he and Dahmer's stepmother sent him to live with his grandmother in West Allis, Wisconsin. Dahmer's grandmother was the only family member to whom Dahmer displayed any affection. They hoped that her influence, plus the change of location, might persuade Dahmer to quit drinking, find a job, and live responsibly.",
"title": "Late teens and early 20s: first murder"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Initially, Dahmer's living arrangements with his grandmother were harmonious: he accompanied her to church, willingly undertook chores, actively sought work and abided by most of her house rules (although he continued to drink and smoke). In early 1982, he found employment as a phlebotomist at the Milwaukee Blood Plasma Center. He held this job for a total of ten months before being laid off. Dahmer remained unemployed for over two years, during which he lived upon whatever money his grandmother gave him.",
"title": "Late teens and early 20s: first murder"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Shortly before losing his job, Dahmer was arrested for indecent exposure. On August 8, 1982, at Wisconsin State Fair Park, he was observed exposing himself \"on the south side of the Coliseum in which 25 people were present including women and children.\" For this incident, he was convicted and fined $50 plus court costs.",
"title": "Late teens and early 20s: first murder"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In January 1985, Dahmer was hired as a mixer at the Milwaukee Ambrosia Chocolate Factory, where he worked from 11 p.m to 7 a.m. six nights per week, with Saturday evenings off. Shortly after he found this job, an incident occurred in which Dahmer was propositioned by another man while reading in the West Allis Public Library. The stranger threw Dahmer a note offering to perform fellatio upon him. Although Dahmer did not respond to this proposition, the incident stirred in his mind the fantasies of control and dominance he had developed as a teenager, and he began to familiarize himself with Milwaukee's gay bars, gay bathhouses, and bookstores. He also stole a male mannequin from a store, which he briefly used for sexual stimulation, until his grandmother discovered the item stowed in a closet and demanded that he discard it.",
"title": "Late teens and early 20s: first murder"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "By late 1985, Dahmer had begun to regularly frequent the bathhouses, which he later described as being \"relaxing places\", but during his sexual encounters, he became frustrated at his partners' moving during the act. Following his arrest, he stated: \"I trained myself to view people as objects of pleasure instead of [as] people\". For this reason, beginning in June 1986, he administered sleeping pills to his partners, giving them liquor laced with sedatives. He then waited for his partner to fall asleep before performing various sexual acts. To maintain an adequate supply of this medication, Dahmer informed doctors he worked nights and required the tablets to adjust to that schedule. After approximately 12 such instances, the bathhouses' administration revoked Dahmer's membership, and he began to use hotel rooms to continue this practice.",
"title": "Late teens and early 20s: first murder"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Shortly after his bathhouse memberships were revoked, Dahmer read a report in a newspaper regarding the upcoming funeral of an 18-year-old male. He conceived the idea of stealing the freshly interred corpse and taking it home. According to Dahmer, he attempted to dig up the coffin from the ground, but found the soil too hard and abandoned the plan.",
"title": "Late teens and early 20s: first murder"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "On September 8, 1986, Dahmer was arrested upon a charge of lewd and lascivious behavior for masturbating in the presence of two 12-year-old boys as he stood close to the Kinnickinnic River. He initially claimed he had merely been urinating, unaware that there were witnesses, but soon admitted the offense. The charge was changed to disorderly conduct and, on March 10, 1987, Dahmer was sentenced to one year of probation, with additional instructions to undergo counseling.",
"title": "Late teens and early 20s: first murder"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "On November 20, 1987, Dahmer, at the time residing with his grandmother in West Allis, encountered a 25-year-old man from Ontonagon, Michigan, named Steven Tuomi at a bar and persuaded him to return to the Ambassador Hotel in Milwaukee, where Dahmer had rented a room for the evening. According to Dahmer, he had no intention of killing Tuomi, but intended to simply drug him and lie beside him as he explored his body. The following morning, Dahmer awoke to find Tuomi lying beneath him on the bed, his chest \"crushed in\" and \"black and blue\" with bruises. Blood was seeping from the corner of his mouth, and Dahmer's fists and one forearm were extensively bruised. Dahmer later said he had no memory of having killed Tuomi, and that he \"could not believe this had happened\".",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Dahmer purchased a large suitcase, in which he transported Tuomi's body to his grandmother's residence. One week later, he severed the head, arms, and legs, then filleted the bones from the body before cutting the flesh into pieces small enough to handle. Dahmer placed the flesh inside plastic garbage bags. He wrapped the bones inside a sheet and pounded them into splinters with a sledgehammer. The dismemberment process took Dahmer approximately two hours. He disposed of all of Tuomi's remains, excluding the head, in the trash.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "For two weeks following Tuomi's killing, Dahmer retained Tuomi's head wrapped in a blanket. After two weeks, Dahmer boiled the head in a mixture of Soilax (an alkali-based industrial detergent) and bleach in an effort to retain the skull, which he then used as stimulus for masturbation. Eventually, the skull became too brittle by this bleaching process, so Dahmer pulverized and disposed of it.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "According to Dahmer, Tuomi's murder was a pivotal incident after which he did not try to control his compulsions. He began to actively seek victims, most of whom he encountered in or around gay bars and would typically lure them to his grandmother's home. He would drug his victim with triazolam or temazepam before or shortly after engaging in sexual activity with them. Once his victim was unconscious, he strangled them to death.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Two months after the Tuomi killing, Dahmer encountered a 14-year-old Native American prostitute, James Doxtator. Dahmer lured him to his grandmother's residence with an offer of $50 to pose for nude pictures. They engaged in sexual activity before Dahmer drugged Doxtator and strangled him on the floor of the cellar. Dahmer left the body in the cellar for one week before dismembering it in much the same manner as he had with Tuomi. He placed all of Doxtator's remains (excluding the skull) in the trash. The skull was boiled and cleansed in bleach before Dahmer found that it, too, had been rendered brittle by the process. He pulverized the skull two weeks later.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "On March 24, 1988, Dahmer met a 22-year-old bisexual man, Richard Guerrero, outside a gay bar called the Phoenix. Dahmer lured Guerrero to his grandmother's residence, offering him $50 to spend the night with him. He drugged Guerrero with sleeping pills, strangled him with a leather strap, and fellated the corpse. Dahmer dismembered Guerrero's body within 24 hours, again disposing of the remains in the trash and retaining the skull before pulverizing it several months later.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "On April 23, Dahmer lured Ronald Flowers Jr. to his house; however, after giving Flowers a drugged coffee, both he and Flowers heard Dahmer's grandmother call, \"Is that you, Jeff?\" Although Dahmer replied in a manner that led his grandmother to believe he was alone, she observed that he was not alone. Because of this, Dahmer was unable to kill Flowers, instead waiting until he had become unconscious before taking him to the County General Hospital.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "In September 1988, Dahmer's grandmother asked him to move out, largely because of his drinking, his habit of bringing young men to her house late at night and the foul smells emanating from the basement and the garage. Dahmer found a one-bedroom apartment at 808 North 24th Street and moved into his new residence on September 25. Two days later, he was arrested for drugging and sexually fondling a 13-year-old boy whom he had lured to his home on the pretext of posing nude for photographs.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Dahmer's father hired an attorney named Gerald Boyle to defend his son. At Boyle's request, Dahmer underwent a series of psychological evaluations prior to his court hearings. The evaluations found that Dahmer harbored deep feelings of alienation. A second evaluation two months later revealed Dahmer to be an impulsive individual, suspicious of others, and dismayed by his lack of accomplishments in life. His probation officer also referenced a 1987 diagnosis of Dahmer suffering from a schizoid personality disorder for presentation to the court.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "On January 30, 1989, Dahmer pleaded guilty to the charges of second-degree sexual assault and of enticing a child for immoral purposes. Sentencing was suspended until May. On March 20, Dahmer commenced a ten-day Easter absence from work, during which he moved back into his grandmother's home.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Two months after his conviction and two months prior to his sentencing, Dahmer murdered his fifth victim, a 24-year-old mixed-race aspiring model, Anthony Sears, whom he met at a gay bar on March 25, 1989. According to Dahmer, on this particular occasion he was not looking to commit a crime; however, shortly before closing time that evening, Sears \"just started talking to me\". Dahmer lured Sears to his grandmother's home, where the pair engaged in oral sex before Dahmer drugged and strangled Sears.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "The following morning, Dahmer placed the corpse in his grandmother's bathtub, where he decapitated the body before attempting to flay the corpse. He stripped the flesh from the body and pulverized the bones, which he disposed of in the trash. According to Dahmer, he found Sears \"exceptionally attractive\", and Sears was the first victim from whom he permanently retained any body parts: he preserved Sears' head and genitalia in acetone and stored them in a wooden box, which he later placed in his work locker. When he moved to a new address the following year, he took the remains there.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "On May 23, 1989, Dahmer was sentenced to five years' probation and one year in the House of Correction, with work release permitted so he could keep his job. He was also required to register as a sex offender. Two months before his scheduled release, Dahmer was paroled from this regimen. His five years' probation imposed in 1989 began at this point. Dahmer temporarily moved back to his grandmother's home in West Allis.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "On May 14, 1990, Dahmer moved out of his grandmother's house and into 924 North 25th Street, Apartment 213, taking Sears' mummified head and genitals with him. Although located in a high-crime area, Dahmer's new apartment was close to his workplace, was furnished, and at $300 per month inclusive of all bills excluding electricity, was economical. Within one week of his moving to this address, Dahmer killed his sixth victim, Raymond Smith. Smith was a 32-year-old prostitute whom Dahmer lured to his apartment with the promise of $50 for sex. Inside the apartment, he gave Smith a drink laced with seven sleeping pills, then manually strangled him.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The following day, Dahmer purchased a Polaroid camera, with which he took several pictures of Smith's body in suggestive positions before dismembering him in the bathroom. He boiled the legs, arms, and pelvis in a steel kettle with Soilax, which allowed him to rinse the bones in his sink. Dahmer dissolved the remainder of Smith's skeleton—excluding the skull—in a container filled with acid. He later spray-painted Smith's skull, which he placed alongside the skull of Sears upon a black towel inside a filing cabinet.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Approximately one week after the murder of Smith, on or about May 27, Dahmer lured another young man to his apartment. On this occasion, Dahmer accidentally consumed the drink laden with sedatives intended for his guest. When he awoke the following day, he discovered the man had stolen several items of clothing, $300 and a watch. Dahmer never reported this incident to the police, although on May 29, he divulged to his probation officer that he had been robbed.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "In June 1990, Dahmer lured a 27-year-old acquaintance, Edward Smith, to his apartment, where he drugged and strangled him. On this occasion, rather than immediately acidifying the skeleton or repeating previous processes of bleaching, which had rendered previous victims' skulls brittle, Dahmer placed Smith's skeleton in his freezer for several months in the hope it would not retain moisture. Freezing the skeleton did not remove moisture, and the skeleton of this victim was acidified several months later. Dahmer accidentally destroyed the skull when he placed it in the oven to dry—a process that caused the skull to explode. Dahmer later informed police he had felt \"rotten\" about Smith's murder, as he had been unable to retain any parts of his body.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "It was my way of remembering their appearance, their physical beauty. I also wanted to keep ... if I couldn't keep them there with me whole, I at least could keep their skeletons.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Jeffrey Dahmer, recollecting his motivations for both photographing his victims, and retaining sections of their skeletal structure. February 1993.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Less than three months after the murder of Edward Smith, Dahmer encountered a 22-year-old Chicago native named Ernest Miller outside a bookstore on the corner of North 27th Street. Miller agreed to accompany Dahmer to his apartment for $50 and further agreed to allow him to listen to his heart and stomach. When Dahmer attempted to perform oral sex upon Miller, he was informed, \"That'll cost you extra\", whereupon Dahmer gave Miller a drink laced with two sleeping pills.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "On this occasion, Dahmer had only two sleeping pills to give his victim. Therefore, he killed Miller by slashing his carotid artery with the same knife he used to dissect his victims' bodies. Miller bled to death within minutes. Dahmer then posed the nude body for various suggestive Polaroid photographs before placing it in his bathtub for dismemberment. Dahmer repeatedly kissed and talked to the severed head while he dismembered the remainder of the body.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Dahmer wrapped Miller's heart, liver, biceps, and portions of flesh from the legs in plastic bags and placed them in the freezer for later consumption. He boiled the remaining flesh and organs into a \"jelly-like substance\" using Soilax, which enabled him to rinse the flesh off the skeleton, which he intended to retain. To preserve the skeleton, Dahmer placed the bones in a light bleach solution for 24 hours before allowing them to dry upon a cloth for one week. The severed head was initially placed in the refrigerator before being stripped of flesh, then painted and coated with enamel.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Three weeks after the murder of Miller, on September 24, Dahmer encountered a 22-year-old father of two named David Thomas at the Grand Avenue Mall. He persuaded him to return to his apartment for a few drinks, with additional money on offer if he would pose for photographs. In his statement to police after his arrest, Dahmer said that, after giving Thomas a drink laden with sedatives, he did not feel attracted to him, but was afraid to allow him to awaken, fearing that he would be angry over having been drugged. Therefore, he strangled him and dismembered the body—intentionally retaining no body parts whatsoever. He photographed the dismemberment process and retained these photographs, which later aided in Thomas's identification.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Following the murder of Thomas, Dahmer did not kill anyone for almost five months, although on a minimum of five occasions between October 1990 and February 1991, he unsuccessfully attempted to lure men to his apartment. He regularly complained of feelings of both anxiety and depression to his probation officer throughout 1990, with frequent references to his sexuality, his solitary lifestyle, financial difficulties, and—shortly before Thanksgiving—his apprehension regarding meeting and facing his father and younger brother. On several occasions, Dahmer also referred to harboring suicidal thoughts.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "In February 1991, Dahmer observed a 17-year-old named Curtis Straughter standing at a bus stop near Marquette University. According to Dahmer, he lured Straughter into his apartment with an offer of money for posing for nude photos, with the added incentive of sexual intercourse. Dahmer drugged Straughter, cuffed his hands behind his back, then strangled him to death with a leather strap. He then dismembered Straughter, retaining his skull, hands, and genitals and photographing each stage of the dismemberment process.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Less than two months later, on April 7, Dahmer encountered a 19-year-old named Errol Lindsey walking to get a key cut. Dahmer lured Lindsey to his apartment where he drugged him, then drilled a hole in his skull through which he injected hydrochloric acid with a baster. According to Dahmer, Lindsey awoke after this experiment (which Dahmer had conceived in the hope of inducing a permanent, unresistant, submissive state), saying: \"I have a headache. What time is it?\" In response to this, Dahmer again drugged Lindsey, then strangled him. He decapitated Lindsey and retained his skull. He then flayed Lindsey's body, placing the skin in a solution of cold water and salt for several weeks in the hope of permanently retaining it. Reluctantly, he disposed of Lindsey's skin when he noted it had become too frayed and brittle.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "By 1991, fellow residents of the Oxford Apartments had repeatedly complained to the building's manager, Sopa Princewill, of the foul smells emanating from Apartment 213, in addition to the sounds of falling objects and the occasional sound of a chainsaw. Princewill contacted Dahmer in response to these complaints on several occasions, although he initially excused the odors emanating from his apartment as being caused by his freezer breaking, causing the contents to become \"spoiled\". On later occasions, he informed Princewill that the reason for the resurgence of the odor was that several of his tropical fish had recently died, and that he would take care of the matter.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "On May 24, 1991, Dahmer encountered 31-year-old aspiring model Tony Hughes at a nightclub. He was lured to Dahmer's apartment with an offer of money to pose for photographs. Hughes was drugged into unconsciousness before Dahmer injected hydrochloric acid into his skull in an effort to disable his will and render him submissive, although on this occasion, the drilling and injection proved fatal.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "On the afternoon of May 26, 1991, Dahmer encountered a 14-year-old Lao teenager, Konerak Sinthasomphone, on Wisconsin Avenue. Unknown to Dahmer, Sinthasomphone was the younger brother of the boy he had molested in 1988. Dahmer offered Sinthasomphone money to accompany him to his apartment to pose for Polaroid pictures. According to Dahmer, Sinthasomphone was initially reluctant to the proposal, before changing his mind and accompanying him to his apartment, where he posed for two pictures in his underwear before Dahmer drugged him into unconsciousness and performed oral sex on him. Before Sinthasomphone fell unconscious, Dahmer led the boy into his bedroom, where the body of Tony Hughes, whom Dahmer had killed three days earlier, lay naked on the floor. According to Dahmer, he \"believed [that Sinthasomphone] saw this body\" yet did not react to seeing the bloated corpse—likely because of the effects of the sleeping pills he had ingested.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "On this occasion, Dahmer drilled a single narrow hole into the crown of Sinthasomphone's skull, through which he injected hydrochloric acid into the frontal lobe. Dahmer then drank several beers while lying alongside Sinthasomphone before briefly falling asleep, then leaving his apartment to drink at a bar and purchase more alcohol.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "In the early morning hours of May 27, Dahmer returned toward his apartment to discover Sinthasomphone sitting naked on the corner of 25th and State, talking in Lao, with three distressed young women standing near him. Dahmer approached the women and told them that Sinthasomphone (whom he referred to by the alias John Hmong) was his friend, and attempted to lead him to his apartment by the arm. The three women dissuaded Dahmer, explaining they had phoned 9-1-1.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Upon the arrival of two Milwaukee police officers, John Balcerzak and Joseph Gabrish, Dahmer's demeanor relaxed: he told the officers that Sinthasomphone was his 19-year-old boyfriend, that he had drunk too much following a quarrel, and that he frequently behaved in this manner when intoxicated. Dahmer added his lover had consumed Jack Daniel's whiskey that evening.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "The three women were exasperated, and when one of the trio attempted to indicate to one of the officers—both of whom had observed no injuries beyond a scrape to Sinthasomphone's knee and believed him to be intoxicated—that Sinthasomphone had blood upon his testicles, was bleeding from his rectum and that he had seemingly struggled against Dahmer's attempts to walk him to his apartment prior to their arrival, the officer harshly informed her to \"butt out\", \"shut the hell up\" and to not interfere.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Shortly after the arrival of the Milwaukee police officers, three members of the Milwaukee Fire Department arrived at the scene. These individuals also examined Sinthasomphone for injuries and provided a yellow blanket for the police officers to cover Sinthasomphone. One of the three believed Sinthasomphone needed treatment, but the police officers directed the fire department personnel to leave. Shortly thereafter, officer Richard Porubcan arrived at the scene. He and Gabrish—followed by Balcerzak—escorted Dahmer and Sinthasomphone to Dahmer's apartment as Dahmer repeatedly commented on the general crime in the neighborhood and of his appreciation of the police.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Inside his apartment and in an effort to verify his claim that he and Sinthasomphone were lovers, Dahmer showed the officers the two semi-nude Polaroid pictures he had taken of Sinthasomphone the previous evening. Though Balcerzak said he smelled nothing unusual, Gabrish later stated he noted a strange scent reminiscent of excrement inside the apartment. This odor emanated from the decomposing body of Hughes. Dahmer stated that to investigate this odor, one officer simply \"peeked his head around the bedroom, but really didn't take a good look.\" The officers then left, with a departing remark that Dahmer \"take good care\" of Sinthasomphone. This incident was listed by the officers as a \"domestic dispute.\"",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Upon the departure of the three officers from his apartment, Dahmer again injected hydrochloric acid into Sinthasomphone's brain. This second injection proved fatal. The following day, May 28, Dahmer took a day's leave from work to devote himself to the dismemberment of the bodies of Sinthasomphone and Hughes. He retained both victims' skulls.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "On June 30, Dahmer traveled to Chicago, where he encountered a 20-year-old named Matt Turner at a bus station. Turner accepted Dahmer's offer to travel to Milwaukee for a professional photo shoot. At the apartment, Dahmer drugged, strangled and dismembered Turner and placed his head and internal organs in separate plastic bags in the freezer. Turner was not reported missing. Five days later, on July 5, Dahmer lured 23-year-old Jeremiah Weinberger from a Chicago bar to his apartment on the promise of spending the weekend with him. He drugged Weinberger and twice injected boiling water through his skull, sending him into a coma from which he died two days later.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "On July 15, Dahmer encountered 24-year-old Oliver Lacy at the corner of 27th and Kilbourn. Lacy agreed to Dahmer's ruse of posing nude for photographs and accompanied him to his apartment, where the pair engaged in tentative sexual activity before Dahmer drugged Lacy. On this occasion, Dahmer intended to prolong the time he spent with Lacy while alive. After unsuccessfully attempting to render Lacy unconscious with chloroform, he phoned his workplace to request a day's absence; this was granted, although the next day, he was suspended.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "After strangling Lacy, Dahmer had sex with the corpse before dismembering him. He placed Lacy's head and heart in the refrigerator and his skeleton in the freezer. Four days later, on July 19, Dahmer received word that he was dismissed. Upon receipt of this news, Dahmer lured 25-year-old Joseph Bradehoft to his apartment. Bradehoft was strangled and left lying on Dahmer's bed covered with a sheet for two days. On July 21, Dahmer removed the sheet to find the head covered in maggots. He decapitated the body, cleaned the head and placed it in the refrigerator. He later acidified Bradehoft's torso, along with those of two other victims killed within the previous month.",
"title": "Late 20s and early 30s: subsequent murders"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "On July 22, 1991, Dahmer approached three men with an offer of $100 to accompany him to his apartment to pose for nude photographs, drink beer and simply keep him company. One of the trio, 32-year-old Tracy Edwards, agreed to accompany him to his apartment. Upon entering Dahmer's apartment, Edwards noted a foul odor and several boxes of hydrochloric acid on the floor, which Dahmer claimed to use for cleaning bricks. After some minor conversation, Edwards responded to Dahmer's request to turn his head and view his tropical fish, whereupon Dahmer placed a handcuff upon his wrist. When Edwards asked, \"What's happening?\" Dahmer unsuccessfully attempted to cuff his wrists together, then told Edwards to accompany him to the bedroom to pose for nude pictures. While inside the bedroom, Edwards noted nude male posters on the wall and that a videotape of The Exorcist III was playing. He also noted a blue 57-gallon drum in the corner, from which a strong odor emanated.",
"title": "Arrest"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Dahmer then brandished a knife and informed Edwards he intended to take nude pictures of him. In an attempt to appease Dahmer, Edwards unbuttoned his shirt, saying he would allow him to do so if he would remove the handcuffs and put the knife away. In response to this promise, Dahmer simply turned his attention towards the TV. Edwards observed Dahmer rocking back and forth and chanting before turning his attention back to him. He placed his head on Edwards' chest, listened to his heartbeat and, with the knife pressed against his intended victim, informed Edwards he intended to eat his heart.",
"title": "Arrest"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "In continuous attempts to prevent Dahmer from attacking him, Edwards repeated that he was Dahmer's friend and that he was not going to run away. Edwards had decided he was going to either jump from a window or run through the unlocked front door upon the next available opportunity. When Edwards next stated he needed to use the bathroom, he asked if they could sit with a beer in the living room, where there was air conditioning. Dahmer consented, and the pair walked to the living room when Edwards exited the bathroom. Inside the living room, Edwards waited until he observed Dahmer have a momentary lapse of concentration before requesting to use the bathroom again. When Edwards rose from the couch, he noted Dahmer was not holding the handcuffs, whereupon Edwards punched him in the face, knocking Dahmer off balance, and ran out the front door.",
"title": "Arrest"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "At 11:30 p.m. on July 22, Edwards flagged down two Milwaukee police officers, Robert Rauth and Rolf Mueller, at the corner of North 25th Street. The officers noted Edwards had a handcuff attached to his wrist, whereupon he explained to the officers that a \"freak\" had placed the handcuffs upon him and asked if the police could remove them. When the officers' handcuff keys failed to fit the brand of handcuffs, Edwards agreed to accompany the officers to the apartment where, Edwards stated, he had spent the previous five hours before escaping.",
"title": "Arrest"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "When the officers and Edwards arrived at Apartment 213, Dahmer invited the trio inside and acknowledged he had placed the handcuffs upon Edwards, although he offered no explanation as to why he had done so. At this point, Edwards divulged to the officers that Dahmer had also brandished a large knife upon him and that this had happened in the bedroom. Dahmer made no comment to this revelation, indicating to one of the officers, Mueller, that the key to the handcuffs was in his bedside dresser. As Mueller entered the bedroom, Dahmer attempted to pass Mueller to retrieve the key himself, whereupon the second officer present, Rauth, informed him to \"back off\".",
"title": "Arrest"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "In the bedroom, Mueller noted there was a large knife beneath the bed. He saw an open drawer which, upon closer inspection, contained scores of Polaroid pictures—many of which were of human bodies in various stages of dismemberment. Mueller noted the decor indicated they had been taken in the same apartment in which they were standing. Mueller walked into the living room to show them to his partner, uttering the words, \"These are for real.\"",
"title": "Arrest"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "When Dahmer saw that Mueller was holding several of his Polaroids, he fought with the officers in an effort to resist arrest. The officers quickly overpowered him, cuffed his hands behind his back, and called a second squad car for backup. At this point, Mueller opened the refrigerator to reveal the freshly severed head of a black male on the bottom shelf. As Dahmer lay pinned on the floor beneath Rauth, he turned his head towards the officers and muttered the words: \"For what I did I should be dead.\"",
"title": "Arrest"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "A more detailed search of the apartment, conducted by the Milwaukee police's Criminal Investigation Bureau, revealed a total of four severed heads in Dahmer's kitchen. A total of seven skulls—some painted, some bleached—were found in Dahmer's bedroom and inside a closet. Investigators discovered collected blood drippings upon a tray at the bottom of Dahmer's refrigerator, plus two human hearts and a portion of arm muscle, each wrapped inside plastic bags upon the shelves. In Dahmer's freezer, investigators discovered an entire torso, plus a bag of human organs and flesh stuck to the ice at the bottom.",
"title": "Arrest"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Elsewhere in Apartment 213, investigators discovered two entire skeletons, a pair of severed hands, two severed and preserved penises, a mummified scalp and, in the 57-gallon drum, three further dismembered torsos dissolving in the acid solution. A total of 74 Polaroid pictures detailing the dismemberment of Dahmer's victims were found. In reference to the recovery of body parts and artifacts at 924 North 25th Street, the chief medical examiner later stated: \"It was more like dismantling someone's museum than an actual crime scene.\"",
"title": "Arrest"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Beginning in the early hours of July 23, 1991, Dahmer was questioned by Detective Patrick Kennedy as to the murders he had committed and the evidence found at his apartment. Over the following two weeks, Kennedy and, later, Detective Dennis Murphy conducted numerous interviews with Dahmer which, when combined, totaled over 60 hours. Dahmer waived his right to have a lawyer present throughout his interrogations, adding he wished to confess all as he had \"created this horror and it only makes sense I do everything to put an end to it.\" He readily admitted to having murdered sixteen young men in Wisconsin since 1987, with one further victim—Steven Hicks—killed in Ohio in 1978.",
"title": "Arrest"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Most of Dahmer's victims had been rendered unconscious prior to their murder, although some had died as a result of having acid or boiling water injected into their brain. As he had no memory of the killing of his second victim, Steven Tuomi, he was unsure whether he was unconscious when beaten to death, although he did concede it was possible that his viewing the exposed chest of Tuomi while in a drunken stupor may have led him to unsuccessfully attempt to tear Tuomi's heart from his chest. Almost all the murders Dahmer committed after moving into the Oxford Apartments had involved a ritual of posing the victims' bodies in suggestive positions—typically with the chest thrust outwards—prior to dismemberment.",
"title": "Arrest"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Dahmer readily admitted to engaging in necrophilia with several of his victims' bodies, including performing sexual acts with their viscera as he dismembered their bodies in his bathtub. Having noted that much of the blood pooled inside his victims' chest after death, Dahmer first removed their internal organs, then suspended the torso so the blood drained into his bathtub, before dicing any organs he did not wish to retain and paring the flesh from the body. The bones he wished to dispose of were pulverized or acidified, with Soilax and bleach solutions used to aid in the preservation of the skeletons and skulls he wished to keep. Dahmer confessed to having consumed the hearts, liver, biceps, and portions of thigh of three victims he had killed at the Oxford Apartments (Raymond Smith, Ernest Miller and Oliver Lacy), and to have retained the flesh and organs of other victims for intended consumption. Typically, Dahmer would tenderize the body parts he intended to consume prior to preparing meals flavored with various condiments.",
"title": "Arrest"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Referencing his reasons for consuming his victims, Dahmer stated he had initially consumed portions of his victims due to \"curiosity\" before adding: \"I suppose, in an odd way, it made me feel they were even more a permanent part of me.\"",
"title": "Arrest"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Describing the increase in his rate of killing in the two months prior to his arrest, Dahmer stated he had been \"completely swept along\" with his compulsion to kill, adding: \"It was an incessant and never-ending desire to be with someone at whatever cost. Someone good looking, really nice looking. It just filled my thoughts all day long.\" When asked as to why he had preserved a total of seven skulls and the entire skeletons of two victims, Dahmer stated he had been in the process of constructing a private altar of victims' skulls which he had intended to display on the black table located in his living room and upon which he had photographed the bodies of many of his victims.",
"title": "Arrest"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "This display of skulls was to be adorned at each side with the complete skeletons of Miller and Lacy. The four severed heads found in his kitchen were to have all flesh removed and used in this altar, as was the skull of at least one future victim. Incense sticks were to be placed at each end of the black table, above which Dahmer intended to place a large blue lamp with extending blue globe lights. The entire construction was to be placed before a window covered with a black, opaque shower curtain, in front of which Dahmer intended to sit in a black leather chair.",
"title": "Arrest"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "When asked in a November 18, 1991 interview to whom the altar was dedicated, Dahmer replied: \"Myself ... It was a place where I could feel at home.\" He further described his intended altar as a \"place for meditation\", from where he believed he could draw a sense of power, adding: \"If this [his arrest] had happened six months later, that's what they would have found.\"",
"title": "Arrest"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "On July 25, 1991, Dahmer was charged with four counts of first-degree murder. By August 22, he had been charged with a further eleven murders committed in Wisconsin. On September 14, investigators in Ohio, having uncovered hundreds of bone fragments in woodland behind the address in which Dahmer had confessed to killing his first victim, formally identified two molars and a vertebra with X-ray records of Hicks. Three days later, Dahmer was charged by authorities in Ohio with Hicks's murder.",
"title": "Arrest"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Dahmer was not charged with the attempted murder of Edwards, nor with the murder of Tuomi. He was not charged with Tuomi's murder because the Milwaukee County District Attorney only brought charges where murder could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt and Dahmer had no memory of actually committing this particular murder, for which no physical evidence of the crime existed. At a scheduled preliminary hearing on January 13, 1992, Dahmer pleaded guilty but insane to 15 counts of murder.",
"title": "Arrest"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Dahmer's trial began on January 30, 1992. He was tried in Milwaukee for the 15 counts of first-degree murder before Judge Laurence Gram. By pleading guilty on January 13 to the charges brought against him, Dahmer had waived his rights to a trial to establish guilt, as defined in Wisconsin law. Attorneys at Dahmer's trial debated whether he suffered from either a mental or a personality disorder. The prosecution claimed that any disorders did not deprive Dahmer of the ability to appreciate the criminality of his conduct or to deprive him of the ability to resist his impulses. The defense argued that Dahmer suffered from a mental disease and was driven by obsessions and impulses he was unable to control.",
"title": "Trial"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "Defense experts argued that Dahmer was insane due to his necrophilic drive—his compulsion to have sexual encounters with corpses. Defense expert Fred Berlin testified that Dahmer was unable to conform his conduct at the time that he committed the crimes due to his paraphilia or, more specifically, necrophilia. Judith Becker, a professor of psychiatry and psychology, was the second expert witness for the defense. Becker diagnosed Dahmer as a necrophiliac, although she added Dahmer had informed her, he preferred comatose sexual partners to deceased ones \"75 percent\" of the time. The final defense expert to testify, forensic psychiatrist Carl Wahlstrom, diagnosed Dahmer with necrophilia, borderline personality disorder, schizotypal personality disorder, alcohol dependence, and a psychotic disorder.",
"title": "Trial"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "On February 8, Fred Fosdal testified on behalf of the prosecution. Fosdal testified to his belief that Dahmer was without mental disease or defect at the time he committed the murders. He described Dahmer as a calculating and cunning individual, able to differentiate between right and wrong, with the ability to control his actions, and whose lust overpowered his morals. Although Fosdal did state his belief that Dahmer was a paraphiliac, his conclusion was that Dahmer was not a sadist.",
"title": "Trial"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "The second and final witness to appear for the prosecution, forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz, began his testimony on February 12. Dietz testified that he did not believe Dahmer had any form of mental disease or defect at the time that he committed the crimes, stating that \"Dahmer went to great lengths to be alone with his victim and to have no witnesses.\" He explained that there was ample evidence that Dahmer prepared in advance for each murder, therefore, his crimes were not impulsive. Although Dietz did concede any acquisition of a paraphilia was not a matter of personal choice, he stated his belief that Dahmer's habit of becoming intoxicated prior to committing each of the murders was significant; \"If he had an impulse to kill or a compulsion to kill\", Dietz testified, \"he wouldn't have to drink alcohol to overcome it. He only has to drink alcohol to overcome it because he is inhibited against killing.\"",
"title": "Trial"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "Dietz noted that Dahmer strongly identified with the villains of The Exorcist III and Return of the Jedi, particularly the level of power held by these characters. Expounding on the significance of these movies on Dahmer's psyche and many of the murders committed at the Oxford Apartments, Dietz explained that Dahmer occasionally viewed scenes from these films before searching for a victim. Dietz diagnosed Dahmer with substance use disorder, paraphilia, and schizotypal personality disorder.",
"title": "Trial"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "Two court-appointed mental health professionals—testifying independently of either prosecution or defense—were forensic psychiatrist George Palermo and clinical psychologist Samuel Friedman. Palermo stated that the murders were the result of a \"pent-up aggression within himself [Dahmer]. He killed those men because he wanted to kill the source of his homosexual attraction to them. In killing them, he killed what he hated in himself.\" Palermo concluded that Dahmer had a severe mixed personality disorder, with antisocial, obsessive-compulsive, sadistic, fetishistic, borderline and necrophilic features, but otherwise legally sane.",
"title": "Trial"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "Friedman testified that it was a longing for companionship that caused Dahmer to kill and testified that Dahmer was not psychotic. He described Dahmer as \"amiable, pleasant to be with, courteous, with a sense of humor, conventionally handsome, and charming in manner. He was, and still is, a bright young man.\" He diagnosed Dahmer with a personality disorder not otherwise specified featuring borderline, obsessive-compulsive, and sadistic traits.",
"title": "Trial"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "The trial lasted two weeks. On February 14, both attorneys delivered their closing arguments to the jury. Each attorney was allowed to speak for two hours. Defense attorney Gerald Boyle argued first. Repeatedly referring to the testimony of the mental health professionals—almost all of whom had agreed Dahmer was afflicted with a mental disease—Boyle argued that Dahmer's compulsive killings had been a result of \"a sickness he discovered, not chose.\" Boyle portrayed Dahmer as a desperately lonely and profoundly sick individual \"so out of control he could not conform his conduct anymore.\"",
"title": "Trial"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "Following the defense counsel's 75-minute closing argument, Michael McCann delivered his closing argument for the prosecution, describing Dahmer as a sane man, in full control of his actions, who simply strove to avoid detection. McCann described Dahmer as a calculating individual who killed to control his victims and retained their bodies \"merely to afford\" himself a prolonged period of sexual pleasure. McCann argued that by pleading guilty but insane to the charges, Dahmer was seeking to escape responsibility for his crimes.",
"title": "Trial"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "On February 15, the court reconvened to hear the verdict: Dahmer was ruled to be sane and not suffering from a mental disorder at the time of each of the 15 murders for which he was tried, although in each count, two of the twelve jurors signified their dissent. Formal sentencing was postponed until February 17. On this date, Dahmer's attorney announced his client wished to address the court. Dahmer then approached a lectern and read from a statement prepared by himself and his defense as he faced the judge.",
"title": "Trial"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "In this statement, Dahmer emphasized that he had never desired freedom following his arrest, and that he \"frankly\" wished for his own death. He further stressed that none of his murders had been motivated by hatred, that he understood that nothing he either said or did could \"undo the terrible harm\" he had caused to the families of his victims and the city of Milwaukee, and that he and his doctors believed his criminal behavior had been motivated by mental disorders. Dahmer added that this medical knowledge had given him \"some peace\", and that although he understood that society would never forgive him, he hoped God would. Dahmer closed his statement with: \"I know my time in prison will be terrible, but I deserve whatever I get because of what I have done. Thank you, your honor, and I am prepared for your sentence, which I know will be the maximum. I ask for no consideration.\" He then returned to his seat to await formal sentencing.",
"title": "Trial"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "Dahmer was then sentenced to life imprisonment plus ten years upon the first two counts. The remaining thirteen counts carried a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment plus seventy years. The death penalty was not an option for Judge Gram to consider at the penalty phase, as Wisconsin had abolished capital punishment in 1853.",
"title": "Trial"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "Upon hearing of Dahmer's sentencing, his father Lionel and stepmother Shari requested to be allowed a ten-minute private meeting with their son before he was transferred to the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, to begin his sentence. This request was granted, and the trio exchanged hugs and well-wishes before Dahmer was escorted away.",
"title": "Trial"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "Three months after his conviction in Milwaukee, Dahmer was extradited to Ohio to be tried for the murder of his first victim, Steven Hicks. In a court hearing lasting just 45 minutes, Dahmer again pleaded guilty to the charges and was sentenced to a 16th term of life imprisonment on May 1, 1992.",
"title": "Trial"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "Upon sentencing, Dahmer was transferred to the Columbia Correctional Institution. For the first year of his incarceration, Dahmer was placed in solitary confinement due to concerns for his physical safety should he come into contact with fellow inmates. He received ample correspondence from individuals across the world, with several individuals donating money which he spent on items such as cassette recordings, stationery, cigarettes, and magazines. Upon Dahmer's request, after one year in solitary confinement, he was transferred to a less secure unit, where he was assigned a two-hour daily work detail cleaning the toilet block. This work detail later expanded to include cleaning the prison gymnasium.",
"title": "Imprisonment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "Shortly after completing his lengthy confessions in 1991, Dahmer had requested to Detective Murphy that he be given a copy of the Bible. This request was granted and Dahmer gradually devoted himself to Christianity and became a born-again Christian. On his father's urging, he also read creationist books from the Institute for Creation Research. In May 1994, Dahmer was baptized by Roy Ratcliff, a minister in the Church of Christ and a graduate of Oklahoma Christian University whom he had met on April 20. This service was conducted in the prison whirlpool.",
"title": "Imprisonment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "Following Dahmer's baptism, Ratcliff visited him on a weekly basis. The two regularly discussed the prospect of death, and Ratcliff later divulged that, in the months prior to his murder, Dahmer had questioned whether he was sinning against God by continuing to live. Referring to his crimes in a 1994 interview with Stone Phillips on Dateline NBC, Dahmer had stated: \"If a person doesn't think that there is a God to be accountable to, then what's the point of trying to modify your behavior to keep it within acceptable ranges? That's how I thought anyway.\"",
"title": "Imprisonment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "On July 3, 1994, a fellow inmate, Osvaldo Durruthy, attempted to slash Dahmer's throat with a razor embedded in a toothbrush as Dahmer sat in the prison chapel after the weekly church service was concluded. Dahmer received superficial wounds and was not seriously hurt in this incident. According to Dahmer's family, he had long been ready to die, and accepted any punishment which he might endure in prison. In addition to his father and stepmother maintaining regular contact, Dahmer's mother, Joyce, also maintained regular contact with her son. Prior to his arrest, the two had not seen each other since Christmas 1983. Joyce related that in her weekly phone calls, whenever she expressed concerns for her son's physical well-being, Dahmer responded with comments to the effect of: \"It doesn't matter, Mom. I don't care if something happens to me.\"",
"title": "Imprisonment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "On the morning of November 28, 1994, Dahmer left his cell to conduct his assigned work detail. Accompanying him were two fellow inmates, Jesse Anderson and Christopher Scarver. The trio were left unsupervised in the showers of the prison gym for approximately 20 minutes. At approximately 8:10 a.m. Dahmer was discovered on the floor of the bathrooms of the gym suffering from extreme head wounds; he had been severely bludgeoned about the head and face with a 20-inch (51-centimeter) metal bar. His head had also been repeatedly struck against the wall in the assault. Although Dahmer was still alive and was rushed to a nearby hospital, he was pronounced dead one hour later. Anderson had been beaten with the same instrument; he died from his wounds two days later.",
"title": "Imprisonment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "Scarver, who was serving a life sentence for a murder committed in 1990, informed authorities he had first attacked Dahmer with the metal bar as Dahmer was cleaning a staff locker room, before attacking Anderson as Anderson cleaned an inmate locker room. According to Scarver, Dahmer did not yell or make any noise as he was attacked. Immediately after attacking both men, Scarver, who was thought to be schizophrenic, returned to his cell and informed a prison guard: \"God told me to do it. Jesse Anderson and Jeffrey Dahmer are dead.\" Scarver was adamant he had not planned the attacks in advance, although he later divulged to investigators he had concealed the 20-inch iron bar used to kill both men in his clothing shortly before the killings.",
"title": "Imprisonment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "Upon learning of his death, Dahmer's mother Joyce responded angrily to the media: \"Now is everybody happy? Now that he's bludgeoned to death, is that good enough for everyone?\" The response of the families of Dahmer's victims was mixed: some celebrated the news, while others were saddened. Catherine Lacy, the mother of victim Oliver Lacy, remarked: \"The hurt is worse now, because he's not suffering like we are.\" The district attorney who prosecuted Dahmer cautioned against turning Scarver into a folk hero, saying that Dahmer's death was still murder. On May 15, 1995, Scarver was sentenced to two additional terms of life imprisonment for the murders of Dahmer and Anderson.",
"title": "Imprisonment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "Dahmer had stated in his will that he wished for no services to be conducted and that he wished to be cremated. In September 1995, Dahmer's body was cremated, and his ashes divided between his parents. Owing to a disagreement between his parents as to whether Dahmer's brain should be retained for medical research, this organ was initially retained, but later cremated in December 1995.",
"title": "Imprisonment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "On August 5, 1991, as the nature and scale of Dahmer's crimes initially came to light, a candlelight vigil to celebrate and heal the Milwaukee community was attended by more than 400 people. Present at the vigil were community leaders, gay rights activists, and family members of several of Dahmer's victims. Organizers stated the purpose of the vigil was to enable Milwaukeeans to \"share their feelings of pain and anger over what happened\".",
"title": "Imprisonment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "Dahmer's murders were committed at a time of heightened racial tension in Milwaukee. A professor of community studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Walter Farrell, later stated race relations in the city had been \"in a state of disrepair for nearly a decade\" at the time of Dahmer's arrest. In an August 1991 interview given to the Christian Science Monitor, Farrell stated that news of the murders, as well as the conduct of Milwaukee police officers John Balcerzak and Joseph Gabrish with regards to victim Konerak Sinthasomphone, exacerbated and highlighted racial tensions within the city.",
"title": "Imprisonment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "Milwaukee's gay scene was generally underground and transient in nature at the time of Dahmer's murders, with many sexually active gay men using aliases. Many in the city's gay community were nervous of the intentions of others after the extent of Dahmer's murders became known, although the fear and distrust generated by Dahmer's crimes was short-lived. As the 1990s progressed, the usage of aliases became less common among members of Milwaukee's gay community.",
"title": "Imprisonment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "The Oxford Apartments at 924 North 25th Street, where Dahmer had killed twelve of his victims, were demolished in November 1992. The site is now a vacant lot. Alternate plans to convert the site into either a memorial garden, a playground, or to reconstruct new housing have failed to materialize.",
"title": "Imprisonment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 115,
"text": "Dahmer's estate was awarded to the families of eleven of his victims who had sued for damages. In 1996, Thomas Jacobson, a lawyer representing eight of the families, announced a planned auction of Dahmer's estate. Although victims' relatives stated the motivation was not greed, the announcement sparked controversy. A civic group, Milwaukee Civic Pride, was quickly established in an effort to raise the funds to purchase and destroy many of Dahmer's possessions. The group pledged $407,225, including a $100,000 gift by Milwaukee real estate developer Joseph Zilber, for purchase of Dahmer's estate; five of the eight families represented by Jacobson agreed to the terms, and Dahmer's possessions were subsequently destroyed and buried in an undisclosed Illinois landfill.",
"title": "Imprisonment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 116,
"text": "In 1994, Lionel published a book, A Father's Story, and donated a portion of the proceeds from his book to the victims' families. Most of the families showed support for Lionel and Shari, although three families subsequently sued Lionel: two for using their names in the book without obtaining prior consent, and a third family—that of Steven Hicks—filing a wrongful death suit against Lionel, Shari, and former wife Joyce, citing parental negligence as the cause for the claim.",
"title": "Imprisonment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 117,
"text": "Lionel Dahmer lived with his second wife, Shari, until her death in January 2023. He died of natural causes on December 5, 2023. Both refused to change their surname and professed their love of Dahmer in spite of his crimes.",
"title": "Imprisonment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 118,
"text": "Joyce Flint died of cancer on November 27, 2000. Prior to her death, she had attempted suicide on at least one occasion. Dahmer's younger brother, David, changed his surname and lives in anonymity.",
"title": "Imprisonment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 119,
"text": "Jeffrey Dahmer killed seventeen young men between 1978 and 1991. Twelve were killed in his North 25th Street apartment. Three victims were murdered and dismembered at his grandmother's West Allis residence. His first and second victims were murdered at his parents' home in Ohio and at the Ambassador Hotel in Milwaukee, respectively. A total of fourteen of Dahmer's victims were from various ethnic minority backgrounds, with nine victims being black. Dahmer was adamant that the race of his victims was incidental to him and that it was the body form of a potential victim that attracted his attention. These contentions have been supported via an independent forensic specialists' study of Dahmer's victim selection, the anthropological analysis of which revealed his victims shared a \"morphological similarity\" and suggesting Dahmer was \"psychologically attracted to a certain anthropometric body type.\"",
"title": "Victims"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 120,
"text": "Most of Dahmer's victims were killed by strangulation after being drugged with sedatives. His first victim was killed by a combination of bludgeoning and strangulation and his second victim was battered to death, with one further victim killed in 1990, Ernest Miller, dying of a combination of shock and blood loss due to his carotid artery being cut. Four of Dahmer's victims killed in 1991 had holes bored into their skulls through which Dahmer injected hydrochloric acid or, later, boiling water, into the frontal lobes in an attempt to induce a permanent, submissive, unresistant state. This proved fatal, although on each occasion this was not Dahmer's intention.",
"title": "Victims"
}
]
| Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer, also known as the Milwaukee Cannibal or the Milwaukee Monster, was an American serial killer and sex offender who killed and dismembered seventeen males between 1978 and 1991. Many of his later murders involved necrophilia, cannibalism, and the permanent preservation of body parts—typically all or part of the skeleton. Although he was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD), schizotypal personality disorder (StPD), and a psychotic disorder, Dahmer was found to be legally sane at his trial. He was convicted of fifteen of the sixteen homicides he had committed in Wisconsin and was sentenced to fifteen terms of life imprisonment on February 17, 1992. Dahmer was later sentenced to a sixteenth term of life imprisonment for an additional homicide committed in Ohio in 1978. On November 28, 1994, Dahmer was beaten to death by Christopher Scarver, a fellow inmate at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin. | 2001-10-16T14:19:57Z | 2023-12-19T01:28:02Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Dahmer |
16,219 | Joseph Cotten | Joseph Cheshire Cotten Jr. (May 15, 1905 – February 6, 1994) was an American film, stage, radio and television actor. Cotten achieved prominence on Broadway, starring in the original stage productions of The Philadelphia Story (1939) and Sabrina Fair (1953). He then gained worldwide fame for his collaborations with Orson Welles films on three films, Citizen Kane (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), and Journey into Fear (1943), for which Cotten starred in and was also credited with the screenplay.
Cotten went on to become one of the leading Hollywood actors of the 1940s, appearing in films such as Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Gaslight (1944), Love Letters (1945), Duel in the Sun (1946), Portrait of Jennie (1948) for which he won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor, The Third Man (1949) and Niagara (1953). One of his final films was Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1980).
Multiple film critics and media outlets have cited him as one of the best actors never to have received an Academy Award nomination.
Joseph Cotten was born in 1905 in Petersburg, Virginia, the first of three boys born for Joseph Cheshire Cotten Sr., an assistant postmaster, and Sally Willson Cotten. He grew up in the Tidewater region and showed an aptitude for drama and a gift for storytelling.
In 1923, when Cotten was 18, his family arranged for him to receive private lessons at the Hickman School of Expression in Washington, D.C., and underwrote his expenses. Cotten served in the First Motion Picture Unit of the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II.
Cotten earned spending money playing professional football on Sundays, for $25 a quarter. After graduation, he earned enough money as a lifeguard at Wilcox Lake to pay back his family's loan, with interest. He moved to Miami in 1925 and worked as an advertising salesman for The Miami Herald at $35 a week. He started performing at the Miami Civic Theatre, and worked there for five years, also reviewing the shows for the Herald.
Cotten moved to New York and went to work for David Belasco as an assistant stage manager. He understudied Melvyn Douglas in Tonight or Never then took over Douglas' role for the Copley Theatre in Boston, where he worked on over 30 plays. Cotten struggled to find work in the depression so turned to modeling under the Walter Thornton Model Agency and acting in industrial films. He also performed on radio. Cotten made his Broadway debut in 1932 in Absent Friends which ran for 88 performances. He followed it with Jezebel (1933), staged by Katherine Cornell and Guthrie McClintic, which only had a short run. He was in Loose Moments which ran for 8 performances.
In 1934, Cotten met and became friends with Orson Welles, a fellow cast member on CBS Radio's The American School of the Air. Welles regarded Cotten as a brilliant comic actor, and gave him the starring role in his Federal Theatre Project farce, Horse Eats Hat (September 26 – December 5, 1936). Cotten was sure that Horse Eats Hat won him the notice of his future Broadway co-star, Katharine Hepburn. Cotten said Welles later told him "You're very lucky to be tall and thin and have curly hair. You can also move about the stage without running into the furniture. But these are fringe assets, and I'm afraid you'll never make it as an actor. But as a star, I think you well might hit the jackpot."
In 1937, Cotten became an inaugural member of Welles's Mercury Theatre company, starring in its Broadway productions Caesar as Publius; it ran for 157 performances. He followed it with The Shoemaker's Holiday (1938) and Danton's Death (1938) for Welles. Cotten also performed in radio dramas presented on The Mercury Theatre on the Air and The Campbell Playhouse. That same year Cotten made his film debut in the Welles-directed short, Too Much Johnson (1938), a comedy that was intended to complement the aborted 1938 Mercury stage production of William Gillette's 1894 play. The film was never screened in public and was lost until 2008 (and then screened in 2013 at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival).
Cotten returned to Broadway in 1939, creating the role of C. K. Dexter Haven opposite Katharine Hepburn's Tracy Lord in the original production of Philip Barry's The Philadelphia Story. The play ran for 417 performances at the Shubert Theatre, and in the months before its extensive national tour a film version was to be made by MGM. Cotten went to Hollywood, but discovered there that his stage success in The Philadelphia Story translated to, in the words of his agent Leland Hayward, "spending a solid year creating the Cary Grant role." Hayward suggested that they call Cotten's good pal, Orson Welles. "He's been making big waves out here", Hayward said. "Maybe nobody in Hollywood ever heard of the Shubert Theatre in New York, but everybody certainly knows about the Mercury Theatre in New York."
After the success of Welles's War of the Worlds 1938 Halloween radio broadcast, Welles gained a unique contract with RKO Pictures. The two-picture deal promised full creative control for the young director below an agreed budget limit, and Welles's intention was to feature the Mercury Players in his productions. Shooting had still not begun on a Welles film after a year, but after a meeting with writer Herman J. Mankiewicz Welles had a suitable project.
In mid-1940, filming began on Citizen Kane, portraying the life of a press magnate (played by Welles) who starts out as an idealist but eventually turns into a corrupt, lonely old man. The film featured Cotten prominently in the role of Kane's best friend Jedediah Leland, eventually a drama critic for one of Kane's papers.
When released on May 1, 1941, Citizen Kane – based in part on the life of William Randolph Hearst – did not do much business at theaters; Hearst owned numerous major newspapers, and forbade them to carry advertisements for the film. Nominated for nine Academy Awards in 1942, the film won only for Best Screenplay, for Mankiewicz and Welles. Citizen Kane launched the film careers of the Mercury Players, including Agnes Moorehead (who played Kane's mother), Ruth Warrick (Kane's first wife), and Ray Collins (Kane's political opponent). However, Cotten was the only one of the four to find major success as a lead in Hollywood outside of Citizen Kane; Moorehead and Collins became successful character film actors Moorehead starred in Bewitched and Warrick spent decades in a career in daytime television.
The Los Angeles Times, in an otherwise mixed review of the film, said that "Cotten's work is vital and distinctive ... He is an important 'find.'" Alexander Korda hired him to play Merle Oberon's leading man in Lydia (1941). "I didn't care about the movies, really", Cotten said later. "I was tall. I had curly hair. I could talk. It was easy to do."
Cotten starred in Welles's adaptation and production of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). After the commercial disappointment of Citizen Kane, RKO was apprehensive about the new film, and after poor preview responses, cut it by nearly an hour before its release. Though at points the film appeared disjointed, it was well received by critics. Despite the critical accolades Cotten received for his performance, he was again snubbed by the Academy.
Cotten was cast in the Nazi-related thriller Journey into Fear (1943) based on the novel by Eric Ambler. It was originally scripted by Ben Hecht but Welles, who was supervising, disliked it, and he rewrote it with Cotten. Released by RKO, the Mercury production was directed by Norman Foster. It was a collaborative effort due to the difficulties shooting the film and the pressures related to Welles's imminent departure to South America to begin work on It's All True.
Alfred Hitchcock hired Cotten to play a charming serial killer in Shadow of a Doubt (1943). It was made for Universal Pictures, for whom Cotten then appeared in Hers to Hold (1943), as Deanna Durbin's leading man.
After Welles's return he and Cotten co-produced The Mercury Wonder Show for members of the U.S. armed services. Opening August 3, 1943, the all-star magic and variety show was presented in a tent at 9000 Cahuenga Boulevard in Hollywood. Featured were Welles (Orson the Magnificent), Cotten (Jo-Jo the Great), Rita Hayworth (forced to quit by Columbia Pictures boss Harry Cohn and replaced by Marlene Dietrich), Agnes Moorehead (Calliope Aggie) and others. Tickets were free to servicemen, and more than 48,000 of them had seen show by September 1943.
In late 1943, Cotten visited Welles's office and said that producer David O. Selznick wanted to make two or three films with him, but that he wanted him under his own contract. Welles then tore up Cotten's contract with Mercury Productions, saying, "He can do more for you than I can. Good luck!" Cotten signed a long-term deal with Selznick. Selznick loaned out Cotten and Ingrid Bergman to MGM for the thriller Gaslight (1944) which was a major hit. Selznick then put Cotten in a wartime drama Since You Went Away (1944) alongside Claudette Colbert, Jennifer Jones and Shirley Temple; it was another major success.
Selznick followed this up by teaming Cotten with Ginger Rogers and Temple in I'll Be Seeing You (1945), another melodrama. Hal Wallis borrowed Cotten and Jones to make Love Letters (1945). Exhibitors voted him the 17th most popular star in the United States in 1945. Selznick used Cotten, Jennifer Jones and Gregory Peck in Duel in the Sun (1946), an epic Western that was hugely popular at the box office.
Dore Schary, who had worked for Selznick, went to run RKO and hired Cotten for The Farmer's Daughter (1947), where he was Loretta Young's leading man. Cotten then made Portrait of Jennie (1948) for Selznick, co starring with Jones; Cotten played a melancholy artist who becomes obsessed with a girl who might have died many years before. His performance won Cotten the International Prize for Best Actor at the 1949 Venice International Film Festival.
Cotten was reunited with Welles in The Third Man (1949), produced by Korda and Selznick. Cotten portrays a writer of pulp fiction who travels to postwar Vienna to meet his friend Harry Lime (Welles). When he arrives, he is told that Lime has died. Determined to prove to the police that his friend was murdered, he uncovers an even darker secret. Years later, Cotten would say "Orson Welles lists Citizen Kane as his best film, Alfred Hitchcock opts for Shadow of a Doubt, and Sir Carol Reed chose The Third Man – and I'm in all of them."
Cotten then reunited with Hitchcock and Ingrid Bergman in Under Capricorn (1949) as an Australian landowner with a shady past; it was a box office disappointment. So too was Beyond the Forest (1949) with Bette Davis at Warner Bros.
Cotten co-starred with Joan Fontaine in September Affair (1950) for Hal Wallis. Selznick loaned him to 20th Century Fox for the dark Civil War Western Two Flags West (1950), then to RKO for Walk Softly, Stranger (1950, shot in 1948) which reunited him with Alida Valli from The Third Man. It was a huge flop. At Fox he did Half Angel (1951) with Young, then did another with Wallis at Paramount, Peking Express (1951) and went to MGM for The Man with a Cloak (1951) with Barbara Stanwyck. He had a cameo in Welles' Othello (1951).
Cotten did a Western at Universal, Untamed Frontier (1953), during the filming of which he was injured. He did a thriller for Andrew L. Stone, The Steel Trap (1952), which reunited with Teresa Wright from Shadow of a Doubt. At Fox he was in the Marilyn Monroe vehicle Niagara (1953), after James Mason turned down the role. He narrated Egypt by Three (1953) and was reunited with Stone in A Blueprint for Murder (1953).
On the stage in 1953, Cotten created the role of Linus Larrabee Jr. in the original Broadway production of Sabrina Fair, opposite Margaret Sullavan. The production ran from November 11, 1953 until August 21, 1954 and was the basis of the Billy Wilder film Sabrina, which starred Humphrey Bogart and Audrey Hepburn. He and Sullivan appeared in a TV production of State of the Union for Producers' Showcase, directed by Arthur Penn.
Cotten made Special Delivery (1955) in West Germany and appeared in a TV adaptation of Broadway for The Best of Broadway (1955), directed by Franklin J. Schaffner. He appeared in episodes of Celebrity Playhouse, The Ford Television Theatre, Star Stage, Alfred Hitchcock Presents (several times) and General Electric Theater.
In 1955, Cotten hosted The 20th Century Fox Hour on television. In 1956, he starred in the NBC anthology series On Trial (renamed at midseason The Joseph Cotten Show). It ran for 41 episodes.
He returned to features with The Bottom of the Bottle (1956), The Killer Is Loose (1957) and The Halliday Brand (1957). He guest-starred on Jane Wyman Presents The Fireside Theatre, Telephone Time, Playhouse 90, Schlitz Playhouse, Zane Grey Theater, Suspicion and Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse. He made a cameo appearance in Welles's Touch of Evil (1958) and a starring role in the film adaptation of Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon (1958). Cotten had another success on Broadway when he appeared in Once More, With Feeling (1958–60), which ran for 263 performances. For the third time, Cotten was in a Broadway hit but did not reprise his role in the film version; Yul Brynner played the part on screen.
Cotten had a supporting role in the films The Angel Wore Red (1960) and The Last Sunset (1961), and guest-starred on The DuPont Show with June Allyson, Checkmate, The Barbara Stanwyck Show, Bus Stop, Theatre '62 (an adaptation of Notorious), Dr. Kildare, Wagon Train and Saints and Sinners.
Cotten returned to Broadway to appear in Calculated Risk (1962–63), which ran for 221 performances and meant he had to turn down a role in a film Harrigan's Halo. He guest starred on The Great Adventure and 77 Sunset Strip and appeared in the pilot for Alexander the Great (1963).
After some time away from film, Cotten returned in the horror classic Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) for Aldrich, with Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland and Agnes Moorehead. Cotten was top billed in The Great Sioux Massacre (1965) and The Tramplers (1965), Brighty of the Grand Canyon (1966), The Cruel Ones (1967), Some May Live (1967) and Gangsters '70 (1968). He took supporting roles in The Money Trap (1965) and The Oscar (1966).
He guest starred on Cimarron Strip, Ironside and Journey to the Unknown and had a support role in Jack of Diamonds (1967). He had the lead in White Comanche (1968) and Latitude Zero (1969) (shot in Japan with his wife) and supported in the TV movies The Lonely Profession (1969) and Cutter's Trail (1970). He also appeared as himself on the Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In (1968) variety show.
Cotten appeared in The Name of the Game, It Takes a Thief, NET Playhouse, The Grasshopper (1970), Tora! Tora! Tora!, The Virginian, Assault on the Wayne (1971), Do You Take This Stranger? (1971), City Beneath the Sea (1971), The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971), Lady Frankenstein (1971) and The Screaming Woman (1972) with de Havilland.
He had lead roles in Doomsday Voyage (1972), Baron Blood (1972), and The Scopone Game (1973) and was in The Devil's Daughter (1973), The Streets of San Francisco, Soylent Green (1973), A Delicate Balance (1973), The Rockford Files, Syndicate Sadists (1975), The Timber Tramps (1975), The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case (1976), A Whisper in the Dark (1976), Origins of the Mafia (1976), Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977) for Aldrich, Airport '77, Aspen (1977), The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, Last In, First Out (1978), Caravans (1978), Indagine su un delitto perfetto (1978), Island of the Fishmen (1979), Concorde Affaire '79 (1979), Guyana: Cult of the Damned (1979), Churchill and the Generals (1979), Tales of the Unexpected and Fantasy Island.
Cotten later admitted, "I was in a lot of junk. I get nervous when I don't work."
Cotten's final performances include in George Bower's supernatural horror film The Hearse (1980), the ABC television movie Casino (1980), Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1980), multiple episodes of The Love Boat (1981), The Survivor (1981), shot in Australia and Delusion (1981).
Cotten's first wife Lenore Kipp died of leukemia in early 1960. He married British actress Patricia Medina on October 20, 1960 in Beverly Hills at the home of David O. Selznick and Jennifer Jones. He bought a historic 1935 home in the Mesa neighborhood of Palm Springs, California, where he and his wife lived from 1985 to 1992. The marriage produced no children.
In 1961 Cotten was admitted to the Society of the Cincinnati in North Carolina based his descent from Captain Hudson Whitaker, Seventh Regiment, North Carolina Continental Line. He held Captain Whitaker's hereditary seat until his death in 1994.
On June 8, 1981, Cotten experienced a heart attack followed by a stroke that affected his brain's speech center. He began years of therapy that eventually restored his ability to speak. As he began to recover, he and Orson Welles talked on the phone each week for several hours. Cotten wrote, "He was strong and supportive, and whenever I used the wrong word (which was frequently) he would say, 'That's a much better word, Jo, I'm going to use it.'" He and Welles would meet for lunch and reminisce. When Cotten announced he had written a book, Welles asked for the manuscript and read it that night.
In 1990, Cotten's larynx was removed because of cancer. He died on February 6, 1994 of pneumonia at the age of 88. He was buried at Blandford Cemetery in Petersburg, Virginia.
At the 10th Venice International Film Festival, Cotten was awarded the Volpi Cup for Best Actor for his performance in the film Portrait of Jennie (1948). He was also given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.
Cotten was portrayed by Tim Robbins in the 1985 TV film Malice in Wonderland, by James Tupper in the film Me and Orson Welles (2008) and by Matthew Glave in the television series Feud (2017), which depicts the filming of Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte. | [
{
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"text": "Joseph Cheshire Cotten Jr. (May 15, 1905 – February 6, 1994) was an American film, stage, radio and television actor. Cotten achieved prominence on Broadway, starring in the original stage productions of The Philadelphia Story (1939) and Sabrina Fair (1953). He then gained worldwide fame for his collaborations with Orson Welles films on three films, Citizen Kane (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), and Journey into Fear (1943), for which Cotten starred in and was also credited with the screenplay.",
"title": ""
},
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"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Cotten went on to become one of the leading Hollywood actors of the 1940s, appearing in films such as Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Gaslight (1944), Love Letters (1945), Duel in the Sun (1946), Portrait of Jennie (1948) for which he won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor, The Third Man (1949) and Niagara (1953). One of his final films was Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1980).",
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},
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"text": "Multiple film critics and media outlets have cited him as one of the best actors never to have received an Academy Award nomination.",
"title": ""
},
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"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Joseph Cotten was born in 1905 in Petersburg, Virginia, the first of three boys born for Joseph Cheshire Cotten Sr., an assistant postmaster, and Sally Willson Cotten. He grew up in the Tidewater region and showed an aptitude for drama and a gift for storytelling.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In 1923, when Cotten was 18, his family arranged for him to receive private lessons at the Hickman School of Expression in Washington, D.C., and underwrote his expenses. Cotten served in the First Motion Picture Unit of the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Cotten earned spending money playing professional football on Sundays, for $25 a quarter. After graduation, he earned enough money as a lifeguard at Wilcox Lake to pay back his family's loan, with interest. He moved to Miami in 1925 and worked as an advertising salesman for The Miami Herald at $35 a week. He started performing at the Miami Civic Theatre, and worked there for five years, also reviewing the shows for the Herald.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Cotten moved to New York and went to work for David Belasco as an assistant stage manager. He understudied Melvyn Douglas in Tonight or Never then took over Douglas' role for the Copley Theatre in Boston, where he worked on over 30 plays. Cotten struggled to find work in the depression so turned to modeling under the Walter Thornton Model Agency and acting in industrial films. He also performed on radio. Cotten made his Broadway debut in 1932 in Absent Friends which ran for 88 performances. He followed it with Jezebel (1933), staged by Katherine Cornell and Guthrie McClintic, which only had a short run. He was in Loose Moments which ran for 8 performances.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In 1934, Cotten met and became friends with Orson Welles, a fellow cast member on CBS Radio's The American School of the Air. Welles regarded Cotten as a brilliant comic actor, and gave him the starring role in his Federal Theatre Project farce, Horse Eats Hat (September 26 – December 5, 1936). Cotten was sure that Horse Eats Hat won him the notice of his future Broadway co-star, Katharine Hepburn. Cotten said Welles later told him \"You're very lucky to be tall and thin and have curly hair. You can also move about the stage without running into the furniture. But these are fringe assets, and I'm afraid you'll never make it as an actor. But as a star, I think you well might hit the jackpot.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In 1937, Cotten became an inaugural member of Welles's Mercury Theatre company, starring in its Broadway productions Caesar as Publius; it ran for 157 performances. He followed it with The Shoemaker's Holiday (1938) and Danton's Death (1938) for Welles. Cotten also performed in radio dramas presented on The Mercury Theatre on the Air and The Campbell Playhouse. That same year Cotten made his film debut in the Welles-directed short, Too Much Johnson (1938), a comedy that was intended to complement the aborted 1938 Mercury stage production of William Gillette's 1894 play. The film was never screened in public and was lost until 2008 (and then screened in 2013 at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival).",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Cotten returned to Broadway in 1939, creating the role of C. K. Dexter Haven opposite Katharine Hepburn's Tracy Lord in the original production of Philip Barry's The Philadelphia Story. The play ran for 417 performances at the Shubert Theatre, and in the months before its extensive national tour a film version was to be made by MGM. Cotten went to Hollywood, but discovered there that his stage success in The Philadelphia Story translated to, in the words of his agent Leland Hayward, \"spending a solid year creating the Cary Grant role.\" Hayward suggested that they call Cotten's good pal, Orson Welles. \"He's been making big waves out here\", Hayward said. \"Maybe nobody in Hollywood ever heard of the Shubert Theatre in New York, but everybody certainly knows about the Mercury Theatre in New York.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "After the success of Welles's War of the Worlds 1938 Halloween radio broadcast, Welles gained a unique contract with RKO Pictures. The two-picture deal promised full creative control for the young director below an agreed budget limit, and Welles's intention was to feature the Mercury Players in his productions. Shooting had still not begun on a Welles film after a year, but after a meeting with writer Herman J. Mankiewicz Welles had a suitable project.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In mid-1940, filming began on Citizen Kane, portraying the life of a press magnate (played by Welles) who starts out as an idealist but eventually turns into a corrupt, lonely old man. The film featured Cotten prominently in the role of Kane's best friend Jedediah Leland, eventually a drama critic for one of Kane's papers.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "When released on May 1, 1941, Citizen Kane – based in part on the life of William Randolph Hearst – did not do much business at theaters; Hearst owned numerous major newspapers, and forbade them to carry advertisements for the film. Nominated for nine Academy Awards in 1942, the film won only for Best Screenplay, for Mankiewicz and Welles. Citizen Kane launched the film careers of the Mercury Players, including Agnes Moorehead (who played Kane's mother), Ruth Warrick (Kane's first wife), and Ray Collins (Kane's political opponent). However, Cotten was the only one of the four to find major success as a lead in Hollywood outside of Citizen Kane; Moorehead and Collins became successful character film actors Moorehead starred in Bewitched and Warrick spent decades in a career in daytime television.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The Los Angeles Times, in an otherwise mixed review of the film, said that \"Cotten's work is vital and distinctive ... He is an important 'find.'\" Alexander Korda hired him to play Merle Oberon's leading man in Lydia (1941). \"I didn't care about the movies, really\", Cotten said later. \"I was tall. I had curly hair. I could talk. It was easy to do.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Cotten starred in Welles's adaptation and production of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). After the commercial disappointment of Citizen Kane, RKO was apprehensive about the new film, and after poor preview responses, cut it by nearly an hour before its release. Though at points the film appeared disjointed, it was well received by critics. Despite the critical accolades Cotten received for his performance, he was again snubbed by the Academy.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Cotten was cast in the Nazi-related thriller Journey into Fear (1943) based on the novel by Eric Ambler. It was originally scripted by Ben Hecht but Welles, who was supervising, disliked it, and he rewrote it with Cotten. Released by RKO, the Mercury production was directed by Norman Foster. It was a collaborative effort due to the difficulties shooting the film and the pressures related to Welles's imminent departure to South America to begin work on It's All True.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Alfred Hitchcock hired Cotten to play a charming serial killer in Shadow of a Doubt (1943). It was made for Universal Pictures, for whom Cotten then appeared in Hers to Hold (1943), as Deanna Durbin's leading man.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "After Welles's return he and Cotten co-produced The Mercury Wonder Show for members of the U.S. armed services. Opening August 3, 1943, the all-star magic and variety show was presented in a tent at 9000 Cahuenga Boulevard in Hollywood. Featured were Welles (Orson the Magnificent), Cotten (Jo-Jo the Great), Rita Hayworth (forced to quit by Columbia Pictures boss Harry Cohn and replaced by Marlene Dietrich), Agnes Moorehead (Calliope Aggie) and others. Tickets were free to servicemen, and more than 48,000 of them had seen show by September 1943.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In late 1943, Cotten visited Welles's office and said that producer David O. Selznick wanted to make two or three films with him, but that he wanted him under his own contract. Welles then tore up Cotten's contract with Mercury Productions, saying, \"He can do more for you than I can. Good luck!\" Cotten signed a long-term deal with Selznick. Selznick loaned out Cotten and Ingrid Bergman to MGM for the thriller Gaslight (1944) which was a major hit. Selznick then put Cotten in a wartime drama Since You Went Away (1944) alongside Claudette Colbert, Jennifer Jones and Shirley Temple; it was another major success.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Selznick followed this up by teaming Cotten with Ginger Rogers and Temple in I'll Be Seeing You (1945), another melodrama. Hal Wallis borrowed Cotten and Jones to make Love Letters (1945). Exhibitors voted him the 17th most popular star in the United States in 1945. Selznick used Cotten, Jennifer Jones and Gregory Peck in Duel in the Sun (1946), an epic Western that was hugely popular at the box office.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Dore Schary, who had worked for Selznick, went to run RKO and hired Cotten for The Farmer's Daughter (1947), where he was Loretta Young's leading man. Cotten then made Portrait of Jennie (1948) for Selznick, co starring with Jones; Cotten played a melancholy artist who becomes obsessed with a girl who might have died many years before. His performance won Cotten the International Prize for Best Actor at the 1949 Venice International Film Festival.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Cotten was reunited with Welles in The Third Man (1949), produced by Korda and Selznick. Cotten portrays a writer of pulp fiction who travels to postwar Vienna to meet his friend Harry Lime (Welles). When he arrives, he is told that Lime has died. Determined to prove to the police that his friend was murdered, he uncovers an even darker secret. Years later, Cotten would say \"Orson Welles lists Citizen Kane as his best film, Alfred Hitchcock opts for Shadow of a Doubt, and Sir Carol Reed chose The Third Man – and I'm in all of them.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Cotten then reunited with Hitchcock and Ingrid Bergman in Under Capricorn (1949) as an Australian landowner with a shady past; it was a box office disappointment. So too was Beyond the Forest (1949) with Bette Davis at Warner Bros.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Cotten co-starred with Joan Fontaine in September Affair (1950) for Hal Wallis. Selznick loaned him to 20th Century Fox for the dark Civil War Western Two Flags West (1950), then to RKO for Walk Softly, Stranger (1950, shot in 1948) which reunited him with Alida Valli from The Third Man. It was a huge flop. At Fox he did Half Angel (1951) with Young, then did another with Wallis at Paramount, Peking Express (1951) and went to MGM for The Man with a Cloak (1951) with Barbara Stanwyck. He had a cameo in Welles' Othello (1951).",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Cotten did a Western at Universal, Untamed Frontier (1953), during the filming of which he was injured. He did a thriller for Andrew L. Stone, The Steel Trap (1952), which reunited with Teresa Wright from Shadow of a Doubt. At Fox he was in the Marilyn Monroe vehicle Niagara (1953), after James Mason turned down the role. He narrated Egypt by Three (1953) and was reunited with Stone in A Blueprint for Murder (1953).",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "On the stage in 1953, Cotten created the role of Linus Larrabee Jr. in the original Broadway production of Sabrina Fair, opposite Margaret Sullavan. The production ran from November 11, 1953 until August 21, 1954 and was the basis of the Billy Wilder film Sabrina, which starred Humphrey Bogart and Audrey Hepburn. He and Sullivan appeared in a TV production of State of the Union for Producers' Showcase, directed by Arthur Penn.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Cotten made Special Delivery (1955) in West Germany and appeared in a TV adaptation of Broadway for The Best of Broadway (1955), directed by Franklin J. Schaffner. He appeared in episodes of Celebrity Playhouse, The Ford Television Theatre, Star Stage, Alfred Hitchcock Presents (several times) and General Electric Theater.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In 1955, Cotten hosted The 20th Century Fox Hour on television. In 1956, he starred in the NBC anthology series On Trial (renamed at midseason The Joseph Cotten Show). It ran for 41 episodes.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "He returned to features with The Bottom of the Bottle (1956), The Killer Is Loose (1957) and The Halliday Brand (1957). He guest-starred on Jane Wyman Presents The Fireside Theatre, Telephone Time, Playhouse 90, Schlitz Playhouse, Zane Grey Theater, Suspicion and Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse. He made a cameo appearance in Welles's Touch of Evil (1958) and a starring role in the film adaptation of Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon (1958). Cotten had another success on Broadway when he appeared in Once More, With Feeling (1958–60), which ran for 263 performances. For the third time, Cotten was in a Broadway hit but did not reprise his role in the film version; Yul Brynner played the part on screen.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Cotten had a supporting role in the films The Angel Wore Red (1960) and The Last Sunset (1961), and guest-starred on The DuPont Show with June Allyson, Checkmate, The Barbara Stanwyck Show, Bus Stop, Theatre '62 (an adaptation of Notorious), Dr. Kildare, Wagon Train and Saints and Sinners.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Cotten returned to Broadway to appear in Calculated Risk (1962–63), which ran for 221 performances and meant he had to turn down a role in a film Harrigan's Halo. He guest starred on The Great Adventure and 77 Sunset Strip and appeared in the pilot for Alexander the Great (1963).",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "After some time away from film, Cotten returned in the horror classic Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) for Aldrich, with Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland and Agnes Moorehead. Cotten was top billed in The Great Sioux Massacre (1965) and The Tramplers (1965), Brighty of the Grand Canyon (1966), The Cruel Ones (1967), Some May Live (1967) and Gangsters '70 (1968). He took supporting roles in The Money Trap (1965) and The Oscar (1966).",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "He guest starred on Cimarron Strip, Ironside and Journey to the Unknown and had a support role in Jack of Diamonds (1967). He had the lead in White Comanche (1968) and Latitude Zero (1969) (shot in Japan with his wife) and supported in the TV movies The Lonely Profession (1969) and Cutter's Trail (1970). He also appeared as himself on the Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In (1968) variety show.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Cotten appeared in The Name of the Game, It Takes a Thief, NET Playhouse, The Grasshopper (1970), Tora! Tora! Tora!, The Virginian, Assault on the Wayne (1971), Do You Take This Stranger? (1971), City Beneath the Sea (1971), The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971), Lady Frankenstein (1971) and The Screaming Woman (1972) with de Havilland.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "He had lead roles in Doomsday Voyage (1972), Baron Blood (1972), and The Scopone Game (1973) and was in The Devil's Daughter (1973), The Streets of San Francisco, Soylent Green (1973), A Delicate Balance (1973), The Rockford Files, Syndicate Sadists (1975), The Timber Tramps (1975), The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case (1976), A Whisper in the Dark (1976), Origins of the Mafia (1976), Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977) for Aldrich, Airport '77, Aspen (1977), The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, Last In, First Out (1978), Caravans (1978), Indagine su un delitto perfetto (1978), Island of the Fishmen (1979), Concorde Affaire '79 (1979), Guyana: Cult of the Damned (1979), Churchill and the Generals (1979), Tales of the Unexpected and Fantasy Island.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Cotten later admitted, \"I was in a lot of junk. I get nervous when I don't work.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Cotten's final performances include in George Bower's supernatural horror film The Hearse (1980), the ABC television movie Casino (1980), Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1980), multiple episodes of The Love Boat (1981), The Survivor (1981), shot in Australia and Delusion (1981).",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Cotten's first wife Lenore Kipp died of leukemia in early 1960. He married British actress Patricia Medina on October 20, 1960 in Beverly Hills at the home of David O. Selznick and Jennifer Jones. He bought a historic 1935 home in the Mesa neighborhood of Palm Springs, California, where he and his wife lived from 1985 to 1992. The marriage produced no children.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "In 1961 Cotten was admitted to the Society of the Cincinnati in North Carolina based his descent from Captain Hudson Whitaker, Seventh Regiment, North Carolina Continental Line. He held Captain Whitaker's hereditary seat until his death in 1994.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "On June 8, 1981, Cotten experienced a heart attack followed by a stroke that affected his brain's speech center. He began years of therapy that eventually restored his ability to speak. As he began to recover, he and Orson Welles talked on the phone each week for several hours. Cotten wrote, \"He was strong and supportive, and whenever I used the wrong word (which was frequently) he would say, 'That's a much better word, Jo, I'm going to use it.'\" He and Welles would meet for lunch and reminisce. When Cotten announced he had written a book, Welles asked for the manuscript and read it that night.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "In 1990, Cotten's larynx was removed because of cancer. He died on February 6, 1994 of pneumonia at the age of 88. He was buried at Blandford Cemetery in Petersburg, Virginia.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "At the 10th Venice International Film Festival, Cotten was awarded the Volpi Cup for Best Actor for his performance in the film Portrait of Jennie (1948). He was also given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.",
"title": "Accolades and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Cotten was portrayed by Tim Robbins in the 1985 TV film Malice in Wonderland, by James Tupper in the film Me and Orson Welles (2008) and by Matthew Glave in the television series Feud (2017), which depicts the filming of Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte.",
"title": "Accolades and legacy"
}
]
| Joseph Cheshire Cotten Jr. was an American film, stage, radio and television actor. Cotten achieved prominence on Broadway, starring in the original stage productions of The Philadelphia Story (1939) and Sabrina Fair (1953). He then gained worldwide fame for his collaborations with Orson Welles films on three films, Citizen Kane (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), and Journey into Fear (1943), for which Cotten starred in and was also credited with the screenplay. Cotten went on to become one of the leading Hollywood actors of the 1940s, appearing in films such as Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Gaslight (1944), Love Letters (1945), Duel in the Sun (1946), Portrait of Jennie (1948) for which he won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor, The Third Man (1949) and Niagara (1953). One of his final films was Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1980). Multiple film critics and media outlets have cited him as one of the best actors never to have received an Academy Award nomination. | 2001-10-16T15:38:59Z | 2023-12-19T04:53:23Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Cotten |
16,223 | Joel | Joel or Jolie
{{disambiguation|hn|geo}
I LOVE JOLOOOO | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Joel or Jolie",
"title": ""
},
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"text": "I LOVE JOLOOOO",
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| Joel or Jolie Joel, including a list of people named Joel or Jolie
Joel (surname), a surname
Joel, Joel de Oliveira Monteiro, Brazilian football goalkeeper
Joel, Joel Bertoti Padilha, Brazilian football centre-back
Joel (prophet), a prophet of ancient Israel
Book of Joel, a book in the Jewish Tanakh, and in the Christian Bible, ascribed to the prophet
Joel, Georgia, a community in the United States
Joel, Wisconsin, a community in the United States {{disambiguation|hn|geo} I LOVE JOLOOOO | 2001-10-18T05:08:39Z | 2023-11-29T12:40:10Z | []
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel |
16,224 | Jonah | Jonah or Jonas (Hebrew: יוֹנָה Yōnā, lit. 'dove') is a prophet in the Hebrew Bible, hailing from Gath-hepher in the Kingdom of Israel around the 8th century BCE. He is the central figure of the Book of Jonah, which details his reluctance in delivering the judgment of Yahweh unto the city of Nineveh (near present-day Mosul) in Assyria. After he is swallowed by a large sea creature and then released, he returns to the divine mission.
In Judaism, the story of Jonah represents the teaching of teshuva, the ability to repent to God for forgiveness. Jesus of Nazareth, in the New Testament of Christianity, calls himself "greater than Jonah" and promises the Pharisees "the sign of Jonah" in reference to his resurrection. Early Christian interpreters viewed Jonah as the type of Jesus. In Islam, Jonah is regarded as an Islamic prophet, and the narrative of Jonah in the Bible is repeated in a chapter of the Quran named after him (Yūnus). Mainstream Bible scholars generally regard the Book of Jonah as fictional, and often at least partially satirical. The character of Jonah, son of Amittai, may have been based on the historical prophet of the same name who prophesied during the reign of Amaziah of the Kingdom of Judah, as mentioned in 2 Kings.
Although the creature that swallowed Jonah is often depicted in art and culture as a whale, the Hebrew text uses the phrase dag gadol (lit. 'big fish'). In the 17th century and early 18th century, the species of the fish that swallowed Jonah was the subject of speculation by naturalists, who interpreted the story as an account of a historical incident. Some modern scholars of folklore, on the other hand, note similarities between Jonah and other legendary religious and mythical figures, specifically the Sumerian ruler Gilgamesh and the Greek hero Jason.
Jonah is the central character in the Book of Jonah, in which God commands him to go to the city of Nineveh to prophesy against it "for their great wickedness is come up before me," but Jonah instead attempts to flee from "the presence of the Lord" by going to Jaffa (sometimes transliterated as Joppa or Joppe). He sets sail for Tarshish. A huge storm arises and the sailors, realizing that it is no ordinary storm, cast lots and discover that Jonah is to blame. Jonah admits this and says that if he is thrown overboard, the storm will cease. The sailors refuse to do this and continue rowing, but all their efforts fail, and they eventually throw Jonah overboard. As a result, the storm calms and the sailors offer sacrifices to God.
After being cast from the ship, Jonah is swallowed by a large fish, within the belly of which he remains for three days and three nights. While in the great fish, Jonah prays to God in his affliction and commits to giving thanks and to paying what he has vowed. God commands the fish to vomit Jonah out.
God again commands Jonah to travel to Nineveh and prophesy to its inhabitants. This time he travels there and enters the city, crying, "In forty days Nineveh shall be overthrown." After Jonah has walked across Nineveh, the people begin to believe his word and proclaim a fast. The king of Nineveh puts on sackcloth and sits in ashes, making a proclamation which decrees fasting, the wearing of sackcloth, prayer, and repentance. God sees their repentant hearts and spares the city at that time. The entire city is humbled and broken, with the people (and even the animals) wearing sackcloth and ashes.
Displeased by this, Jonah refers to his earlier flight to Tarshish while asserting that, since God is merciful, it was inevitable that God would turn from the threatened calamities. He leaves the city and makes a shelter, waiting to see whether or not the city will be destroyed. God causes a plant (in Hebrew a kikayon) to grow over Jonah's shelter to give him some shade from the sun. Later, God causes a worm to bite the plant's root and it withers. Jonah, exposed to the full force of the sun, becomes faint and pleads for God to kill him.
But God said to Jonah: "Do you have a right to be angry about the vine?" And he said: "I do. I am angry enough to die."But the LORD said: "You have been concerned about this vine, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight, and died overnight.But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?"
The Book of Jonah (Yonah יונה) is one of the twelve minor prophets included in the Hebrew Bible. According to one tradition, Jonah was the boy brought back to life by Elijah the prophet in 1 Kings. Another tradition holds that he was the son of the woman of Shunem brought back to life by Elisha in 2 Kings and that he is called the "son of Amittai" (Truth) due to his mother's recognition of Elisha's identity as a prophet in 2 Kings. The Book of Jonah is read every year, in its original Hebrew and in its entirety, on Yom Kippur – the Day of Atonement – as the Haftarah at the afternoon mincha prayer. According to Rabbi Eliezer, the fish that swallowed Jonah was created in the primordial era and the inside of its mouth was like a synagogue; the fish's eyes were like windows and a pearl inside its mouth provided further illumination.
According to the Midrash, while Jonah was inside the fish, the fish told him that its life was nearly over because soon the Leviathan would eat them both. Jonah promised the fish that he would save them. Following Jonah's directions, the fish swam up alongside the Leviathan and Jonah threatened to leash the Leviathan by its tongue and let the other fish eat it. The Leviathan heard Jonah's threats, saw that he was circumcised, and realized that he was protected by the Lord, so it fled in terror, leaving Jonah and the fish alive.
The medieval Jewish scholar and rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra (1092–1167) argued against any literal interpretation of the Book of Jonah, stating that the "experiences of all the prophets except Moses were visions, not actualities." The later scholar Isaac Abarbanel (1437–1509), however, argued that Jonah could have easily survived in the belly of the fish for three days, because "after all, fetuses live nine months without access to fresh air."
Teshuva – the ability to repent and be forgiven by God – is a prominent idea in Jewish thought. This concept is developed in the Book of Jonah: Jonah, the son of truth (the name of his father "Amitai" in Hebrew means truth), refuses to ask the people of Nineveh to repent. He seeks the truth only, and not forgiveness. When forced to go, his call is heard loud and clear, and the people of Nineveh repent ecstatically, "fasting, including the sheep," and the Jewish text is critical of this. The Book of Jonah also highlights the sometimes unstable relationship between two religious needs: comfort and truth.
Twelfth century Jewish rabbi and explorer Petachiah of Regensburg visited Jonah's tomb during his visit to the Holy Land, and wrote: "There is a beautiful palace built over it. Near it is a pleasure garden wherein all kinds of fruit are found. The keeper of the pleasure garden is a Gentile. Nevertheless, when Gentiles come there he gives them no fruit, but when Jews come he gives them a friendly reception, saying, Jonah, son of Amittai, was a Jew, therefore it is due to you to partake of what is his, and then gives to the Jews to eat thereof." Petachiah did not provide details about the exact location of the tomb.
Jonah is mentioned twice in the fourteenth chapter of the deuterocanonical Book of Tobit, the conclusion of which finds Tobit's son, Tobias, rejoicing at the news of Nineveh's destruction by Nebuchadnezzar and Ahasuerus in apparent fulfillment of Jonah's prophecy against the Assyrian capital.
In the New Testament, Jonah is mentioned in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. In Matthew, Jesus makes a reference to Jonah when he is asked for a sign by some of the scribes and the Pharisees. Jesus says that the sign will be the sign of Jonah: Jonah's restoration after three days and three night inside the great fish prefigures his own resurrection.
He answered, "A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a sign! But none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and now something greater than Jonah is here."
Jonah is regarded as a saint by a number of Christian denominations. His feast day in the Roman Catholic Church is on 21 September, according to the Martyrologium Romanum. On the Eastern Orthodox liturgical calendar, Jonah's feast day is on 22 September (for those churches which follow the traditional Julian calendar; 22 September currently falls in October on the modern Gregorian calendar). In the Armenian Apostolic Church, moveable feasts are held in commemoration of Jonah as a single prophet and as one of the Twelve Minor Prophets. Jonah's mission to the Ninevites is commemorated by the Fast of Nineveh in Syriac and Oriental Orthodox Churches. Jonah is commemorated as a prophet in the Calendar of Saints of the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church on 22 September.
Christian theologians have traditionally interpreted Jonah as a type for Jesus Christ. Jonah being in swallowed by the giant fish was regarded as a foreshadowing of Jesus's crucifixion and Jonah emerging from the fish after three days was seen as a parallel for Jesus emerging from the tomb after three days. Saint Jerome equates Jonah with Jesus's more nationalistic side, and justifies Jonah's actions by arguing that "Jonah acts thus as a patriot, not so much that he hates the Ninevites, as that he does not want to destroy his own people."
Other Christian interpreters, including Saint Augustine and Martin Luther, have taken a directly opposite approach, regarding Jonah as the epitome of envy and jealousness, which they regarded as inherent characteristics of the Jewish people. Luther likewise concludes that the kikayon (plant) represents Judaism, and that the worm which devours it represents Christ. Luther also questioned the idea that the Book of Jonah was ever intended as literal history, commenting that he found it hard to believe that anyone would have interpreted it as such if it were not in the Bible. Luther's antisemitic interpretation of Jonah remained the prevailing interpretation among German Protestants throughout early modern history. J. D. Michaelis comments that "the meaning of the fable hits you right between the eyes", and concludes that the Book of Jonah is a polemic against "the Israelite people's hate and envy towards all the other nations of the earth." Albert Eichhorn was a strong supporter of Michaelis's interpretation.
John Calvin and John Hooper regarded the Book of Jonah as a warning to all those who might attempt to flee from the wrath of God. While Luther had been careful to maintain that the Book of Jonah was not written by Jonah, Calvin declared that the Book of Jonah was Jonah's personal confession of guilt. Calvin sees Jonah's time inside the fish's belly as equivalent to the fires of Hell, intended to correct Jonah and set him on the path of righteousness. Also, unlike Luther, Calvin finds fault with all the characters in the story, describing the sailors on the boat as "hard and iron-hearted, like Cyclops'", the penitence of the Ninevites as "untrained", and the king of Nineveh as a "novice". Hooper, on the other hand, sees Jonah as the archetypal dissident and the ship he is cast out from as a symbol of the state. Hooper deplores such dissidents, decrying: "Can you live quietly with so many Jonasses? Nay then, throw them into the sea!" In the eighteenth century, German professors were forbidden from teaching that the Book of Jonah was anything other than a literal, historical account.
Jonah (Arabic: يُونُس, romanized: Yūnus) is the title of the tenth chapter of the Quran. Yūnus is traditionally viewed as highly important in Islam as a prophet who was faithful to God and delivered His messages. Jonah is the only one of Judaism's Twelve Minor Prophets to be named in the Quran. In Quran 21:87 and 68:48, Jonah is called Dhul-Nūn (Arabic: ذُو ٱلنُّوْن; meaning "The One of the Fish"). In 4:163 and 6:86, he is referred to as "an apostle of Allah". Surah 37:139–148 retells the full story of Jonah:
And verily, Jonah was among the messengers.[Mention] when he ran away to the laden ship.Then (to save it from sinking) he drew straws (with other passengers). He lost and was thrown overboard.Then the whale engulfed him while he was blameworthy.Had it not been that he (repented and) glorified Allah,He would certainly have remained inside the Fish till the Day of Resurrection.But We cast him onto the open (shore), (totally) worn out,and caused a squash plant to grow over him.We (later) sent him (back) to (his city of) at least one hundred thousand people,And they believed, so We allowed them enjoyment for a while.
The Quran never mentions Jonah's father, but Muslim tradition teaches that Jonah was from the tribe of Benjamin and that his father was Amittai.
Jonah is also mentioned in a few incidents during the lifetime of Muhammad. Quraysh sent their servant, Addas, to serve him grapes for sustenance. Muhammad asked Addas where he was from and the servant replied Nineveh. "The town of Jonah the just, son of Amittai!" Muhammad exclaimed. Addas was shocked because he knew that the pagan Arabs had no knowledge of the prophet Jonah. He then asked how Muhammad knew of this man. "We are brothers," Muhammad replied. "Jonah was a Prophet of God and I, too, am a Prophet of God." Addas immediately accepted Islam and kissed the hands and feet of Muhammad.
One of the sayings attributed to Muhammad, in the collection of Imam Bukhari, says that Muhammad said "One should not say that I am better than Jonah". Umayya ibn Abi al-Salt, an older contemporary of Muhammad, taught that, had Jonah not prayed to Allah, he would have remained trapped inside the fish until Judgement Day, but, because of his prayer, Jonah "stayed only a few days within the belly of the fish".
The ninth-century Persian historian Al-Tabari records that, while Jonah was inside the fish, "none of his bones or members were injured". Al-Tabari also writes that Allah made the body of the fish transparent, allowing Jonah to see the "wonders of the deep" and that Jonah heard all the fish singing praises to Allah. Kisai Marvazi, a tenth-century poet, records that Jonah's father was seventy years old when Jonah was born and that he died soon afterwards, leaving Jonah's mother with nothing but a wooden spoon, which turned out to be a cornucopia.
Nineveh's current location is marked by excavations of five gates, parts of walls on four sides, and two large mounds: the hill of Kuyunjik and hill of Nabi Yunus. A mosque atop Nabi Yunus was dedicated to the prophet Jonah and contained a shrine, which was revered by both Muslims and Christians as the site of Jonah's tomb. The tomb was a popular pilgrimage site and a symbol of unity to Jews, Christians, and Muslims across the Middle East. On July 24, 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) destroyed the mosque containing the tomb as part of a campaign to destroy religious sanctuaries it deemed to be idolatrous. After Mosul was taken back from ISIL in January 2017, an ancient Assyrian palace built by Esarhaddon dating to around the first half of the 7th century BCE was discovered beneath the ruined mosque. ISIL had plundered the palace of items to sell on the black market, but some of the artifacts that were more difficult to transport still remained in place.
Other reputed locations of Jonah's tomb include:
The story of a man surviving after being swallowed by a whale or giant fish is classified in the catalogue of folktale types as ATU 1889G.
Many Biblical scholars hold that the contents of the Book of Jonah are ahistorical. Although the prophet Jonah allegedly lived in the eighth century BCE, the Book of Jonah was written centuries later during the time of the Achaemenid Empire. The Hebrew used in the Book of Jonah shows strong influences from Aramaic and the cultural practices described in it match those of the Achaemenid Persians. Some scholars regard the Book of Jonah as an intentional work of parody or satire. If this is the case, then it was probably admitted into the canon of the Hebrew Bible by sages who misunderstood its satirical nature and mistakenly interpreted it as a serious prophetic work.
While the Book of Jonah itself is considered fiction, Jonah himself may have been a historical prophet; he is briefly mentioned in the Second Book of Kings:
He restored the border of Israel from the entrance of Hamath unto the sea of the Arabah, according to the word of the LORD, the God of Israel, which He spoke by the hand of His servant Jonah the son of Amittai, the prophet, who was of Gath-hepher.
In a lecture delivered in 1978 and published in 1979, Assyriologist Donald Wiseman defended the plausibility of many aspects of the story, supporting "the tradition that many features in the narrative exhibit an intimate and accurate knowledge of Assyria which could stem from an historical event as early as the eighth century B.C.", concluding that "the story of Jonah need not be considered as a late story or parable".
The views expressed by Jonah in the Book of Jonah are a parody of views held by members of Jewish society at the time when it was written. The primary target of the satire may have been a faction whom Morton Smith calls "Separationists", who believed that God would destroy those who disobeyed him, that sinful cities would be obliterated, and that God's mercy did not extend to those outside the Abrahamic covenant. McKenzie and Graham remark that "Jonah is in some ways the most 'orthodox' of Israelite theologians – to make a theological point." Jonah's statements throughout the book are characterized by their militancy, but his name ironically means "dove", a bird which the ancient Israelites associated with peace.
Jonah's rejection of God's commands is a parody of the obedience of the prophets described in other Old Testament writings. The king of Nineveh's instant repentance parodies the rulers throughout the other writings of the Old Testament who disregard prophetic warnings, such as Ahab and Zedekiah. The readiness to worship God displayed by the sailors on the ship and the people of Nineveh contrasts ironically with Jonah's own reluctance, as does Jonah's greater love for kikayon providing him shade than for all the people in Nineveh.
The Book of Jonah also employs elements of literary absurdism; it exaggerates the size of the city of Nineveh to an implausible degree and incorrectly refers to the administrator of the city as a "king". According to scholars, no human being could realistically survive for three days inside a fish, and the description of the livestock in Nineveh fasting alongside their owners is "silly". Some of these points are countered in the aforementioned lecture of Donald Wiseman.
The motif of a protagonist being swallowed by a giant fish or whale became a stock trope of later satirical writings. Similar incidents are recounted in Lucian of Samosata's A True Story, which was written in the second century CE, and in the novel Baron Munchausen's Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia, published by Rudolf Erich Raspe in 1785.
Though art and culture often depicts Jonah's fish as a whale, the Hebrew text, as throughout scripture, refers to no marine species in particular, simply saying "great fish" or "big fish". While some biblical scholars suggest the size and habits of the great white shark correspond better to the representations of Jonah's experiences, normally an adult human is too large to be swallowed whole. The development of whaling from the 18th century onwards made it clear that most, if not all, species of whale are incapable of swallowing a human, leading to much controversy about the veracity of the biblical story of Jonah.
In Jonah 2:1 (1:17 in English translations), the Hebrew text reads dag gadol (דג גדול) or, in the Hebrew Masoretic Text, dāḡ gāḏōl (דָּ֣ג גָּד֔וֹל), which means "great fish". The Septuagint translates this phrase into Greek as kētei megalōi (κήτει μεγάλῳ), meaning "huge fish". In Greek mythology, the same word meaning "fish" (kêtos) is used to describe the sea monster slain by the hero Perseus that nearly devoured the Princess Andromeda. Jerome later translated this phrase as piscis grandis in his Latin Vulgate. He translated kétos, however, as ventre ceti in Matthew 12:40: this second case occurs only in this verse of the New Testament.
At some point cetus became synonymous with "whale" (the study of whales is now called cetology). In his 1534 translation, William Tyndale translated the phrase in Jonah 2:1 as "greate fyshe" and the word kétos (Greek) or cetus (Latin) in Matthew 12:40 as "whale". Tyndale's translation was later incorporated into the Authorized Version of 1611. Since then, the "great fish" in Jonah 2 has been most often interpreted as a whale. In English some translations use the word "whale" for Matthew 12:40, while others use "sea creature" or "big fish".
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, naturalists, interpreting the Jonah story as a historical account, became obsessed with trying to identify the exact species of the fish that swallowed Jonah. In the mid-nineteenth century, Edward Bouverie Pusey, professor of Hebrew at Oxford University, claimed that the Book of Jonah must have been authored by Jonah himself and argued that the fish story must be historically true, or else it would not have been included in the Bible. Pusey attempted to scientifically catalogue the fish, hoping to "shame those who speak of the miracle of Jonah's preservation in the fish as a thing less credible than any of God's other miraculous doings".
The debate over the fish in the Book of Jonah played a major role during Clarence Darrow's cross-examination of William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes Trial in 1925. Darrow asked Bryan "When you read that ... the whale swallowed Jonah ... how do you literally interpret that?" Bryan replied that he believed in "a God who can make a whale and can make a man and make both of them do what He pleases." Bryan ultimately admitted that it was necessary to interpret the Bible, and is generally regarded as having come off looking like a "buffoon".
The largest of all whales – blue whales – are baleen whales which eat plankton; and "it is commonly said that this species would be choked if it attempted to swallow a herring." As for the whale shark, Dr. E. W. Gudger, an Honorary Associate in Ichthyology at the American Museum of Natural History, notes that, while the whale shark does have a large mouth, its throat is only four inches wide, with a sharp elbow or bend behind the opening, meaning that not even a human arm would be able to pass through it. He concludes that "the whale shark is not the fish that swallowed Jonah."
Sperm whales, however, appear to be a different matter: They regularly eat giant squid, so presumably one could swallow a human. Similar to a cow, sperm whales have four-chambered stomachs. The first chamber has no gastric juices but has muscular walls to crush its food. On the other hand, it is not possible to breathe inside the sperm whale's stomach because there is no air (but probably methane instead). A 2023 novel by Daniel Kraus explores the idea of a man surviving being swallowed by a sperm whale, but with an oxygen tank.
In Turkish, "Jonah's fish" (yunus balığı) is the term used for dolphins. A long-established expression among sailors uses the term "a Jonah" to mean a sailor/passenger whose presence on board brings bad luck and endangers the ship. Later, this meaning was extended to "a person who carries a jinx, one who will bring bad luck to any enterprise."
Despite its brevity, the Book of Jonah has been adapted numerous times in literature and in popular culture. In Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Father Mapple delivers a sermon on the Book of Jonah. Mapple asks why Jonah does not show remorse for disobeying God while he is inside of the fish. He comes to the conclusion that Jonah admirably understands that "his dreadful punishment is just." Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883) features the title character and his father Geppetto being swallowed by "the Terrible Dogfish," an allusion to the story of Jonah. Walt Disney's 1940 film adaptation of the novel retains this allusion. The story of Jonah was adapted into Phil Vischer and Mike Nawrocki's animated film Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie (2002). In the film, Jonah is swallowed by a gargantuan whale.
Joseph Campbell suggests that the story of Jonah parallels a scene from the Epic of Gilgamesh, in which Gilgamesh obtains a plant from the bottom of the sea. In the Book of Jonah, a worm (in Hebrew tola'ath, "maggot") bites the shade-giving plant's root causing it to wither; whereas in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh ties stones to his feet and plucks his plant from the floor of the sea. Once he returns to the shore, the rejuvenating plant is eaten by a serpent.
Campbell also noted several similarities between the story of Jonah and that of Jason in Greek mythology. The Greek rendering of the name Jonah is Jonas (Ἰωνᾶς), which differs from Jason (Ἰάσων) only in the order of sounds—both os are omegas suggesting that Jason may have been confused with Jonah. Gildas Hamel, drawing on the Book of Jonah and Greco-Roman sources—including Greek vases and the accounts of Apollonius of Rhodes, Gaius Valerius Flaccus and Orphic Argonautica—identifies a number of shared motifs, including the names of the heroes, the presence of a dove, the idea of "fleeing" like the wind and causing a storm, the attitude of the sailors, the presence of a sea-monster or dragon threatening the hero or swallowing him, and the form and the word used for the "gourd" (kikayon).
Hamel takes the view that it was the Hebrew author who reacted to and adapted this mythological material to communicate his own, quite different message. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Jonah or Jonas (Hebrew: יוֹנָה Yōnā, lit. 'dove') is a prophet in the Hebrew Bible, hailing from Gath-hepher in the Kingdom of Israel around the 8th century BCE. He is the central figure of the Book of Jonah, which details his reluctance in delivering the judgment of Yahweh unto the city of Nineveh (near present-day Mosul) in Assyria. After he is swallowed by a large sea creature and then released, he returns to the divine mission.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "In Judaism, the story of Jonah represents the teaching of teshuva, the ability to repent to God for forgiveness. Jesus of Nazareth, in the New Testament of Christianity, calls himself \"greater than Jonah\" and promises the Pharisees \"the sign of Jonah\" in reference to his resurrection. Early Christian interpreters viewed Jonah as the type of Jesus. In Islam, Jonah is regarded as an Islamic prophet, and the narrative of Jonah in the Bible is repeated in a chapter of the Quran named after him (Yūnus). Mainstream Bible scholars generally regard the Book of Jonah as fictional, and often at least partially satirical. The character of Jonah, son of Amittai, may have been based on the historical prophet of the same name who prophesied during the reign of Amaziah of the Kingdom of Judah, as mentioned in 2 Kings.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Although the creature that swallowed Jonah is often depicted in art and culture as a whale, the Hebrew text uses the phrase dag gadol (lit. 'big fish'). In the 17th century and early 18th century, the species of the fish that swallowed Jonah was the subject of speculation by naturalists, who interpreted the story as an account of a historical incident. Some modern scholars of folklore, on the other hand, note similarities between Jonah and other legendary religious and mythical figures, specifically the Sumerian ruler Gilgamesh and the Greek hero Jason.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Jonah is the central character in the Book of Jonah, in which God commands him to go to the city of Nineveh to prophesy against it \"for their great wickedness is come up before me,\" but Jonah instead attempts to flee from \"the presence of the Lord\" by going to Jaffa (sometimes transliterated as Joppa or Joppe). He sets sail for Tarshish. A huge storm arises and the sailors, realizing that it is no ordinary storm, cast lots and discover that Jonah is to blame. Jonah admits this and says that if he is thrown overboard, the storm will cease. The sailors refuse to do this and continue rowing, but all their efforts fail, and they eventually throw Jonah overboard. As a result, the storm calms and the sailors offer sacrifices to God.",
"title": "Book of Jonah"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "After being cast from the ship, Jonah is swallowed by a large fish, within the belly of which he remains for three days and three nights. While in the great fish, Jonah prays to God in his affliction and commits to giving thanks and to paying what he has vowed. God commands the fish to vomit Jonah out.",
"title": "Book of Jonah"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "God again commands Jonah to travel to Nineveh and prophesy to its inhabitants. This time he travels there and enters the city, crying, \"In forty days Nineveh shall be overthrown.\" After Jonah has walked across Nineveh, the people begin to believe his word and proclaim a fast. The king of Nineveh puts on sackcloth and sits in ashes, making a proclamation which decrees fasting, the wearing of sackcloth, prayer, and repentance. God sees their repentant hearts and spares the city at that time. The entire city is humbled and broken, with the people (and even the animals) wearing sackcloth and ashes.",
"title": "Book of Jonah"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Displeased by this, Jonah refers to his earlier flight to Tarshish while asserting that, since God is merciful, it was inevitable that God would turn from the threatened calamities. He leaves the city and makes a shelter, waiting to see whether or not the city will be destroyed. God causes a plant (in Hebrew a kikayon) to grow over Jonah's shelter to give him some shade from the sun. Later, God causes a worm to bite the plant's root and it withers. Jonah, exposed to the full force of the sun, becomes faint and pleads for God to kill him.",
"title": "Book of Jonah"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "But God said to Jonah: \"Do you have a right to be angry about the vine?\" And he said: \"I do. I am angry enough to die.\"But the LORD said: \"You have been concerned about this vine, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight, and died overnight.But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?\"",
"title": "Book of Jonah"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The Book of Jonah (Yonah יונה) is one of the twelve minor prophets included in the Hebrew Bible. According to one tradition, Jonah was the boy brought back to life by Elijah the prophet in 1 Kings. Another tradition holds that he was the son of the woman of Shunem brought back to life by Elisha in 2 Kings and that he is called the \"son of Amittai\" (Truth) due to his mother's recognition of Elisha's identity as a prophet in 2 Kings. The Book of Jonah is read every year, in its original Hebrew and in its entirety, on Yom Kippur – the Day of Atonement – as the Haftarah at the afternoon mincha prayer. According to Rabbi Eliezer, the fish that swallowed Jonah was created in the primordial era and the inside of its mouth was like a synagogue; the fish's eyes were like windows and a pearl inside its mouth provided further illumination.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "According to the Midrash, while Jonah was inside the fish, the fish told him that its life was nearly over because soon the Leviathan would eat them both. Jonah promised the fish that he would save them. Following Jonah's directions, the fish swam up alongside the Leviathan and Jonah threatened to leash the Leviathan by its tongue and let the other fish eat it. The Leviathan heard Jonah's threats, saw that he was circumcised, and realized that he was protected by the Lord, so it fled in terror, leaving Jonah and the fish alive.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The medieval Jewish scholar and rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra (1092–1167) argued against any literal interpretation of the Book of Jonah, stating that the \"experiences of all the prophets except Moses were visions, not actualities.\" The later scholar Isaac Abarbanel (1437–1509), however, argued that Jonah could have easily survived in the belly of the fish for three days, because \"after all, fetuses live nine months without access to fresh air.\"",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Teshuva – the ability to repent and be forgiven by God – is a prominent idea in Jewish thought. This concept is developed in the Book of Jonah: Jonah, the son of truth (the name of his father \"Amitai\" in Hebrew means truth), refuses to ask the people of Nineveh to repent. He seeks the truth only, and not forgiveness. When forced to go, his call is heard loud and clear, and the people of Nineveh repent ecstatically, \"fasting, including the sheep,\" and the Jewish text is critical of this. The Book of Jonah also highlights the sometimes unstable relationship between two religious needs: comfort and truth.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Twelfth century Jewish rabbi and explorer Petachiah of Regensburg visited Jonah's tomb during his visit to the Holy Land, and wrote: \"There is a beautiful palace built over it. Near it is a pleasure garden wherein all kinds of fruit are found. The keeper of the pleasure garden is a Gentile. Nevertheless, when Gentiles come there he gives them no fruit, but when Jews come he gives them a friendly reception, saying, Jonah, son of Amittai, was a Jew, therefore it is due to you to partake of what is his, and then gives to the Jews to eat thereof.\" Petachiah did not provide details about the exact location of the tomb.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Jonah is mentioned twice in the fourteenth chapter of the deuterocanonical Book of Tobit, the conclusion of which finds Tobit's son, Tobias, rejoicing at the news of Nineveh's destruction by Nebuchadnezzar and Ahasuerus in apparent fulfillment of Jonah's prophecy against the Assyrian capital.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In the New Testament, Jonah is mentioned in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. In Matthew, Jesus makes a reference to Jonah when he is asked for a sign by some of the scribes and the Pharisees. Jesus says that the sign will be the sign of Jonah: Jonah's restoration after three days and three night inside the great fish prefigures his own resurrection.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "He answered, \"A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a sign! But none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and now something greater than Jonah is here.\"",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Jonah is regarded as a saint by a number of Christian denominations. His feast day in the Roman Catholic Church is on 21 September, according to the Martyrologium Romanum. On the Eastern Orthodox liturgical calendar, Jonah's feast day is on 22 September (for those churches which follow the traditional Julian calendar; 22 September currently falls in October on the modern Gregorian calendar). In the Armenian Apostolic Church, moveable feasts are held in commemoration of Jonah as a single prophet and as one of the Twelve Minor Prophets. Jonah's mission to the Ninevites is commemorated by the Fast of Nineveh in Syriac and Oriental Orthodox Churches. Jonah is commemorated as a prophet in the Calendar of Saints of the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church on 22 September.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Christian theologians have traditionally interpreted Jonah as a type for Jesus Christ. Jonah being in swallowed by the giant fish was regarded as a foreshadowing of Jesus's crucifixion and Jonah emerging from the fish after three days was seen as a parallel for Jesus emerging from the tomb after three days. Saint Jerome equates Jonah with Jesus's more nationalistic side, and justifies Jonah's actions by arguing that \"Jonah acts thus as a patriot, not so much that he hates the Ninevites, as that he does not want to destroy his own people.\"",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Other Christian interpreters, including Saint Augustine and Martin Luther, have taken a directly opposite approach, regarding Jonah as the epitome of envy and jealousness, which they regarded as inherent characteristics of the Jewish people. Luther likewise concludes that the kikayon (plant) represents Judaism, and that the worm which devours it represents Christ. Luther also questioned the idea that the Book of Jonah was ever intended as literal history, commenting that he found it hard to believe that anyone would have interpreted it as such if it were not in the Bible. Luther's antisemitic interpretation of Jonah remained the prevailing interpretation among German Protestants throughout early modern history. J. D. Michaelis comments that \"the meaning of the fable hits you right between the eyes\", and concludes that the Book of Jonah is a polemic against \"the Israelite people's hate and envy towards all the other nations of the earth.\" Albert Eichhorn was a strong supporter of Michaelis's interpretation.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "John Calvin and John Hooper regarded the Book of Jonah as a warning to all those who might attempt to flee from the wrath of God. While Luther had been careful to maintain that the Book of Jonah was not written by Jonah, Calvin declared that the Book of Jonah was Jonah's personal confession of guilt. Calvin sees Jonah's time inside the fish's belly as equivalent to the fires of Hell, intended to correct Jonah and set him on the path of righteousness. Also, unlike Luther, Calvin finds fault with all the characters in the story, describing the sailors on the boat as \"hard and iron-hearted, like Cyclops'\", the penitence of the Ninevites as \"untrained\", and the king of Nineveh as a \"novice\". Hooper, on the other hand, sees Jonah as the archetypal dissident and the ship he is cast out from as a symbol of the state. Hooper deplores such dissidents, decrying: \"Can you live quietly with so many Jonasses? Nay then, throw them into the sea!\" In the eighteenth century, German professors were forbidden from teaching that the Book of Jonah was anything other than a literal, historical account.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Jonah (Arabic: يُونُس, romanized: Yūnus) is the title of the tenth chapter of the Quran. Yūnus is traditionally viewed as highly important in Islam as a prophet who was faithful to God and delivered His messages. Jonah is the only one of Judaism's Twelve Minor Prophets to be named in the Quran. In Quran 21:87 and 68:48, Jonah is called Dhul-Nūn (Arabic: ذُو ٱلنُّوْن; meaning \"The One of the Fish\"). In 4:163 and 6:86, he is referred to as \"an apostle of Allah\". Surah 37:139–148 retells the full story of Jonah:",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "And verily, Jonah was among the messengers.[Mention] when he ran away to the laden ship.Then (to save it from sinking) he drew straws (with other passengers). He lost and was thrown overboard.Then the whale engulfed him while he was blameworthy.Had it not been that he (repented and) glorified Allah,He would certainly have remained inside the Fish till the Day of Resurrection.But We cast him onto the open (shore), (totally) worn out,and caused a squash plant to grow over him.We (later) sent him (back) to (his city of) at least one hundred thousand people,And they believed, so We allowed them enjoyment for a while.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The Quran never mentions Jonah's father, but Muslim tradition teaches that Jonah was from the tribe of Benjamin and that his father was Amittai.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Jonah is also mentioned in a few incidents during the lifetime of Muhammad. Quraysh sent their servant, Addas, to serve him grapes for sustenance. Muhammad asked Addas where he was from and the servant replied Nineveh. \"The town of Jonah the just, son of Amittai!\" Muhammad exclaimed. Addas was shocked because he knew that the pagan Arabs had no knowledge of the prophet Jonah. He then asked how Muhammad knew of this man. \"We are brothers,\" Muhammad replied. \"Jonah was a Prophet of God and I, too, am a Prophet of God.\" Addas immediately accepted Islam and kissed the hands and feet of Muhammad.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "One of the sayings attributed to Muhammad, in the collection of Imam Bukhari, says that Muhammad said \"One should not say that I am better than Jonah\". Umayya ibn Abi al-Salt, an older contemporary of Muhammad, taught that, had Jonah not prayed to Allah, he would have remained trapped inside the fish until Judgement Day, but, because of his prayer, Jonah \"stayed only a few days within the belly of the fish\".",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The ninth-century Persian historian Al-Tabari records that, while Jonah was inside the fish, \"none of his bones or members were injured\". Al-Tabari also writes that Allah made the body of the fish transparent, allowing Jonah to see the \"wonders of the deep\" and that Jonah heard all the fish singing praises to Allah. Kisai Marvazi, a tenth-century poet, records that Jonah's father was seventy years old when Jonah was born and that he died soon afterwards, leaving Jonah's mother with nothing but a wooden spoon, which turned out to be a cornucopia.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Nineveh's current location is marked by excavations of five gates, parts of walls on four sides, and two large mounds: the hill of Kuyunjik and hill of Nabi Yunus. A mosque atop Nabi Yunus was dedicated to the prophet Jonah and contained a shrine, which was revered by both Muslims and Christians as the site of Jonah's tomb. The tomb was a popular pilgrimage site and a symbol of unity to Jews, Christians, and Muslims across the Middle East. On July 24, 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) destroyed the mosque containing the tomb as part of a campaign to destroy religious sanctuaries it deemed to be idolatrous. After Mosul was taken back from ISIL in January 2017, an ancient Assyrian palace built by Esarhaddon dating to around the first half of the 7th century BCE was discovered beneath the ruined mosque. ISIL had plundered the palace of items to sell on the black market, but some of the artifacts that were more difficult to transport still remained in place.",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Other reputed locations of Jonah's tomb include:",
"title": "Religious views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The story of a man surviving after being swallowed by a whale or giant fish is classified in the catalogue of folktale types as ATU 1889G.",
"title": "Scholarly interpretations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Many Biblical scholars hold that the contents of the Book of Jonah are ahistorical. Although the prophet Jonah allegedly lived in the eighth century BCE, the Book of Jonah was written centuries later during the time of the Achaemenid Empire. The Hebrew used in the Book of Jonah shows strong influences from Aramaic and the cultural practices described in it match those of the Achaemenid Persians. Some scholars regard the Book of Jonah as an intentional work of parody or satire. If this is the case, then it was probably admitted into the canon of the Hebrew Bible by sages who misunderstood its satirical nature and mistakenly interpreted it as a serious prophetic work.",
"title": "Scholarly interpretations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "While the Book of Jonah itself is considered fiction, Jonah himself may have been a historical prophet; he is briefly mentioned in the Second Book of Kings:",
"title": "Scholarly interpretations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "He restored the border of Israel from the entrance of Hamath unto the sea of the Arabah, according to the word of the LORD, the God of Israel, which He spoke by the hand of His servant Jonah the son of Amittai, the prophet, who was of Gath-hepher.",
"title": "Scholarly interpretations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In a lecture delivered in 1978 and published in 1979, Assyriologist Donald Wiseman defended the plausibility of many aspects of the story, supporting \"the tradition that many features in the narrative exhibit an intimate and accurate knowledge of Assyria which could stem from an historical event as early as the eighth century B.C.\", concluding that \"the story of Jonah need not be considered as a late story or parable\".",
"title": "Scholarly interpretations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The views expressed by Jonah in the Book of Jonah are a parody of views held by members of Jewish society at the time when it was written. The primary target of the satire may have been a faction whom Morton Smith calls \"Separationists\", who believed that God would destroy those who disobeyed him, that sinful cities would be obliterated, and that God's mercy did not extend to those outside the Abrahamic covenant. McKenzie and Graham remark that \"Jonah is in some ways the most 'orthodox' of Israelite theologians – to make a theological point.\" Jonah's statements throughout the book are characterized by their militancy, but his name ironically means \"dove\", a bird which the ancient Israelites associated with peace.",
"title": "Scholarly interpretations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Jonah's rejection of God's commands is a parody of the obedience of the prophets described in other Old Testament writings. The king of Nineveh's instant repentance parodies the rulers throughout the other writings of the Old Testament who disregard prophetic warnings, such as Ahab and Zedekiah. The readiness to worship God displayed by the sailors on the ship and the people of Nineveh contrasts ironically with Jonah's own reluctance, as does Jonah's greater love for kikayon providing him shade than for all the people in Nineveh.",
"title": "Scholarly interpretations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The Book of Jonah also employs elements of literary absurdism; it exaggerates the size of the city of Nineveh to an implausible degree and incorrectly refers to the administrator of the city as a \"king\". According to scholars, no human being could realistically survive for three days inside a fish, and the description of the livestock in Nineveh fasting alongside their owners is \"silly\". Some of these points are countered in the aforementioned lecture of Donald Wiseman.",
"title": "Scholarly interpretations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The motif of a protagonist being swallowed by a giant fish or whale became a stock trope of later satirical writings. Similar incidents are recounted in Lucian of Samosata's A True Story, which was written in the second century CE, and in the novel Baron Munchausen's Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia, published by Rudolf Erich Raspe in 1785.",
"title": "Scholarly interpretations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Though art and culture often depicts Jonah's fish as a whale, the Hebrew text, as throughout scripture, refers to no marine species in particular, simply saying \"great fish\" or \"big fish\". While some biblical scholars suggest the size and habits of the great white shark correspond better to the representations of Jonah's experiences, normally an adult human is too large to be swallowed whole. The development of whaling from the 18th century onwards made it clear that most, if not all, species of whale are incapable of swallowing a human, leading to much controversy about the veracity of the biblical story of Jonah.",
"title": "The fish"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "In Jonah 2:1 (1:17 in English translations), the Hebrew text reads dag gadol (דג גדול) or, in the Hebrew Masoretic Text, dāḡ gāḏōl (דָּ֣ג גָּד֔וֹל), which means \"great fish\". The Septuagint translates this phrase into Greek as kētei megalōi (κήτει μεγάλῳ), meaning \"huge fish\". In Greek mythology, the same word meaning \"fish\" (kêtos) is used to describe the sea monster slain by the hero Perseus that nearly devoured the Princess Andromeda. Jerome later translated this phrase as piscis grandis in his Latin Vulgate. He translated kétos, however, as ventre ceti in Matthew 12:40: this second case occurs only in this verse of the New Testament.",
"title": "The fish"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "At some point cetus became synonymous with \"whale\" (the study of whales is now called cetology). In his 1534 translation, William Tyndale translated the phrase in Jonah 2:1 as \"greate fyshe\" and the word kétos (Greek) or cetus (Latin) in Matthew 12:40 as \"whale\". Tyndale's translation was later incorporated into the Authorized Version of 1611. Since then, the \"great fish\" in Jonah 2 has been most often interpreted as a whale. In English some translations use the word \"whale\" for Matthew 12:40, while others use \"sea creature\" or \"big fish\".",
"title": "The fish"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, naturalists, interpreting the Jonah story as a historical account, became obsessed with trying to identify the exact species of the fish that swallowed Jonah. In the mid-nineteenth century, Edward Bouverie Pusey, professor of Hebrew at Oxford University, claimed that the Book of Jonah must have been authored by Jonah himself and argued that the fish story must be historically true, or else it would not have been included in the Bible. Pusey attempted to scientifically catalogue the fish, hoping to \"shame those who speak of the miracle of Jonah's preservation in the fish as a thing less credible than any of God's other miraculous doings\".",
"title": "The fish"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The debate over the fish in the Book of Jonah played a major role during Clarence Darrow's cross-examination of William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes Trial in 1925. Darrow asked Bryan \"When you read that ... the whale swallowed Jonah ... how do you literally interpret that?\" Bryan replied that he believed in \"a God who can make a whale and can make a man and make both of them do what He pleases.\" Bryan ultimately admitted that it was necessary to interpret the Bible, and is generally regarded as having come off looking like a \"buffoon\".",
"title": "The fish"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The largest of all whales – blue whales – are baleen whales which eat plankton; and \"it is commonly said that this species would be choked if it attempted to swallow a herring.\" As for the whale shark, Dr. E. W. Gudger, an Honorary Associate in Ichthyology at the American Museum of Natural History, notes that, while the whale shark does have a large mouth, its throat is only four inches wide, with a sharp elbow or bend behind the opening, meaning that not even a human arm would be able to pass through it. He concludes that \"the whale shark is not the fish that swallowed Jonah.\"",
"title": "The fish"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Sperm whales, however, appear to be a different matter: They regularly eat giant squid, so presumably one could swallow a human. Similar to a cow, sperm whales have four-chambered stomachs. The first chamber has no gastric juices but has muscular walls to crush its food. On the other hand, it is not possible to breathe inside the sperm whale's stomach because there is no air (but probably methane instead). A 2023 novel by Daniel Kraus explores the idea of a man surviving being swallowed by a sperm whale, but with an oxygen tank.",
"title": "The fish"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "In Turkish, \"Jonah's fish\" (yunus balığı) is the term used for dolphins. A long-established expression among sailors uses the term \"a Jonah\" to mean a sailor/passenger whose presence on board brings bad luck and endangers the ship. Later, this meaning was extended to \"a person who carries a jinx, one who will bring bad luck to any enterprise.\"",
"title": "Cultural influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Despite its brevity, the Book of Jonah has been adapted numerous times in literature and in popular culture. In Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Father Mapple delivers a sermon on the Book of Jonah. Mapple asks why Jonah does not show remorse for disobeying God while he is inside of the fish. He comes to the conclusion that Jonah admirably understands that \"his dreadful punishment is just.\" Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883) features the title character and his father Geppetto being swallowed by \"the Terrible Dogfish,\" an allusion to the story of Jonah. Walt Disney's 1940 film adaptation of the novel retains this allusion. The story of Jonah was adapted into Phil Vischer and Mike Nawrocki's animated film Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie (2002). In the film, Jonah is swallowed by a gargantuan whale.",
"title": "Cultural influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Joseph Campbell suggests that the story of Jonah parallels a scene from the Epic of Gilgamesh, in which Gilgamesh obtains a plant from the bottom of the sea. In the Book of Jonah, a worm (in Hebrew tola'ath, \"maggot\") bites the shade-giving plant's root causing it to wither; whereas in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh ties stones to his feet and plucks his plant from the floor of the sea. Once he returns to the shore, the rejuvenating plant is eaten by a serpent.",
"title": "Suggested connections to legends"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Campbell also noted several similarities between the story of Jonah and that of Jason in Greek mythology. The Greek rendering of the name Jonah is Jonas (Ἰωνᾶς), which differs from Jason (Ἰάσων) only in the order of sounds—both os are omegas suggesting that Jason may have been confused with Jonah. Gildas Hamel, drawing on the Book of Jonah and Greco-Roman sources—including Greek vases and the accounts of Apollonius of Rhodes, Gaius Valerius Flaccus and Orphic Argonautica—identifies a number of shared motifs, including the names of the heroes, the presence of a dove, the idea of \"fleeing\" like the wind and causing a storm, the attitude of the sailors, the presence of a sea-monster or dragon threatening the hero or swallowing him, and the form and the word used for the \"gourd\" (kikayon).",
"title": "Suggested connections to legends"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Hamel takes the view that it was the Hebrew author who reacted to and adapted this mythological material to communicate his own, quite different message.",
"title": "Suggested connections to legends"
}
]
| Jonah or Jonas is a prophet in the Hebrew Bible, hailing from Gath-hepher in the Kingdom of Israel around the 8th century BCE. He is the central figure of the Book of Jonah, which details his reluctance in delivering the judgment of Yahweh unto the city of Nineveh in Assyria. After he is swallowed by a large sea creature and then released, he returns to the divine mission. In Judaism, the story of Jonah represents the teaching of teshuva, the ability to repent to God for forgiveness. Jesus of Nazareth, in the New Testament of Christianity, calls himself "greater than Jonah" and promises the Pharisees "the sign of Jonah" in reference to his resurrection. Early Christian interpreters viewed Jonah as the type of Jesus. In Islam, Jonah is regarded as an Islamic prophet, and the narrative of Jonah in the Bible is repeated in a chapter of the Quran named after him (Yūnus). Mainstream Bible scholars generally regard the Book of Jonah as fictional, and often at least partially satirical. The character of Jonah, son of Amittai, may have been based on the historical prophet of the same name who prophesied during the reign of Amaziah of the Kingdom of Judah, as mentioned in 2 Kings. Although the creature that swallowed Jonah is often depicted in art and culture as a whale, the Hebrew text uses the phrase dag gadol. In the 17th century and early 18th century, the species of the fish that swallowed Jonah was the subject of speculation by naturalists, who interpreted the story as an account of a historical incident. Some modern scholars of folklore, on the other hand, note similarities between Jonah and other legendary religious and mythical figures, specifically the Sumerian ruler Gilgamesh and the Greek hero Jason. | 2001-10-18T16:32:08Z | 2023-12-31T04:09:47Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonah |
16,225 | Jacquard machine | The Jacquard machine (French: [ʒakaʁ]) is a device fitted to a loom that simplifies the process of manufacturing textiles with such complex patterns as brocade, damask and matelassé. The resulting ensemble of the loom and Jacquard machine is then called a Jacquard loom. The machine was patented by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1804, based on earlier inventions by the Frenchmen Basile Bouchon (1725), Jean Baptiste Falcon (1728), and Jacques Vaucanson (1740). The machine was controlled by a "chain of cards"; a number of punched cards laced together into a continuous sequence. Multiple rows of holes were punched on each card, with one complete card corresponding to one row of the design.
Both the Jacquard process and the necessary loom attachment are named after their inventor. This mechanism is probably one of the most important weaving innovations as Jacquard shedding made possible the automatic production of unlimited varieties of complex pattern weaving. The term "Jacquard" is not specific or limited to any particular loom, but rather refers to the added control mechanism that automates the patterning. The process can also be used for patterned knitwear and machine-knitted textiles such as jerseys.
This use of replaceable punched cards to control a sequence of operations is considered an important step in the history of computing hardware, having inspired Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine.
Traditionally, figured designs were made on a drawloom. The heddles with warp ends to be pulled up were manually selected by a second operator, the draw boy, not the weaver. The work was slow and labour-intensive, and the complexity of the pattern was limited by practical factor.
The first prototype of a Jacquard-type loom was made in the second half of the 15th century by an Italian weaver from Calabria, Jean le Calabrais, who was invited to Lyon by Louis XI. He introduced a new kind of machine which was able to work the yarns faster and more precisely. Over the years, improvements to the loom were ongoing.
An improvement of the draw loom took place in 1725, when Basile Bouchon introduced the principle of applying a perforated band of paper. A continuous roll of paper was punched by hand, in sections, each of which represented one lash or tread, and the length of the roll was determined by the number of shots in each repeat of pattern. The Jacquard machine then evolved from this approach.
Joseph Marie Jacquard saw that a mechanism could be developed for the production of sophisticated patterns. He possibly combined mechanical elements of other inventors, but certainly innovated. His machine was generally similar to Vaucanson's arrangement, but he made use of Jean-Baptiste Falcon's individual pasteboard cards and his square prism (or card "cylinder"): he is credited with having fully perforated each of its four sides, replacing Vaucanson's perforated "barrel". Jacquard's machine contained eight rows of needles and uprights, where Vaucanson had a double row. This modification enabled him to increase the figuring capacity of the machine. In his first machine, he supported the harness by knotted cords, which he elevated by a single trap board.
One of the chief advantages claimed for the Jacquard machine was that unlike previous damask-weaving machines, in which the figuring shed was usually drawn once for every four shots, with the new apparatus, it could be drawn on every shot, thus producing a fabric with greater definition of outline.
Jacquard's invention had a deep influence on Charles Babbage. In that respect, he is viewed by some authors as a precursor of modern computing technology.
On the diagram, the cards are fastened into a continuous chain (1) which passes over a square box. At each quarter rotation a new card is presented to the Jacquard head which represents one row (one "pick" of the shuttle carrying the weft). The box swings from the right to the position shown and presses against the control rods (2). Where there is a hole the rod passes through the card and is unmoved whereas if the hole is not punched the rod is pushed to the left. Each rod acts upon a hook (3). When the rod is pushed in, the hook moves out of position to the left, a rod that is not pushed in leaves its hook in place. A beam (4) then rises under the hooks and those hooks in the rest location are raised; the hooks that have been displaced are not moved by the beam. Each hook can have multiple cords (5). The cords pass through a guide(6) and are attached to their heddle (7) and a return weight (8). The heddles raise the warp to create the shed through which the shuttle carrying the weft will pass. A loom with a 400 hook head might have four threads connected to each hook, resulting in a fabric that is 1600 warp ends wide with four repeats of the weave going across.
The term "Jacquard loom" is somewhat inaccurate. It is the "Jacquard head" that adapts to a great many dobby looms that allow the weaving machine to then create the intricate patterns often seen in Jacquard weaving.
Jacquard-driven looms, although relatively common in the textile industry, are not as ubiquitous as dobby looms which are usually faster and much cheaper to operate. However, dobby looms are not capable of producing so many different weaves from one warp. Modern jacquard machines are controlled by computers in place of the original punched cards and can have thousands of hooks.
The threading of a Jacquard machine is so labor-intensive that many looms are threaded only once. Subsequent warps are then tied into the existing warp with the help of a knotting robot which ties each new thread on individually. Even for a small loom with only a few thousand warp ends the process of re-threading can take days.
Originally the Jacquard machines were mechanical, and the fabric design was stored in a series of punched cards which were joined to form a continuous chain. The Jacquards often were small and only independently controlled a relatively few warp ends. This required a number of repeats across the loom width. Larger capacity machines, or the use of multiple machines, allowed greater control, with fewer repeats, and hence larger designs could be woven across the loom width.
A factory must choose looms and shedding mechanisms to suit its commercial requirements. As a rule the more warp control required the greater the expense. So it is not economical to purchase Jacquard machines if one can make do with a dobby mechanism. As well as the capital expense, the Jacquard machines are more costly to maintain as they are complex and require higher skilled personnel; an expensive design system is required to prepare the designs for the loom, and possibly a card-cutting machine. Weaving is more costly since Jacquard mechanisms are more likely to produce faults than dobby or cam shedding. Also, the looms will not run as quickly and down-time will increase because it takes time to change the continuous chain of cards when a design changes. For these reasons it is best to weave larger batches with mechanical Jacquards.
It is recorded that in 1855, a Frenchman adapted the Jacquard mechanism to a system by which it could be worked by electro-magnets. There was significant interest, but trials were not successful, and the development was soon forgotten.
Bonas Textile Machinery NV launched the first successful electronic Jacquard at ITMA Milan in 1983. Although the machines were initially small, modern technology has allowed Jacquard machine capacity to increase significantly, and single end warp control can extend to more than 10,000 warp ends. That avoids the need for repeats and symmetrical designs and allows almost infinite versatility. The computer-controlled machines significantly reduce the down time associated with changing punched paper designs, thus allowing smaller batch sizes. However, electronic Jacquards are costly and may not be required in a factory weaving large batch sizes, and smaller designs. The larger machines allowing single end warp control are very expensive, and can only be justified where great versatility is required, or very specialized design requirements need to be met. For example, they are an ideal tool to increase the ability and stretch the versatility of the niche linen Jacquard weavers who remain active in Europe and the West, while most of the large batch commodity weaving has moved to low cost areas.
Linen products associated with Jacquard weaving are linen damask napery, Jacquard apparel fabrics and damask bed linen. Jacquard weaving uses all sorts of fibers and blends of fibers, and it is used in the production of fabrics for many end uses. Jacquard weaving can also be used to create fabrics that have a Matelassé or a brocade pattern. Research is under way to develop layered and shaped items as reinforcing components for structures made from composite materials.
A pinnacle of production using a Jacquard machine is a prayer book, woven in silk. The book's title is Livre de Prières. Tissé d'après les enluminures des manuscrits du XIVe au XVIe siècle. All 58 pages of the prayer book were made of silk, woven using a Jacquard machine, using black and gray thread. The pages have elaborate borders with text and pictures of saints. It is estimated that 200,000 to 500,000 punch cards were necessary to encode the pages, at 160 threads per cm (400 threads per inch).
It was issued in 1886 and 1887, in Lyon, France. It was publicly displayed at the 1889 Exposition Universelle (World's Fair). It was designed by R. P. J. Hervier, woven by J. A. Henry and published by A. Roux. It took two years and almost 50 trials to get correct. An estimated 50 or 60 copies were produced.
The Jacquard head used replaceable punched cards to control a sequence of operations. It is considered an important step in the history of computing hardware. The ability to change the pattern of the loom's weave by simply changing cards was an important conceptual precursor to the development of computer programming and data entry. Charles Babbage knew of Jacquard machines and planned to use cards to store programs in his Analytical Engine. In the late 19th century, Herman Hollerith took the idea of using punched cards to store information a step further when he created a punched card tabulating machine which he used to input data for the 1890 U.S. Census. A large data processing industry using punched-card technology was developed in the first half of the twentieth century—dominated initially by the International Business Machine corporation (IBM) with its line of unit record equipment. The cards were used for data, however, with programming done by plugboards.
Some early computers, such as the 1944 IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (Harvard Mark I) received program instructions from a paper tape punched with holes, similar to Jacquard's string of cards. Later computers executed programs from higher-speed memory, though cards were commonly used to load the programs into memory. Punched cards remained in use in computing up until the mid-1980s.
Media related to Jacquard looms at Wikimedia Commons | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Jacquard machine (French: [ʒakaʁ]) is a device fitted to a loom that simplifies the process of manufacturing textiles with such complex patterns as brocade, damask and matelassé. The resulting ensemble of the loom and Jacquard machine is then called a Jacquard loom. The machine was patented by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1804, based on earlier inventions by the Frenchmen Basile Bouchon (1725), Jean Baptiste Falcon (1728), and Jacques Vaucanson (1740). The machine was controlled by a \"chain of cards\"; a number of punched cards laced together into a continuous sequence. Multiple rows of holes were punched on each card, with one complete card corresponding to one row of the design.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Both the Jacquard process and the necessary loom attachment are named after their inventor. This mechanism is probably one of the most important weaving innovations as Jacquard shedding made possible the automatic production of unlimited varieties of complex pattern weaving. The term \"Jacquard\" is not specific or limited to any particular loom, but rather refers to the added control mechanism that automates the patterning. The process can also be used for patterned knitwear and machine-knitted textiles such as jerseys.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "This use of replaceable punched cards to control a sequence of operations is considered an important step in the history of computing hardware, having inspired Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Traditionally, figured designs were made on a drawloom. The heddles with warp ends to be pulled up were manually selected by a second operator, the draw boy, not the weaver. The work was slow and labour-intensive, and the complexity of the pattern was limited by practical factor.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The first prototype of a Jacquard-type loom was made in the second half of the 15th century by an Italian weaver from Calabria, Jean le Calabrais, who was invited to Lyon by Louis XI. He introduced a new kind of machine which was able to work the yarns faster and more precisely. Over the years, improvements to the loom were ongoing.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "An improvement of the draw loom took place in 1725, when Basile Bouchon introduced the principle of applying a perforated band of paper. A continuous roll of paper was punched by hand, in sections, each of which represented one lash or tread, and the length of the roll was determined by the number of shots in each repeat of pattern. The Jacquard machine then evolved from this approach.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Joseph Marie Jacquard saw that a mechanism could be developed for the production of sophisticated patterns. He possibly combined mechanical elements of other inventors, but certainly innovated. His machine was generally similar to Vaucanson's arrangement, but he made use of Jean-Baptiste Falcon's individual pasteboard cards and his square prism (or card \"cylinder\"): he is credited with having fully perforated each of its four sides, replacing Vaucanson's perforated \"barrel\". Jacquard's machine contained eight rows of needles and uprights, where Vaucanson had a double row. This modification enabled him to increase the figuring capacity of the machine. In his first machine, he supported the harness by knotted cords, which he elevated by a single trap board.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "One of the chief advantages claimed for the Jacquard machine was that unlike previous damask-weaving machines, in which the figuring shed was usually drawn once for every four shots, with the new apparatus, it could be drawn on every shot, thus producing a fabric with greater definition of outline.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Jacquard's invention had a deep influence on Charles Babbage. In that respect, he is viewed by some authors as a precursor of modern computing technology.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "On the diagram, the cards are fastened into a continuous chain (1) which passes over a square box. At each quarter rotation a new card is presented to the Jacquard head which represents one row (one \"pick\" of the shuttle carrying the weft). The box swings from the right to the position shown and presses against the control rods (2). Where there is a hole the rod passes through the card and is unmoved whereas if the hole is not punched the rod is pushed to the left. Each rod acts upon a hook (3). When the rod is pushed in, the hook moves out of position to the left, a rod that is not pushed in leaves its hook in place. A beam (4) then rises under the hooks and those hooks in the rest location are raised; the hooks that have been displaced are not moved by the beam. Each hook can have multiple cords (5). The cords pass through a guide(6) and are attached to their heddle (7) and a return weight (8). The heddles raise the warp to create the shed through which the shuttle carrying the weft will pass. A loom with a 400 hook head might have four threads connected to each hook, resulting in a fabric that is 1600 warp ends wide with four repeats of the weave going across.",
"title": "Principles of operation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The term \"Jacquard loom\" is somewhat inaccurate. It is the \"Jacquard head\" that adapts to a great many dobby looms that allow the weaving machine to then create the intricate patterns often seen in Jacquard weaving.",
"title": "Principles of operation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Jacquard-driven looms, although relatively common in the textile industry, are not as ubiquitous as dobby looms which are usually faster and much cheaper to operate. However, dobby looms are not capable of producing so many different weaves from one warp. Modern jacquard machines are controlled by computers in place of the original punched cards and can have thousands of hooks.",
"title": "Principles of operation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The threading of a Jacquard machine is so labor-intensive that many looms are threaded only once. Subsequent warps are then tied into the existing warp with the help of a knotting robot which ties each new thread on individually. Even for a small loom with only a few thousand warp ends the process of re-threading can take days.",
"title": "Principles of operation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Originally the Jacquard machines were mechanical, and the fabric design was stored in a series of punched cards which were joined to form a continuous chain. The Jacquards often were small and only independently controlled a relatively few warp ends. This required a number of repeats across the loom width. Larger capacity machines, or the use of multiple machines, allowed greater control, with fewer repeats, and hence larger designs could be woven across the loom width.",
"title": "Mechanical Jacquard devices"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "A factory must choose looms and shedding mechanisms to suit its commercial requirements. As a rule the more warp control required the greater the expense. So it is not economical to purchase Jacquard machines if one can make do with a dobby mechanism. As well as the capital expense, the Jacquard machines are more costly to maintain as they are complex and require higher skilled personnel; an expensive design system is required to prepare the designs for the loom, and possibly a card-cutting machine. Weaving is more costly since Jacquard mechanisms are more likely to produce faults than dobby or cam shedding. Also, the looms will not run as quickly and down-time will increase because it takes time to change the continuous chain of cards when a design changes. For these reasons it is best to weave larger batches with mechanical Jacquards.",
"title": "Mechanical Jacquard devices"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "It is recorded that in 1855, a Frenchman adapted the Jacquard mechanism to a system by which it could be worked by electro-magnets. There was significant interest, but trials were not successful, and the development was soon forgotten.",
"title": "Electronic Jacquard machines"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Bonas Textile Machinery NV launched the first successful electronic Jacquard at ITMA Milan in 1983. Although the machines were initially small, modern technology has allowed Jacquard machine capacity to increase significantly, and single end warp control can extend to more than 10,000 warp ends. That avoids the need for repeats and symmetrical designs and allows almost infinite versatility. The computer-controlled machines significantly reduce the down time associated with changing punched paper designs, thus allowing smaller batch sizes. However, electronic Jacquards are costly and may not be required in a factory weaving large batch sizes, and smaller designs. The larger machines allowing single end warp control are very expensive, and can only be justified where great versatility is required, or very specialized design requirements need to be met. For example, they are an ideal tool to increase the ability and stretch the versatility of the niche linen Jacquard weavers who remain active in Europe and the West, while most of the large batch commodity weaving has moved to low cost areas.",
"title": "Electronic Jacquard machines"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Linen products associated with Jacquard weaving are linen damask napery, Jacquard apparel fabrics and damask bed linen. Jacquard weaving uses all sorts of fibers and blends of fibers, and it is used in the production of fabrics for many end uses. Jacquard weaving can also be used to create fabrics that have a Matelassé or a brocade pattern. Research is under way to develop layered and shaped items as reinforcing components for structures made from composite materials.",
"title": "Electronic Jacquard machines"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "A pinnacle of production using a Jacquard machine is a prayer book, woven in silk. The book's title is Livre de Prières. Tissé d'après les enluminures des manuscrits du XIVe au XVIe siècle. All 58 pages of the prayer book were made of silk, woven using a Jacquard machine, using black and gray thread. The pages have elaborate borders with text and pictures of saints. It is estimated that 200,000 to 500,000 punch cards were necessary to encode the pages, at 160 threads per cm (400 threads per inch).",
"title": "The woven silk prayer book"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "It was issued in 1886 and 1887, in Lyon, France. It was publicly displayed at the 1889 Exposition Universelle (World's Fair). It was designed by R. P. J. Hervier, woven by J. A. Henry and published by A. Roux. It took two years and almost 50 trials to get correct. An estimated 50 or 60 copies were produced.",
"title": "The woven silk prayer book"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The Jacquard head used replaceable punched cards to control a sequence of operations. It is considered an important step in the history of computing hardware. The ability to change the pattern of the loom's weave by simply changing cards was an important conceptual precursor to the development of computer programming and data entry. Charles Babbage knew of Jacquard machines and planned to use cards to store programs in his Analytical Engine. In the late 19th century, Herman Hollerith took the idea of using punched cards to store information a step further when he created a punched card tabulating machine which he used to input data for the 1890 U.S. Census. A large data processing industry using punched-card technology was developed in the first half of the twentieth century—dominated initially by the International Business Machine corporation (IBM) with its line of unit record equipment. The cards were used for data, however, with programming done by plugboards.",
"title": "Importance in computing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Some early computers, such as the 1944 IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (Harvard Mark I) received program instructions from a paper tape punched with holes, similar to Jacquard's string of cards. Later computers executed programs from higher-speed memory, though cards were commonly used to load the programs into memory. Punched cards remained in use in computing up until the mid-1980s.",
"title": "Importance in computing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Media related to Jacquard looms at Wikimedia Commons",
"title": "External links"
}
]
| The Jacquard machine is a device fitted to a loom that simplifies the process of manufacturing textiles with such complex patterns as brocade, damask and matelassé. The resulting ensemble of the loom and Jacquard machine is then called a Jacquard loom. The machine was patented by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1804, based on earlier inventions by the Frenchmen Basile Bouchon (1725), Jean Baptiste Falcon (1728), and Jacques Vaucanson (1740). The machine was controlled by a "chain of cards"; a number of punched cards laced together into a continuous sequence. Multiple rows of holes were punched on each card, with one complete card corresponding to one row of the design. Both the Jacquard process and the necessary loom attachment are named after their inventor. This mechanism is probably one of the most important weaving innovations as Jacquard shedding made possible the automatic production of unlimited varieties of complex pattern weaving. The term "Jacquard" is not specific or limited to any particular loom, but rather refers to the added control mechanism that automates the patterning. The process can also be used for patterned knitwear and machine-knitted textiles such as jerseys. This use of replaceable punched cards to control a sequence of operations is considered an important step in the history of computing hardware, having inspired Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. | 2002-02-25T15:51:15Z | 2023-12-24T22:48:13Z | [
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16,226 | JUnit | JUnit is a unit testing framework for the Java programming language. JUnit has been important in the development of test-driven development, and is one of a family of unit testing frameworks which is collectively known as xUnit that originated with SUnit.
JUnit is linked as a JAR at compile-time. The latest version of the framework, JUnit 5, resides under package org.junit.jupiter. Previous versions JUnit 4 and JUnit 3 were under packages org.junit and junit.framework, respectively.
A research survey performed in 2013 across 10,000 Java projects hosted on GitHub found that JUnit (in a tie with slf4j-api) was the most commonly included external library. Each library was used by 30.7% of projects.
Every JUnit test class usually has several test cases. These test cases are subject to the test life cycle. The full JUnit Life Cycle has three major phases:
JUnit 5 integrates a number of tools, such as build tools, integrated development environments (IDE), continuous integration (CI) tools and many more.
JUnit supports Apache Ant, Apache Maven and Gradle build tools, which are the most widely used project build tools. Build tools are vital for automating the process of building the project.
Apache Ant, also known as Ant, is one of the build tools with the highest degree of versatility, and has the longest history out of the three build tools listed above. Ant centers around the build.xml file, used for configuring the tasks necessary to run a project. Ant also has an extension called Apache Ivy, which helps deal with dependency resolution. The project dependencies can be declared in the ivy.xml file. Ant can integrate with JUnit 5 by configuring the Java code coverage tools (JaCoCo), for the ivy.xml file. The ivy.xml can then be configured with the java-platform-console and junit-platform-runner dependencies to integrate with JUnit 5.
In contrast to Ant, Apache Maven, also known as Maven, uses a standardized and unified approach to the build process. Maven follows the paradigm of "convention over configuration" for managing its dependencies. The Java source code (or "src") can be found under the src/main/java directory, and the test files can be found under the src/test/java directory. Maven can be used for any Java Project. It uses the Project Object Model (POM), which is an XML-based approach to configuring the build steps for the project. The minimal Maven with the pom.xml build file must contain a list of dependencies and a unique project identifier. Maven must be available on the build path to work. Maven can integrate with JUnit 5 using the jacoco-maven-plugin plugin which supports out-of-box functionality for JUnit 5 tests. Different Maven goals can be specified to achieve these tasks.
Gradle is a build tool that borrows many concepts from its predecessors, Ant and Maven. It uses the build.gradle file to declare the steps required for the project build. Unlike Ant and Maven, which are XML-based, Gradle requires the use of Apache Groovy, which is a Java-based programming language. Unlike Ant and Maven, Gradle does not require the use of XML. Gradle still adheres to Maven's "convention over configuration" approach, and follows the same structure for src/main/java and src/test/java directories. Gradle can integrate with JUnit 5 by configuring a plugin jacoco alongside the junit-platform plug-in given by the JUnit 5 team in the build file.
JUnit follows the paradigm of preferring extension points over features. The JUnit team decided not to put all features within the JUnit core, and instead decided to give an extensible way for developers to address their concerns.
In JUnit 4, there are two extension mechanisms: the Runner API and Rule API. There were some disadvantages to both the Runner API and the Rule API.
A major limitation of the Runner API is that the developer has to implement the entire life cycle even if they only need a specific life cycle stage. This is too complicated and heighweight for the majority of use cases. Another major limitation is that only one runner class is used for each test case, and makes them uncomposable. As an example, Mockito and Parameterized runners cannot exist within the same test class.
A major limitation of the Rule API is that it cannot control the entire life cycle of the test, so they cannot be used for every single use case. They are only appropriate when something needs to occur before or after test case execution. Another major limitation is that rules for class-level and method-level callbacks must be made separately.
In JUnit 5, the extension API is found within the JUnit Jupiter Engine. The JUnit Team wants to allow the developer to hook to separate stages of a test life cycle by providing a single unified extension API. Upon reaching a certain life cycle phase, the Jupiter Engine will invoke all registered extensions for that phase. The developer can hook into five major extension points:
A JUnit test fixture is a Java object. Test methods must be annotated by the @Test annotation. If the situation requires it, it is also possible to define a method to execute before (or after) each (or all) of the test methods with the @BeforeEach (or @AfterEach) and @BeforeAll (or @AfterAll) annotations.
According to Martin Fowler, one of the early adopters of JUnit:
JUnit was born on a flight from Zurich to the 1997 OOPSLA in Atlanta. Kent was flying with Erich Gamma, and what else were two geeks to do on a long flight but program? The first version of JUnit was built there, pair programmed, and done test first (a pleasing form of meta-circular geekery).
As a side effect of its wide use, previous versions of JUnit remain popular, with JUnit 4 having over 100,000 usages by other software components on the Maven Central repository.
In JUnit 4, the annotations for test execution callbacks were @BeforeClass, @Before, @After, and @AfterClass, as opposed to JUnit 5's @BeforeAll, @BeforeEach, @AfterEach, and @AfterAll.
In JUnit 3, test fixtures had to inherit from junit.framework.TestCase. Additionally, test methods had to be prefixed with 'test'. | [
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"title": "Previous versions of JUnit"
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"title": "Previous versions of JUnit"
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| JUnit is a unit testing framework for the Java programming language. JUnit has been important in the development of test-driven development, and is one of a family of unit testing frameworks which is collectively known as xUnit that originated with SUnit. JUnit is linked as a JAR at compile-time. The latest version of the framework, JUnit 5, resides under package org.junit.jupiter. Previous versions JUnit 4 and JUnit 3 were under packages org.junit and junit.framework, respectively. A research survey performed in 2013 across 10,000 Java projects hosted on GitHub found that JUnit was the most commonly included external library. Each library was used by 30.7% of projects. | 2001-10-18T12:04:26Z | 2023-09-19T10:53:13Z | [
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16,227 | Jerome Kern | Jerome David Kern (January 27, 1885 – November 11, 1945) was an American composer of musical theatre and popular music. One of the most important American theatre composers of the early 20th century, he wrote more than 700 songs, used in over 100 stage works, including such classics as "Ol' Man River", "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man", "A Fine Romance", "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", "The Song Is You", "All the Things You Are", "The Way You Look Tonight" and "Long Ago (and Far Away)". He collaborated with many of the leading librettists and lyricists of his era, including George Grossmith Jr., Guy Bolton, P. G. Wodehouse, Otto Harbach, Oscar Hammerstein II, Dorothy Fields, Johnny Mercer, Ira Gershwin and Yip Harburg.
A native New Yorker, Kern created dozens of Broadway musicals and Hollywood films in a career that lasted for more than four decades. His musical innovations, such as 4/4 dance rhythms and the employment of syncopation and jazz progressions, built on, rather than rejected, earlier musical theatre tradition. He and his collaborators also employed his melodies to further the action or develop characterization to a greater extent than in the other musicals of his day, creating the model for later musicals. Although dozens of Kern's musicals and musical films were hits, only Show Boat is now regularly revived. Songs from his other shows, however, are still frequently performed and adapted. Many of Kern's songs have been adapted by jazz musicians to become standard tunes.
Kern was born in New York City, on Sutton Place, in what was then the city's brewery district. His parents were Henry Kern (1842–1908), a Jewish German immigrant, and Fannie Kern née Kakeles (1852–1907), who was an American Jew of Bohemian parentage. At the time of Kern's birth, his father ran a livery stable; later he became a successful merchant. Kern grew up on East 56th Street in Manhattan, where he attended public schools. He showed an early aptitude for music and was taught to play the piano and organ by his mother, a professional player and teacher.
In 1897, the family moved to Newark, New Jersey, where Kern attended Newark High School (which became Barringer High School in 1907). He wrote songs for the school's first musical, a minstrel show, in 1901, and for an amateur musical adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin put on at the Newark Yacht Club in January 1902. Kern left high school before graduation in the spring of his senior year in 1902. In response, Kern's father insisted that his son work with him in business, instead of composing. Kern, however, failed miserably in one of his earliest tasks: he was supposed to purchase two pianos for the store, but instead he ordered 200. His father relented, and later in 1902, Kern became a student at the New York College of Music, studying the piano under Alexander Lambert and Paolo Gallico, and harmony under Dr. Austin Pierce. His first published composition, a piano piece, At the Casino, appeared in the same year. Between 1903 and 1905, he continued his musical training under private tutors in Heidelberg, Germany, returning to New York via London.
For a time, Kern worked as a rehearsal pianist in Broadway theatres and as a song-plugger for Tin Pan Alley music publishers. While in London, he secured a contract from the American impresario Charles Frohman to provide songs for interpolation in Broadway versions of London shows. He began to provide these additions in 1904 to British scores for An English Daisy, by Seymour Hicks and Walter Slaughter, and Mr. Wix of Wickham, for which he wrote most of the songs.
In 1905, Kern contributed the song "How'd you like to spoon with me?" to Ivan Caryll's hit musical The Earl and the Girl when the show transferred to Chicago and New York in 1905. He also contributed to the New York production of The Catch of the Season (1905), The Little Cherub (1906) and The Orchid (1907), among other shows. From 1905 on, he spent long periods of time in London, contributing songs to West End shows like The Beauty of Bath (1906; with lyricist P. G. Wodehouse) and making valuable contacts, including George Grossmith Jr. and Seymour Hicks, who were the first to introduce Kern's songs to the London stage. In 1909 during one of his stays in England, Kern took a boat trip on the River Thames with some friends, and when the boat stopped at Walton-on-Thames, they went to an inn called the Swan for a drink. Kern was much taken with the proprietor's daughter, Eva Leale (1891–1959), who was working behind the bar. He wooed her, and they were married at the Anglican church of St. Mary's in Walton on October 25, 1910. The couple then lived at the Swan when Kern was in England.
Kern is believed to have composed music for silent films as early as 1912, but the earliest documented film music which he is known to have written was for a twenty-part serial, Gloria's Romance in 1916. This was one of the first starring vehicles for Billie Burke, for whom Kern had earlier written the song "Mind the Paint", with lyrics by A. W. Pinero. The film is now considered lost, but Kern's music survives. Another score for the silent movies, Jubilo, followed in 1919. Kern was one of the founding members of ASCAP.
Kern's first complete score was Broadway's The Red Petticoat (1912), one of the first musical-comedy Westerns. The libretto was by Rida Johnson Young. By World War I, more than a hundred of Kern's songs had been used in about thirty productions, mostly Broadway adaptations of West End and European shows. Kern contributed two songs to To-Night's the Night (1914), another Rubens musical. It opened in New York and went on to become a hit in London. The best known of Kern's songs from this period is probably "They Didn't Believe Me", which was a hit in the New York version of the Paul Rubens and Sidney Jones musical, The Girl from Utah (1914), for which Kern wrote five songs. Kern's song, with four beats to a bar, departed from the customary waltz-rhythms of European influence and fitted the new American passion for modern dances such as the fox-trot. He was also able to use elements of American styles, such as ragtime, as well as syncopation, in his lively dance tunes. Theatre historian John Kenrick writes that the song put Kern in great demand on Broadway and established a pattern for musical comedy love songs that lasted through the 1960s.
In May 1915, Kern was due to sail with Charles Frohman from New York to London on board the RMS Lusitania, but Kern missed the boat, having overslept after staying up late playing poker. Frohman died in the sinking of the ship.
Kern composed 16 Broadway scores between 1915 and 1920 and also contributed songs to the London hit Theodore & Co (1916; most of the songs are by the young Ivor Novello) and to revues like the Ziegfeld Follies. The most notable of his scores were those for a series of shows written for the Princess Theatre, a small (299-seat) house built by Ray Comstock. Theatrical agent Elisabeth Marbury asked Kern and librettist Guy Bolton to create a series of intimate and low-budget, yet smart, musicals.
The "Princess Theatre shows" were unique on Broadway not only for their small size, but their clever, coherent plots, integrated scores and naturalistic acting, which presented "a sharp contrast to the large-scale Ruritanian operettas then in vogue" or the star-studded revues and extravaganzas of producers like Florenz Ziegfeld. Earlier musical comedy had often been thinly plotted, gaudy pieces, marked by the insertion of songs into their scores with little regard to the plot. But Kern and Bolton followed the examples of Gilbert and Sullivan and French opéra bouffe in integrating song and story. "These shows built and polished the mold from which almost all later major musical comedies evolved. ... The characters and situations were, within the limitations of musical comedy license, believable and the humor came from the situations or the nature of the characters. Kern's exquisitely flowing melodies were employed to further the action or develop characterization." The shows featured modern American settings and simple scene changes to suit the small theatre.
The team's first Princess Theatre show was an adaptation of Paul Rubens' 1905 London show, Mr. Popple (of Ippleton), called Nobody Home (1915). The piece ran for 135 performances and was a modest financial success. However, it did little to fulfill the new team's mission to innovate, except that Kern's song, "The Magic Melody", was the first Broadway showtune with a basic jazz progression. Kern and Bolton next created an original piece, Very Good Eddie, which was a surprise hit, running for 341 performances, with additional touring productions that went on into the 1918-19 season. The British humorist, lyricist and librettist P. G. Wodehouse joined the Princess team in 1917, adding his skill as a lyricist to the succeeding shows. Oh, Boy! (1917) ran for an extraordinary 463 performances. Other shows written for the theatre were Have a Heart (1917), Leave It to Jane (1917) and Oh, Lady! Lady!! (1918). The first opened at another theatre before Very Good Eddie closed. The second played elsewhere during the long run of Oh Boy! An anonymous admirer wrote a verse in their praise that begins:
This is the trio of musical fame, Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern. Better than anyone else you can name Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern.
In February 1918, Dorothy Parker wrote in Vanity Fair:
Well, Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern have done it again. Every time these three gather together, the Princess Theatre is sold out for months in advance. You can get a seat for Oh, Lady! Lady!! somewhere around the middle of August for just about the price of one on the stock exchange. If you ask me, I will look you fearlessly in the eye and tell you in low, throbbing tones that it has it over any other musical comedy in town. But then Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern are my favorite indoor sport. I like the way they go about a musical comedy. ... I like the way the action slides casually into the songs. ... I like the deft rhyming of the song that is always sung in the last act by two comedians and a comedienne. And oh, how I do like Jerome Kern's music. And all these things are even more so in Oh, Lady! Lady!! than they were in Oh, Boy!
Oh, Lady! Lady!! was the last successful "Princess Theatre show". Kern and Wodehouse disagreed over money, and the composer decided to move on to other projects. Kern's importance to the partnership was illustrated by the fate of the last musical of the series, Oh, My Dear! (1918), to which he contributed only one song: "Go, Little Boat". The rest of the show was composed by Louis Hirsch and ran for 189 performances: "Despite a respectable run, everyone realized there was little point in continuing the series without Kern."
The 1920s were an extremely productive period in American musical theatre, and Kern created at least one show every year for the entire decade. His first show of 1920 was The Night Boat, with book and lyrics by Anne Caldwell, which ran for more than 300 performances in New York and for three seasons on tour. Later in the same year, Kern wrote the score for Sally, with a book by Bolton and lyrics by Otto Harbach. This show, staged by Florenz Ziegfeld, ran for 570 performances, one of the longest runs of any Broadway show in the decade, and popularized the song "Look for the Silver Lining" (which had been written for an earlier show), performed by the rising star Marilyn Miller. It also had a long run in London in 1921, produced by George Grossmith Jr. Kern's next shows were Good Morning, Dearie (1921, with Caldwell) which ran for 347 performances; followed in 1922 by a West End success, The Cabaret Girl in collaboration with Grossmith and Wodehouse; another modest success by the same team, The Beauty Prize (1923); and a Broadway flop, The Bunch and Judy, remembered, if at all, as the first time Kern and Fred Astaire worked together.
Stepping Stones (1923, with Caldwell) was a success, and in 1924 the Princess Theatre team of Bolton, Wodehouse and Kern reunited to write Sitting Pretty, but it did not recapture the popularity of the earlier collaborations. Its relative failure may have been partly due to Kern's growing aversion to having individual songs from his shows performed out of context on radio, in cabaret, or on record, although his chief objection was to jazz interpretations of his songs. He called himself a "musical clothier – nothing more or less," and said, "I write music to both the situations and the lyrics in plays." When Sitting Pretty was produced, he forbade any broadcasting or recording of individual numbers from the show, which limited their chance to gain popularity.
1925 was a major turning point in Kern's career when he met Oscar Hammerstein II, with whom he would entertain a lifelong friendship and collaboration. As a young man, Kern had been an easy companion with great charm and humor, but he became less outgoing in his middle years, sometimes difficult to work with: he once introduced himself to a producer by saying, "I hear you're a son of a bitch. So am I." He rarely collaborated with any one lyricist for long. With Hammerstein, however, he remained on close terms for the rest of his life. Their first show, written together with Harbach, was Sunny, which featured the song "Who (Stole My Heart Away)?" Marilyn Miller played the title role, as she had in Sally. The show ran for 517 performances on Broadway, and the following year ran for 363 performances in the West End, starring Binnie Hale and Jack Buchanan.
Because of the strong success of Sally and Sunny and consistent good results with his other shows, Ziegfeld was willing to gamble on Kern's next project in 1927. Kern had been impressed by Edna Ferber's novel Show Boat and wished to present a musical stage version. He persuaded Hammerstein to adapt it and Ziegfeld to produce it. The story, dealing with racism, marital strife and alcoholism, was unheard of in the escapist world of musical comedy. Despite his doubts, Ziegfeld spared no expense in staging the piece to give it its full epic grandeur. According to the theatre historian John Kenrick: "After the opening night audience filed out of the Ziegfeld Theatre in near silence, Ziegfeld thought his worst fears had been confirmed. He was pleasantly surprised when the next morning brought ecstatic reviews and long lines at the box office. In fact, Show Boat proved to be the most lasting accomplishment of Ziegfeld's career – the only one of his shows that is regularly performed today." The score is, arguably, Kern's greatest and includes the well-known songs "Ol' Man River" and "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" as well as "Make Believe", "You Are Love", "Life Upon the Wicked Stage", "Why Do I Love You", all with lyrics by Hammerstein, and "Bill", originally written for Oh, Lady! Lady!, with lyrics by P. G. Wodehouse. The show ran for 572 performances on Broadway and was also a success in London. Although Ferber's novel was filmed unsuccessfully as a part-talkie in 1929 (using some songs from the Kern score), the musical itself was filmed twice, in 1936, and, with Technicolor, in 1951. In 1989, a stage version of the musical was presented on television for the first time, in a production from the Paper Mill Playhouse telecast by PBS on Great Performances.
While most Kern musicals have largely been forgotten, except for their songs, Show Boat remains well-remembered and frequently seen. It is a staple of stock productions and has been revived numerous times on Broadway and in London. A 1946 revival integrated choreography into the show, in the manner of a Rodgers and Hammerstein production, as did the 1994 Harold Prince–Susan Stroman revival, which was nominated for ten Tony Awards, winning five, including best revival. It was the first musical to enter a major opera company's repertory (New York City Opera, 1954), and the rediscovery of the 1927 score with Robert Russell Bennett's original orchestrations led to a large-scale EMI recording in 1987 and several opera-house productions. In 1941, the conductor Artur Rodziński wished to commission a symphonic suite from the score, but Kern considered himself a songwriter and not a symphonist. He never orchestrated his own scores, leaving that to musical assistants, principally Frank Saddler (until 1921) and Robert Russell Bennett (from 1923). In response to the commission, Kern oversaw an arrangement by Charles Miller and Emil Gerstenberger of numbers from the show into the orchestral work Scenario for Orchestra: Themes from Show Boat, premiered in 1941 by the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Rodziński.
Kern's last Broadway show in the 1920s was Sweet Adeline (1929), with a libretto by Hammerstein. It was a period piece, set in the Gay 90s, about a girl from Hoboken, New Jersey (near Kern's childhood home), who becomes a Broadway star. Opening just before the stock market crash, it received rave reviews, but the elaborate, old-fashioned piece was a step back from the innovations in Show Boat, or even the Princess Theatre shows. In January 1929, at the height of the Jazz Age, and with Show Boat still playing on Broadway, Kern made news on both sides of the Atlantic for reasons wholly unconnected with music. He sold at auction, at New York's Anderson Galleries, the collection of English and American literature that he had been building up for more than a decade. The collection, rich in inscribed first editions and manuscript material of eighteenth and nineteenth century authors, sold for a total of $1,729,462.50 (equivalent to $29,474,591 in 2022) – a record for a single-owner sale that stood for over fifty years. Among the books he sold were first or early editions of poems by Robert Burns and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and works by Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding and Charles Dickens, as well as manuscripts by Alexander Pope, John Keats, Shelley, Lord Byron, Thomas Hardy and others.
In 1929 Kern made his first trip to Hollywood to supervise the 1929 film version of Sally, one of the first "all-talking" Technicolor films. The following year, he was there a second time to work on Men of the Sky, released in 1931 without his songs, and a 1930 film version of Sunny. There was a public reaction against the early glut of film musicals after the advent of film sound; Hollywood released more than 100 musical films in 1930, but only 14 in 1931. Warner Bros. bought out Kern's contract, and he returned to the stage. He collaborated with Harbach on the Broadway musical The Cat and the Fiddle (1931), about a composer and an opera singer, featuring the songs "She Didn't Say Yes" and "The Night Was Made for Love". It ran for 395 performances, a remarkable success for the Depression years, and transferred to London the following year. It was filmed in 1934 with Jeanette MacDonald.
Music in the Air (1932) was another Kern-Hammerstein collaboration and another show-biz plot, best remembered today for "The Song Is You" and "I've Told Ev'ry Little Star". It was "undoubtedly an operetta", set in the German countryside, but without the Ruritanian trimmings of the operettas of Kern's youth. Roberta (1933) by Kern and Harbach included the songs "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", "Let's Begin and "Yesterdays" and featured, among others, Bob Hope, Fred MacMurray, George Murphy and Sydney Greenstreet all in the early stages of their careers. Kern's Three Sisters (1934), was his last West End show, with a libretto by Hammerstein. The musical, depicting horse-racing, the circus, and class distinctions, was a failure, running for only two months. Its song "I Won't Dance" was used in the film Roberta. Some British critics objected to American writers essaying a British story; James Agate, doyen of London theatre critics of the day, dismissed it as "American inanity," though both Kern and Hammerstein were strong and knowledgeable Anglophiles. Kern's last Broadway show (other than revivals) was Very Warm for May (1939), another show-biz story and another disappointment, although the score included the Kern and Hammerstein classic "All The Things You Are".
In 1935, when musical films had become popular once again, thanks to Busby Berkeley, Kern returned to Hollywood, where he composed the scores to a dozen more films, although he also continued working on Broadway productions. He settled permanently in Hollywood in 1937. After suffering a heart attack in 1939, he was told by his doctors to concentrate on film scores, a less stressful task, as Hollywood songwriters were not as deeply involved with the production of their works as Broadway songwriters. This second phase of Kern's Hollywood career had considerably greater artistic and commercial success than the first. With Hammerstein, he wrote songs for the film versions of his recent Broadway shows Music in the Air (1934), which starred Gloria Swanson in a rare singing role, and Sweet Adeline (1935). With Dorothy Fields, he composed the new music for I Dream Too Much (1935), a musical melodrama about the opera world, starring the Metropolitan Opera diva Lily Pons. Kern and Fields interspersed the opera numbers with their songs, including "the swinging 'I Got Love,' the lullaby 'The Jockey on the Carousel,' and the entrancing title song." Also with Fields, he wrote two new songs, "I Won't Dance" and "Lovely to Look At", for the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film version of Roberta (1935), which was a hit. The show also included the song "I'll Be Hard to Handle". This was given a 1952 remake called Lovely to Look At.
Their next film, Swing Time (1936) included the song "The Way You Look Tonight", which won the Academy Award in 1936 for the best song. Other songs in Swing Time include "A Fine Romance", "Pick Yourself Up" and "Never Gonna Dance". The Oxford Companion to the American Musical calls Swing Time "a strong candidate for the best of the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals" and says that, although the screenplay is contrived, it "left plenty of room for dance and all of it was superb. ... Although the movie is remembered as one of the great dance musicals, it also boasts one of the best film scores of the 1930s." For the 1936 film version of Show Boat, Kern and Hammerstein wrote three new songs, including "I Have The Room Above Her" and "Ah Still Suits Me". High, Wide, and Handsome (1937) was intentionally similar in plot and style to Show Boat, but it was a box-office failure. Kern songs were also used in the Cary Grant film, When You're in Love (1937), and the first Abbott and Costello feature, One Night in the Tropics (1940). In 1940, Hammerstein wrote the lyric "The Last Time I Saw Paris", in homage to the French capital, recently occupied by the Germans. Kern set it, the only time he set a pre-written lyric, and his only hit song not written as part of a musical. Originally a hit for Tony Martin and later for Noël Coward, the song was used in the film Lady Be Good (1941) and won Kern another Oscar for best song. Kern's second and last symphonic work was his 'Mark Twain Suite (1942).
In his last Hollywood musicals, Kern worked with several new and distinguished partners. With Johnny Mercer for You Were Never Lovelier (1942), he contributed "a set of memorable songs to entertain audiences until the plot came to its inevitable conclusion". The film starred Astaire and Rita Hayworth and included the song "I'm Old Fashioned". Kern's next collaboration was with Ira Gershwin on Cover Girl starring Hayworth and Gene Kelly (1944) for which Kern composed "Sure Thing","Put Me to the Test," "Make Way for Tomorrow" (lyric by E. Y. Harburg), and the hit ballad "Long Ago (and Far Away)". For the Deanna Durbin Western musical, Can't Help Singing (1944), with lyrics by Harburg, Kern "provided the best original score of Durbin's career, mixing operetta and Broadway sounds in such songs as 'Any Moment Now,' 'Swing Your Partner,' 'More and More,' and the lilting title number." "More and More" was nominated for an Oscar.
Kern composed his last film score, Centennial Summer (1946) in which "the songs were as resplendent as the story and characters were mediocre. ... Oscar Hammerstein, Leo Robin, and E. Y. Harburg contributed lyrics for Kern's lovely music, resulting in the soulful ballad 'All Through the Day,' the rustic 'Cinderella Sue,' the cheerful 'Up With the Lark,' and the torchy 'In Love in Vain.'" "All Through the Day" was another Oscar nominee. The music of Kern's last two films is notable in the way it developed from his earlier work. Some of it was too advanced for the film companies; Kern's biographer, Stephen Banfield, refers to "tonal experimentation ... outlandish enharmonics" that the studios insisted on cutting. At the same time, in some ways his music came full circle: having in his youth helped to end the reigns of the waltz and operetta, he now composed three of his finest waltzes ("Can't Help Singing", "Californ-i-ay" and "Up With the Lark"), the last having a distinctly operetta-like character.
Kern and his wife, Eva, often vacationed on their yacht Show Boat. He collected rare books and enjoyed betting on horses. At the time of Kern's death, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was filming a fictionalized version of his life, Till the Clouds Roll By, which was released in 1946 starring Robert Walker as Kern. In the film, Kern's songs are sung by Judy Garland, Kathryn Grayson, June Allyson, Lena Horne, Dinah Shore, Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury, among others, and Gower Champion and Cyd Charisse appear as dancers. Many of the biographical elements are fictionalized.
In the fall of 1945, Kern returned to New York City to oversee auditions for a new revival of Show Boat, and began to work on the score for what would become the musical Annie Get Your Gun, to be produced by Rodgers and Hammerstein. On November 5, 1945, at 60 years of age, he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage while walking at the corner of Park Avenue and 57th Street. Identifiable only by his ASCAP card, Kern was initially taken to the indigent ward at City Hospital, later being transferred to Doctors Hospital in Manhattan. Hammerstein was at his side when Kern's breathing stopped. Hammerstein hummed or sang the song "I've Told Ev'ry Little Star" from Music in the Air (a personal favorite of the composer's) into Kern's ear. Receiving no response, Hammerstein realized Kern had died. Rodgers and Hammerstein then assigned the task of writing the score for Annie Get Your Gun to the veteran Broadway composer Irving Berlin.
Kern is interred at Ferncliff Cemetery in Westchester County, New York. His daughter, Elizabeth "Betty" Jane Kern (1918–1996) married Artie Shaw in 1942 and later Jack Cummings. Kern's wife eventually remarried, to a singer named George Byron.
Jerome Kern was nominated eight times for an Academy Award, and won twice. Seven nominations were for Best Original Song; these included a posthumous nomination in each of 1945 and 1946. One nomination was in 1945 for Best Original Music Score. Kern was not eligible for any Tony Awards, which were not created until 1947. In 1976, Very Good Eddie was nominated for a Drama Desk Award as Outstanding Revival, and the director and actors received various Tony, Drama Desk and other awards and nominations. Elisabeth Welsh was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance in Jerome Kern Goes to Hollywood in 1986, and Show Boat received Tony nominations in both 1983 and 1995, winning for best revival in 1995 (among numerous other awards and nominations), and won the Laurence Olivier Award for best revival in 2008. In 1986, Big Deal was nominated for the Tony for best musical, among other awards, and Bob Fosse won as best choreographer. In 2000, Swing!, featuring Kern's "I Won't Dance" was nominated for the Tony for Best Musical, among others. In 2002, Elaine Stritch at Liberty, featuring Kern's "All in Fun", won the Tony Award for Best Special Theatrical Event. In 2004, Never Gonna Dance received two Tony nominations.
Kern was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame posthumously, in 1970. In 1985, the U.S. Post Office issued a postage stamp (Scott #2110, 22¢), with an illustration of Kern holding sheet music. The Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia was named after Kern by his Dixieland bandleader father.
Note: All shows listed are musical comedies for which Kern was the sole composer unless otherwise specified.
During his first phase of work (1904–1911), Kern wrote songs for 22 Broadway productions, including songs interpolated into British musicals or featured in revues (sometimes writing lyrics as well as music), and he occasionally co-wrote musicals with one or two other composers. During visits to London beginning in 1905, he also composed songs that were first performed in several London shows. The following are some of the most notable such shows from this period:
From 1912 to 1924, the more-experienced Kern began to work on dramatically concerned shows, including incidental music for plays, and, for the first time since his college show Uncle Tom's Cabin, he wrote musicals as the sole composer. His regular lyricist collaborators for his more than 30 shows during this period were Bolton, Wodehouse, Caldwell, Harry B. Smith and Howard Dietz. Some of his most notable shows during this very productive period were as follows:
During the last phase of his theatrical composing career, Kern continued to work with his previous collaborators but also met Oscar Hammerstein II and Otto Harbach, with whom Kern wrote his most lasting, memorable, and well-known works. The most successful of these are as follows:
In addition to revivals of his most popular shows, Kern's music has been posthumously featured in a variety of revues, musicals and concerts on and off Broadway.
Among the more than 700 songs by Kern are such classics as "They Didn't Believe Me" (1914), "Look for the Silver Lining" (1920), "Ol' Man River", "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man", "Make Believe", "You Are Love" and "Bill" (all from Show Boat, 1927), "The Song Is You" (1932), "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", "Yesterdays" and "Let's Begin" (all from Roberta, 1933), "I Won't Dance" (1935), "A Fine Romance" and the Academy Award-winning "The Way You Look Tonight" (both from Swing Time, 1936), "All the Things You Are" (1939) and "I'm Old Fashioned" (1942). Another Oscar winner was "The Last Time I Saw Paris". One of Kern's last hits was "Long Ago (and Far Away)" (1944). | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Jerome David Kern (January 27, 1885 – November 11, 1945) was an American composer of musical theatre and popular music. One of the most important American theatre composers of the early 20th century, he wrote more than 700 songs, used in over 100 stage works, including such classics as \"Ol' Man River\", \"Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man\", \"A Fine Romance\", \"Smoke Gets in Your Eyes\", \"The Song Is You\", \"All the Things You Are\", \"The Way You Look Tonight\" and \"Long Ago (and Far Away)\". He collaborated with many of the leading librettists and lyricists of his era, including George Grossmith Jr., Guy Bolton, P. G. Wodehouse, Otto Harbach, Oscar Hammerstein II, Dorothy Fields, Johnny Mercer, Ira Gershwin and Yip Harburg.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "A native New Yorker, Kern created dozens of Broadway musicals and Hollywood films in a career that lasted for more than four decades. His musical innovations, such as 4/4 dance rhythms and the employment of syncopation and jazz progressions, built on, rather than rejected, earlier musical theatre tradition. He and his collaborators also employed his melodies to further the action or develop characterization to a greater extent than in the other musicals of his day, creating the model for later musicals. Although dozens of Kern's musicals and musical films were hits, only Show Boat is now regularly revived. Songs from his other shows, however, are still frequently performed and adapted. Many of Kern's songs have been adapted by jazz musicians to become standard tunes.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Kern was born in New York City, on Sutton Place, in what was then the city's brewery district. His parents were Henry Kern (1842–1908), a Jewish German immigrant, and Fannie Kern née Kakeles (1852–1907), who was an American Jew of Bohemian parentage. At the time of Kern's birth, his father ran a livery stable; later he became a successful merchant. Kern grew up on East 56th Street in Manhattan, where he attended public schools. He showed an early aptitude for music and was taught to play the piano and organ by his mother, a professional player and teacher.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In 1897, the family moved to Newark, New Jersey, where Kern attended Newark High School (which became Barringer High School in 1907). He wrote songs for the school's first musical, a minstrel show, in 1901, and for an amateur musical adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin put on at the Newark Yacht Club in January 1902. Kern left high school before graduation in the spring of his senior year in 1902. In response, Kern's father insisted that his son work with him in business, instead of composing. Kern, however, failed miserably in one of his earliest tasks: he was supposed to purchase two pianos for the store, but instead he ordered 200. His father relented, and later in 1902, Kern became a student at the New York College of Music, studying the piano under Alexander Lambert and Paolo Gallico, and harmony under Dr. Austin Pierce. His first published composition, a piano piece, At the Casino, appeared in the same year. Between 1903 and 1905, he continued his musical training under private tutors in Heidelberg, Germany, returning to New York via London.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "For a time, Kern worked as a rehearsal pianist in Broadway theatres and as a song-plugger for Tin Pan Alley music publishers. While in London, he secured a contract from the American impresario Charles Frohman to provide songs for interpolation in Broadway versions of London shows. He began to provide these additions in 1904 to British scores for An English Daisy, by Seymour Hicks and Walter Slaughter, and Mr. Wix of Wickham, for which he wrote most of the songs.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In 1905, Kern contributed the song \"How'd you like to spoon with me?\" to Ivan Caryll's hit musical The Earl and the Girl when the show transferred to Chicago and New York in 1905. He also contributed to the New York production of The Catch of the Season (1905), The Little Cherub (1906) and The Orchid (1907), among other shows. From 1905 on, he spent long periods of time in London, contributing songs to West End shows like The Beauty of Bath (1906; with lyricist P. G. Wodehouse) and making valuable contacts, including George Grossmith Jr. and Seymour Hicks, who were the first to introduce Kern's songs to the London stage. In 1909 during one of his stays in England, Kern took a boat trip on the River Thames with some friends, and when the boat stopped at Walton-on-Thames, they went to an inn called the Swan for a drink. Kern was much taken with the proprietor's daughter, Eva Leale (1891–1959), who was working behind the bar. He wooed her, and they were married at the Anglican church of St. Mary's in Walton on October 25, 1910. The couple then lived at the Swan when Kern was in England.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Kern is believed to have composed music for silent films as early as 1912, but the earliest documented film music which he is known to have written was for a twenty-part serial, Gloria's Romance in 1916. This was one of the first starring vehicles for Billie Burke, for whom Kern had earlier written the song \"Mind the Paint\", with lyrics by A. W. Pinero. The film is now considered lost, but Kern's music survives. Another score for the silent movies, Jubilo, followed in 1919. Kern was one of the founding members of ASCAP.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Kern's first complete score was Broadway's The Red Petticoat (1912), one of the first musical-comedy Westerns. The libretto was by Rida Johnson Young. By World War I, more than a hundred of Kern's songs had been used in about thirty productions, mostly Broadway adaptations of West End and European shows. Kern contributed two songs to To-Night's the Night (1914), another Rubens musical. It opened in New York and went on to become a hit in London. The best known of Kern's songs from this period is probably \"They Didn't Believe Me\", which was a hit in the New York version of the Paul Rubens and Sidney Jones musical, The Girl from Utah (1914), for which Kern wrote five songs. Kern's song, with four beats to a bar, departed from the customary waltz-rhythms of European influence and fitted the new American passion for modern dances such as the fox-trot. He was also able to use elements of American styles, such as ragtime, as well as syncopation, in his lively dance tunes. Theatre historian John Kenrick writes that the song put Kern in great demand on Broadway and established a pattern for musical comedy love songs that lasted through the 1960s.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In May 1915, Kern was due to sail with Charles Frohman from New York to London on board the RMS Lusitania, but Kern missed the boat, having overslept after staying up late playing poker. Frohman died in the sinking of the ship.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Kern composed 16 Broadway scores between 1915 and 1920 and also contributed songs to the London hit Theodore & Co (1916; most of the songs are by the young Ivor Novello) and to revues like the Ziegfeld Follies. The most notable of his scores were those for a series of shows written for the Princess Theatre, a small (299-seat) house built by Ray Comstock. Theatrical agent Elisabeth Marbury asked Kern and librettist Guy Bolton to create a series of intimate and low-budget, yet smart, musicals.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The \"Princess Theatre shows\" were unique on Broadway not only for their small size, but their clever, coherent plots, integrated scores and naturalistic acting, which presented \"a sharp contrast to the large-scale Ruritanian operettas then in vogue\" or the star-studded revues and extravaganzas of producers like Florenz Ziegfeld. Earlier musical comedy had often been thinly plotted, gaudy pieces, marked by the insertion of songs into their scores with little regard to the plot. But Kern and Bolton followed the examples of Gilbert and Sullivan and French opéra bouffe in integrating song and story. \"These shows built and polished the mold from which almost all later major musical comedies evolved. ... The characters and situations were, within the limitations of musical comedy license, believable and the humor came from the situations or the nature of the characters. Kern's exquisitely flowing melodies were employed to further the action or develop characterization.\" The shows featured modern American settings and simple scene changes to suit the small theatre.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The team's first Princess Theatre show was an adaptation of Paul Rubens' 1905 London show, Mr. Popple (of Ippleton), called Nobody Home (1915). The piece ran for 135 performances and was a modest financial success. However, it did little to fulfill the new team's mission to innovate, except that Kern's song, \"The Magic Melody\", was the first Broadway showtune with a basic jazz progression. Kern and Bolton next created an original piece, Very Good Eddie, which was a surprise hit, running for 341 performances, with additional touring productions that went on into the 1918-19 season. The British humorist, lyricist and librettist P. G. Wodehouse joined the Princess team in 1917, adding his skill as a lyricist to the succeeding shows. Oh, Boy! (1917) ran for an extraordinary 463 performances. Other shows written for the theatre were Have a Heart (1917), Leave It to Jane (1917) and Oh, Lady! Lady!! (1918). The first opened at another theatre before Very Good Eddie closed. The second played elsewhere during the long run of Oh Boy! An anonymous admirer wrote a verse in their praise that begins:",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "This is the trio of musical fame, Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern. Better than anyone else you can name Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In February 1918, Dorothy Parker wrote in Vanity Fair:",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Well, Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern have done it again. Every time these three gather together, the Princess Theatre is sold out for months in advance. You can get a seat for Oh, Lady! Lady!! somewhere around the middle of August for just about the price of one on the stock exchange. If you ask me, I will look you fearlessly in the eye and tell you in low, throbbing tones that it has it over any other musical comedy in town. But then Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern are my favorite indoor sport. I like the way they go about a musical comedy. ... I like the way the action slides casually into the songs. ... I like the deft rhyming of the song that is always sung in the last act by two comedians and a comedienne. And oh, how I do like Jerome Kern's music. And all these things are even more so in Oh, Lady! Lady!! than they were in Oh, Boy!",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Oh, Lady! Lady!! was the last successful \"Princess Theatre show\". Kern and Wodehouse disagreed over money, and the composer decided to move on to other projects. Kern's importance to the partnership was illustrated by the fate of the last musical of the series, Oh, My Dear! (1918), to which he contributed only one song: \"Go, Little Boat\". The rest of the show was composed by Louis Hirsch and ran for 189 performances: \"Despite a respectable run, everyone realized there was little point in continuing the series without Kern.\"",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The 1920s were an extremely productive period in American musical theatre, and Kern created at least one show every year for the entire decade. His first show of 1920 was The Night Boat, with book and lyrics by Anne Caldwell, which ran for more than 300 performances in New York and for three seasons on tour. Later in the same year, Kern wrote the score for Sally, with a book by Bolton and lyrics by Otto Harbach. This show, staged by Florenz Ziegfeld, ran for 570 performances, one of the longest runs of any Broadway show in the decade, and popularized the song \"Look for the Silver Lining\" (which had been written for an earlier show), performed by the rising star Marilyn Miller. It also had a long run in London in 1921, produced by George Grossmith Jr. Kern's next shows were Good Morning, Dearie (1921, with Caldwell) which ran for 347 performances; followed in 1922 by a West End success, The Cabaret Girl in collaboration with Grossmith and Wodehouse; another modest success by the same team, The Beauty Prize (1923); and a Broadway flop, The Bunch and Judy, remembered, if at all, as the first time Kern and Fred Astaire worked together.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Stepping Stones (1923, with Caldwell) was a success, and in 1924 the Princess Theatre team of Bolton, Wodehouse and Kern reunited to write Sitting Pretty, but it did not recapture the popularity of the earlier collaborations. Its relative failure may have been partly due to Kern's growing aversion to having individual songs from his shows performed out of context on radio, in cabaret, or on record, although his chief objection was to jazz interpretations of his songs. He called himself a \"musical clothier – nothing more or less,\" and said, \"I write music to both the situations and the lyrics in plays.\" When Sitting Pretty was produced, he forbade any broadcasting or recording of individual numbers from the show, which limited their chance to gain popularity.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "1925 was a major turning point in Kern's career when he met Oscar Hammerstein II, with whom he would entertain a lifelong friendship and collaboration. As a young man, Kern had been an easy companion with great charm and humor, but he became less outgoing in his middle years, sometimes difficult to work with: he once introduced himself to a producer by saying, \"I hear you're a son of a bitch. So am I.\" He rarely collaborated with any one lyricist for long. With Hammerstein, however, he remained on close terms for the rest of his life. Their first show, written together with Harbach, was Sunny, which featured the song \"Who (Stole My Heart Away)?\" Marilyn Miller played the title role, as she had in Sally. The show ran for 517 performances on Broadway, and the following year ran for 363 performances in the West End, starring Binnie Hale and Jack Buchanan.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Because of the strong success of Sally and Sunny and consistent good results with his other shows, Ziegfeld was willing to gamble on Kern's next project in 1927. Kern had been impressed by Edna Ferber's novel Show Boat and wished to present a musical stage version. He persuaded Hammerstein to adapt it and Ziegfeld to produce it. The story, dealing with racism, marital strife and alcoholism, was unheard of in the escapist world of musical comedy. Despite his doubts, Ziegfeld spared no expense in staging the piece to give it its full epic grandeur. According to the theatre historian John Kenrick: \"After the opening night audience filed out of the Ziegfeld Theatre in near silence, Ziegfeld thought his worst fears had been confirmed. He was pleasantly surprised when the next morning brought ecstatic reviews and long lines at the box office. In fact, Show Boat proved to be the most lasting accomplishment of Ziegfeld's career – the only one of his shows that is regularly performed today.\" The score is, arguably, Kern's greatest and includes the well-known songs \"Ol' Man River\" and \"Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man\" as well as \"Make Believe\", \"You Are Love\", \"Life Upon the Wicked Stage\", \"Why Do I Love You\", all with lyrics by Hammerstein, and \"Bill\", originally written for Oh, Lady! Lady!, with lyrics by P. G. Wodehouse. The show ran for 572 performances on Broadway and was also a success in London. Although Ferber's novel was filmed unsuccessfully as a part-talkie in 1929 (using some songs from the Kern score), the musical itself was filmed twice, in 1936, and, with Technicolor, in 1951. In 1989, a stage version of the musical was presented on television for the first time, in a production from the Paper Mill Playhouse telecast by PBS on Great Performances.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "While most Kern musicals have largely been forgotten, except for their songs, Show Boat remains well-remembered and frequently seen. It is a staple of stock productions and has been revived numerous times on Broadway and in London. A 1946 revival integrated choreography into the show, in the manner of a Rodgers and Hammerstein production, as did the 1994 Harold Prince–Susan Stroman revival, which was nominated for ten Tony Awards, winning five, including best revival. It was the first musical to enter a major opera company's repertory (New York City Opera, 1954), and the rediscovery of the 1927 score with Robert Russell Bennett's original orchestrations led to a large-scale EMI recording in 1987 and several opera-house productions. In 1941, the conductor Artur Rodziński wished to commission a symphonic suite from the score, but Kern considered himself a songwriter and not a symphonist. He never orchestrated his own scores, leaving that to musical assistants, principally Frank Saddler (until 1921) and Robert Russell Bennett (from 1923). In response to the commission, Kern oversaw an arrangement by Charles Miller and Emil Gerstenberger of numbers from the show into the orchestral work Scenario for Orchestra: Themes from Show Boat, premiered in 1941 by the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Rodziński.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Kern's last Broadway show in the 1920s was Sweet Adeline (1929), with a libretto by Hammerstein. It was a period piece, set in the Gay 90s, about a girl from Hoboken, New Jersey (near Kern's childhood home), who becomes a Broadway star. Opening just before the stock market crash, it received rave reviews, but the elaborate, old-fashioned piece was a step back from the innovations in Show Boat, or even the Princess Theatre shows. In January 1929, at the height of the Jazz Age, and with Show Boat still playing on Broadway, Kern made news on both sides of the Atlantic for reasons wholly unconnected with music. He sold at auction, at New York's Anderson Galleries, the collection of English and American literature that he had been building up for more than a decade. The collection, rich in inscribed first editions and manuscript material of eighteenth and nineteenth century authors, sold for a total of $1,729,462.50 (equivalent to $29,474,591 in 2022) – a record for a single-owner sale that stood for over fifty years. Among the books he sold were first or early editions of poems by Robert Burns and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and works by Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding and Charles Dickens, as well as manuscripts by Alexander Pope, John Keats, Shelley, Lord Byron, Thomas Hardy and others.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In 1929 Kern made his first trip to Hollywood to supervise the 1929 film version of Sally, one of the first \"all-talking\" Technicolor films. The following year, he was there a second time to work on Men of the Sky, released in 1931 without his songs, and a 1930 film version of Sunny. There was a public reaction against the early glut of film musicals after the advent of film sound; Hollywood released more than 100 musical films in 1930, but only 14 in 1931. Warner Bros. bought out Kern's contract, and he returned to the stage. He collaborated with Harbach on the Broadway musical The Cat and the Fiddle (1931), about a composer and an opera singer, featuring the songs \"She Didn't Say Yes\" and \"The Night Was Made for Love\". It ran for 395 performances, a remarkable success for the Depression years, and transferred to London the following year. It was filmed in 1934 with Jeanette MacDonald.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Music in the Air (1932) was another Kern-Hammerstein collaboration and another show-biz plot, best remembered today for \"The Song Is You\" and \"I've Told Ev'ry Little Star\". It was \"undoubtedly an operetta\", set in the German countryside, but without the Ruritanian trimmings of the operettas of Kern's youth. Roberta (1933) by Kern and Harbach included the songs \"Smoke Gets in Your Eyes\", \"Let's Begin and \"Yesterdays\" and featured, among others, Bob Hope, Fred MacMurray, George Murphy and Sydney Greenstreet all in the early stages of their careers. Kern's Three Sisters (1934), was his last West End show, with a libretto by Hammerstein. The musical, depicting horse-racing, the circus, and class distinctions, was a failure, running for only two months. Its song \"I Won't Dance\" was used in the film Roberta. Some British critics objected to American writers essaying a British story; James Agate, doyen of London theatre critics of the day, dismissed it as \"American inanity,\" though both Kern and Hammerstein were strong and knowledgeable Anglophiles. Kern's last Broadway show (other than revivals) was Very Warm for May (1939), another show-biz story and another disappointment, although the score included the Kern and Hammerstein classic \"All The Things You Are\".",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In 1935, when musical films had become popular once again, thanks to Busby Berkeley, Kern returned to Hollywood, where he composed the scores to a dozen more films, although he also continued working on Broadway productions. He settled permanently in Hollywood in 1937. After suffering a heart attack in 1939, he was told by his doctors to concentrate on film scores, a less stressful task, as Hollywood songwriters were not as deeply involved with the production of their works as Broadway songwriters. This second phase of Kern's Hollywood career had considerably greater artistic and commercial success than the first. With Hammerstein, he wrote songs for the film versions of his recent Broadway shows Music in the Air (1934), which starred Gloria Swanson in a rare singing role, and Sweet Adeline (1935). With Dorothy Fields, he composed the new music for I Dream Too Much (1935), a musical melodrama about the opera world, starring the Metropolitan Opera diva Lily Pons. Kern and Fields interspersed the opera numbers with their songs, including \"the swinging 'I Got Love,' the lullaby 'The Jockey on the Carousel,' and the entrancing title song.\" Also with Fields, he wrote two new songs, \"I Won't Dance\" and \"Lovely to Look At\", for the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film version of Roberta (1935), which was a hit. The show also included the song \"I'll Be Hard to Handle\". This was given a 1952 remake called Lovely to Look At.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Their next film, Swing Time (1936) included the song \"The Way You Look Tonight\", which won the Academy Award in 1936 for the best song. Other songs in Swing Time include \"A Fine Romance\", \"Pick Yourself Up\" and \"Never Gonna Dance\". The Oxford Companion to the American Musical calls Swing Time \"a strong candidate for the best of the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals\" and says that, although the screenplay is contrived, it \"left plenty of room for dance and all of it was superb. ... Although the movie is remembered as one of the great dance musicals, it also boasts one of the best film scores of the 1930s.\" For the 1936 film version of Show Boat, Kern and Hammerstein wrote three new songs, including \"I Have The Room Above Her\" and \"Ah Still Suits Me\". High, Wide, and Handsome (1937) was intentionally similar in plot and style to Show Boat, but it was a box-office failure. Kern songs were also used in the Cary Grant film, When You're in Love (1937), and the first Abbott and Costello feature, One Night in the Tropics (1940). In 1940, Hammerstein wrote the lyric \"The Last Time I Saw Paris\", in homage to the French capital, recently occupied by the Germans. Kern set it, the only time he set a pre-written lyric, and his only hit song not written as part of a musical. Originally a hit for Tony Martin and later for Noël Coward, the song was used in the film Lady Be Good (1941) and won Kern another Oscar for best song. Kern's second and last symphonic work was his 'Mark Twain Suite (1942).",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In his last Hollywood musicals, Kern worked with several new and distinguished partners. With Johnny Mercer for You Were Never Lovelier (1942), he contributed \"a set of memorable songs to entertain audiences until the plot came to its inevitable conclusion\". The film starred Astaire and Rita Hayworth and included the song \"I'm Old Fashioned\". Kern's next collaboration was with Ira Gershwin on Cover Girl starring Hayworth and Gene Kelly (1944) for which Kern composed \"Sure Thing\",\"Put Me to the Test,\" \"Make Way for Tomorrow\" (lyric by E. Y. Harburg), and the hit ballad \"Long Ago (and Far Away)\". For the Deanna Durbin Western musical, Can't Help Singing (1944), with lyrics by Harburg, Kern \"provided the best original score of Durbin's career, mixing operetta and Broadway sounds in such songs as 'Any Moment Now,' 'Swing Your Partner,' 'More and More,' and the lilting title number.\" \"More and More\" was nominated for an Oscar.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Kern composed his last film score, Centennial Summer (1946) in which \"the songs were as resplendent as the story and characters were mediocre. ... Oscar Hammerstein, Leo Robin, and E. Y. Harburg contributed lyrics for Kern's lovely music, resulting in the soulful ballad 'All Through the Day,' the rustic 'Cinderella Sue,' the cheerful 'Up With the Lark,' and the torchy 'In Love in Vain.'\" \"All Through the Day\" was another Oscar nominee. The music of Kern's last two films is notable in the way it developed from his earlier work. Some of it was too advanced for the film companies; Kern's biographer, Stephen Banfield, refers to \"tonal experimentation ... outlandish enharmonics\" that the studios insisted on cutting. At the same time, in some ways his music came full circle: having in his youth helped to end the reigns of the waltz and operetta, he now composed three of his finest waltzes (\"Can't Help Singing\", \"Californ-i-ay\" and \"Up With the Lark\"), the last having a distinctly operetta-like character.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Kern and his wife, Eva, often vacationed on their yacht Show Boat. He collected rare books and enjoyed betting on horses. At the time of Kern's death, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was filming a fictionalized version of his life, Till the Clouds Roll By, which was released in 1946 starring Robert Walker as Kern. In the film, Kern's songs are sung by Judy Garland, Kathryn Grayson, June Allyson, Lena Horne, Dinah Shore, Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury, among others, and Gower Champion and Cyd Charisse appear as dancers. Many of the biographical elements are fictionalized.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In the fall of 1945, Kern returned to New York City to oversee auditions for a new revival of Show Boat, and began to work on the score for what would become the musical Annie Get Your Gun, to be produced by Rodgers and Hammerstein. On November 5, 1945, at 60 years of age, he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage while walking at the corner of Park Avenue and 57th Street. Identifiable only by his ASCAP card, Kern was initially taken to the indigent ward at City Hospital, later being transferred to Doctors Hospital in Manhattan. Hammerstein was at his side when Kern's breathing stopped. Hammerstein hummed or sang the song \"I've Told Ev'ry Little Star\" from Music in the Air (a personal favorite of the composer's) into Kern's ear. Receiving no response, Hammerstein realized Kern had died. Rodgers and Hammerstein then assigned the task of writing the score for Annie Get Your Gun to the veteran Broadway composer Irving Berlin.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Kern is interred at Ferncliff Cemetery in Westchester County, New York. His daughter, Elizabeth \"Betty\" Jane Kern (1918–1996) married Artie Shaw in 1942 and later Jack Cummings. Kern's wife eventually remarried, to a singer named George Byron.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Jerome Kern was nominated eight times for an Academy Award, and won twice. Seven nominations were for Best Original Song; these included a posthumous nomination in each of 1945 and 1946. One nomination was in 1945 for Best Original Music Score. Kern was not eligible for any Tony Awards, which were not created until 1947. In 1976, Very Good Eddie was nominated for a Drama Desk Award as Outstanding Revival, and the director and actors received various Tony, Drama Desk and other awards and nominations. Elisabeth Welsh was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance in Jerome Kern Goes to Hollywood in 1986, and Show Boat received Tony nominations in both 1983 and 1995, winning for best revival in 1995 (among numerous other awards and nominations), and won the Laurence Olivier Award for best revival in 2008. In 1986, Big Deal was nominated for the Tony for best musical, among other awards, and Bob Fosse won as best choreographer. In 2000, Swing!, featuring Kern's \"I Won't Dance\" was nominated for the Tony for Best Musical, among others. In 2002, Elaine Stritch at Liberty, featuring Kern's \"All in Fun\", won the Tony Award for Best Special Theatrical Event. In 2004, Never Gonna Dance received two Tony nominations.",
"title": "Accolades"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Kern was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame posthumously, in 1970. In 1985, the U.S. Post Office issued a postage stamp (Scott #2110, 22¢), with an illustration of Kern holding sheet music. The Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia was named after Kern by his Dixieland bandleader father.",
"title": "Accolades"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Note: All shows listed are musical comedies for which Kern was the sole composer unless otherwise specified.",
"title": "Selected works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "During his first phase of work (1904–1911), Kern wrote songs for 22 Broadway productions, including songs interpolated into British musicals or featured in revues (sometimes writing lyrics as well as music), and he occasionally co-wrote musicals with one or two other composers. During visits to London beginning in 1905, he also composed songs that were first performed in several London shows. The following are some of the most notable such shows from this period:",
"title": "Selected works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "From 1912 to 1924, the more-experienced Kern began to work on dramatically concerned shows, including incidental music for plays, and, for the first time since his college show Uncle Tom's Cabin, he wrote musicals as the sole composer. His regular lyricist collaborators for his more than 30 shows during this period were Bolton, Wodehouse, Caldwell, Harry B. Smith and Howard Dietz. Some of his most notable shows during this very productive period were as follows:",
"title": "Selected works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "During the last phase of his theatrical composing career, Kern continued to work with his previous collaborators but also met Oscar Hammerstein II and Otto Harbach, with whom Kern wrote his most lasting, memorable, and well-known works. The most successful of these are as follows:",
"title": "Selected works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "In addition to revivals of his most popular shows, Kern's music has been posthumously featured in a variety of revues, musicals and concerts on and off Broadway.",
"title": "Selected works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Among the more than 700 songs by Kern are such classics as \"They Didn't Believe Me\" (1914), \"Look for the Silver Lining\" (1920), \"Ol' Man River\", \"Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man\", \"Make Believe\", \"You Are Love\" and \"Bill\" (all from Show Boat, 1927), \"The Song Is You\" (1932), \"Smoke Gets in Your Eyes\", \"Yesterdays\" and \"Let's Begin\" (all from Roberta, 1933), \"I Won't Dance\" (1935), \"A Fine Romance\" and the Academy Award-winning \"The Way You Look Tonight\" (both from Swing Time, 1936), \"All the Things You Are\" (1939) and \"I'm Old Fashioned\" (1942). Another Oscar winner was \"The Last Time I Saw Paris\". One of Kern's last hits was \"Long Ago (and Far Away)\" (1944).",
"title": "Kern's songs"
}
]
| Jerome David Kern was an American composer of musical theatre and popular music. One of the most important American theatre composers of the early 20th century, he wrote more than 700 songs, used in over 100 stage works, including such classics as "Ol' Man River", "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man", "A Fine Romance", "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", "The Song Is You", "All the Things You Are", "The Way You Look Tonight" and "Long Ago". He collaborated with many of the leading librettists and lyricists of his era, including George Grossmith Jr., Guy Bolton, P. G. Wodehouse, Otto Harbach, Oscar Hammerstein II, Dorothy Fields, Johnny Mercer, Ira Gershwin and Yip Harburg. A native New Yorker, Kern created dozens of Broadway musicals and Hollywood films in a career that lasted for more than four decades. His musical innovations, such as 4/4 dance rhythms and the employment of syncopation and jazz progressions, built on, rather than rejected, earlier musical theatre tradition. He and his collaborators also employed his melodies to further the action or develop characterization to a greater extent than in the other musicals of his day, creating the model for later musicals. Although dozens of Kern's musicals and musical films were hits, only Show Boat is now regularly revived. Songs from his other shows, however, are still frequently performed and adapted. Many of Kern's songs have been adapted by jazz musicians to become standard tunes. | 2001-10-18T12:31:52Z | 2023-09-01T21:41:26Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_Kern |
16,228 | Jim Henson | James Maury Henson (September 24, 1936 – May 16, 1990) was an American puppeteer, animator, cartoonist, actor, inventor, and filmmaker who achieved worldwide notability as the creator of the Muppets. Henson was also well known for creating Fraggle Rock (1983–1987) and as the director of The Dark Crystal (1982) and Labyrinth (1986).
Born in Greenville, Mississippi and raised in both Leland, Mississippi and University Park, Maryland, Henson began developing puppets in high school. He created Sam and Friends (1955–1961), a short-form comedy television program, while he was a freshman at the University of Maryland, College Park in collaboration with Jane Nebel, who was a senior there. A few years later the two married. He graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in home economics, after which he and Jane produced coffee advertisements and developed experimental films. In 1958, he co-founded Muppets, Inc. with Jane; it later became The Jim Henson Company.
In 1969, Henson joined the children's educational television program Sesame Street (1969–present) where he helped to develop Muppet characters for the series. He and his creative team also appeared on the first season of the sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live (1975–present). He produced the sketch comedy television series The Muppet Show (1976–1981) during this period. He won fame for his characters, particularly Kermit the Frog, Rowlf the Dog and Ernie. During the later years of his life, he founded the Jim Henson Foundation and Jim Henson's Creature Shop. He won the Emmy Award twice for his involvement in The StoryTeller (1987–1988) and The Jim Henson Hour (1989).
Henson died in New York City at age 53 from streptococcal toxic shock syndrome caused by Streptococcus pyogenes. At the time of his death, he was in negotiations to sell his company to The Walt Disney Company, but talks fell through after his passing. He posthumously received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1991, and was named a Disney Legend in 2011.
James Maury Henson was born on September 24, 1936, in Greenville, Mississippi, the younger of two children of Paul Ransom Henson (1904–1994), an agronomist for the United States Department of Agriculture, and his wife Betty Marcella (née Brown, 1904–1972). Henson's older brother, Paul Ransom Henson Jr. (1932–1956), died in a car crash on April 15, 1956. He was raised as a Christian Scientist and spent his early childhood in nearby Leland, Mississippi, before moving with his family to University Park, Maryland, near Washington, D.C., in the late 1940s. He remembered the arrival of the family's first television as "the biggest event of his adolescence", being heavily influenced by radio ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and the early television puppets of Burr Tillstrom on Kukla, Fran and Ollie and Bil and Cora Baird. He remained a Christian Scientist at least into his twenties when he taught Sunday school, but he wrote to a Christian Science church in 1975 to inform them that he was no longer a practicing member.
At age 18, Henson began working for WTOP-TV (now WUSA-TV) in 1954 while attending Northwestern High School, creating puppets for a Saturday morning children's show called The Junior Morning Show. He enrolled at the University of Maryland, College Park as a studio arts major upon graduation, thinking that he might become a commercial artist. A puppetry class offered in the applied arts department introduced him to the craft and textiles courses in the college of home economics. He graduated in 1960 with a Bachelor of Science degree in home economics. As a freshman, he created Sam and Friends, a five-minute puppet show for WRC-TV in Washington, D.C. The characters on Sam and Friends were forerunners of the Muppets, and the show included a prototype of Henson's most famous character Kermit the Frog. He remained at WRC until Sam and Friends aired its last episode on December 15, 1961.
In the show, Henson began experimenting with techniques that changed the way in which puppetry was used on television, including eliminating the conventional proscenium arch and using the frame defined by the camera shot to allow the puppet performer to work from off-camera. He believed that television puppets needed to have "life and sensitivity" and began making characters from flexible, fabric-covered foam rubber, allowing them to express a wider array of emotions at a time when many puppets were made of carved wood. A marionette's arms are manipulated by strings, but Henson used rods to move his Muppets' arms, allowing greater control of expression. Additionally, he wanted the Muppet characters to "speak" more creatively than was possible for previous puppets, which had random mouth movements, so he used precise lip-sync mouth movements to match the dialogue.
When Henson began work on Sam and Friends, he asked fellow University of Maryland senior Jane Nebel to assist him. The show was a financial success, but he began to have doubts about going into a career performing with puppets once he graduated. He spent several months in Europe, where he was inspired by European puppet performers who looked on their work as an art form. He began dating Jane after his return to the United States.
Henson spent much of the next two decades working in commercials, talk shows, and children's projects before realizing his dream of the Muppets as "entertainment for everybody". The popularity of his work on Sam and Friends in the late 1950s led to a series of guest appearances on network talk and variety shows. He appeared as a guest on many shows, including The Steve Allen Show, The Jack Paar Program, and The Ed Sullivan Show. (Sullivan introduced him as "Jim Newsom and his Puppets" on September 11, 1966.) These television broadcasts greatly increased his exposure, leading to hundreds of commercial appearances by Henson characters throughout the 1960s.
Among the most popular of Henson's commercials was a series for the local Wilkins Coffee company in Washington, D.C. Most of the Wilkins advertisements followed a similar formula. Two Muppets, in this case named Wilkins and Wontkins (and usually both voiced by Henson), would appear. Wilkins would extol the product, while Wontkins would express his hatred for it, causing Wilkins to retaliate physically; examples included Wontkins being shot with a cannon, struck in the head with a hammer or baseball bat, and having a pie thrown in his face. The Jim Henson Company has posted a short selection of them. Henson later explained, "Till then, advertising agencies believed that the hard sell was the only way to get their message over on television. We took a very different approach. We tried to sell things by making people laugh."
The first seven-second commercials for Wilkins were an immediate hit and were later remade for other local coffee companies throughout the United States, such as Community Coffee, Red Diamond Coffee, La Touraine Coffee, Nash's Coffee, and Jomar Instant coffee. The characters were so successful in selling coffee that soon other companies began seeking them to promote their products, such as bakeries like Merita Breads, service station chains such as Standard Oil of Ohio and the downstream assets of Marathon Oil, and beverage bottlers such as Faygo. Over 300 "Wilkins and Wontkins" commercials were made. The ads were primarily produced in black and white, but some color examples also exist.
Henson sold the rights to Wilkins and Wontkins to the Wilkins Company, who allowed marketing executive John T. Brady to sell the rights to some toymakers and film studios. However, in July 1992 Brady was sued by Jim Henson Productions for unfair competition in addition to copyright and trademark infringement. The Henson company claimed that Brady was incorrectly using Henson's name and likeness in their attempts to license the characters.
In 1963, Henson and his wife moved to New York City where the newly formed Muppets, Inc. resided for some time. Jane quit performing to raise their children, and Henson hired writer Jerry Juhl in 1961 and puppet performer Frank Oz in 1963 to replace her. Henson credited them both with developing much of the humor and character of his Muppets. He and Oz developed a close friendship and a performing partnership that lasted until Henson's death; their teamwork is particularly evident in their portrayals of Bert and Ernie, Kermit and Miss Piggy, and Kermit and Fozzie Bear. In New York City, Henson formed a partnership with Bernie Brillstein, who managed Henson's career until the puppeteer's death. In the years that followed, more performers would join Henson's team, including Jerry Nelson, Fran Brill, Richard Hunt, Dave Goelz, Steve Whitmire, and Kevin Clash.
In 1964 he and his family moved to Greenwich, Connecticut until 1971, when they moved to Bedford, New York.
Henson's talk show appearances culminated when he devised Rowlf, a piano-playing anthropomorphic dog that became the first Muppet to make regular appearances on The Jimmy Dean Show. Henson was so grateful for this break that he offered Jimmy Dean a 40-percent interest in his production company, but Dean declined, stating that Henson deserved all the rewards for his own work, a decision of conscience that Dean never regretted. From 1963 to 1966, Henson began exploring filmmaking and produced a series of experimental films. His nine-minute experimental film Time Piece was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film in 1965. He produced The Cube in 1969. Around this time, he wrote the first drafts of a live-action movie script with Jerry Juhl which became Tale of Sand. The script remained in the Henson Company archives until it was adapted in the 2012 graphic novel Jim Henson's Tale of Sand.
During this time, Henson continued to work with various companies who sought out his Muppets for advertising purposes. Among his clients were Wilson Meats, Royal Crown Cola, Claussen's Bread, La Choy, and Frito-Lay, which featured an early version of his character Cookie Monster to promote their Munchos line of potato snacks. Like the Wilkins Coffee ads of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the formula stayed fairly similar. For instance, one of the Claussen's commercials featured Kermit the Frog dangling from a window while a character named Mack asks him if he brought a loaf of the company's bread; when Kermit says he did not, Mack closes the window on Kermit's fingers and causes him to fall, suggesting he "drop down" to the grocery store to buy a loaf.
In 1969, television producer Joan Ganz Cooney and her staff at the Children's Television Workshop were impressed by the quality and creativity of the Henson-led team, so they asked Henson and staff to work full-time on Sesame Street, a children's program for public television that premiered on National Educational Television on November 10, 1969. Part of the show was set aside for a series of funny, colorful puppet characters living on Sesame Street, including Grover, Cookie Monster, Bert and Ernie, Oscar the Grouch, and Big Bird (the latter two performed by Caroll Spinney, a performer discovered by Henson at a Puppeteers of America festival). Henson performed the characters of Ernie, game-show host Guy Smiley, and Kermit, who appeared as a roving television news reporter.
Henson's Muppets initially appeared separately from the realistic segments on the Street, but the show was revamped to integrate the two segments, placing much greater emphasis on Henson's work. Cooney frequently praised Henson's work, and PBS called him "the spark that ignited our fledgling broadcast service." The success of Sesame Street also allowed him to stop producing commercials, and he said that "it was a pleasure to get out of that world".
Henson was also involved in producing various shows and animation inserts during the first two seasons. He produced a series of counting films for the numbers 1 through 10 which always ended with a baker (voiced by Henson) falling down the stairs while carrying the featured number of desserts. He also worked on a variety of inserts for the numbers 2 through 12, including the films "Dollhouse"; "Number Three Ball Film"; the stop-motions "King of Eight" and "Queen of Six"; the cut-out animation "Eleven Cheer"; and the computer animation "Nobody Counts To 10." He also directed the original "C Is For Cookie" and Tales from Muppetland, a short series of TV movie specials that were comic retellings of classic fairy tales aimed at a young audience and hosted by Kermit the Frog. The series included Hey, Cinderella!, The Frog Prince, and The Muppet Musicians of Bremen.
Henson, Oz, and his team were concerned that the company was becoming typecast solely as purveyors of children's entertainment, so they targeted an adult audience with a series of sketches on the first season of the late-night live television variety show Saturday Night Live. Eleven Land of Gorch sketches were aired between October 1975 and January 1976 on NBC, with four additional appearances in March, April, May, and September 1976. Henson liked Lorne Michaels' work and wanted to be a part of it, but he ultimately concluded that "what we were trying to do and what his writers could write for it never gelled". The SNL writers were not comfortable writing for the characters, and they frequently disparaged Henson's creations. Michael O'Donoghue quipped, "I won't write for felt."
Henson began developing a Broadway show and a weekly television series both featuring the Muppets. The American networks rejected the series in 1976, believing that Muppets would appeal only to a child audience. Then, Henson pitched the show to British impresario Lew Grade to finance the show. The show would be shot in the United Kingdom and syndicated worldwide. That same year, he scrapped plans for his Broadway show and moved his creative team to England, where The Muppet Show began taping. The show featured Kermit as host and a variety of other characters, notably Miss Piggy, Gonzo the Great, and Fozzie Bear, along with other characters such as Animal. Henson's teammates sometimes compared his role to that of Kermit: a shy, gentle boss with "a whim of steel" who ran things like "an explosion in a mattress factory." Caroll Spinney remembered that Henson would never say he did not like something. "He would just go 'Hmm.'... And if he liked it, he would say, 'Lovely!'" Henson recognized Kermit as an alter ego, though he thought that Kermit was bolder than he; he once said of the character: "He can say things I hold back."
The Muppets appeared in their first theatrical feature film The Muppet Movie in 1979. It was both a critical and financial success; it made $65.2 million domestically and was the 61st highest-grossing film at the time. Henson's idol Edgar Bergen died at age 75 during production of the film, and Henson dedicated it to his memory. Henson as Kermit sang "Rainbow Connection", and it hit number 25 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song. The Henson-directed The Great Muppet Caper (1981) followed, and Henson decided to end the Muppet Show to concentrate on making films, though the Muppet characters continued to appear in TV movies and specials.
Henson also aided others in their work. During development on The Empire Strikes Back (1980), George Lucas asked him to aid make-up artist Stuart Freeborn in the creation and articulation of Yoda. Lucas had also wanted Henson to puppeteer the character, but Henson instead suggested Frank Oz for the role; Oz performed the role and continued in the subsequent Star Wars films. Lucas lobbied unsuccessfully to have Oz nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
In 1982, Henson founded the Jim Henson Foundation to promote and develop the art of puppetry in the United States. Around that time, he began creating darker and more realistic fantasy films that did not feature the Muppets and displayed "a growing, brooding interest in mortality." He co-directed The Dark Crystal (1982) with Oz, "trying to go toward a sense of realism—toward a reality of creatures that are actually alive". To provide a visual style distinct from the Muppets, the puppets in The Dark Crystal were based on conceptual artwork by Brian Froud, and it was a critical success, winning several industry awards including the Saturn Award for Best Fantasy Film and the Grand Prize Winner at the Avoriaz Fantastic Film Festival. The film was less financially successful in theaters, but later claimed an enormous following and revenue when it was introduced on VHS for home entertainment.
Also in 1982, Henson co-founded Henson International Television with Peter Orton and Sophie Turner Laing as his partners. The company was a distribution company for children's, teens' and family television.
Oz directed The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984), which grossed $25.5 million domestically and ranked as one of the top 40 films of 1984. Labyrinth (1986) was a fantasy that Henson directed by himself, but—despite some positive reviews; The New York Times called it "a fabulous film"—it was a commercial disappointment. This demoralized Henson; his son Brian Henson described it as "the closest I've seen him to turning in on himself and getting quite depressed." The film later became a cult classic.
In 1984 Henson traveled to Moscow, where he made a film about Sergei Obraztsov. To make this possible, he had studied Russian for a year at Yale and had spent a summer there in 1982. Henson also donated four dolls to the puppeteer to replenish the Moscow Museum of Obraztsov Puppets: Fraggle, Skeksi, Bugard, and Robin the Frog. Of the show's guests, the Henson Archivist points out that Jim Henson placed a special importance on meeting Obraztsov: "As a teenager learning to make puppets, Jim checked out some books from the public library for instruction – one was Obraztsov’s 1950 book, My Profession"
Henson continued creating children's television, such as Fraggle Rock and the animated Muppet Babies. He also continued to address darker, more mature themes with the folklore and mythology-oriented show The StoryTeller (1988), which won an Emmy for Outstanding Children's Program. The next year, he returned to television with The Jim Henson Hour, which mixed lighthearted Muppet fare with more risqué material. It was critically well-received and won him another Emmy for Outstanding Directing in a Variety or Music Program, but it was canceled after 12 episodes due to poor ratings. Henson blamed its failure on NBC's constant rescheduling.
In late 1989, Henson entered into negotiations to sell his company and characters (excluding those from Sesame Street) to The Walt Disney Company for almost $150 million, hoping that he would "be able to spend a lot more of my time on the creative side of things" with Disney handling business matters. By 1990, he had completed production on the television special The Muppets at Walt Disney World and the Disney-MGM Studios attraction Muppet*Vision 3D and he was developing film ideas and a television series entitled Muppet High.
Henson married Jane Nebel in 1959 and their children are Lisa (b. 1960), Cheryl (b. 1961), Brian (b. 1963), John (1965–2014), and Heather (b. 1970). Henson and his wife separated in 1986, although they remained close for the rest of his life. Jane said that Jim was so involved with his work that he had very little time to spend with her or their children. All five of his children began working with Muppets at an early age, partly because "one of the best ways of being around him was to work with him", according to Cheryl. Henson was a strong supporter of the civil rights movement.
Henson appeared with Kermit on The Arsenio Hall Show on May 4, 1990. This would be his final television appearance. He disclosed to his publicist that he was tired and had a sore throat, but that he believed it would soon go away. On May 12, Henson traveled to Ahoskie, North Carolina, with his daughter Cheryl to visit his father and stepmother. They returned to their home in New York City the following day, and Henson cancelled a Muppet recording session that had been scheduled for May 14, 1990. His wife came to visit that night.
Henson was having trouble breathing when he woke up at around 2:00 a.m. EST on May 15, and he began coughing up blood. He suggested to his wife that he might be dying, but he did not want to take time off from his schedule to visit a hospital. Two hours later, Henson agreed to be taken by taxi to the emergency room at New York–Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan. Shortly after admission, he stopped breathing and was rushed into the intensive care unit. X-ray images of his chest revealed multiple abscesses in both of his lungs as a result of a previous bacterial infection. Henson was placed on a ventilator but quickly deteriorated over the next several hours despite increasingly aggressive treatment with multiple antibiotics. Although the medicine killed off most of the infection, it had already weakened many of Henson's organs, and he died at 1:21 a.m. the following morning at the age of 53.
David Gelmont announced that Henson had died from Streptococcus pneumoniae, an infection that causes bacterial pneumonia. However, on May 29, Gelmont reclassified it as organ dysfunction resulting from streptococcal toxic shock syndrome caused by Streptococcus pyogenes. Gelmont noted Henson might have been saved had he gone to the hospital even just a few hours sooner. Medical expert Lawrence D. Altman also stated that Henson's death "may have shocked many Americans who believed that bacterial infections no longer could kill with such swiftness." Henson's closest collaborator and best friend, Frank Oz, believes that the stress of negotiating with Disney led to Henson's death, stating in a 2021 interview that "The Disney deal is probably what killed Jim. It made him sick."
News of Henson's death spread quickly and admirers of his work responded from around the world with tributes and condolences. Many of Henson's co-stars and directors from Sesame Street, the Muppets, and other works also shared their thoughts on his death. On May 21, 1990, Henson's public memorial service was conducted in Manhattan at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Another was conducted on July 2, at St Paul's Cathedral in London. In accordance with Henson's wishes, no one in attendance wore black, and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band finished the service by performing "When the Saints Go Marching In". Harry Belafonte sang "Turn the World Around", a song that he had debuted on The Muppet Show, as each member of the congregation waved a brightly colored foam butterfly attached to a puppet performer's rod. Later, Big Bird (performed by Caroll Spinney) walked onto the stage and sang Kermit's signature song "Bein' Green" while fighting back tears. Dave Goelz, Frank Oz, Kevin Clash, Steve Whitmire, Jerry Nelson, and Richard Hunt sang a medley of Henson's favorite songs in their characters' voices, ending with a performance of "Just One Person" while performing their Muppets. The funeral was described by Life as "an epic and almost unbearably moving event". Henson was cremated and in 1992, his ashes were scattered near Taos in New Mexico.
The Jim Henson Company and the Jim Henson Foundation continued after his death, producing new series and specials. Jim Henson's Creature Shop also continues to create characters and special effects for both Henson-related and outside projects. Steve Whitmire, who had joined the Muppets cast in 1978, began performing Kermit the Frog six months after Henson's death. He was dismissed from the cast in October 2016, and Matt Vogel succeeded him in the role of Kermit.
Children's Television Workshop was renamed Sesame Workshop, which retained the Sesame Street characters in 2000. On February 17, 2004, the Muppets and the Bear in the Big Blue House properties were sold to Disney.
One of Henson's last projects was the attraction Muppet*Vision 3D, which opened at Disney's Hollywood Studios on May 16, 1991, exactly one year after his death. The Jim Henson Company retains the Creature Shop as well as the rest of its film and television library, including Fraggle Rock, Farscape, The Dark Crystal, and Labyrinth. Brian Jay Jones wrote the book Jim Henson: The Biography. It was released on what would have been Henson's 77th birthday, September 24, 2013.
The moving-image collection of Jim Henson, which contains the film work of Jim Henson and The Jim Henson Company, is held at the Academy Film Archive.
Henson's characters are currently performed by the following puppeteers: Matt Vogel (Kermit), Peter Linz (Ernie, Link Hogthrob), Eric Jacobson (Guy Smiley, The Newsman), Dave Goelz (Waldorf) and Bill Barretta (Rowlf the Dog, The Swedish Chef, Dr. Teeth).
In 2019, the YouTube channel Defunctland released a six-part miniseries on the life and legacy of Jim Henson.
A biopic film based on Henson's life, known as Muppet Man, has been in development at Walt Disney Pictures and The Jim Henson Company since 2010. In April 2021, it was reported that Michael Mitnick was hired to rewrite the screenplay, previously written by Aaron and Jordan Kandell. Lisa Henson will serve as producer.
In March 2022, it was announced that Ron Howard planned to direct a documentary on Henson's life, with Brian Grazer's Imagine Entertainment collaborating with Disney Original Documentary to produce it. The project was reported to have "the full participation and cooperation of the Henson family". | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "James Maury Henson (September 24, 1936 – May 16, 1990) was an American puppeteer, animator, cartoonist, actor, inventor, and filmmaker who achieved worldwide notability as the creator of the Muppets. Henson was also well known for creating Fraggle Rock (1983–1987) and as the director of The Dark Crystal (1982) and Labyrinth (1986).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Born in Greenville, Mississippi and raised in both Leland, Mississippi and University Park, Maryland, Henson began developing puppets in high school. He created Sam and Friends (1955–1961), a short-form comedy television program, while he was a freshman at the University of Maryland, College Park in collaboration with Jane Nebel, who was a senior there. A few years later the two married. He graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in home economics, after which he and Jane produced coffee advertisements and developed experimental films. In 1958, he co-founded Muppets, Inc. with Jane; it later became The Jim Henson Company.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In 1969, Henson joined the children's educational television program Sesame Street (1969–present) where he helped to develop Muppet characters for the series. He and his creative team also appeared on the first season of the sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live (1975–present). He produced the sketch comedy television series The Muppet Show (1976–1981) during this period. He won fame for his characters, particularly Kermit the Frog, Rowlf the Dog and Ernie. During the later years of his life, he founded the Jim Henson Foundation and Jim Henson's Creature Shop. He won the Emmy Award twice for his involvement in The StoryTeller (1987–1988) and The Jim Henson Hour (1989).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Henson died in New York City at age 53 from streptococcal toxic shock syndrome caused by Streptococcus pyogenes. At the time of his death, he was in negotiations to sell his company to The Walt Disney Company, but talks fell through after his passing. He posthumously received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1991, and was named a Disney Legend in 2011.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "James Maury Henson was born on September 24, 1936, in Greenville, Mississippi, the younger of two children of Paul Ransom Henson (1904–1994), an agronomist for the United States Department of Agriculture, and his wife Betty Marcella (née Brown, 1904–1972). Henson's older brother, Paul Ransom Henson Jr. (1932–1956), died in a car crash on April 15, 1956. He was raised as a Christian Scientist and spent his early childhood in nearby Leland, Mississippi, before moving with his family to University Park, Maryland, near Washington, D.C., in the late 1940s. He remembered the arrival of the family's first television as \"the biggest event of his adolescence\", being heavily influenced by radio ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and the early television puppets of Burr Tillstrom on Kukla, Fran and Ollie and Bil and Cora Baird. He remained a Christian Scientist at least into his twenties when he taught Sunday school, but he wrote to a Christian Science church in 1975 to inform them that he was no longer a practicing member.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "At age 18, Henson began working for WTOP-TV (now WUSA-TV) in 1954 while attending Northwestern High School, creating puppets for a Saturday morning children's show called The Junior Morning Show. He enrolled at the University of Maryland, College Park as a studio arts major upon graduation, thinking that he might become a commercial artist. A puppetry class offered in the applied arts department introduced him to the craft and textiles courses in the college of home economics. He graduated in 1960 with a Bachelor of Science degree in home economics. As a freshman, he created Sam and Friends, a five-minute puppet show for WRC-TV in Washington, D.C. The characters on Sam and Friends were forerunners of the Muppets, and the show included a prototype of Henson's most famous character Kermit the Frog. He remained at WRC until Sam and Friends aired its last episode on December 15, 1961.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In the show, Henson began experimenting with techniques that changed the way in which puppetry was used on television, including eliminating the conventional proscenium arch and using the frame defined by the camera shot to allow the puppet performer to work from off-camera. He believed that television puppets needed to have \"life and sensitivity\" and began making characters from flexible, fabric-covered foam rubber, allowing them to express a wider array of emotions at a time when many puppets were made of carved wood. A marionette's arms are manipulated by strings, but Henson used rods to move his Muppets' arms, allowing greater control of expression. Additionally, he wanted the Muppet characters to \"speak\" more creatively than was possible for previous puppets, which had random mouth movements, so he used precise lip-sync mouth movements to match the dialogue.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "When Henson began work on Sam and Friends, he asked fellow University of Maryland senior Jane Nebel to assist him. The show was a financial success, but he began to have doubts about going into a career performing with puppets once he graduated. He spent several months in Europe, where he was inspired by European puppet performers who looked on their work as an art form. He began dating Jane after his return to the United States.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Henson spent much of the next two decades working in commercials, talk shows, and children's projects before realizing his dream of the Muppets as \"entertainment for everybody\". The popularity of his work on Sam and Friends in the late 1950s led to a series of guest appearances on network talk and variety shows. He appeared as a guest on many shows, including The Steve Allen Show, The Jack Paar Program, and The Ed Sullivan Show. (Sullivan introduced him as \"Jim Newsom and his Puppets\" on September 11, 1966.) These television broadcasts greatly increased his exposure, leading to hundreds of commercial appearances by Henson characters throughout the 1960s.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Among the most popular of Henson's commercials was a series for the local Wilkins Coffee company in Washington, D.C. Most of the Wilkins advertisements followed a similar formula. Two Muppets, in this case named Wilkins and Wontkins (and usually both voiced by Henson), would appear. Wilkins would extol the product, while Wontkins would express his hatred for it, causing Wilkins to retaliate physically; examples included Wontkins being shot with a cannon, struck in the head with a hammer or baseball bat, and having a pie thrown in his face. The Jim Henson Company has posted a short selection of them. Henson later explained, \"Till then, advertising agencies believed that the hard sell was the only way to get their message over on television. We took a very different approach. We tried to sell things by making people laugh.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The first seven-second commercials for Wilkins were an immediate hit and were later remade for other local coffee companies throughout the United States, such as Community Coffee, Red Diamond Coffee, La Touraine Coffee, Nash's Coffee, and Jomar Instant coffee. The characters were so successful in selling coffee that soon other companies began seeking them to promote their products, such as bakeries like Merita Breads, service station chains such as Standard Oil of Ohio and the downstream assets of Marathon Oil, and beverage bottlers such as Faygo. Over 300 \"Wilkins and Wontkins\" commercials were made. The ads were primarily produced in black and white, but some color examples also exist.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Henson sold the rights to Wilkins and Wontkins to the Wilkins Company, who allowed marketing executive John T. Brady to sell the rights to some toymakers and film studios. However, in July 1992 Brady was sued by Jim Henson Productions for unfair competition in addition to copyright and trademark infringement. The Henson company claimed that Brady was incorrectly using Henson's name and likeness in their attempts to license the characters.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In 1963, Henson and his wife moved to New York City where the newly formed Muppets, Inc. resided for some time. Jane quit performing to raise their children, and Henson hired writer Jerry Juhl in 1961 and puppet performer Frank Oz in 1963 to replace her. Henson credited them both with developing much of the humor and character of his Muppets. He and Oz developed a close friendship and a performing partnership that lasted until Henson's death; their teamwork is particularly evident in their portrayals of Bert and Ernie, Kermit and Miss Piggy, and Kermit and Fozzie Bear. In New York City, Henson formed a partnership with Bernie Brillstein, who managed Henson's career until the puppeteer's death. In the years that followed, more performers would join Henson's team, including Jerry Nelson, Fran Brill, Richard Hunt, Dave Goelz, Steve Whitmire, and Kevin Clash.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In 1964 he and his family moved to Greenwich, Connecticut until 1971, when they moved to Bedford, New York.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Henson's talk show appearances culminated when he devised Rowlf, a piano-playing anthropomorphic dog that became the first Muppet to make regular appearances on The Jimmy Dean Show. Henson was so grateful for this break that he offered Jimmy Dean a 40-percent interest in his production company, but Dean declined, stating that Henson deserved all the rewards for his own work, a decision of conscience that Dean never regretted. From 1963 to 1966, Henson began exploring filmmaking and produced a series of experimental films. His nine-minute experimental film Time Piece was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film in 1965. He produced The Cube in 1969. Around this time, he wrote the first drafts of a live-action movie script with Jerry Juhl which became Tale of Sand. The script remained in the Henson Company archives until it was adapted in the 2012 graphic novel Jim Henson's Tale of Sand.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "During this time, Henson continued to work with various companies who sought out his Muppets for advertising purposes. Among his clients were Wilson Meats, Royal Crown Cola, Claussen's Bread, La Choy, and Frito-Lay, which featured an early version of his character Cookie Monster to promote their Munchos line of potato snacks. Like the Wilkins Coffee ads of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the formula stayed fairly similar. For instance, one of the Claussen's commercials featured Kermit the Frog dangling from a window while a character named Mack asks him if he brought a loaf of the company's bread; when Kermit says he did not, Mack closes the window on Kermit's fingers and causes him to fall, suggesting he \"drop down\" to the grocery store to buy a loaf.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In 1969, television producer Joan Ganz Cooney and her staff at the Children's Television Workshop were impressed by the quality and creativity of the Henson-led team, so they asked Henson and staff to work full-time on Sesame Street, a children's program for public television that premiered on National Educational Television on November 10, 1969. Part of the show was set aside for a series of funny, colorful puppet characters living on Sesame Street, including Grover, Cookie Monster, Bert and Ernie, Oscar the Grouch, and Big Bird (the latter two performed by Caroll Spinney, a performer discovered by Henson at a Puppeteers of America festival). Henson performed the characters of Ernie, game-show host Guy Smiley, and Kermit, who appeared as a roving television news reporter.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Henson's Muppets initially appeared separately from the realistic segments on the Street, but the show was revamped to integrate the two segments, placing much greater emphasis on Henson's work. Cooney frequently praised Henson's work, and PBS called him \"the spark that ignited our fledgling broadcast service.\" The success of Sesame Street also allowed him to stop producing commercials, and he said that \"it was a pleasure to get out of that world\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Henson was also involved in producing various shows and animation inserts during the first two seasons. He produced a series of counting films for the numbers 1 through 10 which always ended with a baker (voiced by Henson) falling down the stairs while carrying the featured number of desserts. He also worked on a variety of inserts for the numbers 2 through 12, including the films \"Dollhouse\"; \"Number Three Ball Film\"; the stop-motions \"King of Eight\" and \"Queen of Six\"; the cut-out animation \"Eleven Cheer\"; and the computer animation \"Nobody Counts To 10.\" He also directed the original \"C Is For Cookie\" and Tales from Muppetland, a short series of TV movie specials that were comic retellings of classic fairy tales aimed at a young audience and hosted by Kermit the Frog. The series included Hey, Cinderella!, The Frog Prince, and The Muppet Musicians of Bremen.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Henson, Oz, and his team were concerned that the company was becoming typecast solely as purveyors of children's entertainment, so they targeted an adult audience with a series of sketches on the first season of the late-night live television variety show Saturday Night Live. Eleven Land of Gorch sketches were aired between October 1975 and January 1976 on NBC, with four additional appearances in March, April, May, and September 1976. Henson liked Lorne Michaels' work and wanted to be a part of it, but he ultimately concluded that \"what we were trying to do and what his writers could write for it never gelled\". The SNL writers were not comfortable writing for the characters, and they frequently disparaged Henson's creations. Michael O'Donoghue quipped, \"I won't write for felt.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Henson began developing a Broadway show and a weekly television series both featuring the Muppets. The American networks rejected the series in 1976, believing that Muppets would appeal only to a child audience. Then, Henson pitched the show to British impresario Lew Grade to finance the show. The show would be shot in the United Kingdom and syndicated worldwide. That same year, he scrapped plans for his Broadway show and moved his creative team to England, where The Muppet Show began taping. The show featured Kermit as host and a variety of other characters, notably Miss Piggy, Gonzo the Great, and Fozzie Bear, along with other characters such as Animal. Henson's teammates sometimes compared his role to that of Kermit: a shy, gentle boss with \"a whim of steel\" who ran things like \"an explosion in a mattress factory.\" Caroll Spinney remembered that Henson would never say he did not like something. \"He would just go 'Hmm.'... And if he liked it, he would say, 'Lovely!'\" Henson recognized Kermit as an alter ego, though he thought that Kermit was bolder than he; he once said of the character: \"He can say things I hold back.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The Muppets appeared in their first theatrical feature film The Muppet Movie in 1979. It was both a critical and financial success; it made $65.2 million domestically and was the 61st highest-grossing film at the time. Henson's idol Edgar Bergen died at age 75 during production of the film, and Henson dedicated it to his memory. Henson as Kermit sang \"Rainbow Connection\", and it hit number 25 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song. The Henson-directed The Great Muppet Caper (1981) followed, and Henson decided to end the Muppet Show to concentrate on making films, though the Muppet characters continued to appear in TV movies and specials.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Henson also aided others in their work. During development on The Empire Strikes Back (1980), George Lucas asked him to aid make-up artist Stuart Freeborn in the creation and articulation of Yoda. Lucas had also wanted Henson to puppeteer the character, but Henson instead suggested Frank Oz for the role; Oz performed the role and continued in the subsequent Star Wars films. Lucas lobbied unsuccessfully to have Oz nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "In 1982, Henson founded the Jim Henson Foundation to promote and develop the art of puppetry in the United States. Around that time, he began creating darker and more realistic fantasy films that did not feature the Muppets and displayed \"a growing, brooding interest in mortality.\" He co-directed The Dark Crystal (1982) with Oz, \"trying to go toward a sense of realism—toward a reality of creatures that are actually alive\". To provide a visual style distinct from the Muppets, the puppets in The Dark Crystal were based on conceptual artwork by Brian Froud, and it was a critical success, winning several industry awards including the Saturn Award for Best Fantasy Film and the Grand Prize Winner at the Avoriaz Fantastic Film Festival. The film was less financially successful in theaters, but later claimed an enormous following and revenue when it was introduced on VHS for home entertainment.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Also in 1982, Henson co-founded Henson International Television with Peter Orton and Sophie Turner Laing as his partners. The company was a distribution company for children's, teens' and family television.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Oz directed The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984), which grossed $25.5 million domestically and ranked as one of the top 40 films of 1984. Labyrinth (1986) was a fantasy that Henson directed by himself, but—despite some positive reviews; The New York Times called it \"a fabulous film\"—it was a commercial disappointment. This demoralized Henson; his son Brian Henson described it as \"the closest I've seen him to turning in on himself and getting quite depressed.\" The film later became a cult classic.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In 1984 Henson traveled to Moscow, where he made a film about Sergei Obraztsov. To make this possible, he had studied Russian for a year at Yale and had spent a summer there in 1982. Henson also donated four dolls to the puppeteer to replenish the Moscow Museum of Obraztsov Puppets: Fraggle, Skeksi, Bugard, and Robin the Frog. Of the show's guests, the Henson Archivist points out that Jim Henson placed a special importance on meeting Obraztsov: \"As a teenager learning to make puppets, Jim checked out some books from the public library for instruction – one was Obraztsov’s 1950 book, My Profession\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Henson continued creating children's television, such as Fraggle Rock and the animated Muppet Babies. He also continued to address darker, more mature themes with the folklore and mythology-oriented show The StoryTeller (1988), which won an Emmy for Outstanding Children's Program. The next year, he returned to television with The Jim Henson Hour, which mixed lighthearted Muppet fare with more risqué material. It was critically well-received and won him another Emmy for Outstanding Directing in a Variety or Music Program, but it was canceled after 12 episodes due to poor ratings. Henson blamed its failure on NBC's constant rescheduling.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In late 1989, Henson entered into negotiations to sell his company and characters (excluding those from Sesame Street) to The Walt Disney Company for almost $150 million, hoping that he would \"be able to spend a lot more of my time on the creative side of things\" with Disney handling business matters. By 1990, he had completed production on the television special The Muppets at Walt Disney World and the Disney-MGM Studios attraction Muppet*Vision 3D and he was developing film ideas and a television series entitled Muppet High.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Henson married Jane Nebel in 1959 and their children are Lisa (b. 1960), Cheryl (b. 1961), Brian (b. 1963), John (1965–2014), and Heather (b. 1970). Henson and his wife separated in 1986, although they remained close for the rest of his life. Jane said that Jim was so involved with his work that he had very little time to spend with her or their children. All five of his children began working with Muppets at an early age, partly because \"one of the best ways of being around him was to work with him\", according to Cheryl. Henson was a strong supporter of the civil rights movement.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Henson appeared with Kermit on The Arsenio Hall Show on May 4, 1990. This would be his final television appearance. He disclosed to his publicist that he was tired and had a sore throat, but that he believed it would soon go away. On May 12, Henson traveled to Ahoskie, North Carolina, with his daughter Cheryl to visit his father and stepmother. They returned to their home in New York City the following day, and Henson cancelled a Muppet recording session that had been scheduled for May 14, 1990. His wife came to visit that night.",
"title": "Illness and death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Henson was having trouble breathing when he woke up at around 2:00 a.m. EST on May 15, and he began coughing up blood. He suggested to his wife that he might be dying, but he did not want to take time off from his schedule to visit a hospital. Two hours later, Henson agreed to be taken by taxi to the emergency room at New York–Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan. Shortly after admission, he stopped breathing and was rushed into the intensive care unit. X-ray images of his chest revealed multiple abscesses in both of his lungs as a result of a previous bacterial infection. Henson was placed on a ventilator but quickly deteriorated over the next several hours despite increasingly aggressive treatment with multiple antibiotics. Although the medicine killed off most of the infection, it had already weakened many of Henson's organs, and he died at 1:21 a.m. the following morning at the age of 53.",
"title": "Illness and death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "David Gelmont announced that Henson had died from Streptococcus pneumoniae, an infection that causes bacterial pneumonia. However, on May 29, Gelmont reclassified it as organ dysfunction resulting from streptococcal toxic shock syndrome caused by Streptococcus pyogenes. Gelmont noted Henson might have been saved had he gone to the hospital even just a few hours sooner. Medical expert Lawrence D. Altman also stated that Henson's death \"may have shocked many Americans who believed that bacterial infections no longer could kill with such swiftness.\" Henson's closest collaborator and best friend, Frank Oz, believes that the stress of negotiating with Disney led to Henson's death, stating in a 2021 interview that \"The Disney deal is probably what killed Jim. It made him sick.\"",
"title": "Illness and death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "News of Henson's death spread quickly and admirers of his work responded from around the world with tributes and condolences. Many of Henson's co-stars and directors from Sesame Street, the Muppets, and other works also shared their thoughts on his death. On May 21, 1990, Henson's public memorial service was conducted in Manhattan at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Another was conducted on July 2, at St Paul's Cathedral in London. In accordance with Henson's wishes, no one in attendance wore black, and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band finished the service by performing \"When the Saints Go Marching In\". Harry Belafonte sang \"Turn the World Around\", a song that he had debuted on The Muppet Show, as each member of the congregation waved a brightly colored foam butterfly attached to a puppet performer's rod. Later, Big Bird (performed by Caroll Spinney) walked onto the stage and sang Kermit's signature song \"Bein' Green\" while fighting back tears. Dave Goelz, Frank Oz, Kevin Clash, Steve Whitmire, Jerry Nelson, and Richard Hunt sang a medley of Henson's favorite songs in their characters' voices, ending with a performance of \"Just One Person\" while performing their Muppets. The funeral was described by Life as \"an epic and almost unbearably moving event\". Henson was cremated and in 1992, his ashes were scattered near Taos in New Mexico.",
"title": "Illness and death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The Jim Henson Company and the Jim Henson Foundation continued after his death, producing new series and specials. Jim Henson's Creature Shop also continues to create characters and special effects for both Henson-related and outside projects. Steve Whitmire, who had joined the Muppets cast in 1978, began performing Kermit the Frog six months after Henson's death. He was dismissed from the cast in October 2016, and Matt Vogel succeeded him in the role of Kermit.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Children's Television Workshop was renamed Sesame Workshop, which retained the Sesame Street characters in 2000. On February 17, 2004, the Muppets and the Bear in the Big Blue House properties were sold to Disney.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "One of Henson's last projects was the attraction Muppet*Vision 3D, which opened at Disney's Hollywood Studios on May 16, 1991, exactly one year after his death. The Jim Henson Company retains the Creature Shop as well as the rest of its film and television library, including Fraggle Rock, Farscape, The Dark Crystal, and Labyrinth. Brian Jay Jones wrote the book Jim Henson: The Biography. It was released on what would have been Henson's 77th birthday, September 24, 2013.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "The moving-image collection of Jim Henson, which contains the film work of Jim Henson and The Jim Henson Company, is held at the Academy Film Archive.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Henson's characters are currently performed by the following puppeteers: Matt Vogel (Kermit), Peter Linz (Ernie, Link Hogthrob), Eric Jacobson (Guy Smiley, The Newsman), Dave Goelz (Waldorf) and Bill Barretta (Rowlf the Dog, The Swedish Chef, Dr. Teeth).",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "In 2019, the YouTube channel Defunctland released a six-part miniseries on the life and legacy of Jim Henson.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "A biopic film based on Henson's life, known as Muppet Man, has been in development at Walt Disney Pictures and The Jim Henson Company since 2010. In April 2021, it was reported that Michael Mitnick was hired to rewrite the screenplay, previously written by Aaron and Jordan Kandell. Lisa Henson will serve as producer.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "In March 2022, it was announced that Ron Howard planned to direct a documentary on Henson's life, with Brian Grazer's Imagine Entertainment collaborating with Disney Original Documentary to produce it. The project was reported to have \"the full participation and cooperation of the Henson family\".",
"title": "Legacy"
}
]
| James Maury Henson was an American puppeteer, animator, cartoonist, actor, inventor, and filmmaker who achieved worldwide notability as the creator of the Muppets. Henson was also well known for creating Fraggle Rock (1983–1987) and as the director of The Dark Crystal (1982) and Labyrinth (1986). Born in Greenville, Mississippi and raised in both Leland, Mississippi and University Park, Maryland, Henson began developing puppets in high school. He created Sam and Friends (1955–1961), a short-form comedy television program, while he was a freshman at the University of Maryland, College Park in collaboration with Jane Nebel, who was a senior there. A few years later the two married. He graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in home economics, after which he and Jane produced coffee advertisements and developed experimental films. In 1958, he co-founded Muppets, Inc. with Jane; it later became The Jim Henson Company. In 1969, Henson joined the children's educational television program Sesame Street (1969–present) where he helped to develop Muppet characters for the series. He and his creative team also appeared on the first season of the sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live (1975–present). He produced the sketch comedy television series The Muppet Show (1976–1981) during this period. He won fame for his characters, particularly Kermit the Frog, Rowlf the Dog and Ernie. During the later years of his life, he founded the Jim Henson Foundation and Jim Henson's Creature Shop. He won the Emmy Award twice for his involvement in The StoryTeller (1987–1988) and The Jim Henson Hour (1989). Henson died in New York City at age 53 from streptococcal toxic shock syndrome caused by Streptococcus pyogenes. At the time of his death, he was in negotiations to sell his company to The Walt Disney Company, but talks fell through after his passing. He posthumously received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1991, and was named a Disney Legend in 2011. | 2001-10-18T20:03:43Z | 2023-12-26T20:50:47Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Henson |
16,229 | Joystick | A joystick, sometimes called a flight stick, is an input device consisting of a stick that pivots on a base and reports its angle or direction to the device it is controlling. A joystick, also known as the control column, is the principal control device in the cockpit of many civilian and military aircraft, either as a centre stick (or side-stick). It has various switches to control the movements of the aircraft controlled by the Pilot and First Officer of the flight.
Joysticks are often used to control video games, and usually have one or more than one push-buttons whose state can also be read by the computer. A popular variation of the joystick used on modern video game consoles is the analog stick. Joysticks are also used for controlling machines such as cranes, trucks, underwater unmanned vehicles, wheelchairs, surveillance cameras, and zero turning radius lawn mowers. Miniature finger-operated joysticks have been adopted as input devices for smaller electronic equipment such as mobile phones.
Joysticks originated as controls for aircraft ailerons and elevators, and are first known to have been used as such on Louis Bleriot's Bleriot VIII aircraft of 1908, in combination with a foot-operated rudder bar for the yaw control surface on the tail.
The name joystick is thought to originate with early 20th century French pilot Robert Esnault-Pelterie. There are also competing claims on behalf of fellow pilots Robert Loraine, James Henry Joyce, and A. E. George. Loraine is cited by the Oxford English Dictionary for using the term "joystick" in his diary in 1909 when he went to Pau to learn to fly at Bleriot's school. George was a pioneer aviator who with his colleague Jobling built and flew a biplane at Newcastle in England in 1910. He is alleged to have invented the "George Stick" which became more popularly known as the joystick. The George and Jobling aircraft control column is in the collection of the Discovery Museum in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. Joysticks were present in early planes, though their mechanical origins are uncertain. The coining of the term "joystick" may actually be credited to Loraine, as his is the earliest known usage of the term, although he most certainly did not invent the device.
The electrical two-axis joystick was invented by C. B. Mirick at the United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) and patented in 1926 (U.S. Patent no. 1,597,416)". NRL was actively developing remote controlled aircraft at the time and the joystick was possibly used to support this effort. In the awarded patent, Mirick writes: "My control system is particularly applicable in maneuvering aircraft without a pilot."
The Germans developed an electrical two-axis joystick around 1944. The device was used as part of the Germans' Funkgerät FuG 203 Kehl radio control transmitter system used in certain German bomber aircraft, used to guide both the rocket-boosted anti-ship missile Henschel Hs 293, and the unpowered pioneering precision-guided munition Fritz-X, against maritime and other targets. Here, the joystick of the Kehl transmitter was used by an operator to steer the missile towards its target. This joystick had on-off switches rather than analogue sensors. Both the Hs 293 and Fritz-X used FuG 230 Straßburg radio receivers in them to send the Kehl's control signals to the ordnance's control surfaces. A comparable joystick unit was used for the contemporary American Azon steerable munition, strictly to laterally steer the munition in the yaw axis only.
This German invention was picked up by someone in the team of scientists assembled at the Heeresversuchsanstalt in Peenemünde. Here a part of the team on the German rocket program was developing the Wasserfall missile, a variant of the V-2 rocket, the first ground-to-air missile. The Wasserfall steering equipment converted the electrical signal to radio signals and transmitted these to the missile.
In the 1960s the use of joysticks became widespread in radio-controlled model aircraft systems such as the Kwik Fly produced by Phill Kraft (1964). The now-defunct Kraft Systems firm eventually became an important OEM supplier of joysticks to the computer industry and other users. The first use of joysticks outside the radio-controlled aircraft industry may have been in the control of powered wheelchairs, such as the Permobil (1963). During this time period NASA used joysticks as control devices as part of the Apollo missions. For example, the lunar lander test models were controlled with a joystick.
In many modern airliners aircraft, for example all Airbus aircraft developed from the 1980s, the joystick has received a new lease on life for flight control in the form of a "side-stick", a controller similar to a gaming joystick but which is used to control the flight, replacing the traditional yoke. The sidestick saves weight, improves movement and visibility in the cockpit, and may be safer in an accident than the traditional "control yoke".
Ralph H. Baer, inventor of the Magnavox Odyssey console, released in 1972, created the first video game joysticks in 1967. They were able to control the horizontal and vertical position of a spot displayed on a screen. The earliest known electronic game joystick with a fire button was released by Sega as part of their 1969 arcade game Missile, a shooter simulation game that used it as part of an early dual-control scheme, where two directional buttons are used to move a motorized tank and a two-way joystick is used to shoot and steer the missile onto oncoming planes displayed on the screen; when a plane is hit, an explosion is animated on screen along with an explosion sound. In 1970, the game was released in North America as S.A.M.I. by Midway Games.
Taito released a four-way joystick as part of their arcade racing video game Astro Race in 1973, while their 1975 multidirectional shooter Western Gun introduced dual-stick controls with one eight-way joystick for movement and the other for changing the shooting direction. In North America, it was released by Midway under the title Gun Fight. In 1976, Taito released Interceptor, an early first-person combat flight simulator that involved piloting a jet fighter, using an eight-way joystick to aim with a crosshair and shoot at enemy aircraft.
The Atari CX40 joystick, developed for the 1977 Atari Video Computer System, is a digital controller with a single fire button. The Atari joystick port was for many years the de facto standard digital joystick specification. Joysticks were commonly used as controllers in first and second generation game consoles, but they gave way to the familiar game pad with the Nintendo Entertainment System and Master System during the mid-1980s, though joysticks—especially arcade-style ones—were and are popular after-market add-ons for any console.
In 1985, Sega's third-person arcade rail shooter game Space Harrier featured a true analog flight stick, used for movement. The joystick could register movement in any direction as well as measure the degree of push, which could move the player character at different speeds depending on how far the joystick was pushed in a certain direction.
A variation of the joystick is the rotary joystick. It is a type of joystick-knob hybrid, where the joystick can be moved in various direction while at the same time being able to rotate the joystick. It is mainly used in arcade shoot 'em up games, to control both the player's eight-directional movement and the gun's 360-degree direction. It was introduced by SNK, initially with the tank shooter TNK III (1985) before it was popularized by the run and gun video game Ikari Warriors (1986). SNK later used rotary joystick controls in arcade games such as Guerrilla War (1989).
A distinct variation of an analog joystick is a positional gun, which works differently from a light gun. Instead of using light sensors, a positional gun is essentially an analog joystick mounted in a fixed location that records the position of the gun to determine where the player is aiming on the screen. It is often used for arcade gun games, with early examples including Sega's Sea Devil in 1972; Taito's Attack in 1976; Cross Fire in 1977; and Nintendo's Battle Shark in 1978.
During the 1990s, joysticks such as the CH Products Flightstick, Gravis Phoenix, Microsoft SideWinder, Logitech WingMan, and Thrustmaster FCS were in demand with PC gamers. They were considered a prerequisite for flight simulators such as F-16 Fighting Falcon and LHX Attack Chopper. Joysticks became especially popular with the mainstream success of space flight simulator games like X-Wing and Wing Commander, as well as the "Six degrees of freedom" 3D shooter Descent. VirPil Controls' MongoosT-50 joystick was designed to mimic the style of Russian aircraft (including the Sukhoi Su-35 and Sukhoi Su-57), unlike most flight joysticks.
However, since the beginning of the 21st century, these types of games have waned in popularity and are now considered a "dead" genre, and with that, gaming joysticks have been reduced to niche products. In NowGamer's interview with Jim Boone, a producer at Volition Inc., he stated that FreeSpace 2's poor sales could have been due to joysticks' being sold poorly because they were "going out of fashion" because more modern first-person shooters, such as Quake, were "very much about the mouse and [the] keyboard". He went further on to state "Before that, when we did Descent for example, it was perfectly common for people to have joysticks – we sold a lot of copies of Descent. It was around that time [when] the more modern FPS with mouse and keyboard came out, as opposed to just keyboard like Wolfenstein [3D] or something.".
Since the late 1990s, analog sticks (or thumbsticks, due to their being controlled by one's thumbs) have become standard on controllers for video game consoles, popularized by Nintendo's Nintendo 64 controller, and have the ability to indicate the stick's displacement from its neutral position. This means that the software does not have to keep track of the position or estimate the speed at which the controls are moved. These devices usually use potentiometers to determine the position of the stick, though some newer models instead use a Hall effect sensor for greater reliability and reduced size.
In 1997, ThrustMaster, Inc. introduced a 3D programmable controller, which was integrated into computer games to experience flight simulations. This line adapted several aspects of NASA's RHC (Rotational Hand Controller), which is used for landing and navigation methods.
In 1997 the first gaming joystick with force feedback (haptics) was manufactured by CH Products under license from technology creator, Immersion Corporation. The product, called the Force FX joystick was followed by force feedback joysticks from Logitech, Thrustmaster, and others, also under license from Immersion.
An arcade stick is a large-format controller for use with home consoles or computers. They use the stick-and-button configuration of some arcade cabinets, such as those with particular multi-button arrangements. For example, the six button layout of the arcade games Street Fighter II or Mortal Kombat cannot be comfortably emulated on a console joypad, so licensed home arcade sticks for these games have been manufactured for home consoles and PCs.
A hat switch is a control on some joysticks. It is also known as a POV (point of view) switch. It allows one to look around in one's virtual world, browse menus, etc. For example, many flight simulators use it to switch the player's views, while other games sometimes use it as a substitute for the D-pad. Computer gamepads with both an analogue stick and a D-pad usually assign POV switch scancodes to the latter.
The term hat switch is a shortening of the term "Coolie hat switch", named for the similar-looking headgear.
In a real aircraft, the hat switch may control things like aileron or elevator trim.
Apart from buttons, wheels and dials as well as touchscreens also miniature joysticks have been established for the efficient manual operation of cameras.
In recent times, the employment of joysticks has become commonplace in many industrial and manufacturing applications, such as cranes, assembly lines, forestry equipment, mining trucks, and excavators. In fact, the use of such joysticks is in such high demand, that it has virtually replaced the traditional mechanical control lever in nearly all modern hydraulic control systems. Additionally, most unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and submersible remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) require at least one joystick to control either the vehicle, the on-board cameras, sensors and/or manipulators.
Due to the highly hands-on, rough nature of such applications, the industrial joystick tends to be more robust than the typical video-game controller, and able to function over a high cycle life. This led to the development and employment of Hall effect sensing to such applications in the 1980s as a means of contactless sensing. Several companies produce joysticks for industrial applications using Hall effect technology. Another technology used in joystick design is the use of strain gauges to build force transducers from which the output is proportional to the force applied rather than physical deflection. Miniature force transducers are used as additional controls on joysticks for menu selection functions.
Some larger manufacturers of joysticks are able to customize joystick handles and grips specific to the OEM needs while small regional manufacturers often concentrate on selling standard products at higher prices to smaller OEMs.
Specialist joysticks, classed as an assistive technology pointing device, are used to replace the computer mouse for people with fairly severe physical disabilities. Rather than controlling games, these joysticks control the pointer. They are often useful to people with athetoid conditions, such as cerebral palsy, who find them easier to grasp than a standard mouse. Miniature joysticks are available for people with conditions involving muscular weakness such as muscular dystrophy or motor neurone disease as well. They are also used on electric powered wheelchairs for control since they are simple and effective to use as a control method. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "A joystick, sometimes called a flight stick, is an input device consisting of a stick that pivots on a base and reports its angle or direction to the device it is controlling. A joystick, also known as the control column, is the principal control device in the cockpit of many civilian and military aircraft, either as a centre stick (or side-stick). It has various switches to control the movements of the aircraft controlled by the Pilot and First Officer of the flight.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Joysticks are often used to control video games, and usually have one or more than one push-buttons whose state can also be read by the computer. A popular variation of the joystick used on modern video game consoles is the analog stick. Joysticks are also used for controlling machines such as cranes, trucks, underwater unmanned vehicles, wheelchairs, surveillance cameras, and zero turning radius lawn mowers. Miniature finger-operated joysticks have been adopted as input devices for smaller electronic equipment such as mobile phones.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Joysticks originated as controls for aircraft ailerons and elevators, and are first known to have been used as such on Louis Bleriot's Bleriot VIII aircraft of 1908, in combination with a foot-operated rudder bar for the yaw control surface on the tail.",
"title": "Aviation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The name joystick is thought to originate with early 20th century French pilot Robert Esnault-Pelterie. There are also competing claims on behalf of fellow pilots Robert Loraine, James Henry Joyce, and A. E. George. Loraine is cited by the Oxford English Dictionary for using the term \"joystick\" in his diary in 1909 when he went to Pau to learn to fly at Bleriot's school. George was a pioneer aviator who with his colleague Jobling built and flew a biplane at Newcastle in England in 1910. He is alleged to have invented the \"George Stick\" which became more popularly known as the joystick. The George and Jobling aircraft control column is in the collection of the Discovery Museum in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. Joysticks were present in early planes, though their mechanical origins are uncertain. The coining of the term \"joystick\" may actually be credited to Loraine, as his is the earliest known usage of the term, although he most certainly did not invent the device.",
"title": "Origins"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The electrical two-axis joystick was invented by C. B. Mirick at the United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) and patented in 1926 (U.S. Patent no. 1,597,416)\". NRL was actively developing remote controlled aircraft at the time and the joystick was possibly used to support this effort. In the awarded patent, Mirick writes: \"My control system is particularly applicable in maneuvering aircraft without a pilot.\"",
"title": "Electronic joysticks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The Germans developed an electrical two-axis joystick around 1944. The device was used as part of the Germans' Funkgerät FuG 203 Kehl radio control transmitter system used in certain German bomber aircraft, used to guide both the rocket-boosted anti-ship missile Henschel Hs 293, and the unpowered pioneering precision-guided munition Fritz-X, against maritime and other targets. Here, the joystick of the Kehl transmitter was used by an operator to steer the missile towards its target. This joystick had on-off switches rather than analogue sensors. Both the Hs 293 and Fritz-X used FuG 230 Straßburg radio receivers in them to send the Kehl's control signals to the ordnance's control surfaces. A comparable joystick unit was used for the contemporary American Azon steerable munition, strictly to laterally steer the munition in the yaw axis only.",
"title": "Electronic joysticks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "This German invention was picked up by someone in the team of scientists assembled at the Heeresversuchsanstalt in Peenemünde. Here a part of the team on the German rocket program was developing the Wasserfall missile, a variant of the V-2 rocket, the first ground-to-air missile. The Wasserfall steering equipment converted the electrical signal to radio signals and transmitted these to the missile.",
"title": "Electronic joysticks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In the 1960s the use of joysticks became widespread in radio-controlled model aircraft systems such as the Kwik Fly produced by Phill Kraft (1964). The now-defunct Kraft Systems firm eventually became an important OEM supplier of joysticks to the computer industry and other users. The first use of joysticks outside the radio-controlled aircraft industry may have been in the control of powered wheelchairs, such as the Permobil (1963). During this time period NASA used joysticks as control devices as part of the Apollo missions. For example, the lunar lander test models were controlled with a joystick.",
"title": "Electronic joysticks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In many modern airliners aircraft, for example all Airbus aircraft developed from the 1980s, the joystick has received a new lease on life for flight control in the form of a \"side-stick\", a controller similar to a gaming joystick but which is used to control the flight, replacing the traditional yoke. The sidestick saves weight, improves movement and visibility in the cockpit, and may be safer in an accident than the traditional \"control yoke\".",
"title": "Electronic joysticks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Ralph H. Baer, inventor of the Magnavox Odyssey console, released in 1972, created the first video game joysticks in 1967. They were able to control the horizontal and vertical position of a spot displayed on a screen. The earliest known electronic game joystick with a fire button was released by Sega as part of their 1969 arcade game Missile, a shooter simulation game that used it as part of an early dual-control scheme, where two directional buttons are used to move a motorized tank and a two-way joystick is used to shoot and steer the missile onto oncoming planes displayed on the screen; when a plane is hit, an explosion is animated on screen along with an explosion sound. In 1970, the game was released in North America as S.A.M.I. by Midway Games.",
"title": "Electronic joysticks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Taito released a four-way joystick as part of their arcade racing video game Astro Race in 1973, while their 1975 multidirectional shooter Western Gun introduced dual-stick controls with one eight-way joystick for movement and the other for changing the shooting direction. In North America, it was released by Midway under the title Gun Fight. In 1976, Taito released Interceptor, an early first-person combat flight simulator that involved piloting a jet fighter, using an eight-way joystick to aim with a crosshair and shoot at enemy aircraft.",
"title": "Electronic joysticks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The Atari CX40 joystick, developed for the 1977 Atari Video Computer System, is a digital controller with a single fire button. The Atari joystick port was for many years the de facto standard digital joystick specification. Joysticks were commonly used as controllers in first and second generation game consoles, but they gave way to the familiar game pad with the Nintendo Entertainment System and Master System during the mid-1980s, though joysticks—especially arcade-style ones—were and are popular after-market add-ons for any console.",
"title": "Electronic joysticks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In 1985, Sega's third-person arcade rail shooter game Space Harrier featured a true analog flight stick, used for movement. The joystick could register movement in any direction as well as measure the degree of push, which could move the player character at different speeds depending on how far the joystick was pushed in a certain direction.",
"title": "Electronic joysticks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "A variation of the joystick is the rotary joystick. It is a type of joystick-knob hybrid, where the joystick can be moved in various direction while at the same time being able to rotate the joystick. It is mainly used in arcade shoot 'em up games, to control both the player's eight-directional movement and the gun's 360-degree direction. It was introduced by SNK, initially with the tank shooter TNK III (1985) before it was popularized by the run and gun video game Ikari Warriors (1986). SNK later used rotary joystick controls in arcade games such as Guerrilla War (1989).",
"title": "Electronic joysticks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "A distinct variation of an analog joystick is a positional gun, which works differently from a light gun. Instead of using light sensors, a positional gun is essentially an analog joystick mounted in a fixed location that records the position of the gun to determine where the player is aiming on the screen. It is often used for arcade gun games, with early examples including Sega's Sea Devil in 1972; Taito's Attack in 1976; Cross Fire in 1977; and Nintendo's Battle Shark in 1978.",
"title": "Electronic joysticks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "During the 1990s, joysticks such as the CH Products Flightstick, Gravis Phoenix, Microsoft SideWinder, Logitech WingMan, and Thrustmaster FCS were in demand with PC gamers. They were considered a prerequisite for flight simulators such as F-16 Fighting Falcon and LHX Attack Chopper. Joysticks became especially popular with the mainstream success of space flight simulator games like X-Wing and Wing Commander, as well as the \"Six degrees of freedom\" 3D shooter Descent. VirPil Controls' MongoosT-50 joystick was designed to mimic the style of Russian aircraft (including the Sukhoi Su-35 and Sukhoi Su-57), unlike most flight joysticks.",
"title": "Electronic joysticks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "However, since the beginning of the 21st century, these types of games have waned in popularity and are now considered a \"dead\" genre, and with that, gaming joysticks have been reduced to niche products. In NowGamer's interview with Jim Boone, a producer at Volition Inc., he stated that FreeSpace 2's poor sales could have been due to joysticks' being sold poorly because they were \"going out of fashion\" because more modern first-person shooters, such as Quake, were \"very much about the mouse and [the] keyboard\". He went further on to state \"Before that, when we did Descent for example, it was perfectly common for people to have joysticks – we sold a lot of copies of Descent. It was around that time [when] the more modern FPS with mouse and keyboard came out, as opposed to just keyboard like Wolfenstein [3D] or something.\".",
"title": "Electronic joysticks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Since the late 1990s, analog sticks (or thumbsticks, due to their being controlled by one's thumbs) have become standard on controllers for video game consoles, popularized by Nintendo's Nintendo 64 controller, and have the ability to indicate the stick's displacement from its neutral position. This means that the software does not have to keep track of the position or estimate the speed at which the controls are moved. These devices usually use potentiometers to determine the position of the stick, though some newer models instead use a Hall effect sensor for greater reliability and reduced size.",
"title": "Electronic joysticks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In 1997, ThrustMaster, Inc. introduced a 3D programmable controller, which was integrated into computer games to experience flight simulations. This line adapted several aspects of NASA's RHC (Rotational Hand Controller), which is used for landing and navigation methods.",
"title": "Electronic joysticks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In 1997 the first gaming joystick with force feedback (haptics) was manufactured by CH Products under license from technology creator, Immersion Corporation. The product, called the Force FX joystick was followed by force feedback joysticks from Logitech, Thrustmaster, and others, also under license from Immersion.",
"title": "Electronic joysticks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "An arcade stick is a large-format controller for use with home consoles or computers. They use the stick-and-button configuration of some arcade cabinets, such as those with particular multi-button arrangements. For example, the six button layout of the arcade games Street Fighter II or Mortal Kombat cannot be comfortably emulated on a console joypad, so licensed home arcade sticks for these games have been manufactured for home consoles and PCs.",
"title": "Electronic joysticks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "A hat switch is a control on some joysticks. It is also known as a POV (point of view) switch. It allows one to look around in one's virtual world, browse menus, etc. For example, many flight simulators use it to switch the player's views, while other games sometimes use it as a substitute for the D-pad. Computer gamepads with both an analogue stick and a D-pad usually assign POV switch scancodes to the latter.",
"title": "Electronic joysticks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The term hat switch is a shortening of the term \"Coolie hat switch\", named for the similar-looking headgear.",
"title": "Electronic joysticks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "In a real aircraft, the hat switch may control things like aileron or elevator trim.",
"title": "Electronic joysticks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Apart from buttons, wheels and dials as well as touchscreens also miniature joysticks have been established for the efficient manual operation of cameras.",
"title": "Electronic joysticks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In recent times, the employment of joysticks has become commonplace in many industrial and manufacturing applications, such as cranes, assembly lines, forestry equipment, mining trucks, and excavators. In fact, the use of such joysticks is in such high demand, that it has virtually replaced the traditional mechanical control lever in nearly all modern hydraulic control systems. Additionally, most unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and submersible remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) require at least one joystick to control either the vehicle, the on-board cameras, sensors and/or manipulators.",
"title": "Industrial applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Due to the highly hands-on, rough nature of such applications, the industrial joystick tends to be more robust than the typical video-game controller, and able to function over a high cycle life. This led to the development and employment of Hall effect sensing to such applications in the 1980s as a means of contactless sensing. Several companies produce joysticks for industrial applications using Hall effect technology. Another technology used in joystick design is the use of strain gauges to build force transducers from which the output is proportional to the force applied rather than physical deflection. Miniature force transducers are used as additional controls on joysticks for menu selection functions.",
"title": "Industrial applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Some larger manufacturers of joysticks are able to customize joystick handles and grips specific to the OEM needs while small regional manufacturers often concentrate on selling standard products at higher prices to smaller OEMs.",
"title": "Industrial applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Specialist joysticks, classed as an assistive technology pointing device, are used to replace the computer mouse for people with fairly severe physical disabilities. Rather than controlling games, these joysticks control the pointer. They are often useful to people with athetoid conditions, such as cerebral palsy, who find them easier to grasp than a standard mouse. Miniature joysticks are available for people with conditions involving muscular weakness such as muscular dystrophy or motor neurone disease as well. They are also used on electric powered wheelchairs for control since they are simple and effective to use as a control method.",
"title": "Assistive technology"
}
]
| A joystick, sometimes called a flight stick, is an input device consisting of a stick that pivots on a base and reports its angle or direction to the device it is controlling. A joystick, also known as the control column, is the principal control device in the cockpit of many civilian and military aircraft, either as a centre stick. It has various switches to control the movements of the aircraft controlled by the Pilot and First Officer of the flight. Joysticks are often used to control video games, and usually have one or more than one push-buttons whose state can also be read by the computer. A popular variation of the joystick used on modern video game consoles is the analog stick. Joysticks are also used for controlling machines such as cranes, trucks, underwater unmanned vehicles, wheelchairs, surveillance cameras, and zero turning radius lawn mowers. Miniature finger-operated joysticks have been adopted as input devices for smaller electronic equipment such as mobile phones. | 2001-10-18T16:05:33Z | 2023-12-24T18:59:58Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joystick |
16,232 | Juan Fernández Islands | The Juan Fernández Islands (Spanish: Archipiélago Juan Fernández) are a sparsely inhabited series of islands in the South Pacific Ocean reliant on tourism and fishing. Situated 670 km (362 nmi; 416 mi) off the coast of Chile, they are composed of three main volcanic islands: Robinson Crusoe, Alejandro Selkirk and Santa Clara. The group is part of Insular Chile.
The islands are primarily known for having been the home to the marooned sailor Alexander Selkirk for more than four years from 1704, which may have inspired English writer Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Most of the archipelago's present-day inhabitants reside on Robinson Crusoe Island, and mainly in the capital, San Juan Bautista, located at Cumberland Bay on the island's north coast.
The group of islands is part of Chile's Valparaíso Region (which also includes Easter Island) and, along with the Desventuradas Islands, forms one of the nine communes of Valparaíso Province. The islands are named after Juan Fernández, the explorer who discovered them in the 1570s.
Alejandro Selkirk is the largest of the Juan Fernández Islands at 49.5 km (19.1 sq mi), and its highest peak, Cerro de Los Inocentes, is also the highest point of the archipelago at 1,268 m (4,160 ft). The island's population was 57 in 2012. Robinson Crusoe is the second largest island in the archipelago at 47.9 km (18 sq mi); its highest peak, El Yunque, is 915 m (3,002 ft). The population of Robinson Crusoe was 843 in 2012. Santa Clara is 2.2 km (0.8 sq mi) in area and reaches a height of 375 m (1,230 ft). Santa Clara is uninhabited. The maximum elevations of Juan Fernández, 915 m (3,002 ft) for Robinson Crusoe and 1,329 m (4,360 ft) for Alejandro Selkirk, respectively, are high enough to cause the phenomenon known as Kármán vortex street, which can be seen from space.
The islands are volcanic in origin, produced by the movement of the Nazca Plate over the Juan Fernández hotspot. As the plate moved eastward over the hot spot, volcanic eruptions formed the Juan Fernández Ridge before being subducted under the South American continent at the Peru–Chile Trench. The islands occur where the peaks of the submarine ridge have protruded above sea level. Radiometric dating indicates that Santa Clara is the oldest of the islands, at 5.8 million years old, followed by Robinson Crusoe, 3.8 – 4.2 million years old, and Alexander Selkirk, 1.0 – 2.4 million years old.
The seafloor around Juan Fernández Islands is rich in Manganese–Iron nodules, which might be of potential economic interest.
Some consider the islands to be one of the easternmost points of Oceania, rather than an outlying region of South America. In their book Shore Fishes of Easter Island, authors John E. Randall and Alfredo Cea Egana claim that the Juan Fernández Islands have "great similarity in ichthyofauna with Oceania more so than with the nearing South America."
The islands have a subtropical Mediterranean climate, moderated by the cold Humboldt Current, which flows northward to the east of the islands, and the southeast trade winds. Temperatures range from 10 °C (50 °F) to 22 °C (72 °F), with an annual mean of 15.4 °C (60 °F). Higher elevations are generally cooler, with occasional frosts on Robinson Crusoe.
Average annual precipitation is 1,081 mm (42.6 in), varying from 318 mm (12.5 in) to 1,698 mm (66.9 in) year to year. Much of the variability in rainfall depends on the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. Rainfall is higher in the winter months, and varies with elevation and exposure; elevations above 500 m (1,640 ft) experience almost daily rainfall, while the western, leeward side of Robinson Crusoe and Santa Clara are quite dry.
The Juan Fernández islands are home to a high percentage of rare and endemic plants and animals, and are recognized as a distinct ecoregion. The volcanic origin and remote location of the islands meant that the islands' flora and fauna had to reach the archipelago from far across the sea; as a result, the island is home to relatively few plant species and very few animal species. The closest relatives of the archipelago's plants and animals are found in the Temperate broadleaf and mixed forests ecoregions of southern South America, including the Valdivian temperate rain forests, Magellanic subpolar forests, and Desventuradas Islands.
There are 209 native species of vascular plants in the Juan Fernandez Islands, approximately 150 of which are flowering plants, and 50 are ferns. There are 126 species (62 percent) that are endemic, with 12 endemic genera and two endemic families, Lactoridaceae and Thyrsopteridaceae. Many plants are characteristic of the Antarctic flora, and are related to plants found in southern South America, New Zealand and Australia. Vegetation zones generally correspond to elevation, with grasslands and shrublands at lower elevations, tall and montane forests at middle elevations, and shrublands at the highest elevations. The two main islands have somewhat distinct plant communities.
Alejandro Selkirk is mostly covered with grassland from 0 to 400 m (1,300 ft), interspersed with wooded ravines (quebradas), home to dry forests of Myrceugenia and Zanthoxylum fagara. From 400 m (1,300 ft) to 600 m (2,000 ft) are lower montane forests, with upper montane forest from 600 m (2,000 ft) to 950 m (3,100 ft). The treeline is at approximately 950 m (3,100 ft), above which is alpine shrubland and grassland, dominated by temperate Magellanic vegetation such as Acaena, Dicksonia, Drimys, Empetrum, Gunnera, Myrteola, Pernettya, and Ugni. On Robinson Crusoe, grasslands predominate from 0 to 100 m (300 ft); introduced shrubs from 100 m (300 ft) to 300 m (1,000 ft); tall forests from 300 m (1,000 ft) to 500 m (1,600 ft); montane forests from 500 m (1,640 ft) to 700 m (2,300 ft), with dense tree cover of Cuminia fernandezia, Fagara, and Rhaphithamnus venustus; tree fern forests from 700 m (2,300 ft) to 750 m (2,500 ft), and brushwood forests above 750 m (2,500 ft). Santa Clara is covered with grassland.
Three endemic species dominate the tall and lower montane forests of the archipelago, Drimys confertifolia on both main islands, Myrceugenia fernandeziana on Robinson Crusoe, and M. schulzei on Alexander Selkirk. Endemic tree fern species of southern hemisphere genus Dicksonia (D. berteroana on Robinson Crusoe and D. externa on Alexander Selkirk) and the endemic genus Thyrsopteris (T. elegans) are the predominant species in the tree-fern forests. An endemic species of sandalwood, Santalum fernandezianum, was overexploited for its fragrant wood, has not been seen since 1908, and is believed extinct. The Chonta palm (Juania australis), which is endemic to the Juan Fernández Islands, is endangered.
The Juan Fernández Islands have a very limited fauna, with no native land mammals, reptiles, or amphibians. Seventeen land and sea-bird species breed on the islands. The island has three endemic bird species, and three endemic subspecies. Introduced fauna by humans include rats and goats. Robinson Crusoe Island is home to an endemic and endangered hummingbird, the Juan Fernández firecrown (Sephanoides fernandensis). This large hummingbird, about 11 cm (4 in) long, is thought to number only about 500 individuals. The other endemic bird species are the Juan Fernández tit-tyrant (Anairetes fernandezianus) of Robinson Crusoe Island, and the Masafuera rayadito (Aphrastura masafuerae) of Alejandro Selkirk Island. The islands support the entire known breeding populations of two petrel species, Stejneger's Petrel Pterodroma longirostris (IUCN status VU) and the Juan Fernandez Petrel Pterodroma externa (IUCN status VU). In addition, the Juan Fernandez Islands may still support a third breeding petrel species, De Filippi's Petrel Pterodroma defilippiana (IUCN status VU), whose only other known breeding grounds are on the Desventuradas Islands. The Magellanic penguin breeds on Robinson Crusoe Island within the archipelago. All three islands of the Juan Fernandez archipelago have been recognised as Important Bird Areas (IBAs) by BirdLife International.
The endemic Juan-Fernandez spiny lobster (without claws) lives in the marine waters (Jasus frontalis). The Juan Fernández fur seal (Arctophoca philippii) also lives on the islands. This species was nearly exterminated in the sixteenth to nineteenth century, but it was rediscovered in 1965. A census in 1970 found about 750 fur seals living there. Only two were sighted on the Desventuradas Islands, located some 780 km (485 mi) to the north. The actual population of the Desventuradas may be higher, because the species tends to hide in sea caves. There seems to be a yearly population increase of 16–17 percent.
A 2008 report by archaeologists from the Australian National University states that, "a combination of palaeoecology and archaeology in the Juan Fernández Islands showed it was unlikely there had been human activity in the islands before Europeans arrived." Ichthyologists Ingo Hahn and Uwe Römer wrote in 2002, "the geographically isolated Juan Fernández Islands were probably untouched by man until their discovery by European sailors in 1574. Polynesians did not reach further east than Easter Island and native Americans perhaps not west of the South American continent."
The archipelago was discovered on 22 November 1574, by the Spanish sailor Juan Fernández, who was sailing south between Callao and Valparaíso along a route which he also discovered, hundreds of miles west of the coast of Chile, which avoided the northerly Humboldt current. He called the islands Más Afuera, Más a Tierra, and Santa Clara.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, the islands were used as a hideout for pirates and became the location of a penal colony. It was during this period that Alexander Selkirk became marooned on the islands. In the 1740s, they were visited by Commodore Anson's flotilla during his ill-fated venture to the South Seas. The location of the archipelago was fixed by Alessandro Malaspina in 1790; previous charts had differed on the location. British and American whaling vessels were regular visitors to the islands, starting with the London (Captain Joshua Coffin) in 1795.
During the maritime fur trade era of the early 19th century the islands were a source of fur seal skins, and the Juan Fernández fur seal was nearly driven to extinction. In his book Two Years Before the Mast (Chapter VII), Richard Henry Dana Jr. described the islands as he found them circa 1834. At this time the main island was being used as a penal colony. However, when Dr John Coulter visited it in the early 1840s, he reported the island deserted after the approximately 1000 convicts had risen up, killing the soldiers and Governor who had held them captive. The prisoners fled to mainland Chile, where "great numbers" were later hunted down and shot. The story appears in Coulter's book Adventures in the Pacific (1845). In 1908, the islands were visited by the Swedish Magellanic Expedition and Carl Skottsberg is believed to have been the last to have seen the Santalum fernandezianum tree alive.
Late in 1914 the islands were the rendezvous for Admiral Maximilian von Spee's East Asia Squadron as he gathered his ships together before defeating the British under Admiral Christopher Cradock at the Battle of Coronel. Following the Royal Navy's win at the Battle of the Falkland Islands a month later, the only surviving German cruiser, SMS Dresden, was hunted down and cornered illegally at Más a Tierra early in 1915, although she was in Chilean territorial waters, where it was scuttled after a brief battle with British cruisers.
In 1966 the Chilean government renamed Más Afuera as Alejandro Selkirk Island and Más a Tierra as Robinson Crusoe Island, in order to promote tourism. Incidentally, Selkirk never set foot on Más Afuera, only on Más a Tierra. On 30 July 2007, a constitutional reform gave the Juan Fernández Islands and Easter Island the status of "special territories" of Chile. Pending the enactment of a charter the archipelago will continue to be governed as a commune of the Valparaíso Region.
On 27 February 2010, a tsunami following the 8.8 magnitude earthquake off Maule, Chile struck the islands causing at least 8 deaths. Eleven people were reported as missing. Some early reports described the tsunami as being 40 m (130 ft) high, but later reports measured it at 3 m (10 ft). Most of the town of San Juan Bautista on Robinson Crusoe Island was destroyed.
As a commune, the Juan Fernández Islands are a third-level administrative division of Chile governed by a municipal council, headed by a mayor (Spanish: alcalde) who is directly elected every four years. The current mayor for the term 2021–2024 is Pablo Andrés Manríquez Angulo.
Within the electoral divisions of Chile, the commune was represented in the Chamber of Deputies by Joaquín Godoy (RN) and Aldo Cornejo (PDC) as part of the 13th electoral district, together with Valparaíso and Easter Island. It was represented in the Senate by Francisco Chahuán Chahuán (RN) and Ricardo Lagos Weber (PPD) as part of the 6th senatorial constituency (Valparaíso-Coast).
The islands are served by Robinson Crusoe Airfield, located on Robinson Crusoe Island. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Juan Fernández Islands (Spanish: Archipiélago Juan Fernández) are a sparsely inhabited series of islands in the South Pacific Ocean reliant on tourism and fishing. Situated 670 km (362 nmi; 416 mi) off the coast of Chile, they are composed of three main volcanic islands: Robinson Crusoe, Alejandro Selkirk and Santa Clara. The group is part of Insular Chile.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The islands are primarily known for having been the home to the marooned sailor Alexander Selkirk for more than four years from 1704, which may have inspired English writer Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Most of the archipelago's present-day inhabitants reside on Robinson Crusoe Island, and mainly in the capital, San Juan Bautista, located at Cumberland Bay on the island's north coast.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The group of islands is part of Chile's Valparaíso Region (which also includes Easter Island) and, along with the Desventuradas Islands, forms one of the nine communes of Valparaíso Province. The islands are named after Juan Fernández, the explorer who discovered them in the 1570s.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Alejandro Selkirk is the largest of the Juan Fernández Islands at 49.5 km (19.1 sq mi), and its highest peak, Cerro de Los Inocentes, is also the highest point of the archipelago at 1,268 m (4,160 ft). The island's population was 57 in 2012. Robinson Crusoe is the second largest island in the archipelago at 47.9 km (18 sq mi); its highest peak, El Yunque, is 915 m (3,002 ft). The population of Robinson Crusoe was 843 in 2012. Santa Clara is 2.2 km (0.8 sq mi) in area and reaches a height of 375 m (1,230 ft). Santa Clara is uninhabited. The maximum elevations of Juan Fernández, 915 m (3,002 ft) for Robinson Crusoe and 1,329 m (4,360 ft) for Alejandro Selkirk, respectively, are high enough to cause the phenomenon known as Kármán vortex street, which can be seen from space.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The islands are volcanic in origin, produced by the movement of the Nazca Plate over the Juan Fernández hotspot. As the plate moved eastward over the hot spot, volcanic eruptions formed the Juan Fernández Ridge before being subducted under the South American continent at the Peru–Chile Trench. The islands occur where the peaks of the submarine ridge have protruded above sea level. Radiometric dating indicates that Santa Clara is the oldest of the islands, at 5.8 million years old, followed by Robinson Crusoe, 3.8 – 4.2 million years old, and Alexander Selkirk, 1.0 – 2.4 million years old.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The seafloor around Juan Fernández Islands is rich in Manganese–Iron nodules, which might be of potential economic interest.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Some consider the islands to be one of the easternmost points of Oceania, rather than an outlying region of South America. In their book Shore Fishes of Easter Island, authors John E. Randall and Alfredo Cea Egana claim that the Juan Fernández Islands have \"great similarity in ichthyofauna with Oceania more so than with the nearing South America.\"",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The islands have a subtropical Mediterranean climate, moderated by the cold Humboldt Current, which flows northward to the east of the islands, and the southeast trade winds. Temperatures range from 10 °C (50 °F) to 22 °C (72 °F), with an annual mean of 15.4 °C (60 °F). Higher elevations are generally cooler, with occasional frosts on Robinson Crusoe.",
"title": "Climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Average annual precipitation is 1,081 mm (42.6 in), varying from 318 mm (12.5 in) to 1,698 mm (66.9 in) year to year. Much of the variability in rainfall depends on the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. Rainfall is higher in the winter months, and varies with elevation and exposure; elevations above 500 m (1,640 ft) experience almost daily rainfall, while the western, leeward side of Robinson Crusoe and Santa Clara are quite dry.",
"title": "Climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The Juan Fernández islands are home to a high percentage of rare and endemic plants and animals, and are recognized as a distinct ecoregion. The volcanic origin and remote location of the islands meant that the islands' flora and fauna had to reach the archipelago from far across the sea; as a result, the island is home to relatively few plant species and very few animal species. The closest relatives of the archipelago's plants and animals are found in the Temperate broadleaf and mixed forests ecoregions of southern South America, including the Valdivian temperate rain forests, Magellanic subpolar forests, and Desventuradas Islands.",
"title": "Biota and ecology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "There are 209 native species of vascular plants in the Juan Fernandez Islands, approximately 150 of which are flowering plants, and 50 are ferns. There are 126 species (62 percent) that are endemic, with 12 endemic genera and two endemic families, Lactoridaceae and Thyrsopteridaceae. Many plants are characteristic of the Antarctic flora, and are related to plants found in southern South America, New Zealand and Australia. Vegetation zones generally correspond to elevation, with grasslands and shrublands at lower elevations, tall and montane forests at middle elevations, and shrublands at the highest elevations. The two main islands have somewhat distinct plant communities.",
"title": "Biota and ecology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Alejandro Selkirk is mostly covered with grassland from 0 to 400 m (1,300 ft), interspersed with wooded ravines (quebradas), home to dry forests of Myrceugenia and Zanthoxylum fagara. From 400 m (1,300 ft) to 600 m (2,000 ft) are lower montane forests, with upper montane forest from 600 m (2,000 ft) to 950 m (3,100 ft). The treeline is at approximately 950 m (3,100 ft), above which is alpine shrubland and grassland, dominated by temperate Magellanic vegetation such as Acaena, Dicksonia, Drimys, Empetrum, Gunnera, Myrteola, Pernettya, and Ugni. On Robinson Crusoe, grasslands predominate from 0 to 100 m (300 ft); introduced shrubs from 100 m (300 ft) to 300 m (1,000 ft); tall forests from 300 m (1,000 ft) to 500 m (1,600 ft); montane forests from 500 m (1,640 ft) to 700 m (2,300 ft), with dense tree cover of Cuminia fernandezia, Fagara, and Rhaphithamnus venustus; tree fern forests from 700 m (2,300 ft) to 750 m (2,500 ft), and brushwood forests above 750 m (2,500 ft). Santa Clara is covered with grassland.",
"title": "Biota and ecology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Three endemic species dominate the tall and lower montane forests of the archipelago, Drimys confertifolia on both main islands, Myrceugenia fernandeziana on Robinson Crusoe, and M. schulzei on Alexander Selkirk. Endemic tree fern species of southern hemisphere genus Dicksonia (D. berteroana on Robinson Crusoe and D. externa on Alexander Selkirk) and the endemic genus Thyrsopteris (T. elegans) are the predominant species in the tree-fern forests. An endemic species of sandalwood, Santalum fernandezianum, was overexploited for its fragrant wood, has not been seen since 1908, and is believed extinct. The Chonta palm (Juania australis), which is endemic to the Juan Fernández Islands, is endangered.",
"title": "Biota and ecology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The Juan Fernández Islands have a very limited fauna, with no native land mammals, reptiles, or amphibians. Seventeen land and sea-bird species breed on the islands. The island has three endemic bird species, and three endemic subspecies. Introduced fauna by humans include rats and goats. Robinson Crusoe Island is home to an endemic and endangered hummingbird, the Juan Fernández firecrown (Sephanoides fernandensis). This large hummingbird, about 11 cm (4 in) long, is thought to number only about 500 individuals. The other endemic bird species are the Juan Fernández tit-tyrant (Anairetes fernandezianus) of Robinson Crusoe Island, and the Masafuera rayadito (Aphrastura masafuerae) of Alejandro Selkirk Island. The islands support the entire known breeding populations of two petrel species, Stejneger's Petrel Pterodroma longirostris (IUCN status VU) and the Juan Fernandez Petrel Pterodroma externa (IUCN status VU). In addition, the Juan Fernandez Islands may still support a third breeding petrel species, De Filippi's Petrel Pterodroma defilippiana (IUCN status VU), whose only other known breeding grounds are on the Desventuradas Islands. The Magellanic penguin breeds on Robinson Crusoe Island within the archipelago. All three islands of the Juan Fernandez archipelago have been recognised as Important Bird Areas (IBAs) by BirdLife International.",
"title": "Biota and ecology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The endemic Juan-Fernandez spiny lobster (without claws) lives in the marine waters (Jasus frontalis). The Juan Fernández fur seal (Arctophoca philippii) also lives on the islands. This species was nearly exterminated in the sixteenth to nineteenth century, but it was rediscovered in 1965. A census in 1970 found about 750 fur seals living there. Only two were sighted on the Desventuradas Islands, located some 780 km (485 mi) to the north. The actual population of the Desventuradas may be higher, because the species tends to hide in sea caves. There seems to be a yearly population increase of 16–17 percent.",
"title": "Biota and ecology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "A 2008 report by archaeologists from the Australian National University states that, \"a combination of palaeoecology and archaeology in the Juan Fernández Islands showed it was unlikely there had been human activity in the islands before Europeans arrived.\" Ichthyologists Ingo Hahn and Uwe Römer wrote in 2002, \"the geographically isolated Juan Fernández Islands were probably untouched by man until their discovery by European sailors in 1574. Polynesians did not reach further east than Easter Island and native Americans perhaps not west of the South American continent.\"",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The archipelago was discovered on 22 November 1574, by the Spanish sailor Juan Fernández, who was sailing south between Callao and Valparaíso along a route which he also discovered, hundreds of miles west of the coast of Chile, which avoided the northerly Humboldt current. He called the islands Más Afuera, Más a Tierra, and Santa Clara.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In the 17th and 18th centuries, the islands were used as a hideout for pirates and became the location of a penal colony. It was during this period that Alexander Selkirk became marooned on the islands. In the 1740s, they were visited by Commodore Anson's flotilla during his ill-fated venture to the South Seas. The location of the archipelago was fixed by Alessandro Malaspina in 1790; previous charts had differed on the location. British and American whaling vessels were regular visitors to the islands, starting with the London (Captain Joshua Coffin) in 1795.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "During the maritime fur trade era of the early 19th century the islands were a source of fur seal skins, and the Juan Fernández fur seal was nearly driven to extinction. In his book Two Years Before the Mast (Chapter VII), Richard Henry Dana Jr. described the islands as he found them circa 1834. At this time the main island was being used as a penal colony. However, when Dr John Coulter visited it in the early 1840s, he reported the island deserted after the approximately 1000 convicts had risen up, killing the soldiers and Governor who had held them captive. The prisoners fled to mainland Chile, where \"great numbers\" were later hunted down and shot. The story appears in Coulter's book Adventures in the Pacific (1845). In 1908, the islands were visited by the Swedish Magellanic Expedition and Carl Skottsberg is believed to have been the last to have seen the Santalum fernandezianum tree alive.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Late in 1914 the islands were the rendezvous for Admiral Maximilian von Spee's East Asia Squadron as he gathered his ships together before defeating the British under Admiral Christopher Cradock at the Battle of Coronel. Following the Royal Navy's win at the Battle of the Falkland Islands a month later, the only surviving German cruiser, SMS Dresden, was hunted down and cornered illegally at Más a Tierra early in 1915, although she was in Chilean territorial waters, where it was scuttled after a brief battle with British cruisers.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In 1966 the Chilean government renamed Más Afuera as Alejandro Selkirk Island and Más a Tierra as Robinson Crusoe Island, in order to promote tourism. Incidentally, Selkirk never set foot on Más Afuera, only on Más a Tierra. On 30 July 2007, a constitutional reform gave the Juan Fernández Islands and Easter Island the status of \"special territories\" of Chile. Pending the enactment of a charter the archipelago will continue to be governed as a commune of the Valparaíso Region.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "On 27 February 2010, a tsunami following the 8.8 magnitude earthquake off Maule, Chile struck the islands causing at least 8 deaths. Eleven people were reported as missing. Some early reports described the tsunami as being 40 m (130 ft) high, but later reports measured it at 3 m (10 ft). Most of the town of San Juan Bautista on Robinson Crusoe Island was destroyed.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "As a commune, the Juan Fernández Islands are a third-level administrative division of Chile governed by a municipal council, headed by a mayor (Spanish: alcalde) who is directly elected every four years. The current mayor for the term 2021–2024 is Pablo Andrés Manríquez Angulo.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Within the electoral divisions of Chile, the commune was represented in the Chamber of Deputies by Joaquín Godoy (RN) and Aldo Cornejo (PDC) as part of the 13th electoral district, together with Valparaíso and Easter Island. It was represented in the Senate by Francisco Chahuán Chahuán (RN) and Ricardo Lagos Weber (PPD) as part of the 6th senatorial constituency (Valparaíso-Coast).",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The islands are served by Robinson Crusoe Airfield, located on Robinson Crusoe Island.",
"title": "Travel"
}
]
| The Juan Fernández Islands are a sparsely inhabited series of islands in the South Pacific Ocean reliant on tourism and fishing. Situated 670 km off the coast of Chile, they are composed of three main volcanic islands: Robinson Crusoe, Alejandro Selkirk and Santa Clara. The group is part of Insular Chile. The islands are primarily known for having been the home to the marooned sailor Alexander Selkirk for more than four years from 1704, which may have inspired English writer Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Most of the archipelago's present-day inhabitants reside on Robinson Crusoe Island, and mainly in the capital, San Juan Bautista, located at Cumberland Bay on the island's north coast. The group of islands is part of Chile's Valparaíso Region and, along with the Desventuradas Islands, forms one of the nine communes of Valparaíso Province. The islands are named after Juan Fernández, the explorer who discovered them in the 1570s. | 2001-10-19T03:00:24Z | 2023-12-30T00:42:53Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Fern%C3%A1ndez_Islands |
16,233 | John Maynard Smith | John Maynard Smith FRS (6 January 1920 – 19 April 2004) was a British theoretical and mathematical evolutionary biologist and geneticist. Originally an aeronautical engineer during the Second World War, he took a second degree in genetics under the well-known biologist J. B. S. Haldane. Maynard Smith was instrumental in the application of game theory to evolution with George R. Price, and theorised on other problems such as the evolution of sex and signalling theory.
John Maynard Smith was born in London, the son of the surgeon Sidney Maynard Smith, but following his father's death in 1928, the family moved to Exmoor, where he became interested in natural history. Quite unhappy with the lack of formal science education at Eton College, Maynard Smith took it upon himself to develop an interest in Darwinian evolutionary theory and mathematics, after having read the work of old Etonian J. B. S. Haldane, whose books were in the school's library despite the bad reputation Haldane had at Eton for his communism. He became an atheist at age 14.
On leaving school, Maynard Smith joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and started studying engineering at Trinity College, Cambridge. When the Second World War broke out in 1939, he defied his party's line and volunteered for service. He was rejected, however, because of poor eyesight and was told to finish his engineering degree, which he did in 1941. He later quipped that "under the circumstances, my poor eyesight was a selective advantage—it stopped me getting shot". The year of his graduation, he married Sheila Matthew, and they later had two sons and one daughter (Tony, Carol, and Julian). Between 1942 and 1947, he applied his degree to military aircraft design.
Maynard Smith, having decided that aircraft were "noisy and old-fashioned", then took a change of career, entering University College London to study fruit fly genetics under Haldane. After graduating he became a lecturer in zoology at his alma mater between 1952 and 1965, where he directed the Drosophila lab and conducted research on population genetics. He published a popular Penguin book, The Theory of Evolution, in 1958 (with subsequent editions in 1966, 1975, 1993).
He became gradually less attracted to communism and became a less active member, finally leaving the party in 1956 like many other intellectuals, after the Soviet Union brutally suppressed the Hungarian Revolution (Haldane had left the party in 1950 after becoming similarly disillusioned). He also admitted that a research program in evolutionary biology explicitly informed by Marxism seemed to bear little fruit.
In 1962 he was one of the founding members of the University of Sussex and was a dean between 1965 and 1985. He subsequently became a professor emeritus. Prior to his death the building housing much of life sciences at Sussex was renamed the John Maynard Smith Building in his honour.
In 1973 Maynard Smith formalised a central concept in evolutionary game theory called the evolutionarily stable strategy, based on a verbal argument by George R. Price. This area of research culminated in his 1982 book Evolution and the Theory of Games. The Hawk-Dove game is arguably his single most influential game theoretical model.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1977. In 1986 he was awarded the Darwin Medal.
Maynard Smith published a book titled The Evolution of Sex which explored in mathematical terms, the notion of the "two-fold cost of sex". During the late 1980s he also became interested in evolutionary transitions in individuality (ETIs) and worked with the evolutionary biologist Eörs Szathmáry. Together they wrote an influential 1995 book The Major Transitions in Evolution, a seminal work which continues to contribute to ongoing issues in evolutionary biology. A popular science version of the book, The Origins of Life: From the birth of life to the origin of language, was published in 1999.
In 1991 he was awarded the Balzan Prize for genetics and evolution "for his powerful analysis of evolutionary theory and of the role of sexual reproduction as a critical factor in evolution and in the survival of species; for his mathematical models applying the theory of games to evolutionary problems" (motivation of the Balzan General Prize Committee). In 1995 he was awarded the Linnean Medal by the Linnean Society and in 1999 he was awarded the Crafoord Prize jointly with Ernst Mayr and George C. Williams. In 2001 he was awarded the Kyoto Prize.
In his honour the European Society for Evolutionary Biology has an award for extraordinary young evolutionary biology researchers named The John Maynard Smith Prize.
His final book, Animal Signals, co-authored with David Harper, on signalling theory was published in 2003.
He died on 19 April 2004 sitting in a chair at home, surrounded by books. He was survived by his wife Sheila and their children.
Another evolutionary biologist, William Donald Hamilton, harboured a grievance against Maynard Smith for his handling of an article that Hamilton submitted to The Journal of Theoretical Biology in 1963, which was eventually published as two papers in July 1964. Maynard Smith acted as a reviewer of the paper after two other reviewers had been unable to understand it, and requested that Hamilton revise it into two parts due to concerns about its accessibility, later describing it as "deeply obscure". In March 1964, Maynard Smith published the article "Group Selection and Kin selection" in Nature, which covered concepts from Hamilton's article. Although Maynard Smith cited an earlier paper by Hamilton published in the American Naturalist, Hamilton felt Maynard Smith had not given him sufficient credit. Hamilton also objected to an anecdote included by Maynard Smith in a review published in the New Scientist in 1976 which implied Maynard Smith's mentor Haldane had understood the concept of Hamilton's inclusive fitness in the 1950s. Hamilton replied to the review suggesting that the anecdote was false, but later apologised to Maynard Smith for having doubted it.
The John Maynard Smith Archive is housed at the British Library (Add MS 86569-86840). The papers can be accessed through the British Library catalogue. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "John Maynard Smith FRS (6 January 1920 – 19 April 2004) was a British theoretical and mathematical evolutionary biologist and geneticist. Originally an aeronautical engineer during the Second World War, he took a second degree in genetics under the well-known biologist J. B. S. Haldane. Maynard Smith was instrumental in the application of game theory to evolution with George R. Price, and theorised on other problems such as the evolution of sex and signalling theory.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "John Maynard Smith was born in London, the son of the surgeon Sidney Maynard Smith, but following his father's death in 1928, the family moved to Exmoor, where he became interested in natural history. Quite unhappy with the lack of formal science education at Eton College, Maynard Smith took it upon himself to develop an interest in Darwinian evolutionary theory and mathematics, after having read the work of old Etonian J. B. S. Haldane, whose books were in the school's library despite the bad reputation Haldane had at Eton for his communism. He became an atheist at age 14.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "On leaving school, Maynard Smith joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and started studying engineering at Trinity College, Cambridge. When the Second World War broke out in 1939, he defied his party's line and volunteered for service. He was rejected, however, because of poor eyesight and was told to finish his engineering degree, which he did in 1941. He later quipped that \"under the circumstances, my poor eyesight was a selective advantage—it stopped me getting shot\". The year of his graduation, he married Sheila Matthew, and they later had two sons and one daughter (Tony, Carol, and Julian). Between 1942 and 1947, he applied his degree to military aircraft design.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Maynard Smith, having decided that aircraft were \"noisy and old-fashioned\", then took a change of career, entering University College London to study fruit fly genetics under Haldane. After graduating he became a lecturer in zoology at his alma mater between 1952 and 1965, where he directed the Drosophila lab and conducted research on population genetics. He published a popular Penguin book, The Theory of Evolution, in 1958 (with subsequent editions in 1966, 1975, 1993).",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "He became gradually less attracted to communism and became a less active member, finally leaving the party in 1956 like many other intellectuals, after the Soviet Union brutally suppressed the Hungarian Revolution (Haldane had left the party in 1950 after becoming similarly disillusioned). He also admitted that a research program in evolutionary biology explicitly informed by Marxism seemed to bear little fruit.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In 1962 he was one of the founding members of the University of Sussex and was a dean between 1965 and 1985. He subsequently became a professor emeritus. Prior to his death the building housing much of life sciences at Sussex was renamed the John Maynard Smith Building in his honour.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In 1973 Maynard Smith formalised a central concept in evolutionary game theory called the evolutionarily stable strategy, based on a verbal argument by George R. Price. This area of research culminated in his 1982 book Evolution and the Theory of Games. The Hawk-Dove game is arguably his single most influential game theoretical model.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1977. In 1986 he was awarded the Darwin Medal.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Maynard Smith published a book titled The Evolution of Sex which explored in mathematical terms, the notion of the \"two-fold cost of sex\". During the late 1980s he also became interested in evolutionary transitions in individuality (ETIs) and worked with the evolutionary biologist Eörs Szathmáry. Together they wrote an influential 1995 book The Major Transitions in Evolution, a seminal work which continues to contribute to ongoing issues in evolutionary biology. A popular science version of the book, The Origins of Life: From the birth of life to the origin of language, was published in 1999.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In 1991 he was awarded the Balzan Prize for genetics and evolution \"for his powerful analysis of evolutionary theory and of the role of sexual reproduction as a critical factor in evolution and in the survival of species; for his mathematical models applying the theory of games to evolutionary problems\" (motivation of the Balzan General Prize Committee). In 1995 he was awarded the Linnean Medal by the Linnean Society and in 1999 he was awarded the Crafoord Prize jointly with Ernst Mayr and George C. Williams. In 2001 he was awarded the Kyoto Prize.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In his honour the European Society for Evolutionary Biology has an award for extraordinary young evolutionary biology researchers named The John Maynard Smith Prize.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "His final book, Animal Signals, co-authored with David Harper, on signalling theory was published in 2003.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "He died on 19 April 2004 sitting in a chair at home, surrounded by books. He was survived by his wife Sheila and their children.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Another evolutionary biologist, William Donald Hamilton, harboured a grievance against Maynard Smith for his handling of an article that Hamilton submitted to The Journal of Theoretical Biology in 1963, which was eventually published as two papers in July 1964. Maynard Smith acted as a reviewer of the paper after two other reviewers had been unable to understand it, and requested that Hamilton revise it into two parts due to concerns about its accessibility, later describing it as \"deeply obscure\". In March 1964, Maynard Smith published the article \"Group Selection and Kin selection\" in Nature, which covered concepts from Hamilton's article. Although Maynard Smith cited an earlier paper by Hamilton published in the American Naturalist, Hamilton felt Maynard Smith had not given him sufficient credit. Hamilton also objected to an anecdote included by Maynard Smith in a review published in the New Scientist in 1976 which implied Maynard Smith's mentor Haldane had understood the concept of Hamilton's inclusive fitness in the 1950s. Hamilton replied to the review suggesting that the anecdote was false, but later apologised to Maynard Smith for having doubted it.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The John Maynard Smith Archive is housed at the British Library (Add MS 86569-86840). The papers can be accessed through the British Library catalogue.",
"title": "Legacy"
}
]
| John Maynard Smith was a British theoretical and mathematical evolutionary biologist and geneticist. Originally an aeronautical engineer during the Second World War, he took a second degree in genetics under the well-known biologist J. B. S. Haldane. Maynard Smith was instrumental in the application of game theory to evolution with George R. Price, and theorised on other problems such as the evolution of sex and signalling theory. | 2001-10-19T04:23:24Z | 2023-12-22T03:49:37Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Smith |
16,238 | John Danforth | John Claggett Danforth (born September 5, 1936) is an American politician, attorney and diplomat who began his career in 1968 as the Attorney General of Missouri and served three terms as United States Senator from Missouri. In 2004, he served briefly as United States Ambassador to the United Nations. Danforth is an ordained Episcopal priest.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Danforth graduated from Princeton University and Yale University. George W. Bush considered selecting him as a vice-presidential running mate in 2000.
Danforth was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of Dorothy (Claggett) and Donald Danforth. He is the grandson of William H. Danforth, founder of Ralston Purina. Danforth's brother, William Henry Danforth, was former chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis.
Danforth attended St. Louis Country Day School and Princeton University, where he graduated with an A.B. in religion in 1958 after completing a 111-page senior thesis titled "Christ and Meaning: An Interpretation of Reinhold Niebuhr's Christology." He received degrees from Yale Law School and Yale Divinity School in 1963.
Danforth practiced law at the New York law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell from 1964 to 1966. He was a partner at the law firm of Bryan, Cave, McPheeters and McRoberts in St. Louis from 1966 to 1968.
Before Danforth entered Republican politics, Missouri was a reliably Democratic state with its U.S. senators and governors usually being Democrats. Danforth's seat in the Senate was previously held by Democrats Thomas Hart Benton, Harry S. Truman, and Stuart Symington.
In 1968 Danforth was elected Missouri Attorney General, the first Republican elected to the office in 40 years, and the first from his party elected to statewide office in 22 years. On his staff of assistant attorneys general were future Missouri Governor and U.S. Senator Kit Bond, future Missouri Governor, U.S. Senator and U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, future Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and future federal judge D. Brook Bartlett. Danforth was reelected in 1972.
In 1970 Danforth ran for the United States Senate for the first time, against Democratic incumbent Stuart Symington. He lost in a close race.
In 1976 Danforth ran to succeed Symington, who was retiring. He had little opposition in the Republican primary. The Democrats had a three-way battle among Symington's son James W. Symington, former Missouri Governor Warren Hearnes and rising political star Congressman Jerry Litton. Litton won the primary, but he and his family were killed when the plane taking them to their victory party in Kansas City crashed on takeoff in Chillicothe, Missouri. Hearnes, who had finished second in the primary, was chosen to replace Litton as the Democratic nominee. In the general election, Danforth defeated Hearnes with nearly 57% of the vote.
In 1982 the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate was Harriett Woods, a relatively unknown state senator from the St. Louis suburb of University City. She was active in women's rights organizations and collected union support and was a cousin of Democratic Senator Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio. Her speeches denounced Ronald Reagan's policies so vigorously that she ran on the nickname "Give 'em Hell, Harriett" (a play on the famous Truman phrase). Danforth defeated Woods 51% to 49%, with Woods's pro-choice stance said to be the reason for her loss.
In 1988 Danforth defeated Democrat Jay Nixon, 68%–32%. He chose not to run for a fourth term and retired from the Senate in 1995. He was succeeded by former Missouri governor John Ashcroft. Nixon was later elected Missouri Attorney General, and, in 2008, governor of Missouri.
In January 2001, when Missouri Democrats opposed Ashcroft's nomination for U.S. Attorney General, Danforth's name was invoked. Former U.S. Senator Tom Eagleton reacted to the nomination by saying: "John Danforth would have been my first choice. John Ashcroft would have been my last choice."
During the 1991 Senate confirmation hearings for U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, Danforth used his clout to support Thomas, who had served Danforth during his state attorney general years and later as an aide in the Senate.
Danforth portrayed himself as a political moderate, but voted like his right-wing Republican colleagues, including sustaining filibusters. He was once quoted as saying he joined the Republican Party for "the same reason you sometimes choose which movie to see—[it's] the one with the shortest line."
Danforth is a longtime opponent of capital punishment, as he made clear on the Senate floor in 1994.
In 1988, George H. W. Bush's presidential campaign vetted Danforth as a potential running mate. Bush selected Senator Dan Quayle (whose middle name is "Danforth") instead.
On July 1, 2004, Danforth was sworn in as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, succeeding John Negroponte, who left the post after becoming the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq in June. He is best remembered for attempts to bring peace to the Sudan but stayed at the UN for just six months. Danforth was mentioned as a successor to Secretary of State Colin Powell. Six days after the announcement that Condoleezza Rice was going to take the position, Danforth submitted his resignation on November 22, 2004, effective January 20, 2005. His resignation letter said, "Forty-seven years ago, I married the girl of my dreams, and, at this point in my life, what is most important to me is to spend more time with her."
In 1999, Democratic U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno appointed Danforth to lead an investigation into the FBI's role in the 1993 Waco Siege. Danforth appointed Democratic U.S. Attorney Edward L. Dowd Jr. for the Eastern District of Missouri as his deputy special counsel. He also hired Bryan Cave partner Thomas A. Schweich as his chief of staff. Assistant U.S. Attorney James G. Martin served as Danforth's director of investigative operations for what became known as the "Waco Investigation" and its resulting "Danforth Report".
In July 2000, Danforth's name was leaked as being on the short list of potential vice presidential nominees for Republican nominee George W. Bush, along with Michigan Governor John Engler, New York Governor George Pataki, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge, and former U.S. Secretary of Transportation, U.S. Secretary of Labor and former American Red Cross President Elizabeth Dole. One week before the 2000 Republican National Convention was held in Philadelphia, campaign sources said that Dick Cheney, the man charged with leading the selection process for the nominee, had recommended Danforth, but Bush selected Cheney himself. Bush wrote in his book Decision Points that Danforth would have been his choice if Cheney had not accepted. In September 2001, Bush appointed Danforth a special envoy to Sudan. He brokered a peace deal that officially ended the civil war in the South between Sudan's Islamic government and the U.S.-backed Christian rebels, but elements of that conflict still remain unresolved (as has the separate Darfur conflict). Known as the Second Sudanese Civil War, the conflict ended in January 2005 with the signing of a peace agreement.
On June 11, 2004, Danforth presided over the funeral of Ronald Reagan, held at Washington National Cathedral. Danforth also officiated at the funerals of Washington Post executive Katharine Graham, former United States Senator Harry Flood Byrd Jr. of Virginia, and Missouri State Auditor Tom Schweich.
On March 30, 2005, Danforth wrote an op-ed in The New York Times critical of the Republican party. The article began: "By a series of recent initiatives, Republicans have transformed our party into the political arm of conservative Christians". He also penned a June 17, 2005, piece headlined "Onward, Moderate Christian Soldiers". In 2015, Danforth joined 299 other Republicans in signing an amicus brief calling on the Supreme Court to legalize same-sex marriage.
Contributing to the anthology Our American Story (2019), Danforth addressed the possibility of a shared American narrative and focused on the "great American purpose" of "hold[ing] together in one nation a diverse and often contentious people." He encouraged continued work "to demand a functioning government where compromise is the norm, to integrate all our people into one indivisible nation, and to incorporate separated individuals into the wholeness of the community." Danforth is a member of the Reformers Caucus of Issue One.
Since the mid-2000s, Danforth was a mentor and political supporter of Josh Hawley, who became Attorney General of Missouri in 2017 and U.S. Senator in 2019 with Danforth's encouragement; Danforth also supported Hawley's presidential ambitions. In the wake of the January 6 United States Capitol attack and Hawley's efforts to challenge the 2021 United States Electoral College vote count, Danforth said that supporting Hawley in the 2018 election "was the worst mistake I ever made in my life". During the 2022 United States Senate election in Missouri, Danforth headed a PAC supporting independent candidate John Wood, considered a long shot to win. Wood collected enough signatures to get on the ballot but dropped out after 50 days when Eric Schmitt won the Republican primary. Danforth spent $6 million on the effort.
In 1995, following his departure from the Senate, Danforth again became a partner at the Bryan Cave law firm. As of 2021 Danforth is a partner at Dowd Bennett, a Clayton law firm just outside Saint Louis.
In May 2012, a group led by Danforth's son-in-law and Summitt Distributing CEO Tom Stillman, in which Danforth is a minority investor, took controlling ownership of the St. Louis Blues of the National Hockey League. The group acquired full ownership of the team in June 2019. Danforth has a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame. He is an honorary board member of the humanitarian organization Wings of Hope.
Danforth married the former Sally Dobson in 1957. They have five children and 15 grandchildren.
Media related to John Danforth at Wikimedia Commons | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "John Claggett Danforth (born September 5, 1936) is an American politician, attorney and diplomat who began his career in 1968 as the Attorney General of Missouri and served three terms as United States Senator from Missouri. In 2004, he served briefly as United States Ambassador to the United Nations. Danforth is an ordained Episcopal priest.",
"title": ""
},
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"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Danforth graduated from Princeton University and Yale University. George W. Bush considered selecting him as a vice-presidential running mate in 2000.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Danforth was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of Dorothy (Claggett) and Donald Danforth. He is the grandson of William H. Danforth, founder of Ralston Purina. Danforth's brother, William Henry Danforth, was former chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
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"text": "Danforth attended St. Louis Country Day School and Princeton University, where he graduated with an A.B. in religion in 1958 after completing a 111-page senior thesis titled \"Christ and Meaning: An Interpretation of Reinhold Niebuhr's Christology.\" He received degrees from Yale Law School and Yale Divinity School in 1963.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Danforth practiced law at the New York law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell from 1964 to 1966. He was a partner at the law firm of Bryan, Cave, McPheeters and McRoberts in St. Louis from 1966 to 1968.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Before Danforth entered Republican politics, Missouri was a reliably Democratic state with its U.S. senators and governors usually being Democrats. Danforth's seat in the Senate was previously held by Democrats Thomas Hart Benton, Harry S. Truman, and Stuart Symington.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In 1968 Danforth was elected Missouri Attorney General, the first Republican elected to the office in 40 years, and the first from his party elected to statewide office in 22 years. On his staff of assistant attorneys general were future Missouri Governor and U.S. Senator Kit Bond, future Missouri Governor, U.S. Senator and U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, future Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and future federal judge D. Brook Bartlett. Danforth was reelected in 1972.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In 1970 Danforth ran for the United States Senate for the first time, against Democratic incumbent Stuart Symington. He lost in a close race.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In 1976 Danforth ran to succeed Symington, who was retiring. He had little opposition in the Republican primary. The Democrats had a three-way battle among Symington's son James W. Symington, former Missouri Governor Warren Hearnes and rising political star Congressman Jerry Litton. Litton won the primary, but he and his family were killed when the plane taking them to their victory party in Kansas City crashed on takeoff in Chillicothe, Missouri. Hearnes, who had finished second in the primary, was chosen to replace Litton as the Democratic nominee. In the general election, Danforth defeated Hearnes with nearly 57% of the vote.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In 1982 the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate was Harriett Woods, a relatively unknown state senator from the St. Louis suburb of University City. She was active in women's rights organizations and collected union support and was a cousin of Democratic Senator Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio. Her speeches denounced Ronald Reagan's policies so vigorously that she ran on the nickname \"Give 'em Hell, Harriett\" (a play on the famous Truman phrase). Danforth defeated Woods 51% to 49%, with Woods's pro-choice stance said to be the reason for her loss.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In 1988 Danforth defeated Democrat Jay Nixon, 68%–32%. He chose not to run for a fourth term and retired from the Senate in 1995. He was succeeded by former Missouri governor John Ashcroft. Nixon was later elected Missouri Attorney General, and, in 2008, governor of Missouri.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In January 2001, when Missouri Democrats opposed Ashcroft's nomination for U.S. Attorney General, Danforth's name was invoked. Former U.S. Senator Tom Eagleton reacted to the nomination by saying: \"John Danforth would have been my first choice. John Ashcroft would have been my last choice.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "During the 1991 Senate confirmation hearings for U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, Danforth used his clout to support Thomas, who had served Danforth during his state attorney general years and later as an aide in the Senate.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Danforth portrayed himself as a political moderate, but voted like his right-wing Republican colleagues, including sustaining filibusters. He was once quoted as saying he joined the Republican Party for \"the same reason you sometimes choose which movie to see—[it's] the one with the shortest line.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Danforth is a longtime opponent of capital punishment, as he made clear on the Senate floor in 1994.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In 1988, George H. W. Bush's presidential campaign vetted Danforth as a potential running mate. Bush selected Senator Dan Quayle (whose middle name is \"Danforth\") instead.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "On July 1, 2004, Danforth was sworn in as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, succeeding John Negroponte, who left the post after becoming the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq in June. He is best remembered for attempts to bring peace to the Sudan but stayed at the UN for just six months. Danforth was mentioned as a successor to Secretary of State Colin Powell. Six days after the announcement that Condoleezza Rice was going to take the position, Danforth submitted his resignation on November 22, 2004, effective January 20, 2005. His resignation letter said, \"Forty-seven years ago, I married the girl of my dreams, and, at this point in my life, what is most important to me is to spend more time with her.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In 1999, Democratic U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno appointed Danforth to lead an investigation into the FBI's role in the 1993 Waco Siege. Danforth appointed Democratic U.S. Attorney Edward L. Dowd Jr. for the Eastern District of Missouri as his deputy special counsel. He also hired Bryan Cave partner Thomas A. Schweich as his chief of staff. Assistant U.S. Attorney James G. Martin served as Danforth's director of investigative operations for what became known as the \"Waco Investigation\" and its resulting \"Danforth Report\".",
"title": "Post-Senate career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In July 2000, Danforth's name was leaked as being on the short list of potential vice presidential nominees for Republican nominee George W. Bush, along with Michigan Governor John Engler, New York Governor George Pataki, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge, and former U.S. Secretary of Transportation, U.S. Secretary of Labor and former American Red Cross President Elizabeth Dole. One week before the 2000 Republican National Convention was held in Philadelphia, campaign sources said that Dick Cheney, the man charged with leading the selection process for the nominee, had recommended Danforth, but Bush selected Cheney himself. Bush wrote in his book Decision Points that Danforth would have been his choice if Cheney had not accepted. In September 2001, Bush appointed Danforth a special envoy to Sudan. He brokered a peace deal that officially ended the civil war in the South between Sudan's Islamic government and the U.S.-backed Christian rebels, but elements of that conflict still remain unresolved (as has the separate Darfur conflict). Known as the Second Sudanese Civil War, the conflict ended in January 2005 with the signing of a peace agreement.",
"title": "Post-Senate career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "On June 11, 2004, Danforth presided over the funeral of Ronald Reagan, held at Washington National Cathedral. Danforth also officiated at the funerals of Washington Post executive Katharine Graham, former United States Senator Harry Flood Byrd Jr. of Virginia, and Missouri State Auditor Tom Schweich.",
"title": "Post-Senate career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "On March 30, 2005, Danforth wrote an op-ed in The New York Times critical of the Republican party. The article began: \"By a series of recent initiatives, Republicans have transformed our party into the political arm of conservative Christians\". He also penned a June 17, 2005, piece headlined \"Onward, Moderate Christian Soldiers\". In 2015, Danforth joined 299 other Republicans in signing an amicus brief calling on the Supreme Court to legalize same-sex marriage.",
"title": "Post-Senate career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Contributing to the anthology Our American Story (2019), Danforth addressed the possibility of a shared American narrative and focused on the \"great American purpose\" of \"hold[ing] together in one nation a diverse and often contentious people.\" He encouraged continued work \"to demand a functioning government where compromise is the norm, to integrate all our people into one indivisible nation, and to incorporate separated individuals into the wholeness of the community.\" Danforth is a member of the Reformers Caucus of Issue One.",
"title": "Post-Senate career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Since the mid-2000s, Danforth was a mentor and political supporter of Josh Hawley, who became Attorney General of Missouri in 2017 and U.S. Senator in 2019 with Danforth's encouragement; Danforth also supported Hawley's presidential ambitions. In the wake of the January 6 United States Capitol attack and Hawley's efforts to challenge the 2021 United States Electoral College vote count, Danforth said that supporting Hawley in the 2018 election \"was the worst mistake I ever made in my life\". During the 2022 United States Senate election in Missouri, Danforth headed a PAC supporting independent candidate John Wood, considered a long shot to win. Wood collected enough signatures to get on the ballot but dropped out after 50 days when Eric Schmitt won the Republican primary. Danforth spent $6 million on the effort.",
"title": "Post-Senate career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "In 1995, following his departure from the Senate, Danforth again became a partner at the Bryan Cave law firm. As of 2021 Danforth is a partner at Dowd Bennett, a Clayton law firm just outside Saint Louis.",
"title": "Post-Senate career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In May 2012, a group led by Danforth's son-in-law and Summitt Distributing CEO Tom Stillman, in which Danforth is a minority investor, took controlling ownership of the St. Louis Blues of the National Hockey League. The group acquired full ownership of the team in June 2019. Danforth has a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame. He is an honorary board member of the humanitarian organization Wings of Hope.",
"title": "Post-Senate career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Danforth married the former Sally Dobson in 1957. They have five children and 15 grandchildren.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Media related to John Danforth at Wikimedia Commons",
"title": "External links"
}
]
| John Claggett Danforth is an American politician, attorney and diplomat who began his career in 1968 as the Attorney General of Missouri and served three terms as United States Senator from Missouri. In 2004, he served briefly as United States Ambassador to the United Nations. Danforth is an ordained Episcopal priest. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Danforth graduated from Princeton University and Yale University. George W. Bush considered selecting him as a vice-presidential running mate in 2000. | 2001-10-22T01:47:00Z | 2023-11-22T09:03:15Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Danforth |
16,239 | Jordanes | Jordanes (/dʒɔːrˈdeɪniːz/), also written as Jordanis or Jornandes, was a 6th-century Eastern Roman bureaucrat widely believed to be of Gothic descent who became a historian later in life. Late in life he wrote two works, one on Roman history (Romana) and the other on the Goths (Getica). The latter, along with Isidore of Seville's Historia Gothorum, is one of only two extant ancient works dealing with the early history of the Goths.
Other writers, such as Procopius, wrote works on the later history of the Goths. Getica has been the object of much critical review. Jordanes wrote in Late Latin rather than the classical Ciceronian Latin. According to his own introduction, he had only three days to review what Cassiodorus had written and so he must also have relied on his own knowledge.
Jordanes writes about himself almost in passing:
The Sciri, moreover, and the Sadagarii and certain of the Alani with their leader, Candac by name, received Scythia Minor and Lower Moesia. Paria, the father of my father Alanoviiamuth (that is to say, my grandfather), was secretary to this Candac as long as he lived. To his sister's son Gunthigis, also called Baza, the Master of the Soldiery, who was the son of Andag the son of Andela, who was descended from the stock of the Amali, I also, Jordanes, although an unlearned man before my conversion, was secretary.
Paria was Jordanes's paternal grandfather. Jordanes writes that he was secretary to Candac, dux Alanorum, an otherwise unknown leader of the Alans.
Jordanes was asked by a friend to write Getica as a summary of a multi-volume history of the Goths by the statesman Cassiodorus that existed then but has since been lost. Jordanes was selected for his known interest in history and because of his own Gothic background. He had been a high-level notarius, or secretary, of a small client state on the Roman frontier in Scythia Minor, modern southeastern Romania and northeastern Bulgaria.
Jordanes was notarius, or secretary to Gunthigis Baza, a nephew of Candac and a magister militum of the leading Ostrogoth clan of the Amali.
That was ante conversionem meam ("before my conversion"). The nature and the details of the conversion remain obscure. The Goths had been converted with the assistance of Ulfilas (a Goth), made bishop on that account. However, the Goths had adopted Arianism. Jordanes's conversion may have been a conversion to the trinitarian Nicene Creed, which may be expressed in anti-Arianism in certain passages in Getica. In the letter to Vigilius he mentions that he was awakened vestris interrogationibus – "by your questioning".
Alternatively, Jordanes's conversio may mean that he had become a monk, a religiosus or a member of the clergy. Some manuscripts say that he was a bishop, and some even say bishop of Ravenna, but the name Jordanes is not known in the lists of bishops of Ravenna.
Jordanes wrote Romana, about the history of Rome, but his best-known work is his Getica, which was written in Constantinople about 551 AD. Jordanes wrote his Romana at the behest of a certain Vigilius. Although some scholars have identified this person with Pope Vigilius, there is nothing else to support the identification besides the name. The form of address that Jordanes uses and his admonition that Vigilius "turn to God" would seem to rule out this identification.
In the preface to his Getica, Jordanes writes that he is interrupting his work on the Romana at the behest of a brother Castalius, who apparently knew that Jordanes possessed the twelve volumes of the History of the Goths by Cassiodorus. Castalius wanted a short book about the subject, and Jordanes obliged with an excerpt based on memory, possibly supplemented with other material to which he had access. The Getica sets off with a geography/ethnography of the North, especially of Scandza (16–24).
He lets the history of the Goths commence with the emigration of Berig with three ships from Scandza to Gothiscandza (25, 94), in a distant past. In the pen of Jordanes, Herodotus's Getian demigod Zalmoxis becomes a king of the Goths (39). Jordanes tells how the Goths sacked "Troy and Ilium" just after they had recovered somewhat from the war with Agamemnon (108). They are also said to have encountered the Egyptian pharaoh Vesosis (47). The less fictional part of Jordanes's work begins when the Goths encounter Roman military forces in the third century AD. The work concludes with the defeat of the Goths by the Byzantine general Belisarius. Jordanes concludes the work by stating that he writes to honour those who were victorious over the Goths after a history spanning 2,030 years.
Several Romanian and American historians wrote about Jordanes's error who considered that Getae were Goths. According to that interpretation, many of the historical data about Dacians and Getae were wrongly attributed to Goths.
Arne Søby Christensen and Michael Kulikowski argue in their works that Jordanes developed in Getica the history of Getic and Dacian peoples, which he supplemented with probably-invented events such as a Gothic war against Egypt. Caracalla in 214 received the titles "Geticus Maximus" and "Quasi Gothicus" after battles with Getae and Goths. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Jordanes (/dʒɔːrˈdeɪniːz/), also written as Jordanis or Jornandes, was a 6th-century Eastern Roman bureaucrat widely believed to be of Gothic descent who became a historian later in life. Late in life he wrote two works, one on Roman history (Romana) and the other on the Goths (Getica). The latter, along with Isidore of Seville's Historia Gothorum, is one of only two extant ancient works dealing with the early history of the Goths.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Other writers, such as Procopius, wrote works on the later history of the Goths. Getica has been the object of much critical review. Jordanes wrote in Late Latin rather than the classical Ciceronian Latin. According to his own introduction, he had only three days to review what Cassiodorus had written and so he must also have relied on his own knowledge.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Jordanes writes about himself almost in passing:",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The Sciri, moreover, and the Sadagarii and certain of the Alani with their leader, Candac by name, received Scythia Minor and Lower Moesia. Paria, the father of my father Alanoviiamuth (that is to say, my grandfather), was secretary to this Candac as long as he lived. To his sister's son Gunthigis, also called Baza, the Master of the Soldiery, who was the son of Andag the son of Andela, who was descended from the stock of the Amali, I also, Jordanes, although an unlearned man before my conversion, was secretary.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Paria was Jordanes's paternal grandfather. Jordanes writes that he was secretary to Candac, dux Alanorum, an otherwise unknown leader of the Alans.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Jordanes was asked by a friend to write Getica as a summary of a multi-volume history of the Goths by the statesman Cassiodorus that existed then but has since been lost. Jordanes was selected for his known interest in history and because of his own Gothic background. He had been a high-level notarius, or secretary, of a small client state on the Roman frontier in Scythia Minor, modern southeastern Romania and northeastern Bulgaria.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Jordanes was notarius, or secretary to Gunthigis Baza, a nephew of Candac and a magister militum of the leading Ostrogoth clan of the Amali.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "That was ante conversionem meam (\"before my conversion\"). The nature and the details of the conversion remain obscure. The Goths had been converted with the assistance of Ulfilas (a Goth), made bishop on that account. However, the Goths had adopted Arianism. Jordanes's conversion may have been a conversion to the trinitarian Nicene Creed, which may be expressed in anti-Arianism in certain passages in Getica. In the letter to Vigilius he mentions that he was awakened vestris interrogationibus – \"by your questioning\".",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Alternatively, Jordanes's conversio may mean that he had become a monk, a religiosus or a member of the clergy. Some manuscripts say that he was a bishop, and some even say bishop of Ravenna, but the name Jordanes is not known in the lists of bishops of Ravenna.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Jordanes wrote Romana, about the history of Rome, but his best-known work is his Getica, which was written in Constantinople about 551 AD. Jordanes wrote his Romana at the behest of a certain Vigilius. Although some scholars have identified this person with Pope Vigilius, there is nothing else to support the identification besides the name. The form of address that Jordanes uses and his admonition that Vigilius \"turn to God\" would seem to rule out this identification.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In the preface to his Getica, Jordanes writes that he is interrupting his work on the Romana at the behest of a brother Castalius, who apparently knew that Jordanes possessed the twelve volumes of the History of the Goths by Cassiodorus. Castalius wanted a short book about the subject, and Jordanes obliged with an excerpt based on memory, possibly supplemented with other material to which he had access. The Getica sets off with a geography/ethnography of the North, especially of Scandza (16–24).",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "He lets the history of the Goths commence with the emigration of Berig with three ships from Scandza to Gothiscandza (25, 94), in a distant past. In the pen of Jordanes, Herodotus's Getian demigod Zalmoxis becomes a king of the Goths (39). Jordanes tells how the Goths sacked \"Troy and Ilium\" just after they had recovered somewhat from the war with Agamemnon (108). They are also said to have encountered the Egyptian pharaoh Vesosis (47). The less fictional part of Jordanes's work begins when the Goths encounter Roman military forces in the third century AD. The work concludes with the defeat of the Goths by the Byzantine general Belisarius. Jordanes concludes the work by stating that he writes to honour those who were victorious over the Goths after a history spanning 2,030 years.",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Several Romanian and American historians wrote about Jordanes's error who considered that Getae were Goths. According to that interpretation, many of the historical data about Dacians and Getae were wrongly attributed to Goths.",
"title": "Controversy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Arne Søby Christensen and Michael Kulikowski argue in their works that Jordanes developed in Getica the history of Getic and Dacian peoples, which he supplemented with probably-invented events such as a Gothic war against Egypt. Caracalla in 214 received the titles \"Geticus Maximus\" and \"Quasi Gothicus\" after battles with Getae and Goths.",
"title": "Controversy"
}
]
| Jordanes, also written as Jordanis or Jornandes, was a 6th-century Eastern Roman bureaucrat widely believed to be of Gothic descent who became a historian later in life. Late in life he wrote two works, one on Roman history (Romana) and the other on the Goths (Getica). The latter, along with Isidore of Seville's Historia Gothorum, is one of only two extant ancient works dealing with the early history of the Goths. Other writers, such as Procopius, wrote works on the later history of the Goths. Getica has been the object of much critical review. Jordanes wrote in Late Latin rather than the classical Ciceronian Latin. According to his own introduction, he had only three days to review what Cassiodorus had written and so he must also have relied on his own knowledge. | 2001-10-22T20:18:53Z | 2023-12-24T12:15:21Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordanes |
16,240 | Jim Bakker | James Orsen Bakker (/ˈbeɪkər/; born January 2, 1940) is an American televangelist. Between 1974 and 1987, Bakker hosted the television program The PTL Club and its cable television platform, the PTL Satellite Network, with his then wife, Tammy Faye. He also developed Heritage USA, a now-defunct Christian theme park in Fort Mill, South Carolina.
In the late 1980s, Bakker resigned from the PTL ministry over a cover-up of hush money to church secretary Jessica Hahn for an alleged rape. Subsequent revelations of accounting fraud brought about felony charges, conviction, imprisonment, and divorce. Bakker later remarried and returned to televangelism, founding Morningside Church in Blue Eye, Missouri, and reestablishing the PTL ministry. He currently hosts The Jim Bakker Show, which focuses on the end times and the Second Coming of Christ while promoting emergency survival products. Bakker has written several books, including I Was Wrong and Time Has Come: How to Prepare Now for Epic Events Ahead.
James Orsen Bakker was born in Muskegon, Michigan, the son of Raleigh Bakker and Furnia Lynette "Furn" Irwin. Bakker attended North Central University, a Minneapolis bible college affiliated with the Assemblies of God, where he met fellow student Tammy Faye LaValley in 1960. Bakker worked at a restaurant in the Young-Quinlan department store in Minneapolis; Tammy Faye worked at the Three Sisters, a nearby boutique.
The Bakkers married on April 1, 1961, and left college to become itinerant evangelists. They had two children, Tammy Sue "Sissy" Bakker Chapman (born March 2, 1970) and Jamie Charles "Jay" Bakker (born December 18, 1975). The couple divorced on March 13, 1992. On September 4, 1998, Bakker married Lori Beth Graham, a former televangelist, fifty days after they met. In 2002, they adopted five children.
In 1966, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker began working at Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) in Portsmouth, Virginia, which had an audience in the low thousands at the time. The Bakkers contributed to the network's growth, hosting a children's variety show called Come On Over that employed comic routines with puppets. Due to the success of Come On Over, Robertson made Bakker the host of a new prime-time talk show, The 700 Club, which gradually became CBN's flagship program. The Bakkers left CBN in 1972 and, the following year, joined with Paul and Jan Crouch to help co-found the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) in California. However, this partnership lasted only eight months until a falling-out between Jim Bakker and Paul Crouch caused the Bakkers to leave the new network.
After their exit from TBN, the Bakkers moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, where in 1976 they debuted their own late night-style talk show, The PTL Club. Bakker founded the PTL Satellite Network in 1974, which aired The PTL Club and other religious television programs through local affiliates across the U.S.
Throughout the 1970s, Bakker built a headquarters for PTL in the Carolinas called Heritage Village. Over time, the Bakkers expanded the ministry to include the Heritage USA theme park in Fort Mill, South Carolina, which became the third most successful theme park in the U.S. at the time. Viewer contributions were estimated to exceed $1 million a week, with proceeds to expand the theme park and The PTL Club's mission. Bakker responded to inquiries about his use of mass media by saying: "I believe that if Jesus were alive today, he would be on TV".
Two scandals brought down PTL in 1987: Bakker was accused of sexual misconduct by church secretary Jessica Hahn, which led to his resignation, and his illegal misuse of ministry funds eventually led to his imprisonment. Bakker was dismissed as an Assemblies of God minister on May 6, 1987. In 1990, the biographic television movie Fall from Grace, starring Kevin Spacey as Bakker, depicted his rise and fall. On January 18, 2019, ABC's 20/20 aired a two-hour special, entitled Unfaithfully Yours, about the PTL scandal.
In 1979, Bakker and PTL came under investigation by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for allegedly misusing funds raised on the air. The FCC report was finalized in 1982 and found that Bakker had raised $350,000 that he told viewers would go towards funding overseas missions but that was actually used to pay for part of Heritage USA. The report also found that the Bakkers used PTL funds for personal expenses. FCC commissioners voted four to three to drop the investigation, after which they allowed Bakker to sell the only TV station that he owned, therefore bypassing future FCC oversight. The FCC forwarded its report to the U.S. Department of Justice, which declined to press charges, citing insufficient evidence. Bakker used the controversy to raise more funds from his audience, branding the investigation a "witch-hunt" and asking viewers to "give the Devil a black eye".
A confidential 1985 Internal Revenue Service (IRS) report found that $1.3 million in ministry funds was used for the Bakkers' personal benefit from 1980 to 1983. The report recommended that PTL be stripped of its tax-exempt status, but no action was taken until after the Jessica Hahn scandal broke in 1987. Art Harris and Michael Isikoff wrote in The Washington Post that politics may have played a role in the three government agencies taking no action against PTL despite the evidence against them, as members of the Reagan administration were not eager to go after television ministers whose evangelical followers made up their base.
A $279,000 payoff for the silence of Jessica Hahn, who alleged that Bakker and former PTL Club co-host John Wesley Fletcher drugged and raped her, was paid with PTL funds through Bakker's associate Roe Messner. Bakker, who made PTL's financial decisions, allegedly kept two sets of books to conceal accounting irregularities. Reporters for The Charlotte Observer, led by Charles Shepard, investigated PTL's finances and published a series of articles.
On March 19, 1987, after the disclosure of a payoff to Hahn, Bakker resigned from PTL. Although he acknowledged that he had a sexual encounter with Hahn at a hotel room in Clearwater, Florida, he denied raping her. Bakker was also the subject of homosexual and bisexual allegations made by Fletcher and PTL director Jay Babcock, which Bakker denied under oath. Rival televangelist John Ankerberg appeared on Larry King Live and made several allegations of moral impropriety against Bakker, which both Bakkers denied.
Bakker was succeeded as PTL head by the Rev. Jerry Falwell of Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia. Bakker chose Falwell as his successor because he feared that fellow televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, who had initiated an Assemblies of God investigation into Bakker's sexual misconduct, was attempting to take over his ministry.
Bakker believed that Falwell would temporarily lead the ministry until the scandal died down, but on April 28, 1987, Falwell barred Bakker from returning to PTL upon hearing of allegations of illicit behavior which went beyond the Hahn allegations. Later that summer, as donations declined sharply in the wake of Bakker's resignation and the end of The PTL Club, Falwell raised $20 million to keep Heritage USA solvent and took a promised water slide ride at the park. Falwell and the remaining members of the PTL board resigned in October 1987, stating that a ruling from a bankruptcy court judge made rebuilding the ministry impossible.
In response to the scandal, Falwell called Bakker a liar, an embezzler, a sexual deviant, and "the greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history". On CNN, Swaggart stated that Bakker was a "cancer in the body of Christ". In February 1988, Swaggart became involved in a sex scandal of his own after being caught visiting prostitutes in New Orleans. The Bakker and Swaggart scandals had a profound effect on the world of televangelism, causing greater media scrutiny of TV ministers and their finances. Falwell said that the scandals had "strengthened broadcast evangelism and made Christianity stronger, more mature and more committed."
The PTL Club's fundraising activities between 1984 and 1987 were reported by The Charlotte Observer, eventually leading to criminal charges against Bakker. Bakker and his PTL associates sold $1,000 "lifetime memberships", entitling buyers to an annual three-night stay at a luxury hotel at Heritage USA during that period. According to the prosecution at Bakker's fraud trial, tens of thousands of memberships were sold but only one 500-room hotel was ever finished. Bakker sold "exclusive partnerships" which exceeded capacity, raising more than twice the money needed to build the hotel. Much of the money paid Heritage USA's operating expenses, and Bakker kept $3.4 million.
After a 16-month federal grand jury probe, Bakker was indicted in 1988 on eight counts of mail fraud, 15 counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy. In 1989, after a five-week trial which began on August 28 in Charlotte, North Carolina, a jury found him guilty on all 24 counts. Judge Robert Daniel Potter sentenced Bakker to 45 years in federal prison and imposed a $500,000 fine. At the Federal Medical Center, Rochester in Rochester, Minnesota, he shared a cell with activist Lyndon LaRouche and skydiver Roger Nelson.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld Bakker's conviction on the fraud and conspiracy charges, voided Bakker's 45-year sentence and $500,000 fine and ordered a new sentencing hearing in February 1991. The court ruled that Potter's sentencing statement about Bakker, that "those of us who do have a religion are sick of being saps for money-grubbing preachers and priests", was evidence that the judge had injected his religious beliefs into Bakker's sentence.
A sentence-reduction hearing was held on November 16, 1992, and Bakker's sentence was reduced to eight years. In August 1993, he was transferred to a minimum-security federal prison in Jesup, Georgia. Bakker was paroled in July 1994, after serving almost five years of his sentence. His son, Jay, spearheaded a letter-writing campaign to the parole board advocating leniency. Celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz acted as Bakker's parole attorney, having said that he "would guarantee that Mr. Bakker would never again engage in the blend of religion and commerce that led to his conviction." Bakker was released from Federal Bureau of Prisons custody on December 1, 1994, owing $6 million to the IRS.
In 2003, Bakker began broadcasting The Jim Bakker Show daily at Studio City Café in Branson, Missouri, with his second wife Lori; it has been carried on CTN, Daystar, Folk TV, Grace Network (Canada), Daystar Television Canada, GEB America, Hope TV (Canada), Impact Network, WGN, WHT, TCT Network, The Word Network, UpliftTV, and ZLiving networks. Most of Bakker's audience receives his program on DirecTV and Dish Network.
Bakker condemned the prosperity theology in which he took part earlier in his career, and has embraced apocalypticism. His show has a millennial, survivalist focus and sells buckets of freeze-dried food, such as beans on toast, to his audience in preparation for the end of days. Elspeth Reeve wrote in The Atlantic that Bakker's "doomsday survival gear" is overpriced. A man named Jerry Crawford, who credits Bakker with saving his marriage, invested $25 million in a new ministry for Bakker in Blue Eye, Missouri, named Morningside USA. Production for The Jim Bakker Show moved to Morningside in 2008.
In 2013, Bakker wrote Time Has Come: How to Prepare Now for Epic Events Ahead about end-time events. Bakker has changed his views on prosperity theology. In his 1980 book Eight Keys to Success, he stated, "God wants you to be happy, God wants you to be rich, God wants you to prosper." In his 1996 book, I Was Wrong, he admitted that the first time he actually read the Bible all the way through was in prison. Bakker also wrote that he realized that he had taken passages out of context and used them as prooftexts to support his prosperity theology.
Bakker's revived show features a number of ministers who bill themselves as "prophets". He now says that "PTL" stands for "Prophets Talking Loud".
In an October 2017 video, Bakker said that "God will punish those" who ridicule him; he has said that Hurricane Harvey was a judgment of God, and he blamed Hurricane Matthew on then-President Barack Obama. Bakker predicted that if then-President Donald Trump was impeached, Christians would begin a Second American Civil War. He compared the 2017 Washington train derailment to the sinking of the RMS Titanic and stated the Amtrak train derailment was a warning from God. He also claimed that he predicted the September 11 attacks of 2001, stating that he "saw 9/11 in 1999 before New Year's Eve" and that there would "be terrorism" and bombings in New York City and Washington, D.C." A few days after the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, he stated that "God came to [him] in a dream... and he was wearing camouflage, a hunting vest and had an AR-15 strapped to his back" and that God supported Trump's plan to arm teachers. Following the death of Billy Graham on February 21, 2018, Bakker attended Graham's funeral and paid his respects, stating that Graham was the greatest preacher since Jesus, and also remarking that Graham had visited him in prison.
On the Stand in the Gap Today radio program, Pennsylvania Pastors Network president Sam Rohrer criticized Bakker's civil-war prediction. Christian Today criticized Bakker's show for preying on "the most vulnerable kinds of people" and claimed that it had "no place on our TV screens."
Bakker sold colloidal silver supplements that he advertised as a panacea. In March 2020, the office of the Attorney General of New York ordered Bakker to cease making false medicinal claims about his supplements' alleged ability to cure the 2019–2020 strains of coronavirus, and the Federal Trade Commission and the Food and Drug Administration also sent a warning letter to Bakker about his claims regarding the supplements and coronavirus.
Missouri attorney general Eric Schmitt and Arkansas attorney general Leslie Rutledge filed lawsuits against Bakker for allegedly pushing the supplements as a treatment for the virus. In the State lawsuit against him, Bakker is represented by former Missouri governor Jay Nixon, who has argued for the suit to be dismissed. Nixon says that the allegations made in the lawsuit are false, stating: "Bakker is being unfairly targeted by those who want to crush his ministry and force his Christian television program off the air."
In April 2020, prohibited from receiving credit card transactions, Bakker disclosed to his viewers that his ministry was on the brink of filing for bankruptcy and urgently petitioned them for donations.
The following month, GEB America and World Harvest Television dropped Bakker's program from their networks after DirecTV owner AT&T asked channels to reconsider airing the show. AT&T made the request of its channels in response to a deplatforming campaign from the liberal Christian group Faithful America.
On May 8, 2020, Lori Bakker announced that Jim Bakker had suffered a stroke that his son Jay described as “minor”. Lori stated that he would be taking a sabbatical from the program until he recovers. She blamed the stroke on Bakker's hard work on his show and wrote that he had described the criticism against him as “the most vicious attack that he has ever experienced”. Bakker returned to his program for the first time following his stroke on July 8, 2020.
On June 23, 2021, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt announced the settlement of the state's lawsuit against Bakker. Bakker and Morningside Church would be prohibited from saying silver solution could "diagnose, prevent, mitigate, treat, or cure any disease or illness". Restitution of about $157,000 would also be paid to those who bought silver solution between February 12, 2020, and March 10, 2020. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "James Orsen Bakker (/ˈbeɪkər/; born January 2, 1940) is an American televangelist. Between 1974 and 1987, Bakker hosted the television program The PTL Club and its cable television platform, the PTL Satellite Network, with his then wife, Tammy Faye. He also developed Heritage USA, a now-defunct Christian theme park in Fort Mill, South Carolina.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "In the late 1980s, Bakker resigned from the PTL ministry over a cover-up of hush money to church secretary Jessica Hahn for an alleged rape. Subsequent revelations of accounting fraud brought about felony charges, conviction, imprisonment, and divorce. Bakker later remarried and returned to televangelism, founding Morningside Church in Blue Eye, Missouri, and reestablishing the PTL ministry. He currently hosts The Jim Bakker Show, which focuses on the end times and the Second Coming of Christ while promoting emergency survival products. Bakker has written several books, including I Was Wrong and Time Has Come: How to Prepare Now for Epic Events Ahead.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "James Orsen Bakker was born in Muskegon, Michigan, the son of Raleigh Bakker and Furnia Lynette \"Furn\" Irwin. Bakker attended North Central University, a Minneapolis bible college affiliated with the Assemblies of God, where he met fellow student Tammy Faye LaValley in 1960. Bakker worked at a restaurant in the Young-Quinlan department store in Minneapolis; Tammy Faye worked at the Three Sisters, a nearby boutique.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The Bakkers married on April 1, 1961, and left college to become itinerant evangelists. They had two children, Tammy Sue \"Sissy\" Bakker Chapman (born March 2, 1970) and Jamie Charles \"Jay\" Bakker (born December 18, 1975). The couple divorced on March 13, 1992. On September 4, 1998, Bakker married Lori Beth Graham, a former televangelist, fifty days after they met. In 2002, they adopted five children.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In 1966, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker began working at Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) in Portsmouth, Virginia, which had an audience in the low thousands at the time. The Bakkers contributed to the network's growth, hosting a children's variety show called Come On Over that employed comic routines with puppets. Due to the success of Come On Over, Robertson made Bakker the host of a new prime-time talk show, The 700 Club, which gradually became CBN's flagship program. The Bakkers left CBN in 1972 and, the following year, joined with Paul and Jan Crouch to help co-found the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) in California. However, this partnership lasted only eight months until a falling-out between Jim Bakker and Paul Crouch caused the Bakkers to leave the new network.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "After their exit from TBN, the Bakkers moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, where in 1976 they debuted their own late night-style talk show, The PTL Club. Bakker founded the PTL Satellite Network in 1974, which aired The PTL Club and other religious television programs through local affiliates across the U.S.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Throughout the 1970s, Bakker built a headquarters for PTL in the Carolinas called Heritage Village. Over time, the Bakkers expanded the ministry to include the Heritage USA theme park in Fort Mill, South Carolina, which became the third most successful theme park in the U.S. at the time. Viewer contributions were estimated to exceed $1 million a week, with proceeds to expand the theme park and The PTL Club's mission. Bakker responded to inquiries about his use of mass media by saying: \"I believe that if Jesus were alive today, he would be on TV\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Two scandals brought down PTL in 1987: Bakker was accused of sexual misconduct by church secretary Jessica Hahn, which led to his resignation, and his illegal misuse of ministry funds eventually led to his imprisonment. Bakker was dismissed as an Assemblies of God minister on May 6, 1987. In 1990, the biographic television movie Fall from Grace, starring Kevin Spacey as Bakker, depicted his rise and fall. On January 18, 2019, ABC's 20/20 aired a two-hour special, entitled Unfaithfully Yours, about the PTL scandal.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In 1979, Bakker and PTL came under investigation by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for allegedly misusing funds raised on the air. The FCC report was finalized in 1982 and found that Bakker had raised $350,000 that he told viewers would go towards funding overseas missions but that was actually used to pay for part of Heritage USA. The report also found that the Bakkers used PTL funds for personal expenses. FCC commissioners voted four to three to drop the investigation, after which they allowed Bakker to sell the only TV station that he owned, therefore bypassing future FCC oversight. The FCC forwarded its report to the U.S. Department of Justice, which declined to press charges, citing insufficient evidence. Bakker used the controversy to raise more funds from his audience, branding the investigation a \"witch-hunt\" and asking viewers to \"give the Devil a black eye\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "A confidential 1985 Internal Revenue Service (IRS) report found that $1.3 million in ministry funds was used for the Bakkers' personal benefit from 1980 to 1983. The report recommended that PTL be stripped of its tax-exempt status, but no action was taken until after the Jessica Hahn scandal broke in 1987. Art Harris and Michael Isikoff wrote in The Washington Post that politics may have played a role in the three government agencies taking no action against PTL despite the evidence against them, as members of the Reagan administration were not eager to go after television ministers whose evangelical followers made up their base.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "A $279,000 payoff for the silence of Jessica Hahn, who alleged that Bakker and former PTL Club co-host John Wesley Fletcher drugged and raped her, was paid with PTL funds through Bakker's associate Roe Messner. Bakker, who made PTL's financial decisions, allegedly kept two sets of books to conceal accounting irregularities. Reporters for The Charlotte Observer, led by Charles Shepard, investigated PTL's finances and published a series of articles.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "On March 19, 1987, after the disclosure of a payoff to Hahn, Bakker resigned from PTL. Although he acknowledged that he had a sexual encounter with Hahn at a hotel room in Clearwater, Florida, he denied raping her. Bakker was also the subject of homosexual and bisexual allegations made by Fletcher and PTL director Jay Babcock, which Bakker denied under oath. Rival televangelist John Ankerberg appeared on Larry King Live and made several allegations of moral impropriety against Bakker, which both Bakkers denied.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Bakker was succeeded as PTL head by the Rev. Jerry Falwell of Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia. Bakker chose Falwell as his successor because he feared that fellow televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, who had initiated an Assemblies of God investigation into Bakker's sexual misconduct, was attempting to take over his ministry.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Bakker believed that Falwell would temporarily lead the ministry until the scandal died down, but on April 28, 1987, Falwell barred Bakker from returning to PTL upon hearing of allegations of illicit behavior which went beyond the Hahn allegations. Later that summer, as donations declined sharply in the wake of Bakker's resignation and the end of The PTL Club, Falwell raised $20 million to keep Heritage USA solvent and took a promised water slide ride at the park. Falwell and the remaining members of the PTL board resigned in October 1987, stating that a ruling from a bankruptcy court judge made rebuilding the ministry impossible.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In response to the scandal, Falwell called Bakker a liar, an embezzler, a sexual deviant, and \"the greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history\". On CNN, Swaggart stated that Bakker was a \"cancer in the body of Christ\". In February 1988, Swaggart became involved in a sex scandal of his own after being caught visiting prostitutes in New Orleans. The Bakker and Swaggart scandals had a profound effect on the world of televangelism, causing greater media scrutiny of TV ministers and their finances. Falwell said that the scandals had \"strengthened broadcast evangelism and made Christianity stronger, more mature and more committed.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The PTL Club's fundraising activities between 1984 and 1987 were reported by The Charlotte Observer, eventually leading to criminal charges against Bakker. Bakker and his PTL associates sold $1,000 \"lifetime memberships\", entitling buyers to an annual three-night stay at a luxury hotel at Heritage USA during that period. According to the prosecution at Bakker's fraud trial, tens of thousands of memberships were sold but only one 500-room hotel was ever finished. Bakker sold \"exclusive partnerships\" which exceeded capacity, raising more than twice the money needed to build the hotel. Much of the money paid Heritage USA's operating expenses, and Bakker kept $3.4 million.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "After a 16-month federal grand jury probe, Bakker was indicted in 1988 on eight counts of mail fraud, 15 counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy. In 1989, after a five-week trial which began on August 28 in Charlotte, North Carolina, a jury found him guilty on all 24 counts. Judge Robert Daniel Potter sentenced Bakker to 45 years in federal prison and imposed a $500,000 fine. At the Federal Medical Center, Rochester in Rochester, Minnesota, he shared a cell with activist Lyndon LaRouche and skydiver Roger Nelson.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld Bakker's conviction on the fraud and conspiracy charges, voided Bakker's 45-year sentence and $500,000 fine and ordered a new sentencing hearing in February 1991. The court ruled that Potter's sentencing statement about Bakker, that \"those of us who do have a religion are sick of being saps for money-grubbing preachers and priests\", was evidence that the judge had injected his religious beliefs into Bakker's sentence.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "A sentence-reduction hearing was held on November 16, 1992, and Bakker's sentence was reduced to eight years. In August 1993, he was transferred to a minimum-security federal prison in Jesup, Georgia. Bakker was paroled in July 1994, after serving almost five years of his sentence. His son, Jay, spearheaded a letter-writing campaign to the parole board advocating leniency. Celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz acted as Bakker's parole attorney, having said that he \"would guarantee that Mr. Bakker would never again engage in the blend of religion and commerce that led to his conviction.\" Bakker was released from Federal Bureau of Prisons custody on December 1, 1994, owing $6 million to the IRS.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In 2003, Bakker began broadcasting The Jim Bakker Show daily at Studio City Café in Branson, Missouri, with his second wife Lori; it has been carried on CTN, Daystar, Folk TV, Grace Network (Canada), Daystar Television Canada, GEB America, Hope TV (Canada), Impact Network, WGN, WHT, TCT Network, The Word Network, UpliftTV, and ZLiving networks. Most of Bakker's audience receives his program on DirecTV and Dish Network.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Bakker condemned the prosperity theology in which he took part earlier in his career, and has embraced apocalypticism. His show has a millennial, survivalist focus and sells buckets of freeze-dried food, such as beans on toast, to his audience in preparation for the end of days. Elspeth Reeve wrote in The Atlantic that Bakker's \"doomsday survival gear\" is overpriced. A man named Jerry Crawford, who credits Bakker with saving his marriage, invested $25 million in a new ministry for Bakker in Blue Eye, Missouri, named Morningside USA. Production for The Jim Bakker Show moved to Morningside in 2008.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In 2013, Bakker wrote Time Has Come: How to Prepare Now for Epic Events Ahead about end-time events. Bakker has changed his views on prosperity theology. In his 1980 book Eight Keys to Success, he stated, \"God wants you to be happy, God wants you to be rich, God wants you to prosper.\" In his 1996 book, I Was Wrong, he admitted that the first time he actually read the Bible all the way through was in prison. Bakker also wrote that he realized that he had taken passages out of context and used them as prooftexts to support his prosperity theology.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Bakker's revived show features a number of ministers who bill themselves as \"prophets\". He now says that \"PTL\" stands for \"Prophets Talking Loud\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "In an October 2017 video, Bakker said that \"God will punish those\" who ridicule him; he has said that Hurricane Harvey was a judgment of God, and he blamed Hurricane Matthew on then-President Barack Obama. Bakker predicted that if then-President Donald Trump was impeached, Christians would begin a Second American Civil War. He compared the 2017 Washington train derailment to the sinking of the RMS Titanic and stated the Amtrak train derailment was a warning from God. He also claimed that he predicted the September 11 attacks of 2001, stating that he \"saw 9/11 in 1999 before New Year's Eve\" and that there would \"be terrorism\" and bombings in New York City and Washington, D.C.\" A few days after the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, he stated that \"God came to [him] in a dream... and he was wearing camouflage, a hunting vest and had an AR-15 strapped to his back\" and that God supported Trump's plan to arm teachers. Following the death of Billy Graham on February 21, 2018, Bakker attended Graham's funeral and paid his respects, stating that Graham was the greatest preacher since Jesus, and also remarking that Graham had visited him in prison.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "On the Stand in the Gap Today radio program, Pennsylvania Pastors Network president Sam Rohrer criticized Bakker's civil-war prediction. Christian Today criticized Bakker's show for preying on \"the most vulnerable kinds of people\" and claimed that it had \"no place on our TV screens.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Bakker sold colloidal silver supplements that he advertised as a panacea. In March 2020, the office of the Attorney General of New York ordered Bakker to cease making false medicinal claims about his supplements' alleged ability to cure the 2019–2020 strains of coronavirus, and the Federal Trade Commission and the Food and Drug Administration also sent a warning letter to Bakker about his claims regarding the supplements and coronavirus.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Missouri attorney general Eric Schmitt and Arkansas attorney general Leslie Rutledge filed lawsuits against Bakker for allegedly pushing the supplements as a treatment for the virus. In the State lawsuit against him, Bakker is represented by former Missouri governor Jay Nixon, who has argued for the suit to be dismissed. Nixon says that the allegations made in the lawsuit are false, stating: \"Bakker is being unfairly targeted by those who want to crush his ministry and force his Christian television program off the air.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In April 2020, prohibited from receiving credit card transactions, Bakker disclosed to his viewers that his ministry was on the brink of filing for bankruptcy and urgently petitioned them for donations.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The following month, GEB America and World Harvest Television dropped Bakker's program from their networks after DirecTV owner AT&T asked channels to reconsider airing the show. AT&T made the request of its channels in response to a deplatforming campaign from the liberal Christian group Faithful America.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "On May 8, 2020, Lori Bakker announced that Jim Bakker had suffered a stroke that his son Jay described as “minor”. Lori stated that he would be taking a sabbatical from the program until he recovers. She blamed the stroke on Bakker's hard work on his show and wrote that he had described the criticism against him as “the most vicious attack that he has ever experienced”. Bakker returned to his program for the first time following his stroke on July 8, 2020.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "On June 23, 2021, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt announced the settlement of the state's lawsuit against Bakker. Bakker and Morningside Church would be prohibited from saying silver solution could \"diagnose, prevent, mitigate, treat, or cure any disease or illness\". Restitution of about $157,000 would also be paid to those who bought silver solution between February 12, 2020, and March 10, 2020.",
"title": "Career"
}
]
| James Orsen Bakker is an American televangelist. Between 1974 and 1987, Bakker hosted the television program The PTL Club and its cable television platform, the PTL Satellite Network, with his then wife, Tammy Faye. He also developed Heritage USA, a now-defunct Christian theme park in Fort Mill, South Carolina. In the late 1980s, Bakker resigned from the PTL ministry over a cover-up of hush money to church secretary Jessica Hahn for an alleged rape. Subsequent revelations of accounting fraud brought about felony charges, conviction, imprisonment, and divorce. Bakker later remarried and returned to televangelism, founding Morningside Church in Blue Eye, Missouri, and reestablishing the PTL ministry. He currently hosts The Jim Bakker Show, which focuses on the end times and the Second Coming of Christ while promoting emergency survival products. Bakker has written several books, including I Was Wrong and Time Has Come: How to Prepare Now for Epic Events Ahead. | 2001-10-23T10:24:03Z | 2023-12-16T16:15:42Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Bakker |
16,241 | Jan and Dean | Jan and Dean was an American rock duo consisting of William Jan Berry (April 3, 1941 – March 26, 2004) and Dean Ormsby Torrence (born March 10, 1940). In the early 1960s, they were pioneers of the California Sound and vocal surf music styles popularized by the Beach Boys.
Among their most successful songs was 1963's "Surf City", the first surf song ever to reach the #1 spot. Their other charting top 10 singles were "Drag City" (1963), "Dead Man's Curve" (1964; inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2008), and "The Little Old Lady from Pasadena" (1964).
In 1972, Torrence won the Grammy Award for Best Album Cover for the psychedelic rock band Pollution's first eponymous 1971 album, and was nominated three other times in the same category for albums of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. In 2013, Torrence's design contribution of the Surf City Allstars' In Concert CD was named a Silver Award of Distinction at the Communicator Awards competition.
William Jan Berry (April 3, 1941 – March 26, 2004), was born in Los Angeles to Clara Lorentze Mustad (born September 2, 1919, Bergen, Norway – died July 9, 2009) and aeronautical engineer William L. Berry (born December 7, 1909, New York City – died December 19, 2004, Camarillo, California), He was raised in Bel Air, Los Angeles. Jan's father worked for Howard Hughes as a project manager of the "Spruce Goose" and flew on its only flight with Hughes.
Dean Ormsby Torrence (born (1940-03-10) March 10, 1940 (age 83)) was born in Los Angeles, the son of Natalie Ormsby (April 10, 1911 – August 10, 2008) and Maurice Dean Torrence (December 5, 1907 – November 16, 1997). His father, Maurice, was a graduate of Stanford University, and was a sales manager at the Wilshire Oil Company.
Berry and Torrence met while both were students at Emerson Junior High School in Westwood, Los Angeles, and both were on the school's football team. By 1957, they were students in the class of 1958 at the nearby University High School, where again they were both on the school's football team, the Warriors. Berry and Torrence had adjoining lockers, and after football practice, they began harmonizing together in the showers with several other football players, including future actor James Brolin.
In order to enter a talent competition at University High School, Berry and Torrence helped form a doo-wop group known as "The Barons" (named after their high school's Hi-Y club, of which they were members), which was composed of fellow University High students William "Chuck" Steele (lead singer), Arnold P. "Arnie" Ginsburg (born November 19, 1939; 1st tenor), Wallace S. "Wally" Yagi (born July 20, 1940; 2nd tenor), John 'Sagi" Seligman (2nd tenor), with Berry singing bass and Torrence providing falsetto.
During its short duration, Sandy Nelson, Torrence's neighbor, played drums, and future Beach Boy Bruce Johnston occasionally sang and played piano. The Barons rehearsed for hours in Berry's parents' garage, where Berry's father provided an upright piano and two two-track Ampex reel-to-reel tape recorders.
In 1958, the Barons performed to popular acclaim at the talent competition at University High School, covering contemporary hits like "Get a Job", "Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay", and "Short Shorts". Following the contest, various members of the Barons drifted away, leaving only Berry and Torrence, who tried to write their own songs.
After being inspired by a poster featuring a local Hollywood burlesque performer, Virginia Lee Hicks, who was then performing as Jennie Lee, the "Bazoom Girl", at the New Follies Burlesk at 548 S. Main St, Los Angeles, Ginsburg wrote a tribute song, "Jennie Lee", that he brought to Berry and Torrence. Berry adapted the Civil War tune "Aura Lea" and arranged the harmonies. After weeks of practice, Berry, Ginsburg, and Torrence planned to make a demo recording in Berry's garage, but Torrence was conscripted into the United States Army Reserve, forcing Berry and Ginsburg to record "Jennie Lee" without Torrence, with Berry's friend and fellow University High student Donald J. Altfeld (born March 18, 1940, in Los Angeles ) "beating out the rhythm on a children's metal high chair". The next day Berry took their recording to Radio Recorders, a small recording studio, to have it transferred to an acetate disc. Joe Lubin, Vice President and Head of A & R of Arwin Records, was impressed and offered to add instruments and to release it through Arwin.
In March 1958, the fathers of Berry and Ginsburg signed contracts authorizing Lubin to produce, arrange, and manage their sons.
Produced by Lubin, "Jennie Lee" (Arwin 108), backed with "Gotta Get a Date" (credited to Ginsburg, Berry & Lubin), became a surprise commercial success. According to Berry biographer Mark A. Moore, "The song (with backing vocals, plus additional instruments added by the Ernie Freeman combo) had a raucous R&B flavor, with a bouncing bomp-bomp vocal hook that would become a signature from Jan on future recordings." Distributed by Dot Records, "Jennie Lee" was released in mid-April, entered the charts on May 10, 1958, the same day they appeared on ABC's Dick Clark Show. "Jennie Lee" peaked at No. 3 on the Cash Box charts on June 21, 1958, No. 4 on the R&B charts, and No. 8 on the Billboard charts on June 30, 1958. Billy Ward and his Dominoes's R&B cover of "Jennie Lee" reached No. 55 in the Pop charts in June 1958, while other cover versions including that of Moon Mullican (Coral 9-61994) and Bobby Phillips & the Toppers (Tops 45-R422-49), released in 1958 failed to chart.
In July 1958, Jan & Arnie released their second single, "Gas Money" backed with "Bonnie Lou" (Arwin 111), both written by Berry, Ginsburg, and Altfeld. Like "Jennie Lee", "Gas Money" contained a few elements of what would later become surf music. It entered the Billboard charts on August 24, 1958, and peaked at No. 81 a week later. Jan & Arnie were a featured act on the Summer Dance Party that toured the US East Coast, including Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Connecticut in July 1958. By the end of the month, they traveled to Manhattan to appear on The Dick Clark Show.
On August 24, 1958, Jan & Arnie played in a live show hosted by Dick Clark that featured Bobby Darin, the Champs, Sheb Wooley, the Blossoms, the Six Teens, Jerry Wallace, Jack Jones, Rod McKuen and the Ernie Freeman Orchestra in front of nearly 12,000 fans at the first rock-n-roll show ever held at the Hollywood Bowl.
By September 6, 1958, Jan & Arnie's third and final single, "The Beat That Can't Be Beat" backed with "I Love Linda" (Arwin 113), again composed by the Berry, Ginsburg and Altfeld team, was released. However this single failed to chart, due in part to a lack of distribution. On October 19, 1958, Jan & Arnie performed "The Beat That Can't Be Beat" on CBS's Jack Benny Show.
Arnie Ginsburg recorded a one-off single with a band named the Rituals on the Arwin label. The single, "Girl in Zanzibar" b/w "Guitarro", was released on vinyl in January 1959, preceding Jan and Dean's first single "Baby Talk", released in May 1959. Other than Arnie, the single featured Richard Podolor on guitar, Sandy Nelson on drums, Bruce Johnston on piano, Dave Shostac on sax, Harper Cosby on bass and Mike Deasy on guitar. It is unclear if the actual single was released for the general public but there are several promotional copies pressed to vinyl in existence.
By the end of the year, when Torrence had completed his six-month stint at Fort Ord, Ginsburg had become disenchanted with the music business. Ginsburg enrolled in the School of Architecture and Design at the University of Southern California and graduated in the field of product design in 1966. After graduation Ginsburg worked for several noted Los Angeles architects, among them Charles Eames, and in December 1973 he was granted a U.S. patent for a table he designed.
Ginsburg moved in 1975 to Santa Barbara, California, where he worked as an architectural designer. designing the innovative Ginsburg House. In September 1976, Ginsburg and Michael W. O'Neill were granted a patent for a portable batting cage.
After Torrence returned from a six-month compulsory stint in the US Army Reserve, Berry and Torrence began to make music as "Jan and Dean". With the help of record producers Herb Alpert and Lou Adler, Jan and Dean scored a No. 10 hit on the Dore label with "Baby Talk" (1959) (which was incorrectly labeled as Jan & Arnie when it initially was released), then scored a series of hits over the next couple of years. Playing local venues, they met and performed with the Beach Boys, and discovered the appeal of the latter's "surf sound". By this time Berry was co-writing, arranging, and producing all of Jan and Dean's original material.
During this time Berry co-wrote or arranged and produced songs for other artists outside of Jan and Dean, including the Angels ("I Adore Him", Top 30), the Gents, the Matadors (Sinners), Pixie (unreleased), Jill Gibson, Shelley Fabares, Deane Hawley, the Rip Chords ("Three Window Coupe", Top 30), and Johnny Crawford, among others.
Unlike most other rock 'n roll acts of the period, Jan and Dean did not give music their full-time attention. Jan and Dean were college students, maintaining their studies while writing and recording music and making public appearances on the side. Torrence majored in advertising design in the school of architecture at USC, where he also was a member of the Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity. Berry took science and music classes at UCLA, became a member of Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, and entered the California College of Medicine (now the UC Irvine School of Medicine) in 1963.
Jan and Dean reached their commercial peak in 1963 and 1964, after they met Brian Wilson. The duo scored sixteen Top 40 hits on the Billboard and Cash Box magazine charts, with a total of twenty-six chart hits over an eight-year period (1959-1966). Berry and Wilson collaborated on roughly a dozen hits and album cuts for Jan and Dean, including "Surf City", co-written by Jan Berry and Brian Wilson, (#1, 1963). Subsequent top 10 hits included "Drag City" (#10, 1964), the eerily portentous "Dead Man's Curve" (#8, 1964), and "The Little Old Lady from Pasadena" (#3, 1964).
In 1964, at the height of their fame, Jan and Dean hosted and performed at The T.A.M.I. Show, a historic concert film directed by Steve Binder. The film also featured such acts as the Rolling Stones, Chuck Berry, Gerry & the Pacemakers, James Brown, Billy J. Kramer & the Dakotas, Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, Lesley Gore, Smokey Robinson & the Miracles and the Beach Boys. Also in 1964, the duo performed the title track for the Columbia Pictures film Ride the Wild Surf, starring Fabian Forte, Tab Hunter, Peter Brown, Shelley Fabares, and Barbara Eden. The song, penned by Jan Berry, Brian Wilson and Roger Christian, was a Top 20 national hit. The pair were also to have appeared in the film, but their roles were cut following their friendship with Barry Keenan, who had engineered the Frank Sinatra Jr. kidnapping.
Jan and Dean also filmed two unreleased television pilots: Surf Scene in 1963 and On the Run in 1966. Their feature film for Paramount Pictures Easy Come, Easy Go was canceled when Berry, as well as the film's director and other crew members, were seriously injured in a railroad accident while shooting the film in Chatsworth, California, in August 1965.
After the surfing craze, Jan and Dean scored two Top-30 hits in 1965: "You Really Know How to Hurt a Guy" got up to 27 and "I Found a Girl" got to 30—the latter from the album Folk 'n Roll. During this period, they also began to experiment with cutting-edge comedy concepts such as the original (unreleased) Filet of Soul and Jan & Dean Meet Batman. The former's album cover shows Berry with his leg in a cast as a result of the accident while filming Easy Come, Easy Go.
In 1966, Jan Berry recorded "The Universal Coward", an angry response to Donovan’s anti-war single Universal Soldier (originally written by Buffy Sainte-Marie) even though Berry never served in the military.
On April 12, 1966, Berry received severe head injuries in an automobile accident on Whittier Drive, just a short distance from Dead Man's Curve in Beverly Hills, California, two years after the song had become a hit. He was en route to a business meeting when he crashed his Corvette into a parked truck on Whittier Drive, near the intersection of Sunset Boulevard, in Beverly Hills. Berry also had separated from his girlfriend of seven years, singer-artist Jill Gibson, later a member of the Mamas & the Papas for a short time, who also had co-written several songs with him. He was in a coma for more than two months before finally awakening on the morning of June 16.
Berry recovered from brain damage and partial paralysis. He had limited use of his right arm, and had to learn to write with his left hand as well as learning to walk again.
In Berry's absence, Torrence released several singles on the J&D Record Co. label and recorded Save for a Rainy Day in 1966, a concept album featuring all rain-themed songs. Torrence posed with Berry's brother Ken for the album cover photos. Columbia Records released one single from the project ("Yellow Balloon") as did the song's writer, Gary Zekley, with the group the Yellow Balloon.
Besides his studio work, Torrence became a graphic artist, starting his own company, Kittyhawk Graphics, and designing and creating album covers and logos for other musicians and recording artists, including Harry Nilsson, Steve Martin, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Dennis Wilson, Bruce Johnston, the Beach Boys, Diana Ross and the Supremes, Linda Ronstadt, Canned Heat, the Ventures and many others. Torrence (with Gene Brownell) won a Grammy Award for "Album Cover of the Year" in 1971, for the album Pollution by Pollution on Prophesy Records.
Berry returned to the studio in April 1967, almost one year to the day after his accident. Working with Alan Wolfson, he began writing and producing music again. In December 1967, Jan and Dean signed an agreement with Warner Bros. Records. Warner issued three singles under the name "Jan and Dean", but a 1968 Berry-produced album for Warner Bros., the psychedelic Carnival of Sound, remained unreleased until February 2010, when Rhino Records' "Handmade" label put out CD and vinyl compilations of all tracks recorded for Carnival, along with various outtakes and remixes from the project.
In 1971, Jan and Dean released the album Jan & Dean Anthology Album under the label United Artists Records. The album included many of their top hits, starting with 1958's "Jennie Lee" and ending with 1968's "Vegetables".
Berry began to sing again in the early 1970s, touring with his Aloha band, while Dean began performing with a band called Papa Doo Run Run.
On August 26, 1973, Torrence was scheduled to appear at the Hollywood Palladium as part of Jim Pewter's "Surfer's Stomp" reunion. Torrence had recently released some Jan & Dean songs with new vocal parts by Bruce Johnston (of the Beach Boys) and producer Terry Melcher under the moniker the Legendary Masked Surfers. Torrence arranged with Berry to join him lip-syncing on stage to a pre-recorded track. The two anticipated that the audience would know it was a tape recording, and they decided to make light of it during the performance. That night, they joked around and stopped lip-syncing on stage while the music continued, but the audience became angry and started booing. The duo's first live performance after Berry's accident occurred at the Palomino Nightclub in North Hollywood on June 5, 1976, ten years after the accident, as guests of Disneyland regulars Papa Doo Run Run. Their first actual multi-song concert billed as Jan and Dean took place in 1978 in New York City at the Palladium as part of the Murray the K Brooklyn Fox Reunion Show. This was followed by a handful of East Coast shows as guests of their longtime friends the Beach Boys. Four nationwide J & D headlining tours followed through 1980. Berry was still suffering the effects of his 1966 accident, with partial paralysis and aphasia.
The duo experienced a resurgence after Paul Morantz's "Road back from Deadman's Curve" article appeared in Rolling Stone in 1974, writing the piece after spending extensive time with the two singers, their families, doctors and associates. Morantz first submitted the story to Playboy, who recommended it to Rolling Stone. He then wrote a film treatment from his story which was purchased by CBS.
On February 3, 1978, CBS aired a made-for-TV film about the duo titled Deadman's Curve. The biopic starred Richard Hatch as Jan Berry and Bruce Davison as Dean Torrence, with cameo appearances by Dick Clark, Wolfman Jack, Mike Love of the Beach Boys, and Bruce Johnston (who at that time was temporarily out of the Beach Boys), as well as Berry himself. Near the end of the film he can be seen sitting in the audience, watching "himself" (Richard Hatch) perform onstage. The part of Jan and Dean's band was played by Papa Doo Run Run, which included Mark Ward and Jim Armstrong, who went on to form Jan and Dean and the Bel-Air Bandits. Johnston and Berry had known each other since high school, and had played music together in Berry's garage in Bel Air — long before Jan and Dean or the Beach Boys were formed. Following the release of the film, the duo made steps toward an official comeback that year, including touring with the Beach Boys, and performing with Papa Doo Run Run at Cupertino High School. In the Netherlands the showing on television of the movie by Veronica in August 1979 earned them a huge hit record of the re-recorded "Surf City" and "Deadman's Curve" songs as a double A-sided single record release, and a golden oldies record having "The Little Old Lady From Pasadena" as its flip side reached a lower position in the charts.
In the early 1980s, Papa Doo Run Run left to explore other performance and recording ventures. Berry struggled to overcome drug addiction. In 1979, Berry had performed over 100 concerts of Jan and Dean songs with another front man from Hawaii, Randy Ruff. Torrence also toured briefly as "Mike & Dean", with Mike Love of the Beach Boys. Later, the duo reunited for good. In "Phase II" of their career, Torrence led the touring operation.
Jan and Dean continued to tour on their own throughout the 1980s, the 1990s, and into the new millennium – with 1960s nostalgia providing them with a ready audience, headlining oldies shows throughout North America. Sundazed Records reissued Torrence's Save for a Rainy Day in 1996 in CD and vinyl formats, as well as the collector's vinyl 45 rpm companion EP, "Sounds For A Rainy Day", featuring four instrumental versions of the album's tracks.
Between the 1970s and the early 2000s, Torrence issued a number of re-recordings of classic Jan and Dean and Beach Boys hits. A double album titled One Summer Night / Live was issued by Rhino Records in 1982. Torrence released the album Silver Summer with the help of Mike Love in 1985 for Jan & Dean's 25th anniversary. Silver Summer was officially released as a Jan & Dean album, but falsely gives credit to Berry as co-producer and singer; Berry did not contribute to the album. Torrence participated with Berry on Port to Paradise, released as a cassette on the J&D Records label in 1986. In 1997, after many years of hard work, Berry released a solo album called Second Wave on One Way Records. June 11, 2002, Torrence released a solo album titled Anthology: Legendary Masked Surfer Unmasked.
On August 31, 1991, Berry married Gertie Filip at the Stardust Convention Centre in Las Vegas, Nevada. Torrence was Berry's best man at the wedding.
Berry died March 26, 2004, after a seizure. He was an organ donor and his body was cremated. On April 18, a "Celebration of Life" was held in Berry's memory at the Roxy Theatre on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, California. Attendees included Torrence, Lou Adler, Jill Gibson, and Nancy Sinatra, along with many family members, friends, and musicians associated with Jan and Dean and the Beach Boys, including the original members of Papa Doo Run Run.
In February 2010, the Jan and Dean album Carnival of Sound was released on the Rhino Handmade label. The album cover was designed by Torrence. Along with the CD, there was a limited edition (1500 copies), which included a 10-track LP. The album was released in Europe in April 2010 in its original US form.
In 2012, Torrence reunited with Bruce Davison, who portrayed him in the 1978 film Deadman's Curve, to perform with the Bamboo Trading Company on their From Kitty Hawk To Surf City album. The songs were "Shrewd Awakening" and "Tonga Hut", which was featured on the film Return of the Killer Shrews, a sequel to the 1959 film The Killer Shrews and also "Tweet (Don't Talk Anymore)", "Drinkin' In the Sunshine", and "Star Of The Beach". The album also features Dean's two daughters, Jillian and Katie Torrence. Torrence and his two daughters were featured in the music video of "Shrewd Awakening".
After Berry's death, Torrence began touring occasionally with the Surf City All-Stars. He serves as a spokesman for the City of Huntington Beach, California, which, thanks in part to his efforts, is nationally recognized as "Surf City USA". Torrence's website features—among other things—rare images, a complete Jan and Dean discography, a biography, and a timeline of his career with cohort Jan Berry. He currently resides in Huntington Beach, California, with his wife and two daughters.
In 1964, Jan and Dean were signed to host what became the first multi-act rock and roll show that was edited into a motion picture designed for wide distribution. The T.A.M.I. Show became a seminal and original production – in essence one of the first rock videos – on its release in 1964. Using a high-resolution videotape process called Electronovision (transferred from television directly onto 35mm motion picture stock as a kinescope), new sound recording techniques and having a remarkable cast, The T.A.M.I. Show set the standard for all succeeding music film and video work, including many of the early videos shown by MTV 17 years later. The revolutionary technical achievements of The T.A.M.I. Show and the list of performers (including a performance by James Brown that many critics have called the best of his career) marked a high point for Jan and Dean, as they were the hosts and one of the main featured acts as well. They became one of the main faces of mid-1960s music, until Berry's auto accident two years later, through their T.A.M.I. Show appearance.
According to rock critic Dave Marsh, the attitude and public persona of punk rock can be traced to Jan and Dean.
Brian Wilson has cited Berry as having a direct impact on his own growth as a record producer.
In an interview conducted by Jan and Dean fan and historian David Beard for the Collectors' Choice release, Jan & Dean, the Complete Liberty Singles, Dean Torrence stated that he felt the duo should be in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame: "We have the scoreboard if you just want to compare number of hits and musical projects done. We beat 75 percent of the people in there. So what else is it? I've got to think that we were pretty irreverent when it came to the music industry. They kind of always held that against us. That's okay with me."
Jan and Dean were inducted into the Hollywood Rock Walk of Fame on April 12, 1996, exactly 30 years after Jan Berry had his near fatal car accident.
On January 28, 2023, Jan and Dean were inducted into the California Music Hall Of Fame.
The Who covered Jan and Dean's "Bucket T" on their UK EP Ready Steady Who from 1966. It is one of only a few songs the group performed where surf-fan Keith Moon provided the lead vocals.
Alternative rock group the Red Hot Chili Peppers referenced the duo in their song "Did I Let You Know", on the album I'm with You. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Jan and Dean was an American rock duo consisting of William Jan Berry (April 3, 1941 – March 26, 2004) and Dean Ormsby Torrence (born March 10, 1940). In the early 1960s, they were pioneers of the California Sound and vocal surf music styles popularized by the Beach Boys.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Among their most successful songs was 1963's \"Surf City\", the first surf song ever to reach the #1 spot. Their other charting top 10 singles were \"Drag City\" (1963), \"Dead Man's Curve\" (1964; inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2008), and \"The Little Old Lady from Pasadena\" (1964).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In 1972, Torrence won the Grammy Award for Best Album Cover for the psychedelic rock band Pollution's first eponymous 1971 album, and was nominated three other times in the same category for albums of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. In 2013, Torrence's design contribution of the Surf City Allstars' In Concert CD was named a Silver Award of Distinction at the Communicator Awards competition.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "William Jan Berry (April 3, 1941 – March 26, 2004), was born in Los Angeles to Clara Lorentze Mustad (born September 2, 1919, Bergen, Norway – died July 9, 2009) and aeronautical engineer William L. Berry (born December 7, 1909, New York City – died December 19, 2004, Camarillo, California), He was raised in Bel Air, Los Angeles. Jan's father worked for Howard Hughes as a project manager of the \"Spruce Goose\" and flew on its only flight with Hughes.",
"title": "Early lives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Dean Ormsby Torrence (born (1940-03-10) March 10, 1940 (age 83)) was born in Los Angeles, the son of Natalie Ormsby (April 10, 1911 – August 10, 2008) and Maurice Dean Torrence (December 5, 1907 – November 16, 1997). His father, Maurice, was a graduate of Stanford University, and was a sales manager at the Wilshire Oil Company.",
"title": "Early lives"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Berry and Torrence met while both were students at Emerson Junior High School in Westwood, Los Angeles, and both were on the school's football team. By 1957, they were students in the class of 1958 at the nearby University High School, where again they were both on the school's football team, the Warriors. Berry and Torrence had adjoining lockers, and after football practice, they began harmonizing together in the showers with several other football players, including future actor James Brolin.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In order to enter a talent competition at University High School, Berry and Torrence helped form a doo-wop group known as \"The Barons\" (named after their high school's Hi-Y club, of which they were members), which was composed of fellow University High students William \"Chuck\" Steele (lead singer), Arnold P. \"Arnie\" Ginsburg (born November 19, 1939; 1st tenor), Wallace S. \"Wally\" Yagi (born July 20, 1940; 2nd tenor), John 'Sagi\" Seligman (2nd tenor), with Berry singing bass and Torrence providing falsetto.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "During its short duration, Sandy Nelson, Torrence's neighbor, played drums, and future Beach Boy Bruce Johnston occasionally sang and played piano. The Barons rehearsed for hours in Berry's parents' garage, where Berry's father provided an upright piano and two two-track Ampex reel-to-reel tape recorders.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In 1958, the Barons performed to popular acclaim at the talent competition at University High School, covering contemporary hits like \"Get a Job\", \"Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay\", and \"Short Shorts\". Following the contest, various members of the Barons drifted away, leaving only Berry and Torrence, who tried to write their own songs.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "After being inspired by a poster featuring a local Hollywood burlesque performer, Virginia Lee Hicks, who was then performing as Jennie Lee, the \"Bazoom Girl\", at the New Follies Burlesk at 548 S. Main St, Los Angeles, Ginsburg wrote a tribute song, \"Jennie Lee\", that he brought to Berry and Torrence. Berry adapted the Civil War tune \"Aura Lea\" and arranged the harmonies. After weeks of practice, Berry, Ginsburg, and Torrence planned to make a demo recording in Berry's garage, but Torrence was conscripted into the United States Army Reserve, forcing Berry and Ginsburg to record \"Jennie Lee\" without Torrence, with Berry's friend and fellow University High student Donald J. Altfeld (born March 18, 1940, in Los Angeles ) \"beating out the rhythm on a children's metal high chair\". The next day Berry took their recording to Radio Recorders, a small recording studio, to have it transferred to an acetate disc. Joe Lubin, Vice President and Head of A & R of Arwin Records, was impressed and offered to add instruments and to release it through Arwin.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In March 1958, the fathers of Berry and Ginsburg signed contracts authorizing Lubin to produce, arrange, and manage their sons.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Produced by Lubin, \"Jennie Lee\" (Arwin 108), backed with \"Gotta Get a Date\" (credited to Ginsburg, Berry & Lubin), became a surprise commercial success. According to Berry biographer Mark A. Moore, \"The song (with backing vocals, plus additional instruments added by the Ernie Freeman combo) had a raucous R&B flavor, with a bouncing bomp-bomp vocal hook that would become a signature from Jan on future recordings.\" Distributed by Dot Records, \"Jennie Lee\" was released in mid-April, entered the charts on May 10, 1958, the same day they appeared on ABC's Dick Clark Show. \"Jennie Lee\" peaked at No. 3 on the Cash Box charts on June 21, 1958, No. 4 on the R&B charts, and No. 8 on the Billboard charts on June 30, 1958. Billy Ward and his Dominoes's R&B cover of \"Jennie Lee\" reached No. 55 in the Pop charts in June 1958, while other cover versions including that of Moon Mullican (Coral 9-61994) and Bobby Phillips & the Toppers (Tops 45-R422-49), released in 1958 failed to chart.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In July 1958, Jan & Arnie released their second single, \"Gas Money\" backed with \"Bonnie Lou\" (Arwin 111), both written by Berry, Ginsburg, and Altfeld. Like \"Jennie Lee\", \"Gas Money\" contained a few elements of what would later become surf music. It entered the Billboard charts on August 24, 1958, and peaked at No. 81 a week later. Jan & Arnie were a featured act on the Summer Dance Party that toured the US East Coast, including Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Connecticut in July 1958. By the end of the month, they traveled to Manhattan to appear on The Dick Clark Show.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "On August 24, 1958, Jan & Arnie played in a live show hosted by Dick Clark that featured Bobby Darin, the Champs, Sheb Wooley, the Blossoms, the Six Teens, Jerry Wallace, Jack Jones, Rod McKuen and the Ernie Freeman Orchestra in front of nearly 12,000 fans at the first rock-n-roll show ever held at the Hollywood Bowl.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "By September 6, 1958, Jan & Arnie's third and final single, \"The Beat That Can't Be Beat\" backed with \"I Love Linda\" (Arwin 113), again composed by the Berry, Ginsburg and Altfeld team, was released. However this single failed to chart, due in part to a lack of distribution. On October 19, 1958, Jan & Arnie performed \"The Beat That Can't Be Beat\" on CBS's Jack Benny Show.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Arnie Ginsburg recorded a one-off single with a band named the Rituals on the Arwin label. The single, \"Girl in Zanzibar\" b/w \"Guitarro\", was released on vinyl in January 1959, preceding Jan and Dean's first single \"Baby Talk\", released in May 1959. Other than Arnie, the single featured Richard Podolor on guitar, Sandy Nelson on drums, Bruce Johnston on piano, Dave Shostac on sax, Harper Cosby on bass and Mike Deasy on guitar. It is unclear if the actual single was released for the general public but there are several promotional copies pressed to vinyl in existence.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "By the end of the year, when Torrence had completed his six-month stint at Fort Ord, Ginsburg had become disenchanted with the music business. Ginsburg enrolled in the School of Architecture and Design at the University of Southern California and graduated in the field of product design in 1966. After graduation Ginsburg worked for several noted Los Angeles architects, among them Charles Eames, and in December 1973 he was granted a U.S. patent for a table he designed.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Ginsburg moved in 1975 to Santa Barbara, California, where he worked as an architectural designer. designing the innovative Ginsburg House. In September 1976, Ginsburg and Michael W. O'Neill were granted a patent for a portable batting cage.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "After Torrence returned from a six-month compulsory stint in the US Army Reserve, Berry and Torrence began to make music as \"Jan and Dean\". With the help of record producers Herb Alpert and Lou Adler, Jan and Dean scored a No. 10 hit on the Dore label with \"Baby Talk\" (1959) (which was incorrectly labeled as Jan & Arnie when it initially was released), then scored a series of hits over the next couple of years. Playing local venues, they met and performed with the Beach Boys, and discovered the appeal of the latter's \"surf sound\". By this time Berry was co-writing, arranging, and producing all of Jan and Dean's original material.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "During this time Berry co-wrote or arranged and produced songs for other artists outside of Jan and Dean, including the Angels (\"I Adore Him\", Top 30), the Gents, the Matadors (Sinners), Pixie (unreleased), Jill Gibson, Shelley Fabares, Deane Hawley, the Rip Chords (\"Three Window Coupe\", Top 30), and Johnny Crawford, among others.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Unlike most other rock 'n roll acts of the period, Jan and Dean did not give music their full-time attention. Jan and Dean were college students, maintaining their studies while writing and recording music and making public appearances on the side. Torrence majored in advertising design in the school of architecture at USC, where he also was a member of the Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity. Berry took science and music classes at UCLA, became a member of Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, and entered the California College of Medicine (now the UC Irvine School of Medicine) in 1963.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Jan and Dean reached their commercial peak in 1963 and 1964, after they met Brian Wilson. The duo scored sixteen Top 40 hits on the Billboard and Cash Box magazine charts, with a total of twenty-six chart hits over an eight-year period (1959-1966). Berry and Wilson collaborated on roughly a dozen hits and album cuts for Jan and Dean, including \"Surf City\", co-written by Jan Berry and Brian Wilson, (#1, 1963). Subsequent top 10 hits included \"Drag City\" (#10, 1964), the eerily portentous \"Dead Man's Curve\" (#8, 1964), and \"The Little Old Lady from Pasadena\" (#3, 1964).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In 1964, at the height of their fame, Jan and Dean hosted and performed at The T.A.M.I. Show, a historic concert film directed by Steve Binder. The film also featured such acts as the Rolling Stones, Chuck Berry, Gerry & the Pacemakers, James Brown, Billy J. Kramer & the Dakotas, Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, Lesley Gore, Smokey Robinson & the Miracles and the Beach Boys. Also in 1964, the duo performed the title track for the Columbia Pictures film Ride the Wild Surf, starring Fabian Forte, Tab Hunter, Peter Brown, Shelley Fabares, and Barbara Eden. The song, penned by Jan Berry, Brian Wilson and Roger Christian, was a Top 20 national hit. The pair were also to have appeared in the film, but their roles were cut following their friendship with Barry Keenan, who had engineered the Frank Sinatra Jr. kidnapping.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Jan and Dean also filmed two unreleased television pilots: Surf Scene in 1963 and On the Run in 1966. Their feature film for Paramount Pictures Easy Come, Easy Go was canceled when Berry, as well as the film's director and other crew members, were seriously injured in a railroad accident while shooting the film in Chatsworth, California, in August 1965.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "After the surfing craze, Jan and Dean scored two Top-30 hits in 1965: \"You Really Know How to Hurt a Guy\" got up to 27 and \"I Found a Girl\" got to 30—the latter from the album Folk 'n Roll. During this period, they also began to experiment with cutting-edge comedy concepts such as the original (unreleased) Filet of Soul and Jan & Dean Meet Batman. The former's album cover shows Berry with his leg in a cast as a result of the accident while filming Easy Come, Easy Go.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In 1966, Jan Berry recorded \"The Universal Coward\", an angry response to Donovan’s anti-war single Universal Soldier (originally written by Buffy Sainte-Marie) even though Berry never served in the military.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "On April 12, 1966, Berry received severe head injuries in an automobile accident on Whittier Drive, just a short distance from Dead Man's Curve in Beverly Hills, California, two years after the song had become a hit. He was en route to a business meeting when he crashed his Corvette into a parked truck on Whittier Drive, near the intersection of Sunset Boulevard, in Beverly Hills. Berry also had separated from his girlfriend of seven years, singer-artist Jill Gibson, later a member of the Mamas & the Papas for a short time, who also had co-written several songs with him. He was in a coma for more than two months before finally awakening on the morning of June 16.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Berry recovered from brain damage and partial paralysis. He had limited use of his right arm, and had to learn to write with his left hand as well as learning to walk again.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In Berry's absence, Torrence released several singles on the J&D Record Co. label and recorded Save for a Rainy Day in 1966, a concept album featuring all rain-themed songs. Torrence posed with Berry's brother Ken for the album cover photos. Columbia Records released one single from the project (\"Yellow Balloon\") as did the song's writer, Gary Zekley, with the group the Yellow Balloon.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Besides his studio work, Torrence became a graphic artist, starting his own company, Kittyhawk Graphics, and designing and creating album covers and logos for other musicians and recording artists, including Harry Nilsson, Steve Martin, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Dennis Wilson, Bruce Johnston, the Beach Boys, Diana Ross and the Supremes, Linda Ronstadt, Canned Heat, the Ventures and many others. Torrence (with Gene Brownell) won a Grammy Award for \"Album Cover of the Year\" in 1971, for the album Pollution by Pollution on Prophesy Records.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Berry returned to the studio in April 1967, almost one year to the day after his accident. Working with Alan Wolfson, he began writing and producing music again. In December 1967, Jan and Dean signed an agreement with Warner Bros. Records. Warner issued three singles under the name \"Jan and Dean\", but a 1968 Berry-produced album for Warner Bros., the psychedelic Carnival of Sound, remained unreleased until February 2010, when Rhino Records' \"Handmade\" label put out CD and vinyl compilations of all tracks recorded for Carnival, along with various outtakes and remixes from the project.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In 1971, Jan and Dean released the album Jan & Dean Anthology Album under the label United Artists Records. The album included many of their top hits, starting with 1958's \"Jennie Lee\" and ending with 1968's \"Vegetables\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Berry began to sing again in the early 1970s, touring with his Aloha band, while Dean began performing with a band called Papa Doo Run Run.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "On August 26, 1973, Torrence was scheduled to appear at the Hollywood Palladium as part of Jim Pewter's \"Surfer's Stomp\" reunion. Torrence had recently released some Jan & Dean songs with new vocal parts by Bruce Johnston (of the Beach Boys) and producer Terry Melcher under the moniker the Legendary Masked Surfers. Torrence arranged with Berry to join him lip-syncing on stage to a pre-recorded track. The two anticipated that the audience would know it was a tape recording, and they decided to make light of it during the performance. That night, they joked around and stopped lip-syncing on stage while the music continued, but the audience became angry and started booing. The duo's first live performance after Berry's accident occurred at the Palomino Nightclub in North Hollywood on June 5, 1976, ten years after the accident, as guests of Disneyland regulars Papa Doo Run Run. Their first actual multi-song concert billed as Jan and Dean took place in 1978 in New York City at the Palladium as part of the Murray the K Brooklyn Fox Reunion Show. This was followed by a handful of East Coast shows as guests of their longtime friends the Beach Boys. Four nationwide J & D headlining tours followed through 1980. Berry was still suffering the effects of his 1966 accident, with partial paralysis and aphasia.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The duo experienced a resurgence after Paul Morantz's \"Road back from Deadman's Curve\" article appeared in Rolling Stone in 1974, writing the piece after spending extensive time with the two singers, their families, doctors and associates. Morantz first submitted the story to Playboy, who recommended it to Rolling Stone. He then wrote a film treatment from his story which was purchased by CBS.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "On February 3, 1978, CBS aired a made-for-TV film about the duo titled Deadman's Curve. The biopic starred Richard Hatch as Jan Berry and Bruce Davison as Dean Torrence, with cameo appearances by Dick Clark, Wolfman Jack, Mike Love of the Beach Boys, and Bruce Johnston (who at that time was temporarily out of the Beach Boys), as well as Berry himself. Near the end of the film he can be seen sitting in the audience, watching \"himself\" (Richard Hatch) perform onstage. The part of Jan and Dean's band was played by Papa Doo Run Run, which included Mark Ward and Jim Armstrong, who went on to form Jan and Dean and the Bel-Air Bandits. Johnston and Berry had known each other since high school, and had played music together in Berry's garage in Bel Air — long before Jan and Dean or the Beach Boys were formed. Following the release of the film, the duo made steps toward an official comeback that year, including touring with the Beach Boys, and performing with Papa Doo Run Run at Cupertino High School. In the Netherlands the showing on television of the movie by Veronica in August 1979 earned them a huge hit record of the re-recorded \"Surf City\" and \"Deadman's Curve\" songs as a double A-sided single record release, and a golden oldies record having \"The Little Old Lady From Pasadena\" as its flip side reached a lower position in the charts.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In the early 1980s, Papa Doo Run Run left to explore other performance and recording ventures. Berry struggled to overcome drug addiction. In 1979, Berry had performed over 100 concerts of Jan and Dean songs with another front man from Hawaii, Randy Ruff. Torrence also toured briefly as \"Mike & Dean\", with Mike Love of the Beach Boys. Later, the duo reunited for good. In \"Phase II\" of their career, Torrence led the touring operation.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Jan and Dean continued to tour on their own throughout the 1980s, the 1990s, and into the new millennium – with 1960s nostalgia providing them with a ready audience, headlining oldies shows throughout North America. Sundazed Records reissued Torrence's Save for a Rainy Day in 1996 in CD and vinyl formats, as well as the collector's vinyl 45 rpm companion EP, \"Sounds For A Rainy Day\", featuring four instrumental versions of the album's tracks.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Between the 1970s and the early 2000s, Torrence issued a number of re-recordings of classic Jan and Dean and Beach Boys hits. A double album titled One Summer Night / Live was issued by Rhino Records in 1982. Torrence released the album Silver Summer with the help of Mike Love in 1985 for Jan & Dean's 25th anniversary. Silver Summer was officially released as a Jan & Dean album, but falsely gives credit to Berry as co-producer and singer; Berry did not contribute to the album. Torrence participated with Berry on Port to Paradise, released as a cassette on the J&D Records label in 1986. In 1997, after many years of hard work, Berry released a solo album called Second Wave on One Way Records. June 11, 2002, Torrence released a solo album titled Anthology: Legendary Masked Surfer Unmasked.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "On August 31, 1991, Berry married Gertie Filip at the Stardust Convention Centre in Las Vegas, Nevada. Torrence was Berry's best man at the wedding.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Berry died March 26, 2004, after a seizure. He was an organ donor and his body was cremated. On April 18, a \"Celebration of Life\" was held in Berry's memory at the Roxy Theatre on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, California. Attendees included Torrence, Lou Adler, Jill Gibson, and Nancy Sinatra, along with many family members, friends, and musicians associated with Jan and Dean and the Beach Boys, including the original members of Papa Doo Run Run.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "In February 2010, the Jan and Dean album Carnival of Sound was released on the Rhino Handmade label. The album cover was designed by Torrence. Along with the CD, there was a limited edition (1500 copies), which included a 10-track LP. The album was released in Europe in April 2010 in its original US form.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "In 2012, Torrence reunited with Bruce Davison, who portrayed him in the 1978 film Deadman's Curve, to perform with the Bamboo Trading Company on their From Kitty Hawk To Surf City album. The songs were \"Shrewd Awakening\" and \"Tonga Hut\", which was featured on the film Return of the Killer Shrews, a sequel to the 1959 film The Killer Shrews and also \"Tweet (Don't Talk Anymore)\", \"Drinkin' In the Sunshine\", and \"Star Of The Beach\". The album also features Dean's two daughters, Jillian and Katie Torrence. Torrence and his two daughters were featured in the music video of \"Shrewd Awakening\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "After Berry's death, Torrence began touring occasionally with the Surf City All-Stars. He serves as a spokesman for the City of Huntington Beach, California, which, thanks in part to his efforts, is nationally recognized as \"Surf City USA\". Torrence's website features—among other things—rare images, a complete Jan and Dean discography, a biography, and a timeline of his career with cohort Jan Berry. He currently resides in Huntington Beach, California, with his wife and two daughters.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "In 1964, Jan and Dean were signed to host what became the first multi-act rock and roll show that was edited into a motion picture designed for wide distribution. The T.A.M.I. Show became a seminal and original production – in essence one of the first rock videos – on its release in 1964. Using a high-resolution videotape process called Electronovision (transferred from television directly onto 35mm motion picture stock as a kinescope), new sound recording techniques and having a remarkable cast, The T.A.M.I. Show set the standard for all succeeding music film and video work, including many of the early videos shown by MTV 17 years later. The revolutionary technical achievements of The T.A.M.I. Show and the list of performers (including a performance by James Brown that many critics have called the best of his career) marked a high point for Jan and Dean, as they were the hosts and one of the main featured acts as well. They became one of the main faces of mid-1960s music, until Berry's auto accident two years later, through their T.A.M.I. Show appearance.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "According to rock critic Dave Marsh, the attitude and public persona of punk rock can be traced to Jan and Dean.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Brian Wilson has cited Berry as having a direct impact on his own growth as a record producer.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "In an interview conducted by Jan and Dean fan and historian David Beard for the Collectors' Choice release, Jan & Dean, the Complete Liberty Singles, Dean Torrence stated that he felt the duo should be in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame: \"We have the scoreboard if you just want to compare number of hits and musical projects done. We beat 75 percent of the people in there. So what else is it? I've got to think that we were pretty irreverent when it came to the music industry. They kind of always held that against us. That's okay with me.\"",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Jan and Dean were inducted into the Hollywood Rock Walk of Fame on April 12, 1996, exactly 30 years after Jan Berry had his near fatal car accident.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "On January 28, 2023, Jan and Dean were inducted into the California Music Hall Of Fame.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The Who covered Jan and Dean's \"Bucket T\" on their UK EP Ready Steady Who from 1966. It is one of only a few songs the group performed where surf-fan Keith Moon provided the lead vocals.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Alternative rock group the Red Hot Chili Peppers referenced the duo in their song \"Did I Let You Know\", on the album I'm with You.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "",
"title": "External links"
}
]
| Jan and Dean was an American rock duo consisting of William Jan Berry and Dean Ormsby Torrence. In the early 1960s, they were pioneers of the California Sound and vocal surf music styles popularized by the Beach Boys. Among their most successful songs was 1963's "Surf City", the first surf song ever to reach the #1 spot. Their other charting top 10 singles were "Drag City" (1963), "Dead Man's Curve", and "The Little Old Lady from Pasadena" (1964). In 1972, Torrence won the Grammy Award for Best Album Cover for the psychedelic rock band Pollution's first eponymous 1971 album, and was nominated three other times in the same category for albums of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. In 2013, Torrence's design contribution of the Surf City Allstars' In Concert CD was named a Silver Award of Distinction at the Communicator Awards competition. | 2001-10-23T02:25:43Z | 2023-12-30T20:27:36Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_and_Dean |
16,243 | Jawaharlal Nehru | Jawaharlal Nehru (/ˈneɪru/ or /ˈnɛru/; Hindi: [ˈdʒəʋɑːɦəɾˈlɑːl ˈneːɦɾuː] ; juh-WAH-hurr-LAHL NE-hǝ-ROO; 14 November 1889 – 27 May 1964) was an Indian anti-colonial nationalist, statesman, secular humanist, social democrat, and author who was a central figure in India during the middle of the 20th century. Nehru was a principal leader of the Indian nationalist movement in the 1930s and 1940s. Upon India's independence in 1947, he served as the country's first prime minister for 16 years. Nehru promoted parliamentary democracy, secularism, and science and technology during the 1950s, powerfully influencing India's arc as a modern nation. In international affairs, he steered India clear of the two blocs of the Cold War. A well-regarded author, his books written in prison, such as Letters from a Father to His Daughter (1929), An Autobiography (1936) and The Discovery of India (1946), have been read around the world. The honorific Pandit has been commonly applied before his name.
The son of Motilal Nehru, a prominent lawyer and Indian nationalist, Jawaharlal Nehru was educated in England—at Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge, and trained in the law at the Inner Temple. He became a barrister, returned to India, enrolled at the Allahabad High Court and gradually began to take an interest in national politics, which eventually became a full-time occupation. He joined the Indian National Congress, rose to become the leader of a progressive faction during the 1920s, and eventually of the Congress, receiving the support of Mahatma Gandhi who was to designate Nehru as his political heir. As Congress president in 1929, Nehru called for complete independence from the British Raj.
Nehru and the Congress dominated Indian politics during the 1930s. Nehru promoted the idea of the secular nation-state in the 1937 provincial elections, allowing the Congress to sweep the elections, and to form governments in several provinces. In September 1939, the Congress ministries resigned to protest Viceroy Lord Linlithgow's decision to join the war without consulting them. After the All India Congress Committee's Quit India Resolution of 8 August 1942, senior Congress leaders were imprisoned and for a time the organisation was suppressed. Nehru, who had reluctantly heeded Gandhi's call for immediate independence, and had desired instead to support the Allied war effort during World War II, came out of a lengthy prison term to a much altered political landscape. The Muslim League, under Muhammad Ali Jinnah, had come to dominate Muslim politics in the interim. In the 1946 provincial elections, Congress won the elections but the League won all the seats reserved for Muslims, which the British interpreted to be a clear mandate for Pakistan in some form. Nehru became the interim prime minister of India in September 1946, with the League joining his government with some hesitancy in October 1946.
Upon India's independence on 15 August 1947, Nehru gave a critically acclaimed speech, "Tryst with Destiny"; he was sworn in as the Dominion of India's prime minister and raised the Indian flag at the Red Fort in Delhi. On 26 January 1950, when India became a republic within the Commonwealth of Nations, Nehru became the Republic of India's first prime minister. He embarked on an ambitious program of economic, social, and political reforms. Nehru promoted a pluralistic multi-party democracy. In foreign affairs, he played a leading role in establishing the Non-Aligned Movement, a group of nations that did not seek membership in the two main ideological blocs of the Cold War.
Under Nehru's leadership, the Congress emerged as a catch-all party, dominating national and state-level politics and winning elections in 1951, 1957 and 1962. His premiership, spanning 16 years and 286 days—which is, to date, the longest in India—ended with his death in 1964 from a heart attack. Hailed as the "architect of Modern India", his birthday is celebrated as Children's Day in India.
Jawaharlal Nehru was born on 14 November 1889 in Allahabad in British India. His father, Motilal Nehru (1861–1931), a self-made wealthy barrister who belonged to the Kashmiri Pandit community, served twice as president of the Indian National Congress, in 1919 and 1928. His mother, Swarup Rani Thussu (1868–1938), who came from a well-known Kashmiri Brahmin family settled in Lahore, was Motilal's second wife, his first having died in childbirth. Jawaharlal was the eldest of three children. The elder of his two sisters, Vijaya Lakshmi, later became the first female president of the United Nations General Assembly. His youngest sister, Krishna Hutheesing, became a noted writer and authored several books on her brother.
Nehru described his childhood as a "sheltered and uneventful one". He grew up in an atmosphere of privilege in wealthy homes, including a palatial estate called the Anand Bhavan. His father had him educated at home by private governesses and tutors. Influenced by the Irish theosophist Ferdinand T. Brooks' teaching, Nehru became interested in science and theosophy. A family friend, Annie Besant subsequently initiated him into the Theosophical Society at age thirteen. However, his interest in theosophy did not prove to be enduring, and he left the society shortly after Brooks departed as his tutor. He wrote: "For nearly three years [Brooks] was with me and in many ways, he influenced me greatly".
Nehru's theosophical interests induced him to study the Buddhist and Hindu scriptures. According to B. R. Nanda, these scriptures were Nehru's "first introduction to the religious and cultural heritage of [India]....[They] provided Nehru the initial impulse for [his] long intellectual quest which culminated…in The Discovery of India."
Nehru became an ardent nationalist during his youth. The Second Boer War and the Russo-Japanese War intensified his feelings. Of the latter he wrote, "[The] Japanese victories [had] stirred up my enthusiasm. ...Nationalistic ideas filled my mind. ... I mused of Indian freedom and Asiatic freedom from the thraldom of Europe." Later, in 1905, when he had begun his institutional schooling at Harrow, a leading school in England where he was nicknamed "Joe", G. M. Trevelyan's Garibaldi books, which he had received as prizes for academic merit, influenced him greatly. He viewed Garibaldi as a revolutionary hero. He wrote: "Visions of similar deeds in India came before, of [my] gallant fight for [Indian] freedom and in my mind, India and Italy got strangely mixed together."
Nehru went to Trinity College, Cambridge, in October 1907 and graduated with an honours degree in natural science in 1910. During this period, he studied politics, economics, history and literature with interest. The writings of Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, Lowes Dickinson and Meredith Townsend moulded much of his political and economic thinking.
After completing his degree in 1910, Nehru moved to London and studied law at the Inner Temple Inn. During this time, he continued to study Fabian Society scholars including Beatrice Webb. He was called to the Bar in 1912.
After returning to India in August 1912, Nehru enrolled as an advocate of the Allahabad High Court and tried to settle down as a barrister. But, unlike his father, he had very little interest in his profession and relished neither the practice of law nor the company of lawyers: "Decidedly the atmosphere was not intellectually stimulating and a sense of the utter insipidity of life grew upon me." His involvement in nationalist politics was to gradually replace his legal practice.
Nehru had developed an interest in Indian politics during his time in Britain as a student and a barrister. Within months of his return to India in 1912, Nehru attended an annual session of the Indian National Congress in Patna. Congress in 1912 was the party of moderates and elites, and he was disconcerted by what he saw as "very much an English-knowing upper-class affair". Nehru doubted the effectiveness of Congress but agreed to work for the party in support of the Indian civil rights movement led by Mahatma Gandhi in South Africa, collecting funds for the movement in 1913. Later, he campaigned against indentured labour and other such discrimination faced by Indians in the British colonies.
When World War I broke out, sympathy in India was divided. Although educated Indians "by and large took a vicarious pleasure" in seeing the British rulers humbled, the ruling upper classes sided with the Allies. Nehru confessed he viewed the war with mixed feelings. As Frank Moraes writes, "[i]f [Nehru's] sympathy was with any country it was with France, whose culture he greatly admired". During the war, Nehru volunteered for the St. John Ambulance and worked as one of the organisation's provincial secretaries Allahabad. He also spoke out against the censorship acts passed by the British government in India.
Nehru emerged from the war years as a leader whose political views were considered radical. Although the political discourse at the time had been dominated by the moderate, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, who said that it was "madness to think of independence," Nehru had spoken, "openly of the politics of non-cooperation, of the need of resigning from honorary positions under the government and of not continuing the futile politics of representation". He ridiculed the Indian Civil Service for supporting British policies. He noted someone had once defined the Indian Civil Service, "with which we are unfortunately still afflicted in this country, as neither Indian, nor civil, nor a service". Motilal Nehru, a prominent moderate leader, acknowledged the limits of constitutional agitation but counselled his son that there was no other "practical alternative" to it. Nehru, however, was dissatisfied with the pace of the national movement. He became involved with aggressive nationalists leaders demanding Home Rule for Indians.
The influence of moderates on Congress' politics waned after Gokhale died in 1915. Anti-moderate leaders like Annie Besant and Bal Gangadhar Tilak took the opportunity to call for a national movement for Home Rule. However, in 1915, the proposal was rejected because of the reluctance of the moderates to commit to such a radical course of action.
Nehru married Kamala Kaul in 1916. Their only daughter Indira was born a year later in 1917. Kamala gave birth to a boy in November 1924, but he lived for only a week.
Nevertheless, Besant formed a league for advocating Home Rule in 1916. Tilak, after releasing from a term in prison, had formed his own league in April 1916. Nehru joined both leagues, but worked primarily for the former. He remarked later that "[Besant] had a very powerful influence on me in my childhood ... even later when I entered political life her influence continued." Another development that brought about a radical change in Indian politics was the espousal of Hindu-Muslim unity with the Lucknow Pact at the annual meeting of the Congress in December 1916. The pact had been initiated earlier in the year at Allahabad at a meeting of the All India Congress Committee, which was held at the Nehru residence at Anand Bhawan. Nehru welcomed and encouraged the rapprochement between the two Indian communities.
Several nationalist leaders banded together in 1916 under the leadership of Annie Besant to voice a demand for self-governance, and to obtain the status of a Dominion within the British Empire as enjoyed at the time by Australia, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand and Newfoundland. Nehru joined the movement and rose to become secretary of Besant's Home Rule League.
In June 1917, the British government arrested and interned Besant. The Congress and other Indian organisations threatened to launch protests if she was not freed. Subsequently, the British government was forced to release Besant and make significant concessions after a period of intense protest.
Nehru's first big national involvement came at the onset of the non-co-operation movement in 1920. He led the movement in the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh). Nehru was arrested on charges of anti-governmental activities in 1921 and released a few months later. In the rift that formed within the Congress following Gandhi's sudden halting of the non-Cooperation movement after the Chauri Chaura incident, Nehru remained loyal to him and did not join the Swaraj Party formed by his father Motilal Nehru and CR Das. In 1923, Nehru was imprisoned in Nabha, a princely state, when he went there to see the struggle that was being waged by the Sikhs against the corrupt Mahants. He was released after his sentence was suspended by the British administration under the criminal procedure code.
Nehru played a leading role in the development of the internationalist outlook of the Indian independence struggle. He sought foreign allies for India and forged links with movements for independence and democracy around the world. In 1927, his efforts paid off, and the Congress was invited to attend the Congress of oppressed nationalities in Brussels, Belgium. The meeting was called to coordinate and plan a common struggle against imperialism. Nehru represented India and was elected to the Executive Council of the League against Imperialism which was born at this meeting.
Increasingly, Nehru saw the struggle for independence from British imperialism as a multinational effort by the various colonies and dominions of the Empire; some of his statements on this matter, however, were interpreted as complicity with the rise of Hitler and his espoused intentions. Faced with these allegations, Nehru responded:
We have sympathy for the national movement of Arabs in Palestine because it is directed against British Imperialism. Our sympathies cannot be weakened by the fact that the national movement coincides with Hitler's interests.
Nehru drafted the policies of the Congress and a future Indian nation in 1929. He declared the aims of the congress were freedom of religion; right to form associations; freedom of expression of thought; equality before the law for every individual without distinction of caste, colour, creed, or religion; protection of regional languages and cultures, safeguarding the interests of the peasants and labour; abolition of untouchability; introduction of the adult franchise; imposition of prohibition, nationalisation of industries; socialism; and the establishment of a secular India. All these aims formed the core of the "Fundamental Rights and Economic Policy" resolution drafted by Nehru in 1929–1931 and were ratified in 1931 by the Congress party session at Karachi chaired by Vallabhbhai Patel.
Nehru was one of the first leaders to demand that the Congress Party should resolve to make a complete and explicit break from all ties with the British Empire. The Madras session of Congress in 1927, approved his resolution for independence despite Gandhi's criticism. At that time, he formed the Independence for India League, a pressure group within the Congress. In 1928, Gandhi agreed to Nehru's demands and proposed a resolution that called for the British to grant Dominion status to India within two years. If the British failed to meet the deadline, the Congress would call upon all Indians to fight for complete independence. Nehru was one of the leaders who objected to the time given to the British—he pressed Gandhi to demand immediate actions from the British. Gandhi brokered a further compromise by reducing the time given from two years to one. The British rejected demands for Dominion status in 1929. Nehru assumed the presidency of the Congress party during the Lahore session on 29 December 1929 and introduced a successful resolution calling for complete independence. Nehru drafted the Indian Declaration of Independence, which stated:
We believe that it is the inalienable right of the Indian people, as of any other people, to have freedom and to enjoy the fruits of their toil and have the necessities of life, so that they may have full opportunities for growth. We believe also that if any government deprives a people of these rights and oppresses them the people have a further right to alter it or abolish it. The British government in India has not only deprived the Indian people of their freedom but has based itself on the exploitation of the masses, and has ruined India economically, politically, culturally, and spiritually. We believe, therefore, that India must sever the British connection and attain Purna Swaraj or complete independence.
At midnight on New Year's Eve 1929, Nehru hoisted the tricolour flag of India upon the banks of the Ravi in Lahore. A pledge of independence was read out, which included a readiness to withhold taxes. The massive gathering of the public attending the ceremony was asked if they agreed with it, and the majority of people were witnessed raising their hands in approval. 172 Indian members of central and provincial legislatures resigned in support of the resolution and in accordance with Indian public sentiment. The Congress asked the people of India to observe 26 January as Independence Day. Congress volunteers, nationalists, and the public hoisted the flag of India publicly across India. Plans for mass civil disobedience were also underway.
After the Lahore session of the Congress in 1929, Nehru gradually emerged as the paramount leader of the Indian independence movement. Gandhi stepped back into a more spiritual role. Although Gandhi did not explicitly designate Nehru as his political heir until 1942, as early as the mid-1930s, the country saw Nehru as the natural successor to Gandhi.
Nehru and most of the Congress leaders were ambivalent initially about Gandhi's plan to begin civil disobedience with a satyagraha aimed at the British salt tax. After the protest had gathered steam, they realised the power of salt as a symbol. Nehru remarked about the unprecedented popular response, "It seemed as though a spring had been suddenly released". He was arrested on 14 April 1930 while on a train from Allahabad to Raipur. Earlier, after addressing a huge meeting and leading a vast procession, he had ceremoniously manufactured some contraband salt. He was charged with breach of the salt law and sentenced to six months of imprisonment at Central Jail.
He nominated Gandhi to succeed him as the Congress president during his absence in jail, but Gandhi declined, and Nehru nominated his father as his successor. With Nehru's arrest, the civil disobedience acquired a new tempo, and arrests, firing on crowds and lathi charges grew to be ordinary occurrences.
The salt satyagraha ("pressure for reform through passive resistance") succeeded in attracting world attention. Indian, British, and world opinion increasingly recognised the legitimacy of the claims by the Congress party for independence. Nehru considered the salt satyagraha the high-water mark of his association with Gandhi, and felt its lasting importance was in changing the attitudes of Indians:
Of course these movements exercised tremendous pressure on the British Government and shook the government machinery. But the real importance, to my mind, lay in the effect they had on our own people, and especially the village masses. ... Non-cooperation dragged them out of the mire and gave them self-respect and self-reliance. ... They acted courageously and did not submit so easily to unjust oppression; their outlook widened and they began to think a little in terms of India as a whole. ... It was a remarkable transformation and the Congress, under Gandhi's leadership, must have the credit for it.
Nehru's trip to Europe in 1936 happened to be the turning point in his political and economic mindset. The visit sparked his interest in Marxism and his socialist thought pattern. Time later spent incarcerated enabled him to research Marxism more deeply. Appealed by its ideas but repelled by some of its tactics, he never could bring himself to buy Karl Marx's words as revealed gospel. However, from that time on, the benchmark of his economic view remained Marxist, adapted, where necessary, to Indian circumstances.
Nehru spent the early months of 1936 in Switzerland visiting his ailing wife in Lausanne, where she died in March. While in Europe, he became very concerned with the possibility of another world war. At that time, he emphasised that, in the event of war, India's place was alongside the democracies, though he insisted India could only fight in support of Great Britain and France as a free country.
At its 1936 Lucknow session, despite opposition from the newly elected Nehru as the party president, the Congress party agreed to contest the provincial elections to be held in 1937 under the Government of India Act 1935. The elections brought the Congress party to power in a majority of the provinces with increased popularity and power for Nehru. Since the Muslim League under Muhammad Ali Jinnah (who was to become the creator of Pakistan) had fared badly at the polls, Nehru declared that the only two parties that mattered in India were the British colonial authorities and the Congress. Jinnah's statements that the Muslim League was the third and "equal partner" within Indian politics were widely rejected.
In the 1930s, under the leadership of Jayaprakash Narayan, Narendra Deo, and others, the Congress Socialist Party group was formed within the INC. Though Nehru never joined the group, he acted as a bridge between them and Gandhi. He had the support of left-wing Congressmen Maulana Azad and Subhas Chandra Bose. The trio combined to oust Rajendra Prasad as the Congress president in 1936. Nehru was elected in his place and held the presidency for two years (1936–37). His socialist colleagues Bose (1938–39) and Azad (1940–46) succeeded him. During Nehru's second term as general secretary of the Congress, he proposed certain resolutions concerning the foreign policy of India. From then on, he was given carte blanche ("blank cheque") in framing the foreign policy of any future Indian nation. Nehru worked closely with Bose in developing good relations with governments of free countries all over the world.
Nehru was one of the first nationalist leaders to realise the sufferings of the people in the states ruled by Indian princes. The nationalist movement had been confined to the territories under direct British rule. He helped to make the struggle of the people in the princely states a part of the nationalist movement for independence. Nehru was also given the responsibility of planning the economy of a future India and appointed the National Planning Commission in 1938 to help frame such policies. However, many of the plans framed by Nehru and his colleagues would come undone with the unexpected partition of India in 1947.
The All India States Peoples Conference (AISPC) was formed in 1927 and Nehru, who had supported the cause of the people of the princely states for many years, was made the organisation's president in 1939. He opened up its ranks to membership from across the political spectrum. AISPC was to play an important role during the political integration of India, helping Indian leaders Vallabhbhai Patel and V. P. Menon (to whom Nehru had delegated integrating the princely states into India) negotiate with hundreds of princes.
When World War II began, Viceroy Linlithgow unilaterally declared India a belligerent on the side of Britain, without consulting the elected Indian representatives. Nehru hurried back from a visit to China, announcing that, in a conflict between democracy and fascism, "our sympathies must inevitably be on the side of democracy, ... I should like India to play its full part and throw all her resources into the struggle for a new order".
After much deliberation, the Congress under Nehru informed the government that it would co-operate with the British but on certain conditions. First, Britain must give an assurance of full independence for India after the war and allow the election of a constituent assembly to frame a new constitution; second, although the Indian armed forces would remain under the British Commander-in-chief, Indians must be included immediately in the central government and given a chance to share power and responsibility. When Nehru presented Lord Linlithgow with these demands, he chose to reject them. A deadlock was reached: "The same old game is played again," Nehru wrote bitterly to Gandhi, "the background is the same, the various epithets are the same and the actors are the same and the results must be the same".
On 23 October 1939, the Congress condemned the Viceroy's attitude and called upon the Congress ministries in the various provinces to resign in protest. Before this crucial announcement, Nehru urged Jinnah and the Muslim League to join the protest, but Jinnah declined.
As Nehru had firmly placed India on the path of democracy and freedom at a time when the world was under the threat of Fascism, he and Bose split in the late 1930s when the latter agreed to seek the help of Fascists in driving the British out of India. At the same time, Nehru supported the Republicans who were fighting against Francisco Franco's forces in the Spanish Civil War. Nehru and his aide V. K. Krishna Menon visited Spain and declared support for the Republicans. When Benito Mussolini, dictator of Italy, expressed his desire to meet, Nehru refused him.
In March 1940, Muhammad Ali Jinnah passed what came to be known as the Pakistan Resolution, declaring that, "Muslims are a nation according to any definition of a nation, and they must have their homelands, their territory and their State." This state was to be known as Pakistan, meaning 'Land of the Pure'. Nehru angrily declared that "all the old problems ... pale into insignificance before the latest stand taken by the Muslim League leader in Lahore". Linlithgow made Nehru an offer on 8 October 1940, which stated that Dominion status for India was the objective of the British government. However, it referred neither to a date nor a method to accomplish this. Only Jinnah received something more precise: "The British would not contemplate transferring power to a Congress-dominated national government, the authority of which was denied by various elements in India's national life".
In October 1940, Gandhi and Nehru, abandoning their original stand of supporting Britain, decided to launch a limited civil disobedience campaign in which leading advocates of Indian independence were selected to participate one by one. Nehru was arrested and sentenced to four years imprisonment. On 15 January 1941, Gandhi stated:
Some say Jawaharlal and I were estranged. It will require much more than a difference of opinion to estrange us. We had differences from the time we became co-workers and yet I have said for some years and say so now that not Rajaji but Jawaharlal will be my successor.
After spending a little more than a year in jail, Nehru was released, along with other Congress prisoners, three days before the bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.
When the Japanese carried their attack through Burma (now Myanmar) to the borders of India in the spring of 1942, the British government, faced with this new military threat, decided to make some overtures to India, as Nehru had originally desired. Prime Minister Winston Churchill dispatched Sir Stafford Cripps, a member of the War Cabinet who was known to be politically close to Nehru and knew Jinnah, with proposals for a settlement of the constitutional problem. As soon as he arrived, he discovered that India was more deeply divided than he had imagined. Nehru, eager for a compromise, was hopeful; Gandhi was not. Jinnah had continued opposing the Congress: "Pakistan is our only demand, and by God, we will have it," he declared in the Muslim League newspaper Dawn. Cripps' mission failed as Gandhi would accept nothing less than independence. Relations between Nehru and Gandhi cooled over the latter's refusal to co-operate with Cripps, but the two later reconciled.
In 1942, Gandhi called on the British to leave India; Nehru, though reluctant to embarrass the allied war effort, had no alternative but to join Gandhi. Following the Quit India resolution passed by the Congress party in Bombay on 8 August 1942, the entire Congress working committee, including Gandhi and Nehru, was arrested and imprisoned. Most of the Congress working committee including Nehru, Abdul Kalam Azad, and Sardar Patel were incarcerated at the Ahmednagar Fort until 15 June 1945.
During the period when all the Congress leaders were in jail, the Muslim League under Jinnah grew in power. In April 1943, the League captured the governments of Bengal and, a month later, that of the North-West Frontier Province. In none of these provinces had the League previously had a majority—only the arrest of Congress members made it possible. With all the Muslim-dominated provinces except Punjab under Jinnah's control, the concept of a separate Muslim State was turning into a reality. However, by 1944, Jinnah's power and prestige were waning.
A general sympathy towards the jailed Congress leaders was developing among Muslims, and much of the blame for the disastrous Bengal famine of 1943–44 during which two million died had been laid on the shoulders of the province's Muslim League government. The numbers at Jinnah's meetings, once counted in thousands, soon numbered only a few hundred. In despair, Jinnah left the political scene for a stay in Kashmir. His prestige was restored unwittingly by Gandhi, who had been released from prison on medical grounds in May 1944 and had met Jinnah in Bombay in September. There, he offered the Muslim leader a plebiscite in the Muslim areas after the war to see whether they wanted to separate from the rest of India. Essentially, it was an acceptance of the principle of Pakistan—but not in so many words. Jinnah demanded that the exact words be used. Gandhi refused and the talks broke down. Jinnah, however, had greatly strengthened his own position and that of the League. The most influential member of the Congress had been seen to negotiate with him on equal terms.
Nehru and his colleagues were released prior to the arrival of the British 1946 Cabinet Mission to India to propose plans for the transfer of power. The agreed plan in 1946 led to elections to the provincial assemblies. In turn, the members of the assemblies elected members of the Constituent Assembly. Congress won the majority of seats in the assembly and headed the interim government, with Nehru as the prime minister. The Muslim League joined the government later with Liaquat Ali Khan as the Finance member.
Nehru served as prime minister for 16 years, initially as the interim prime minister, then from 1947 as the prime minister of the Dominion of India and then from 1950 as the prime minister of the Republic of India.
In July 1946, Nehru pointedly observed that no princely state could prevail militarily against the army of independent India. In January 1947, he said that independent India would not accept the divine right of kings. In May 1947, he declared that any princely state which refused to join the Constituent Assembly would be treated as an enemy state. Vallabhbhai Patel and V. P. Menon were more conciliatory towards the princes, and as the men charged with integrating the states, were successful in the task. During the drafting of the Indian constitution, many Indian leaders (except Nehru) were in favour of allowing each princely state or covenanting state to be independent as a federal state along the lines suggested originally by the Government of India Act 1935. But as the drafting of the constitution progressed, and the idea of forming a republic took concrete shape, it was decided that all the princely states/covenanting states would merge with the Indian republic.
In 1963, Nehru brought in legislation making it illegal to demand secession and introduced the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution which makes it necessary for those running for office to take an oath that says "I will uphold the sovereignty and integrity of India".
The period before independence in early 1947 was impaired by outbreaks of communal violence and political disorder, and the opposition of the Muslim League led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who were demanding a separate Muslim state of Pakistan.
He took office as the prime minister of India on 15 August and delivered his inaugural address titled "Tryst with Destiny".
Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history when we step out from the old to the new when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. It is fitting that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity.
On 30 January 1948, Gandhi was shot while he was walking in the garden of Birla House on his way to address a prayer meeting. The assassin, Nathuram Godse, was a Hindu nationalist with links to the extremist Hindu Mahasabha party, who held Gandhi responsible for weakening India by insisting upon a payment to Pakistan. Nehru addressed the nation by radio:
Friends and comrades, the light has gone out of our lives, and there is darkness everywhere, and I do not quite know what to tell you or how to say it. Our beloved leader, Bapu as we called him, the father of the nation, is no more. Perhaps I am wrong to say that; nevertheless, we will not see him again, as we have seen him for these many years, we will not run to him for advice or seek solace from him, and that is a terrible blow, not only for me but for millions and millions in this country.
Yasmin Khan argued that Gandhi's death and funeral helped consolidate the authority of the new Indian state under Nehru and Patel. The Congress tightly controlled the epic public displays of grief over a two-week period—the funeral, mortuary rituals and distribution of the martyr's ashes with millions participating in different events. The goal was to assert the power of the government, legitimise the Congress party's control and suppress all religious paramilitary groups. Nehru and Patel suppressed the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Muslim National Guards, and the Khaksars, with some 200,000 arrests. Gandhi's death and funeral linked the distant state with the Indian people and helped them to understand the need to suppress religious parties during the transition to independence for the Indian people. In later years, there emerged a revisionist school of history which sought to blame Nehru for the partition of India, mostly referring to his highly centralised policies for an independent India in 1947, which Jinnah opposed in favour of a more decentralised India.
The British Indian Empire, which included present-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, was divided into two types of territories: the Provinces of British India, which were governed directly by British officials responsible to the Viceroy of India; and princely states, under the rule of local hereditary rulers who recognised British suzerainty in return for local autonomy, in most cases as established by a treaty. Between 1947 and about 1950, the territories of the princely states were politically integrated into the Indian Union under Nehru and Sardar Patel. Most were merged into existing provinces; others were organised into new provinces, such as Rajputana, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Bharat, and Vindhya Pradesh, made up of multiple princely states; a few, including Mysore, Hyderabad, Bhopal and Bilaspur, became separate provinces. The Government of India Act 1935 remained the constitutional law of India the pending adoption of a new Constitution.
The new Constitution of India, which came into force on 26 January 1950 (Republic Day), made India a sovereign democratic republic. The new republic was declared to be a "Union of States".
After the adoption of the constitution on 26 November 1949, the Constituent Assembly continued to act as the interim parliament until new elections. Nehru's interim cabinet consisted of 15 members from diverse communities and parties. The first elections to Indian legislative bodies (National parliament and State assemblies ) under the new constitution of India were held in 1952. The Congress party under Nehru's leadership won a large majority at both state and national levels.
In December 1953, Nehru appointed the States Reorganisation Commission to prepare for the creation of states on linguistic lines. Headed by Justice Fazal Ali, the commission itself was also known as the Fazal Ali Commission. Govind Ballabh Pant, who served as Nehru's home minister from December 1954, oversaw the commission's efforts. The commission created a report in 1955 recommending the reorganisation of India's states.
Under the Seventh Amendment, the existing distinction between Part A, Part B, Part C, and Part D states was abolished. The distinction between Part A and Part B states was removed, becoming known simply as states'. A new type of entity, the union territory, replaced the classification as a Part C or Part D state. Nehru stressed commonality among Indians and promoted pan-Indianism, refusing to reorganise states on either religious or ethnic lines.
In the 1957 elections, under Nehru’s leadership, the Indian National Congress easily won a second term in power, taking 371 of the 494 seats. They gained an extra seven seats (the size of the Lok Sabha had been increased by five) and their vote share increased from 45.0% to 47.8%. The INC won nearly five times more votes than the Communist Party, the second-largest party.
In 1962, Nehru led the Congress to victory with a diminished majority. The numbers who voted for the Communist and socialist parties grew, although some right-wing groups like Bharatiya Jana Sangh also did well.
After years of failed negotiations, Nehru authorised the Indian Army to invade Portuguese-controlled Portuguese India (Goa) in 1961, and then he formally annexed it to India. It increased his popularity in India, but he was criticised by the communist opposition in India for the use of military force.
From 1959, in a process that accelerated in 1961, Nehru adopted the "Forward Policy" of setting up military outposts in disputed areas of the Sino-Indian border, including 43 outposts in territory not previously controlled by India. China attacked some of these outposts, and the Sino-Indian War began, which India lost. The war ended with China announcing a unilateral ceasefire and with its forces withdrawing to 20 kilometers behind the line of actual control of 1959.
The war exposed the unpreparedness of India's military, which could send only 14,000 troops to the war zone in opposition to the much larger Chinese Army, and Nehru was widely criticised for his government's insufficient attention to defence. In response, defence minister V. K. Krishna Menon resigned and Nehru sought US military aid. Nehru's improved relations with the US under John F. Kennedy proved useful during the war, as in 1962, the president of Pakistan (then closely aligned with the Americans) Ayub Khan was made to guarantee his neutrality regarding India, threatened by "communist aggression from Red China". India's relationship with the Soviet Union, criticised by right-wing groups supporting free-market policies, was also seemingly validated. Nehru would continue to maintain his commitment to the non-aligned movement, despite calls from some to settle down on one permanent ally.
The unpreparedness of the army was blamed on Defence Minister Menon, who "resigned" from his government post to allow for someone who might modernise India's military further. India's policy of weaponisation using indigenous sources and self-sufficiency began in earnest under Nehru, completed by his daughter Indira Gandhi, who later led India to a crushing military victory over rival Pakistan in 1971. Toward the end of the war, India had increased her support for Tibetan refugees and revolutionaries, some of them having settled in India, as they were fighting the same common enemy in the region. Nehru ordered the raising of an elite Indian-trained "Tibetan Armed Force" composed of Tibetan refugees, which served with distinction in future wars against Pakistan in 1965 and 1971.
To date, Nehru is considered the most popular prime minister winning three consecutive elections with around 45% of the vote. A Pathé News archive video reporting Nehru's death remarks "Neither on the political stage nor in moral stature was his leadership ever challenged". In his book Verdicts on Nehru, Ramachandra Guha cited a contemporary account that described what Nehru's 1951–52 Indian general election campaign looked like:
Almost at every place, city, town, village or wayside halt, people had waited overnight to welcome the nation's leader. Schools and shops closed; milkmaids and cowherds had taken a holiday; the kisan and his helpmate took a temporary respite from their dawn-to-dusk programme of hard work in field and home. In Nehru's name, stocks of soda and lemonade sold out; even water became scarce . . . Special trains were run from out-of-the-way places to carry people to Nehru's meetings, enthusiasts travelling not only on footboards but also on top of carriages. Scores of people fainted in milling crowds.
In the 1950s, Nehru was admired by world leaders such as British prime minister Winston Churchill, and US President Dwight D. Eisenhower. A letter from Eisenhower to Nehru, dated 27 November 1958, read:
Universally you are recognised as one of the most powerful influences for peace and conciliation in the world. I believe that because you are a world leader for peace in your individual capacity, as well as a representative of the largest neutral nation....
In 1955, Churchill called Nehru, the light of Asia, and a greater light than Gautama Buddha. Nehru is time and again described as a charismatic leader with a rare charm.
According to Bhikhu Parekh, Nehru can be regarded as the founder of the modern Indian state. Parekh attributes this to the national philosophy Nehru formulated for India. For him, modernisation was the national philosophy, with seven goals: national unity, parliamentary democracy, industrialisation, socialism, development of the scientific temper, and non-alignment. In Parekh's opinion, the philosophy and the policies that resulted from this benefited a large section of society such as public sector workers, industrial houses, and middle and upper peasantry. However, it failed to benefit the urban and rural poor, the unemployed and the Hindu fundamentalists.
After the exit of Subhash Chandra Bose from mainstream Indian politics (because of his support of violence in driving the British out of India), the power struggle between the socialists and conservatives in the Congress party balanced out. However, the death of Vallabhbhai Patel in 1950 left Nehru as the sole remaining iconic national leader, and soon the situation became such that Nehru could implement many of his basic policies without hindrance. Nehru's daughter, Indira Gandhi, was able to fulfil her father's dream through the 42nd amendment (1976) of the Indian constitution by which India officially became "socialist" and "secular", during the state of emergency she imposed.
Nehru implemented policies based on import substitution industrialisation and advocated a mixed economy where the government-controlled public sector would co-exist with the private sector. He believed the establishment of basic and heavy industry was fundamental to the development and modernisation of the Indian economy. The government, therefore, directed investment primarily into key public sector industries—steel, iron, coal, and power—promoting their development with subsidies and protectionist policies.
The policy of non-alignment during the Cold War meant that Nehru received financial and technical support from both power blocs in building India's industrial base from scratch. Steel mill complexes were built at Bokaro and Rourkela with assistance from the Soviet Union and West Germany. There was substantial industrial development. The industry grew 7.0% annually between 1950 and 1965—almost trebling industrial output and making India the world's seventh-largest industrial country. Nehru's critics, however, contended that India's import substitution industrialisation, which continued long after the Nehru era, weakened the international competitiveness of its manufacturing industries. India's share of world trade fell from 1.4% in 1951–1960 to 0.5% between 1981 and 1990. However, India's export performance is argued to have shown actual sustained improvement over the period. The volume of exports grew at an annual rate of 2.9% in 1951–1960 to 7.6% in 1971–1980.
GDP and GNP grew 3.9 and 4.0% annually between 1950 and 1951 and 1964–1965. It was a radical break from the British colonial period, but the growth rates were considered anaemic at best compared to other industrial powers in Europe and East Asia. India lagged behind the miracle economies (Japan, West Germany, France, and Italy). State planning, controls, and regulations were argued to have impaired economic growth. While India's economy grew faster than both the United Kingdom and the United States, low initial income and rapid population increase meant that growth was inadequate for any sort of catch-up with rich income nations.
Under Nehru's leadership, the government attempted to develop India quickly by embarking on agrarian reform and rapid industrialisation. A successful land reform was introduced that abolished giant landholdings, but efforts to redistribute land by placing limits on landownership failed. Attempts to introduce large-scale cooperative farming were frustrated by landowning rural elites, who formed the core of the powerful right-wing of the Congress and had considerable political support in opposing Nehru's efforts. Agricultural production expanded until the early 1960s, as additional land was brought under cultivation and some irrigation projects began to have an effect. The establishment of agricultural universities, modelled after land-grant colleges in the United States, contributed to the development of the economy. These universities worked with high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice, initially developed in Mexico and the Philippines, that in the 1960s began the Green Revolution, an effort to diversify and increase crop production. At the same time, a series of failed monsoons would cause serious food shortages, despite the steady progress and an increase in agricultural production.
Nehru was a passionate advocate of education for India's children and youth, believing it essential for India's future progress. His government oversaw the establishment of many institutions of higher learning, including the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, the Indian Institutes of Technology, the Indian Institutes of Management and the National Institutes of Technology. Nehru also outlined a commitment in his five-year plans to guarantee free and compulsory primary education to all of India's children. For this purpose, Nehru oversaw the creation of mass village enrolment programs and the construction of thousands of schools. Nehru also launched initiatives such as the provision of free milk and meals to children to fight malnutrition. Adult education centres and vocational and technical schools were also organised for adults, especially in the rural areas.
Under Nehru, the Indian Parliament enacted many changes to Hindu law through the Hindu code bills to criminalise caste discrimination and increase the legal rights and social freedoms of women. The Nehru administration saw such codification as necessary to unify the Hindu community, which ideally would be a first step towards unifying the nation. They succeeded in passing four Hindu code bills in 1955–56: the Hindu Marriage Act, Hindu Succession Act, Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act, and Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Act. Those who practise Sikhism, Jainism, and Buddhism are categorised as Hindus under the jurisdiction of the Code Bill.
Nehru specifically wrote Article 44 of the Indian constitution under the Directive Principles of State Policy which states: "The State shall endeavor to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India." The article has formed the basis of secularism in India. However, Nehru has been criticised for the inconsistent application of the law. Most notably, he allowed Muslims to keep their personal law in matters relating to marriage and inheritance. In the small state of Goa, a civil code based on the old Portuguese Family Laws was allowed to continue, and Nehru prohibited Muslim personal law. This resulted from the annexation of Goa in 1961 by India, when Nehru promised the people that their laws would be left intact. This has led to accusations of selective secularism.
While Nehru exempted Muslim law from legislation and they remained unreformed, he passed the Special Marriage Act in 1954. The idea behind this act was to give everyone in India the ability to marry outside the personal law under a civil marriage. In many respects, the act was almost identical to the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, demonstrating how secularised the law regarding Hindus had become. The Special Marriage Act allowed Muslims to marry under it and keep the protections, generally beneficial to Muslim women, that could not be found in the personal law. Under the act, polygamy was illegal, and inheritance and succession would be governed by the Indian Succession Act, rather than the respective Muslim personal law. Divorce would be governed by secular law, and maintenance of a divorced wife would be along the lines set down in civil law.
A system of reservations in government services and educational institutions was created to eradicate the social inequalities and disadvantages faced by peoples of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Nehru convincingly succeeded in secularism and religious harmony, increasing the representation of minorities in government.
Nehru led the faction of the Congress party, which promoted Hindi as the lingua franca of the Indian nation. After an exhaustive and divisive debate with the non-Hindi speakers, Hindi was adopted as the official language of India in 1950, with English continuing as an associate official language for 15 years, after which Hindi would become the sole official language. Efforts by the Indian Government to make Hindi the sole official language after 1965 were unacceptable to many non-Hindi Indian states, which wanted the continued use of English. The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), a descendant of Dravidar Kazhagam, led the opposition to Hindi. To allay their fears, Nehru enacted the Official Languages Act in 1963 to ensure the continuing use of English beyond 1965. The text of the Act did not satisfy the DMK and increased their scepticism that future administrations might not honour his assurances.
Throughout his long tenure as the prime minister, Nehru also held the portfolio of External Affairs. His idealistic approach focused on giving India a leadership position in nonalignment. He sought to build support among the newly independent nations of Asia and Africa in opposition to the two hostile superpowers contesting the Cold War.
After independence, Nehru wanted to maintain good relations with Britain and other British Commonwealth countries. As prime minister of the Dominion of India, he signed the 1949 London Declaration, under which India agreed to remain within the Commonwealth of Nations after becoming a republic in January 1950, and to recognise the British monarch as a "symbol of the free association of its independent member nations and as such the Head of the Commonwealth". The other nations of the Commonwealth recognised India's continuing membership of the association.
On the international scene, Nehru was an opponent of military action and military alliances. He was a strong supporter of the United Nations, except when it tried to resolve the Kashmir question. He pioneered the policy of non-alignment and co-founded the Non-Aligned Movement of nations professing neutrality between the rival blocs of nations led by the US and the USSR. Recognising the People's Republic of China soon after its founding (while most of the Western bloc continued relations with Taiwan), Nehru argued for its inclusion in the United Nations and refused to brand the Chinese as the aggressors in their conflict with Korea. He sought to establish warm and friendly relations with China in 1950 and hoped to act as an intermediary to bridge the gulf and tensions between the communist states and the Western bloc.
Nehru was a key organiser of the Bandung Conference of April 1955, which brought 29 newly independent nations together from Asia and Africa, and was designed to galvanise the nonalignment movement under Nehru's leadership. He envisioned it as his key leadership opportunity on the world stage, where he would bring together emerging nations. He was one of the key participants of the 1st Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961 in Belgrade, FPR Yugoslavia.
While averse to war, Nehru led the campaigns against Pakistan in Kashmir. He used military force to annex Hyderabad in 1948 and Goa in 1961. While laying the foundation stone of the National Defence Academy in 1949, he stated:
We, who for generations had talked about and attempted in everything a peaceful way and practised non-violence, should now be, in a sense, glorifying our army, navy and air force. It means a lot. Though it is odd, yet it simply reflects the oddness of life. Though life is logical, we have to face all contingencies, and unless we are prepared to face them, we will go under. There was no greater prince of peace and apostle of non-violence than Mahatma Gandhi...but yet, he said it was better to take the sword than to surrender, fail or run away. We cannot live carefree assuming that we are safe. Human nature is such. We cannot take the risks and risk our hard-won freedom. We have to be prepared with all modern defence methods and a well-equipped army, navy, and air force."
Nehru entrusted Homi J. Bhabha, a nuclear physicist, with complete authority over all nuclear-related affairs and programs and answerable only to the prime minister.
Many hailed Nehru for working to defuse global tensions and the threat of nuclear weapons after the Korean War (1950–1953). He commissioned the first study of the effects of nuclear explosions on human health and campaigned ceaselessly for the abolition of what he called "these frightful engines of destruction". He also had pragmatic reasons for promoting de-nuclearization, fearing a nuclear arms race would lead to over-militarisation that would be unaffordable for developing countries such as his own.
At Lord Mountbatten's urging, in 1948, Nehru had promised to hold a plebiscite in Kashmir under the auspices of the UN. Kashmir was a disputed territory between India and Pakistan, the two have gone to war over it in 1947. However, as Pakistan failed to pull back troops in accordance with the UN resolution, and as Nehru grew increasingly wary of the UN, he declined to hold a plebiscite in 1953. His policies on Kashmir and the integration of the state into India were frequently defended before the United Nations by his aide, V. K. Krishna Menon, who earned a reputation in India for his passionate speeches.
In 1953, Nehru orchestrated the ouster and arrest of Sheikh Abdullah, the prime minister of Kashmir, whom he had previously supported but was now suspected of harbouring separatist ambitions; Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad replaced him.
Menon was instructed to deliver an unprecedented eight-hour speech defending India's stand on Kashmir in 1957; to date, the speech is the longest ever delivered in the United Nations Security Council, covering five hours of the 762nd meeting on 23 January, and two hours and forty-eight minutes on the 24th, reportedly concluding with Menon's collapse on the Security Council floor. During the filibuster, Nehru moved swiftly and successfully to consolidate Indian power in Kashmir (then under great unrest). Menon's passionate defence of Indian sovereignty in Kashmir enlarged his base of support in India and led to the Indian press temporarily dubbing him the "Hero of Kashmir". Nehru was then at the peak of his popularity in India; the only (minor) criticism came from the far right.
In 1954, Nehru signed with China the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, known in India as the Panchsheel (from the Sanskrit words, panch: five, sheel: virtues), a set of principles to govern relations between the two states. Their first formal codification in treaty form was in an agreement between China and India in 1954, which recognised Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. They were enunciated in the preamble to the "Agreement (with the exchange of notes) on Trade and Intercourse between Tibet Region of China and India", which was signed at Peking on 29 April 1954. Negotiations took place in Delhi from December 1953 to April 1954 between the Delegation of the People's Republic of China (PRC) Government and the Delegation of the Indian Government on the relations between the two countries regarding the disputed territories of Aksai Chin and South Tibet. By 1957, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai had also persuaded Nehru to accept the Chinese position on Tibet, thus depriving Tibet of a possible ally, and of the possibility of receiving military aid from India. The treaty was disregarded in the 1960s, but in the 1970s, the Five Principles again came to be seen as important in China–India relations, and more generally as norms of relations between states. They became widely recognised and accepted throughout the region during the premiership of Indira Gandhi and the three-year rule of the Janata Party (1977–1980). Although the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence were the basis of the 1954 Sino-Indian border treaty, in later years, Nehru's foreign policy suffered from increasing Chinese assertiveness over border disputes and his decision to grant asylum to the 14th Dalai Lama.
In 1956, Nehru criticised the joint invasion of the Suez Canal by the British, French, and Israelis. His role, both as Indian prime minister and a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, was significant; he tried to be even-handed between the two sides while vigorously denouncing Anthony Eden and co-sponsors of the invasion. Nehru had a powerful ally in the US President Dwight Eisenhower who, if relatively silent publicly, went to the extent of using America's clout at the International Monetary Fund to make Britain and France back down. During the Suez crisis, Nehru's right-hand man, Menon attempted to persuade a recalcitrant Gamal Nasser to compromise with the West and was instrumental in moving Western powers towards an awareness that Nasser might prove willing to compromise.
There were various assassination attempts on Nehru. The first attempt was made during partition in 1947 while he was visiting the North-West Frontier Province (now in Pakistan) in a car. Second attempt was came from Baburao Laxman Kochale, a knife-wielding rickshaw-puller, near Nagpur in 1955. The third attempt was a plot by Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1955. The fourth attempt took place in Bombay in 1956, and the fifth was a failed bombing attempt on train tracks in Maharashtra in 1961. Despite threats to his life, Nehru despised having too much security around him and did not like to disrupt traffic because of his movements.
Nehru's health began declining steadily in 1962. In the spring of 1962, he was affected with a viral infection over which he spent most of April in bed. In the next year, through 1963, he spent months recuperating in Kashmir. Some writers attribute this dramatic decline to his surprise and chagrin over the Sino-Indian War, which he perceived as a betrayal of trust. Upon his return from Dehradun on 26 May 1964, he was feeling quite comfortable and went to bed at about 23:30 as usual. He had a restful night until about 06:30. Soon after he returned from the bathroom, Nehru complained of pain in the back. He spoke to the doctors who attended to him for a brief while, and almost immediately he collapsed. He remained unconscious until he died at 13:44. His death was announced in the Lok Sabha at 14:00 local time on 27 May 1964; the cause of death was believed to be a heart attack. Draped in the Indian national Tri-colour flag, the body of Jawaharlal Nehru was placed for public viewing. "Raghupati Raghava Rajaram" was chanted as the body was placed on the platform. On 28 May, Nehru was cremated in accordance with Hindu rites at the Shantivan on the banks of the Yamuna, witnessed by 1.5 million mourners who had flocked into the streets of Delhi and the cremation grounds.
US President Lyndon B. Johnson remarked on his death:-
History has already recorded his monumental contribution to the molding of a strong and independent India. And yet, it is not just as a leader of India that he has served humanity. Perhaps more than any other world leader he has given expression to man's yearning for peace. This is the issue of our age. In his fearless pursuit of a world free from war he has served all humanity.
Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev remarked:-
He was a passionate fighter for peace in the whole world and an ardent champion of the realization of the principles of peaceful coexistence of states; he was the inspirer of the policy of Non-Alignment promoted by the Indian Government. This reasonable policy won India respect and due to it, India is now occupying a worthy place in the international arena.
Nehru's death left India with no clear political heir to his leadership. Lal Bahadur Shastri later succeeded Nehru as the prime minister.
The death was announced to the Indian parliament in words similar to Nehru's own at the time of Gandhi's assassination: "The light is out." India's future prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee famously delivered Nehru an acclaimed eulogy. He hailed Nehru as Bharat Mata's "favourite prince" and likened him to the Hindu god Rama.
Nehru served as the prime minister for eighteen years, first as interim prime minister during 1946–1947 during the last year of the British Raj and then as prime minister of independent India from 15 August 1947 to 27 May 1964.
B. R. Ambedkar, the law minister in the interim cabinet, also chaired the Constitution Drafting Committee.
Vallabhbhai Patel served as home minister in the interim government. He was instrumental in getting the Congress party working committee to vote for partition. He is also credited with integrating peacefully most of the princely states of India. Patel was a long-time comrade to Nehru but died in 1950, leaving Nehru as the unchallenged leader of India until his own death in 1964.
Maulana Azad was the First Minister of Education in the Indian government Minister of Human Resource Development (until 25 September 1958, Ministry of Education). His contribution to establishing the education foundation in India is recognised by celebrating his birthday as National Education Day across India.
Jagjivan Ram became the youngest minister in Nehru's Interim Government of India, a labour minister and also a member of the Constituent Assembly of India, where, as a member of the Dalit caste, he ensured that social justice was enshrined in the Constitution. He went on to serve as a minister with various portfolios during Nehru's tenure and in Shastri and Indira Gandhi governments.
Morarji Desai was a nationalist with anti-corruption leanings but was socially conservative, pro-business, and in favour of free enterprise reforms, as opposed to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's socialistic policies. After serving as chief minister of Bombay State, he joined Nehru's cabinet in 1956 as the finance minister of India. he held that position until 1963 when he along with other senior ministers in the Nehru cabinet resigned under the Kamaraj plan.The plan, as proposed by Madras Chief Minister K.Kamaraj, was to revert government ministers to party positions after a certain tenure and vice versa. With Nehru's age and health failing in the early 1960s, Desai was considered a possible contender for the position of Prime Minister. Later Desai alleged that Nehru used the Kamaraj Plan to remove all possible contenders 'from the path of his daughter, Indira Gandhi. Desai succeeded Indira Gandhi as the prime minister in 1977 when he was selected by the victorious Janata alliance as their parliamentary leader.
Govind Ballabh Pant (1887–1961) was a key figure in the Indian independence movement and later a pivotal figure in the politics of Uttar Pradesh (UP) and in the Indian Government. Pant served in Nehru's cabinet as Union home minister from 1955 until his death in 1961. As home minister, his chief achievement was the re-organisation of states along linguistic lines. He was also responsible for the establishment of Hindi as the official language of the central government and a few states. During his tenure as the home minister, Pant was awarded the Bharat Ratna.
C. D. Deshmukh was one of five members of the Planning Commission when it was constituted in 1950 by a cabinet resolution. Deshmukh succeeded John Mathai as the Union Finance Minister in 1950 after Mathai resigned in protest over the transfer of certain powers to the Planning Commission. As finance minister, Deshmukh remained a member of the Planning Commission. Deshmukh's tenure—during which he delivered six budgets and an interim budget—is noted for the effective management of the Indian economy and its steady growth which saw it recover from the impacts of the events of the 1940s. During Deshmukh's tenure, the State Bank of India was formed in 1955 through the nationalisation and amalgamation of the Imperial Bank with several smaller banks. He accomplished the nationalisation of insurance companies and the formation of the Life Insurance Corporation of India through the Life Insurance Corporation of India Act, 1956. Deshmukh resigned over the Government's proposal to move a bill in Parliament bifurcating Bombay State into Gujarat and Maharashtra while designating the city of Bombay a Union territory.
V. K. Krishna Menon (1896–1974) was a close associate of Nehru and has been described by some as the second most powerful man in India during Nehru's tenure as prime minister. Under Nehru, he served as India's high commissioner to the UK, UN ambassador, and Union minister of defence. He resigned after the debacle of the 1962 China War.
In the years following independence, Nehru frequently turned to his daughter Indira Gandhi for managing his personal affairs. Indira moved into Nehru's official residence to attend to him and became his constant companion in his travels across India and the world. She would virtually become Nehru's chief of staff. Towards the end of the 1950s, Indira Gandhi served as the president of the Congress. In that capacity, she was instrumental in getting the Communist-led Kerala State Government dismissed in 1959. Indira was elected as Congress party president in 1959, which aroused criticism for alleged nepotism, although Nehru had actually disapproved of her election, partly because he considered that it smacked of "dynasticism"; he said, indeed it was "wholly undemocratic and an undesirable thing", and refused her a position in his cabinet. Indira herself was at loggerheads with her father over policy; most notably, she used his oft-stated personal deference to the Congress Working Committee to push through the dismissal of the Communist Party of India government in the state of Kerala, over his own objections. Nehru began to be embarrassed by her ruthlessness and disregard for parliamentary tradition and was "hurt" by what he saw as an assertiveness with no purpose other than to stake out an identity independent of her father.
After Kamala's death in 1936, Nehru was rumoured to have relationships with several women. These included Shraddha Mata, Padmaja Naidu and Edwina Mountbatten. Countess Mountbatten's daughter Lady Pamela Hicks acknowledged Nehru's platonic relationship with Lady Mountbatten.
British historian Philip Ziegler, with access to the private letters and diaries, concludes the relationship:
was to endure until Edwina Mountbatten's death: intensely loving, romantic, trusting, generous, idealistic, even spiritual. If there was any physical element it can only have been of minor importance to either party. [India's Governor-General] Mountbatten's reaction was one of pleasure....He liked and admired Nehru, it was useful to him that the Prime Minister should find such attractions in the Governor-General's home, it was agreeable to find Edwina almost permanently in good temper: the advantages of the alliance were obvious.
Nehru's sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit told Pupul Jayakar, Indira Gandhi's friend and biographer, that Padmaja Naidu and Nehru lived together for many years.
Described as a Hindu agnostic, and styling himself as a "scientific humanist", Nehru thought that religious taboos were preventing India from moving forward and adapting to modern conditions: "No country or people who are slaves to dogma and dogmatic mentality can progress, and unhappily our country and people have become extraordinarily dogmatic and little-minded."
The spectacle of what is called religion, or at any rate organised religion, in India and elsewhere, has filled me with horror and I have frequently condemned it and wished to make a clean sweep of it. Almost always it seemed to stand for blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition, exploitation and the preservation of vested interests.
As a humanist, Nehru considered that his afterlife was not in some mystical heaven or reincarnation but in the practical achievements of a life lived fully with and for his fellow human beings: “…Nor am I greatly interested in life after death. I find the problems of this life sufficiently absorbing to fill my mind,” he wrote. In his Last Will and Testament, he wrote: “I wish to declare with all earnestness that I do not want any religious ceremonies performed for me after my death. I do not believe in such ceremonies, and to submit to them, even as a matter of form, would be hypocrisy and an attempt to delude ourselves and others.”
In his autobiography, he analysed Abrahamic and Indian religions and their impact on India. He wanted to model India as a secular country; his secularist policies remain a subject of debate.
Jawaharlal Nehru, next to Mahatma Gandhi, is regarded as the most significant figure of the Indian independence movement that successfully ended British rule over the Indian subcontinent.
As India's first Prime minister and external affairs minister, Nehru played a major role in shaping modern India's government and political culture along with the sound foreign policy. He is praised for creating a system providing universal primary education, reaching children in the farthest corners of rural India. Nehru's education policy is also credited for the development of world-class educational institutions like the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Indian Institutes of Technology, and the Indian Institutes of Management.
Following the independence, Nehru popularized the credo of 'unity in diversity' and implemented it as state policy. This proved particularly important as post-Independence differences surfaced since British withdrawal from the subcontinent prompted regional leaders to no longer relate to one another as allies against a common adversary. While differences in culture and, especially, language threatened the unity of the new nation, Nehru established programs such as the National Book Trust and the National Literary Academy which promoted the translation of regional works of literatures between languages and organised the transfer of materials between regions. In pursuit of a single, unified India, Nehru warned, "Integrate or perish."
Called an "architect of Modern India", he is widely recognized as the greatest figure of modern India after Mahatma Gandhi. On the occasion of his first death anniversary in 1965, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Lal Bahadur Shastri and others described Nehru as the greatest figure of India after Gandhi.
Writing in 2005, Ramachandra Guha wrote that while no other Indian prime minister was ever close to the challenges that Nehru dealt with and if Nehru had died in 1958 then he would be remembered as the greatest statesman of the 20th century. However, in recent years, Nehru's reputation has seen re-emergence and he is credited for keeping India together contrary to predictions of many that the country was bound to fall apart.
In his lifetime, Jawaharlal Nehru enjoyed an iconic status in India and was generally admired across the world for his idealism and statesmanship. Nehru's ideals and policies continue shaping the Congress Party's manifesto and core political philosophy. His birthday, 14 November is celebrated in India as Bal Divas ("Children's Day") in recognition of his lifelong passion and work for the welfare, education and development of children and young people. Children across India remember him as Chacha Nehru ("Uncle Nehru"). Nehru remains a popular symbol of the Congress Party which frequently celebrates his memory. people often emulate his style of clothing, especially the Gandhi cap and the Nehru jacket. Nehru's preference for the sherwani ensured it continues to be considered formal wear in North India today.
Many public institutions and memorials across India are dedicated to Nehru's memory. The Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi is among the most prestigious universities in India. The Jawaharlal Nehru Port near the city of Mumbai is a modern port and dock designed to handle a huge cargo and traffic load. Nehru's residence in Delhi is preserved as the Teen Murti House now has the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library, and one of five Nehru Planetariums that were set in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Allahabad and Pune. The complex also houses the offices of the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, established in 1964 under the chairmanship of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, then president of India. The foundation also gives away the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fellowship, established in 1968. The Nehru family homes at Anand Bhavan and Swaraj Bhavan are also preserved to commemorate Nehru and his family's legacy. In 1997, Nehru was voted as the greatest Indian since independence in India Today's poll. In 2012, he ranked number four in Outlook's poll of The Greatest Indian.
There have been many documentaries about Nehru's life, and he has been portrayed in fictionalised films. The canonical performance is probably that of Roshan Seth, who played him three times: in Richard Attenborough's 1982 film Gandhi, Shyam Benegal's 1988 television series Bharat Ek Khoj, based on Nehru's The Discovery of India, and in a 2007 TV film entitled The Last Days of the Raj. Benegal directed the 1984 documentary film, Nehru, covering his political career. Indian film director Kiran Kumar made a film about Nehru titled Nehru: The Jewel of India in 1990 starring Partap Sharma in the titular role. In Ketan Mehta's film Sardar, Benjamin Gilani portrayed Nehru. Naunihal (lit. 'Young man'), a 1967 Indian Hindi-language drama film by Raj Marbros, follows Raju, an orphan, who believes that Jawaharlal Nehru is his relative and sets out to meet him.
Similarly, in the 1957 film Ab Dilli Dur Nahin (lit. 'Now Delhi is not far away') by Amar Kumar, Rattan, a young boy, travels to Delhi and seeks to avert the death sentence of his wrongly convicted father by asking Prime Minister Nehru for help. Another 1957 English language short documentary Our Prime Minister was produced, compiled and directed by Ezra Mir, who also directed Three weeks in the life of Prime Minister Nehru in 1962. Girish Karnad's historical play, Tughlaq (1962) is an allegory about the Nehruvian era. It was staged by Ebrahim Alkazi with the National School of Drama Repertory at Purana Qila, Delhi in the 1970s and later at the Festival of India, London in 1982.
Nehru was a prolific writer in English who wrote The Discovery of India, Glimpses of World History, An Autobiography (released in the United States as "Toward Freedom,") and Letters from a Father to His Daughter, all written in jail. Letters comprised 30 letters written to his daughter Indira Priyadarshani Nehru (later Gandhi) who was then 10 years old and studying at a boarding school in Mussoorie. It attempted to instruct her about natural history and world civilisations.
Nehru's books have been widely read. An Autobiography, in particular, has been critically acclaimed. John Gunther, writing in Inside Asia, contrasted it with Gandhi's autobiography:
The Mahatma's placid story compares to Nehru's as a cornflower to an orchid, a rhyming couplet to a sonnet by MacLeish or Auden, a water pistol to a machine gun. Nehru's autobiography is subtle, complex, discriminating, infinitely cultivated, steeped in doubt, suffused with intellectual passion. Lord Halifax once said that no one could understand India without reading it; it is a kind of 'Education of Henry Adams,' written in superlative prose—hardly a dozen men alive write English as well as Nehru ...
Michael Brecher, who considered Nehru to be an intellectual for whom ideas were important aspects of Indian nationalism, wrote in Political Leadership and Charisma: Nehru, Ben-Gurion, and Other 20th-Century Political Leaders:
Nehru's books were not scholarly, nor were they intended to be. He was not a trained historian, but his feel for the flow of events and his capacity to weave together a wide range of knowledge in a meaningful pattern give to his books qualities of a high order. In these works, he also revealed a sensitive literary style. ... Glimpses of World History is the most illuminating on Nehru as an intellectual. The first of the trilogy, Glimpses, was a series of thinly connected sketches of the story of mankind in the form of letters to his teenage daughter, Indira, later prime minister of India. ... Despite its polemical character in many sections and its shortcomings as an impartial history, Glimpses is a work of great artistic value, a worthy precursor of his noble and magnanimous Autobiography.
Michael Crocker thought An Autobiography would have given Nehru literary fame had the political fame eluded him:
It is to his years in prison that we owe his three main books, ... Nehru's writings illustrate a cerebral life, and a power of self-discipline, altogether out of the ordinary. Words by the million bubbled up out of his fullness of mind and spirit. Had he never been prime minister of India he would have been famous as the author of the Autobiography and the autobiographical parts of The Discovery of India. An Autobiography, at least with some excisions here and there, is likely to be read for generations. ... There are, for instance, the characteristic touches of truism and anticlimax, strange in a man who could both think and, at his best, write so well ...
Nehru's speech A Tryst With Destiny was rated by the British newspaper The Guardian to be among the great speeches of the 20th-century. Ian Jack wrote in his introduction to the speech:
Dressed in a golden silk jacket with a red rose in the buttonhole, Nehru rose to speak. His sentences were finely made and memorable – Nehru was a good writer; his Discovery of India stands well above the level reached by most politician-writers. ... The nobility of Nehru's words – their sheer sweep – provided the new India with a lodestone that was ambitious and humane. Post-colonialism began here as well as Indian democracy, which has since outlived many expectations of its death.
In 1948, Nehru was conferred an honorary doctorate by the University of Mysore. He later received honorary doctorates from the University of Madras, Columbia University, and Keio University. The Hamburg University had awarded Nehru two honorary degrees of the Faculties of Law and Agriculture. In 1955, he was awarded with Honorary citizen of Belgrade by the Yugoslavian government.
In 1955, Nehru was awarded the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honour. President Rajendra Prasad awarded him the honour without taking advice from the Prime Minister and added that "I am taking this step on my own initiative".
He was posthumously awarded the Order of the Companions of O. R. Tambo by the Government of South Africa in 2005. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Jawaharlal Nehru (/ˈneɪru/ or /ˈnɛru/; Hindi: [ˈdʒəʋɑːɦəɾˈlɑːl ˈneːɦɾuː] ; juh-WAH-hurr-LAHL NE-hǝ-ROO; 14 November 1889 – 27 May 1964) was an Indian anti-colonial nationalist, statesman, secular humanist, social democrat, and author who was a central figure in India during the middle of the 20th century. Nehru was a principal leader of the Indian nationalist movement in the 1930s and 1940s. Upon India's independence in 1947, he served as the country's first prime minister for 16 years. Nehru promoted parliamentary democracy, secularism, and science and technology during the 1950s, powerfully influencing India's arc as a modern nation. In international affairs, he steered India clear of the two blocs of the Cold War. A well-regarded author, his books written in prison, such as Letters from a Father to His Daughter (1929), An Autobiography (1936) and The Discovery of India (1946), have been read around the world. The honorific Pandit has been commonly applied before his name.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The son of Motilal Nehru, a prominent lawyer and Indian nationalist, Jawaharlal Nehru was educated in England—at Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge, and trained in the law at the Inner Temple. He became a barrister, returned to India, enrolled at the Allahabad High Court and gradually began to take an interest in national politics, which eventually became a full-time occupation. He joined the Indian National Congress, rose to become the leader of a progressive faction during the 1920s, and eventually of the Congress, receiving the support of Mahatma Gandhi who was to designate Nehru as his political heir. As Congress president in 1929, Nehru called for complete independence from the British Raj.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Nehru and the Congress dominated Indian politics during the 1930s. Nehru promoted the idea of the secular nation-state in the 1937 provincial elections, allowing the Congress to sweep the elections, and to form governments in several provinces. In September 1939, the Congress ministries resigned to protest Viceroy Lord Linlithgow's decision to join the war without consulting them. After the All India Congress Committee's Quit India Resolution of 8 August 1942, senior Congress leaders were imprisoned and for a time the organisation was suppressed. Nehru, who had reluctantly heeded Gandhi's call for immediate independence, and had desired instead to support the Allied war effort during World War II, came out of a lengthy prison term to a much altered political landscape. The Muslim League, under Muhammad Ali Jinnah, had come to dominate Muslim politics in the interim. In the 1946 provincial elections, Congress won the elections but the League won all the seats reserved for Muslims, which the British interpreted to be a clear mandate for Pakistan in some form. Nehru became the interim prime minister of India in September 1946, with the League joining his government with some hesitancy in October 1946.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Upon India's independence on 15 August 1947, Nehru gave a critically acclaimed speech, \"Tryst with Destiny\"; he was sworn in as the Dominion of India's prime minister and raised the Indian flag at the Red Fort in Delhi. On 26 January 1950, when India became a republic within the Commonwealth of Nations, Nehru became the Republic of India's first prime minister. He embarked on an ambitious program of economic, social, and political reforms. Nehru promoted a pluralistic multi-party democracy. In foreign affairs, he played a leading role in establishing the Non-Aligned Movement, a group of nations that did not seek membership in the two main ideological blocs of the Cold War.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Under Nehru's leadership, the Congress emerged as a catch-all party, dominating national and state-level politics and winning elections in 1951, 1957 and 1962. His premiership, spanning 16 years and 286 days—which is, to date, the longest in India—ended with his death in 1964 from a heart attack. Hailed as the \"architect of Modern India\", his birthday is celebrated as Children's Day in India.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Jawaharlal Nehru was born on 14 November 1889 in Allahabad in British India. His father, Motilal Nehru (1861–1931), a self-made wealthy barrister who belonged to the Kashmiri Pandit community, served twice as president of the Indian National Congress, in 1919 and 1928. His mother, Swarup Rani Thussu (1868–1938), who came from a well-known Kashmiri Brahmin family settled in Lahore, was Motilal's second wife, his first having died in childbirth. Jawaharlal was the eldest of three children. The elder of his two sisters, Vijaya Lakshmi, later became the first female president of the United Nations General Assembly. His youngest sister, Krishna Hutheesing, became a noted writer and authored several books on her brother.",
"title": "Early life and career (1889–1912)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Nehru described his childhood as a \"sheltered and uneventful one\". He grew up in an atmosphere of privilege in wealthy homes, including a palatial estate called the Anand Bhavan. His father had him educated at home by private governesses and tutors. Influenced by the Irish theosophist Ferdinand T. Brooks' teaching, Nehru became interested in science and theosophy. A family friend, Annie Besant subsequently initiated him into the Theosophical Society at age thirteen. However, his interest in theosophy did not prove to be enduring, and he left the society shortly after Brooks departed as his tutor. He wrote: \"For nearly three years [Brooks] was with me and in many ways, he influenced me greatly\".",
"title": "Early life and career (1889–1912)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Nehru's theosophical interests induced him to study the Buddhist and Hindu scriptures. According to B. R. Nanda, these scriptures were Nehru's \"first introduction to the religious and cultural heritage of [India]....[They] provided Nehru the initial impulse for [his] long intellectual quest which culminated…in The Discovery of India.\"",
"title": "Early life and career (1889–1912)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Nehru became an ardent nationalist during his youth. The Second Boer War and the Russo-Japanese War intensified his feelings. Of the latter he wrote, \"[The] Japanese victories [had] stirred up my enthusiasm. ...Nationalistic ideas filled my mind. ... I mused of Indian freedom and Asiatic freedom from the thraldom of Europe.\" Later, in 1905, when he had begun his institutional schooling at Harrow, a leading school in England where he was nicknamed \"Joe\", G. M. Trevelyan's Garibaldi books, which he had received as prizes for academic merit, influenced him greatly. He viewed Garibaldi as a revolutionary hero. He wrote: \"Visions of similar deeds in India came before, of [my] gallant fight for [Indian] freedom and in my mind, India and Italy got strangely mixed together.\"",
"title": "Early life and career (1889–1912)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Nehru went to Trinity College, Cambridge, in October 1907 and graduated with an honours degree in natural science in 1910. During this period, he studied politics, economics, history and literature with interest. The writings of Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, Lowes Dickinson and Meredith Townsend moulded much of his political and economic thinking.",
"title": "Early life and career (1889–1912)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "After completing his degree in 1910, Nehru moved to London and studied law at the Inner Temple Inn. During this time, he continued to study Fabian Society scholars including Beatrice Webb. He was called to the Bar in 1912.",
"title": "Early life and career (1889–1912)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "After returning to India in August 1912, Nehru enrolled as an advocate of the Allahabad High Court and tried to settle down as a barrister. But, unlike his father, he had very little interest in his profession and relished neither the practice of law nor the company of lawyers: \"Decidedly the atmosphere was not intellectually stimulating and a sense of the utter insipidity of life grew upon me.\" His involvement in nationalist politics was to gradually replace his legal practice.",
"title": "Early life and career (1889–1912)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Nehru had developed an interest in Indian politics during his time in Britain as a student and a barrister. Within months of his return to India in 1912, Nehru attended an annual session of the Indian National Congress in Patna. Congress in 1912 was the party of moderates and elites, and he was disconcerted by what he saw as \"very much an English-knowing upper-class affair\". Nehru doubted the effectiveness of Congress but agreed to work for the party in support of the Indian civil rights movement led by Mahatma Gandhi in South Africa, collecting funds for the movement in 1913. Later, he campaigned against indentured labour and other such discrimination faced by Indians in the British colonies.",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1912–1938)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "When World War I broke out, sympathy in India was divided. Although educated Indians \"by and large took a vicarious pleasure\" in seeing the British rulers humbled, the ruling upper classes sided with the Allies. Nehru confessed he viewed the war with mixed feelings. As Frank Moraes writes, \"[i]f [Nehru's] sympathy was with any country it was with France, whose culture he greatly admired\". During the war, Nehru volunteered for the St. John Ambulance and worked as one of the organisation's provincial secretaries Allahabad. He also spoke out against the censorship acts passed by the British government in India.",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1912–1938)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Nehru emerged from the war years as a leader whose political views were considered radical. Although the political discourse at the time had been dominated by the moderate, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, who said that it was \"madness to think of independence,\" Nehru had spoken, \"openly of the politics of non-cooperation, of the need of resigning from honorary positions under the government and of not continuing the futile politics of representation\". He ridiculed the Indian Civil Service for supporting British policies. He noted someone had once defined the Indian Civil Service, \"with which we are unfortunately still afflicted in this country, as neither Indian, nor civil, nor a service\". Motilal Nehru, a prominent moderate leader, acknowledged the limits of constitutional agitation but counselled his son that there was no other \"practical alternative\" to it. Nehru, however, was dissatisfied with the pace of the national movement. He became involved with aggressive nationalists leaders demanding Home Rule for Indians.",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1912–1938)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The influence of moderates on Congress' politics waned after Gokhale died in 1915. Anti-moderate leaders like Annie Besant and Bal Gangadhar Tilak took the opportunity to call for a national movement for Home Rule. However, in 1915, the proposal was rejected because of the reluctance of the moderates to commit to such a radical course of action.",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1912–1938)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Nehru married Kamala Kaul in 1916. Their only daughter Indira was born a year later in 1917. Kamala gave birth to a boy in November 1924, but he lived for only a week.",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1912–1938)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Nevertheless, Besant formed a league for advocating Home Rule in 1916. Tilak, after releasing from a term in prison, had formed his own league in April 1916. Nehru joined both leagues, but worked primarily for the former. He remarked later that \"[Besant] had a very powerful influence on me in my childhood ... even later when I entered political life her influence continued.\" Another development that brought about a radical change in Indian politics was the espousal of Hindu-Muslim unity with the Lucknow Pact at the annual meeting of the Congress in December 1916. The pact had been initiated earlier in the year at Allahabad at a meeting of the All India Congress Committee, which was held at the Nehru residence at Anand Bhawan. Nehru welcomed and encouraged the rapprochement between the two Indian communities.",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1912–1938)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Several nationalist leaders banded together in 1916 under the leadership of Annie Besant to voice a demand for self-governance, and to obtain the status of a Dominion within the British Empire as enjoyed at the time by Australia, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand and Newfoundland. Nehru joined the movement and rose to become secretary of Besant's Home Rule League.",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1912–1938)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In June 1917, the British government arrested and interned Besant. The Congress and other Indian organisations threatened to launch protests if she was not freed. Subsequently, the British government was forced to release Besant and make significant concessions after a period of intense protest.",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1912–1938)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Nehru's first big national involvement came at the onset of the non-co-operation movement in 1920. He led the movement in the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh). Nehru was arrested on charges of anti-governmental activities in 1921 and released a few months later. In the rift that formed within the Congress following Gandhi's sudden halting of the non-Cooperation movement after the Chauri Chaura incident, Nehru remained loyal to him and did not join the Swaraj Party formed by his father Motilal Nehru and CR Das. In 1923, Nehru was imprisoned in Nabha, a princely state, when he went there to see the struggle that was being waged by the Sikhs against the corrupt Mahants. He was released after his sentence was suspended by the British administration under the criminal procedure code.",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1912–1938)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Nehru played a leading role in the development of the internationalist outlook of the Indian independence struggle. He sought foreign allies for India and forged links with movements for independence and democracy around the world. In 1927, his efforts paid off, and the Congress was invited to attend the Congress of oppressed nationalities in Brussels, Belgium. The meeting was called to coordinate and plan a common struggle against imperialism. Nehru represented India and was elected to the Executive Council of the League against Imperialism which was born at this meeting.",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1912–1938)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Increasingly, Nehru saw the struggle for independence from British imperialism as a multinational effort by the various colonies and dominions of the Empire; some of his statements on this matter, however, were interpreted as complicity with the rise of Hitler and his espoused intentions. Faced with these allegations, Nehru responded:",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1912–1938)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "We have sympathy for the national movement of Arabs in Palestine because it is directed against British Imperialism. Our sympathies cannot be weakened by the fact that the national movement coincides with Hitler's interests.",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1912–1938)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Nehru drafted the policies of the Congress and a future Indian nation in 1929. He declared the aims of the congress were freedom of religion; right to form associations; freedom of expression of thought; equality before the law for every individual without distinction of caste, colour, creed, or religion; protection of regional languages and cultures, safeguarding the interests of the peasants and labour; abolition of untouchability; introduction of the adult franchise; imposition of prohibition, nationalisation of industries; socialism; and the establishment of a secular India. All these aims formed the core of the \"Fundamental Rights and Economic Policy\" resolution drafted by Nehru in 1929–1931 and were ratified in 1931 by the Congress party session at Karachi chaired by Vallabhbhai Patel.",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1912–1938)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Nehru was one of the first leaders to demand that the Congress Party should resolve to make a complete and explicit break from all ties with the British Empire. The Madras session of Congress in 1927, approved his resolution for independence despite Gandhi's criticism. At that time, he formed the Independence for India League, a pressure group within the Congress. In 1928, Gandhi agreed to Nehru's demands and proposed a resolution that called for the British to grant Dominion status to India within two years. If the British failed to meet the deadline, the Congress would call upon all Indians to fight for complete independence. Nehru was one of the leaders who objected to the time given to the British—he pressed Gandhi to demand immediate actions from the British. Gandhi brokered a further compromise by reducing the time given from two years to one. The British rejected demands for Dominion status in 1929. Nehru assumed the presidency of the Congress party during the Lahore session on 29 December 1929 and introduced a successful resolution calling for complete independence. Nehru drafted the Indian Declaration of Independence, which stated:",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1912–1938)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "We believe that it is the inalienable right of the Indian people, as of any other people, to have freedom and to enjoy the fruits of their toil and have the necessities of life, so that they may have full opportunities for growth. We believe also that if any government deprives a people of these rights and oppresses them the people have a further right to alter it or abolish it. The British government in India has not only deprived the Indian people of their freedom but has based itself on the exploitation of the masses, and has ruined India economically, politically, culturally, and spiritually. We believe, therefore, that India must sever the British connection and attain Purna Swaraj or complete independence.",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1912–1938)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "At midnight on New Year's Eve 1929, Nehru hoisted the tricolour flag of India upon the banks of the Ravi in Lahore. A pledge of independence was read out, which included a readiness to withhold taxes. The massive gathering of the public attending the ceremony was asked if they agreed with it, and the majority of people were witnessed raising their hands in approval. 172 Indian members of central and provincial legislatures resigned in support of the resolution and in accordance with Indian public sentiment. The Congress asked the people of India to observe 26 January as Independence Day. Congress volunteers, nationalists, and the public hoisted the flag of India publicly across India. Plans for mass civil disobedience were also underway.",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1912–1938)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "After the Lahore session of the Congress in 1929, Nehru gradually emerged as the paramount leader of the Indian independence movement. Gandhi stepped back into a more spiritual role. Although Gandhi did not explicitly designate Nehru as his political heir until 1942, as early as the mid-1930s, the country saw Nehru as the natural successor to Gandhi.",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1912–1938)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Nehru and most of the Congress leaders were ambivalent initially about Gandhi's plan to begin civil disobedience with a satyagraha aimed at the British salt tax. After the protest had gathered steam, they realised the power of salt as a symbol. Nehru remarked about the unprecedented popular response, \"It seemed as though a spring had been suddenly released\". He was arrested on 14 April 1930 while on a train from Allahabad to Raipur. Earlier, after addressing a huge meeting and leading a vast procession, he had ceremoniously manufactured some contraband salt. He was charged with breach of the salt law and sentenced to six months of imprisonment at Central Jail.",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1912–1938)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "He nominated Gandhi to succeed him as the Congress president during his absence in jail, but Gandhi declined, and Nehru nominated his father as his successor. With Nehru's arrest, the civil disobedience acquired a new tempo, and arrests, firing on crowds and lathi charges grew to be ordinary occurrences.",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1912–1938)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The salt satyagraha (\"pressure for reform through passive resistance\") succeeded in attracting world attention. Indian, British, and world opinion increasingly recognised the legitimacy of the claims by the Congress party for independence. Nehru considered the salt satyagraha the high-water mark of his association with Gandhi, and felt its lasting importance was in changing the attitudes of Indians:",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1912–1938)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Of course these movements exercised tremendous pressure on the British Government and shook the government machinery. But the real importance, to my mind, lay in the effect they had on our own people, and especially the village masses. ... Non-cooperation dragged them out of the mire and gave them self-respect and self-reliance. ... They acted courageously and did not submit so easily to unjust oppression; their outlook widened and they began to think a little in terms of India as a whole. ... It was a remarkable transformation and the Congress, under Gandhi's leadership, must have the credit for it.",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1912–1938)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Nehru's trip to Europe in 1936 happened to be the turning point in his political and economic mindset. The visit sparked his interest in Marxism and his socialist thought pattern. Time later spent incarcerated enabled him to research Marxism more deeply. Appealed by its ideas but repelled by some of its tactics, he never could bring himself to buy Karl Marx's words as revealed gospel. However, from that time on, the benchmark of his economic view remained Marxist, adapted, where necessary, to Indian circumstances.",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1912–1938)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Nehru spent the early months of 1936 in Switzerland visiting his ailing wife in Lausanne, where she died in March. While in Europe, he became very concerned with the possibility of another world war. At that time, he emphasised that, in the event of war, India's place was alongside the democracies, though he insisted India could only fight in support of Great Britain and France as a free country.",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1912–1938)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "At its 1936 Lucknow session, despite opposition from the newly elected Nehru as the party president, the Congress party agreed to contest the provincial elections to be held in 1937 under the Government of India Act 1935. The elections brought the Congress party to power in a majority of the provinces with increased popularity and power for Nehru. Since the Muslim League under Muhammad Ali Jinnah (who was to become the creator of Pakistan) had fared badly at the polls, Nehru declared that the only two parties that mattered in India were the British colonial authorities and the Congress. Jinnah's statements that the Muslim League was the third and \"equal partner\" within Indian politics were widely rejected.",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1912–1938)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In the 1930s, under the leadership of Jayaprakash Narayan, Narendra Deo, and others, the Congress Socialist Party group was formed within the INC. Though Nehru never joined the group, he acted as a bridge between them and Gandhi. He had the support of left-wing Congressmen Maulana Azad and Subhas Chandra Bose. The trio combined to oust Rajendra Prasad as the Congress president in 1936. Nehru was elected in his place and held the presidency for two years (1936–37). His socialist colleagues Bose (1938–39) and Azad (1940–46) succeeded him. During Nehru's second term as general secretary of the Congress, he proposed certain resolutions concerning the foreign policy of India. From then on, he was given carte blanche (\"blank cheque\") in framing the foreign policy of any future Indian nation. Nehru worked closely with Bose in developing good relations with governments of free countries all over the world.",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1912–1938)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Nehru was one of the first nationalist leaders to realise the sufferings of the people in the states ruled by Indian princes. The nationalist movement had been confined to the territories under direct British rule. He helped to make the struggle of the people in the princely states a part of the nationalist movement for independence. Nehru was also given the responsibility of planning the economy of a future India and appointed the National Planning Commission in 1938 to help frame such policies. However, many of the plans framed by Nehru and his colleagues would come undone with the unexpected partition of India in 1947.",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1912–1938)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "The All India States Peoples Conference (AISPC) was formed in 1927 and Nehru, who had supported the cause of the people of the princely states for many years, was made the organisation's president in 1939. He opened up its ranks to membership from across the political spectrum. AISPC was to play an important role during the political integration of India, helping Indian leaders Vallabhbhai Patel and V. P. Menon (to whom Nehru had delegated integrating the princely states into India) negotiate with hundreds of princes.",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1912–1938)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "When World War II began, Viceroy Linlithgow unilaterally declared India a belligerent on the side of Britain, without consulting the elected Indian representatives. Nehru hurried back from a visit to China, announcing that, in a conflict between democracy and fascism, \"our sympathies must inevitably be on the side of democracy, ... I should like India to play its full part and throw all her resources into the struggle for a new order\".",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1939–1947)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "After much deliberation, the Congress under Nehru informed the government that it would co-operate with the British but on certain conditions. First, Britain must give an assurance of full independence for India after the war and allow the election of a constituent assembly to frame a new constitution; second, although the Indian armed forces would remain under the British Commander-in-chief, Indians must be included immediately in the central government and given a chance to share power and responsibility. When Nehru presented Lord Linlithgow with these demands, he chose to reject them. A deadlock was reached: \"The same old game is played again,\" Nehru wrote bitterly to Gandhi, \"the background is the same, the various epithets are the same and the actors are the same and the results must be the same\".",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1939–1947)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "On 23 October 1939, the Congress condemned the Viceroy's attitude and called upon the Congress ministries in the various provinces to resign in protest. Before this crucial announcement, Nehru urged Jinnah and the Muslim League to join the protest, but Jinnah declined.",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1939–1947)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "As Nehru had firmly placed India on the path of democracy and freedom at a time when the world was under the threat of Fascism, he and Bose split in the late 1930s when the latter agreed to seek the help of Fascists in driving the British out of India. At the same time, Nehru supported the Republicans who were fighting against Francisco Franco's forces in the Spanish Civil War. Nehru and his aide V. K. Krishna Menon visited Spain and declared support for the Republicans. When Benito Mussolini, dictator of Italy, expressed his desire to meet, Nehru refused him.",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1939–1947)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "In March 1940, Muhammad Ali Jinnah passed what came to be known as the Pakistan Resolution, declaring that, \"Muslims are a nation according to any definition of a nation, and they must have their homelands, their territory and their State.\" This state was to be known as Pakistan, meaning 'Land of the Pure'. Nehru angrily declared that \"all the old problems ... pale into insignificance before the latest stand taken by the Muslim League leader in Lahore\". Linlithgow made Nehru an offer on 8 October 1940, which stated that Dominion status for India was the objective of the British government. However, it referred neither to a date nor a method to accomplish this. Only Jinnah received something more precise: \"The British would not contemplate transferring power to a Congress-dominated national government, the authority of which was denied by various elements in India's national life\".",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1939–1947)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "In October 1940, Gandhi and Nehru, abandoning their original stand of supporting Britain, decided to launch a limited civil disobedience campaign in which leading advocates of Indian independence were selected to participate one by one. Nehru was arrested and sentenced to four years imprisonment. On 15 January 1941, Gandhi stated:",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1939–1947)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Some say Jawaharlal and I were estranged. It will require much more than a difference of opinion to estrange us. We had differences from the time we became co-workers and yet I have said for some years and say so now that not Rajaji but Jawaharlal will be my successor.",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1939–1947)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "After spending a little more than a year in jail, Nehru was released, along with other Congress prisoners, three days before the bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1939–1947)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "When the Japanese carried their attack through Burma (now Myanmar) to the borders of India in the spring of 1942, the British government, faced with this new military threat, decided to make some overtures to India, as Nehru had originally desired. Prime Minister Winston Churchill dispatched Sir Stafford Cripps, a member of the War Cabinet who was known to be politically close to Nehru and knew Jinnah, with proposals for a settlement of the constitutional problem. As soon as he arrived, he discovered that India was more deeply divided than he had imagined. Nehru, eager for a compromise, was hopeful; Gandhi was not. Jinnah had continued opposing the Congress: \"Pakistan is our only demand, and by God, we will have it,\" he declared in the Muslim League newspaper Dawn. Cripps' mission failed as Gandhi would accept nothing less than independence. Relations between Nehru and Gandhi cooled over the latter's refusal to co-operate with Cripps, but the two later reconciled.",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1939–1947)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "In 1942, Gandhi called on the British to leave India; Nehru, though reluctant to embarrass the allied war effort, had no alternative but to join Gandhi. Following the Quit India resolution passed by the Congress party in Bombay on 8 August 1942, the entire Congress working committee, including Gandhi and Nehru, was arrested and imprisoned. Most of the Congress working committee including Nehru, Abdul Kalam Azad, and Sardar Patel were incarcerated at the Ahmednagar Fort until 15 June 1945.",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1939–1947)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "During the period when all the Congress leaders were in jail, the Muslim League under Jinnah grew in power. In April 1943, the League captured the governments of Bengal and, a month later, that of the North-West Frontier Province. In none of these provinces had the League previously had a majority—only the arrest of Congress members made it possible. With all the Muslim-dominated provinces except Punjab under Jinnah's control, the concept of a separate Muslim State was turning into a reality. However, by 1944, Jinnah's power and prestige were waning.",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1939–1947)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "A general sympathy towards the jailed Congress leaders was developing among Muslims, and much of the blame for the disastrous Bengal famine of 1943–44 during which two million died had been laid on the shoulders of the province's Muslim League government. The numbers at Jinnah's meetings, once counted in thousands, soon numbered only a few hundred. In despair, Jinnah left the political scene for a stay in Kashmir. His prestige was restored unwittingly by Gandhi, who had been released from prison on medical grounds in May 1944 and had met Jinnah in Bombay in September. There, he offered the Muslim leader a plebiscite in the Muslim areas after the war to see whether they wanted to separate from the rest of India. Essentially, it was an acceptance of the principle of Pakistan—but not in so many words. Jinnah demanded that the exact words be used. Gandhi refused and the talks broke down. Jinnah, however, had greatly strengthened his own position and that of the League. The most influential member of the Congress had been seen to negotiate with him on equal terms.",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1939–1947)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Nehru and his colleagues were released prior to the arrival of the British 1946 Cabinet Mission to India to propose plans for the transfer of power. The agreed plan in 1946 led to elections to the provincial assemblies. In turn, the members of the assemblies elected members of the Constituent Assembly. Congress won the majority of seats in the assembly and headed the interim government, with Nehru as the prime minister. The Muslim League joined the government later with Liaquat Ali Khan as the Finance member.",
"title": "Nationalist movement (1939–1947)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Nehru served as prime minister for 16 years, initially as the interim prime minister, then from 1947 as the prime minister of the Dominion of India and then from 1950 as the prime minister of the Republic of India.",
"title": "Prime Minister of India (1947–1964)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "In July 1946, Nehru pointedly observed that no princely state could prevail militarily against the army of independent India. In January 1947, he said that independent India would not accept the divine right of kings. In May 1947, he declared that any princely state which refused to join the Constituent Assembly would be treated as an enemy state. Vallabhbhai Patel and V. P. Menon were more conciliatory towards the princes, and as the men charged with integrating the states, were successful in the task. During the drafting of the Indian constitution, many Indian leaders (except Nehru) were in favour of allowing each princely state or covenanting state to be independent as a federal state along the lines suggested originally by the Government of India Act 1935. But as the drafting of the constitution progressed, and the idea of forming a republic took concrete shape, it was decided that all the princely states/covenanting states would merge with the Indian republic.",
"title": "Prime Minister of India (1947–1964)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "In 1963, Nehru brought in legislation making it illegal to demand secession and introduced the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution which makes it necessary for those running for office to take an oath that says \"I will uphold the sovereignty and integrity of India\".",
"title": "Prime Minister of India (1947–1964)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The period before independence in early 1947 was impaired by outbreaks of communal violence and political disorder, and the opposition of the Muslim League led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who were demanding a separate Muslim state of Pakistan.",
"title": "Prime Minister of India (1947–1964)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "He took office as the prime minister of India on 15 August and delivered his inaugural address titled \"Tryst with Destiny\".",
"title": "Prime Minister of India (1947–1964)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history when we step out from the old to the new when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. It is fitting that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity.",
"title": "Prime Minister of India (1947–1964)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "On 30 January 1948, Gandhi was shot while he was walking in the garden of Birla House on his way to address a prayer meeting. The assassin, Nathuram Godse, was a Hindu nationalist with links to the extremist Hindu Mahasabha party, who held Gandhi responsible for weakening India by insisting upon a payment to Pakistan. Nehru addressed the nation by radio:",
"title": "Prime Minister of India (1947–1964)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Friends and comrades, the light has gone out of our lives, and there is darkness everywhere, and I do not quite know what to tell you or how to say it. Our beloved leader, Bapu as we called him, the father of the nation, is no more. Perhaps I am wrong to say that; nevertheless, we will not see him again, as we have seen him for these many years, we will not run to him for advice or seek solace from him, and that is a terrible blow, not only for me but for millions and millions in this country.",
"title": "Prime Minister of India (1947–1964)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Yasmin Khan argued that Gandhi's death and funeral helped consolidate the authority of the new Indian state under Nehru and Patel. The Congress tightly controlled the epic public displays of grief over a two-week period—the funeral, mortuary rituals and distribution of the martyr's ashes with millions participating in different events. The goal was to assert the power of the government, legitimise the Congress party's control and suppress all religious paramilitary groups. Nehru and Patel suppressed the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Muslim National Guards, and the Khaksars, with some 200,000 arrests. Gandhi's death and funeral linked the distant state with the Indian people and helped them to understand the need to suppress religious parties during the transition to independence for the Indian people. In later years, there emerged a revisionist school of history which sought to blame Nehru for the partition of India, mostly referring to his highly centralised policies for an independent India in 1947, which Jinnah opposed in favour of a more decentralised India.",
"title": "Prime Minister of India (1947–1964)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "The British Indian Empire, which included present-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, was divided into two types of territories: the Provinces of British India, which were governed directly by British officials responsible to the Viceroy of India; and princely states, under the rule of local hereditary rulers who recognised British suzerainty in return for local autonomy, in most cases as established by a treaty. Between 1947 and about 1950, the territories of the princely states were politically integrated into the Indian Union under Nehru and Sardar Patel. Most were merged into existing provinces; others were organised into new provinces, such as Rajputana, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Bharat, and Vindhya Pradesh, made up of multiple princely states; a few, including Mysore, Hyderabad, Bhopal and Bilaspur, became separate provinces. The Government of India Act 1935 remained the constitutional law of India the pending adoption of a new Constitution.",
"title": "Prime Minister of India (1947–1964)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "The new Constitution of India, which came into force on 26 January 1950 (Republic Day), made India a sovereign democratic republic. The new republic was declared to be a \"Union of States\".",
"title": "Prime Minister of India (1947–1964)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "After the adoption of the constitution on 26 November 1949, the Constituent Assembly continued to act as the interim parliament until new elections. Nehru's interim cabinet consisted of 15 members from diverse communities and parties. The first elections to Indian legislative bodies (National parliament and State assemblies ) under the new constitution of India were held in 1952. The Congress party under Nehru's leadership won a large majority at both state and national levels.",
"title": "Prime Minister of India (1947–1964)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "In December 1953, Nehru appointed the States Reorganisation Commission to prepare for the creation of states on linguistic lines. Headed by Justice Fazal Ali, the commission itself was also known as the Fazal Ali Commission. Govind Ballabh Pant, who served as Nehru's home minister from December 1954, oversaw the commission's efforts. The commission created a report in 1955 recommending the reorganisation of India's states.",
"title": "Prime Minister of India (1947–1964)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Under the Seventh Amendment, the existing distinction between Part A, Part B, Part C, and Part D states was abolished. The distinction between Part A and Part B states was removed, becoming known simply as states'. A new type of entity, the union territory, replaced the classification as a Part C or Part D state. Nehru stressed commonality among Indians and promoted pan-Indianism, refusing to reorganise states on either religious or ethnic lines.",
"title": "Prime Minister of India (1947–1964)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "In the 1957 elections, under Nehru’s leadership, the Indian National Congress easily won a second term in power, taking 371 of the 494 seats. They gained an extra seven seats (the size of the Lok Sabha had been increased by five) and their vote share increased from 45.0% to 47.8%. The INC won nearly five times more votes than the Communist Party, the second-largest party.",
"title": "Prime Minister of India (1947–1964)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "In 1962, Nehru led the Congress to victory with a diminished majority. The numbers who voted for the Communist and socialist parties grew, although some right-wing groups like Bharatiya Jana Sangh also did well.",
"title": "Prime Minister of India (1947–1964)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "After years of failed negotiations, Nehru authorised the Indian Army to invade Portuguese-controlled Portuguese India (Goa) in 1961, and then he formally annexed it to India. It increased his popularity in India, but he was criticised by the communist opposition in India for the use of military force.",
"title": "Prime Minister of India (1947–1964)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "From 1959, in a process that accelerated in 1961, Nehru adopted the \"Forward Policy\" of setting up military outposts in disputed areas of the Sino-Indian border, including 43 outposts in territory not previously controlled by India. China attacked some of these outposts, and the Sino-Indian War began, which India lost. The war ended with China announcing a unilateral ceasefire and with its forces withdrawing to 20 kilometers behind the line of actual control of 1959.",
"title": "Prime Minister of India (1947–1964)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "The war exposed the unpreparedness of India's military, which could send only 14,000 troops to the war zone in opposition to the much larger Chinese Army, and Nehru was widely criticised for his government's insufficient attention to defence. In response, defence minister V. K. Krishna Menon resigned and Nehru sought US military aid. Nehru's improved relations with the US under John F. Kennedy proved useful during the war, as in 1962, the president of Pakistan (then closely aligned with the Americans) Ayub Khan was made to guarantee his neutrality regarding India, threatened by \"communist aggression from Red China\". India's relationship with the Soviet Union, criticised by right-wing groups supporting free-market policies, was also seemingly validated. Nehru would continue to maintain his commitment to the non-aligned movement, despite calls from some to settle down on one permanent ally.",
"title": "Prime Minister of India (1947–1964)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "The unpreparedness of the army was blamed on Defence Minister Menon, who \"resigned\" from his government post to allow for someone who might modernise India's military further. India's policy of weaponisation using indigenous sources and self-sufficiency began in earnest under Nehru, completed by his daughter Indira Gandhi, who later led India to a crushing military victory over rival Pakistan in 1971. Toward the end of the war, India had increased her support for Tibetan refugees and revolutionaries, some of them having settled in India, as they were fighting the same common enemy in the region. Nehru ordered the raising of an elite Indian-trained \"Tibetan Armed Force\" composed of Tibetan refugees, which served with distinction in future wars against Pakistan in 1965 and 1971.",
"title": "Prime Minister of India (1947–1964)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "To date, Nehru is considered the most popular prime minister winning three consecutive elections with around 45% of the vote. A Pathé News archive video reporting Nehru's death remarks \"Neither on the political stage nor in moral stature was his leadership ever challenged\". In his book Verdicts on Nehru, Ramachandra Guha cited a contemporary account that described what Nehru's 1951–52 Indian general election campaign looked like:",
"title": "Prime Minister of India (1947–1964)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Almost at every place, city, town, village or wayside halt, people had waited overnight to welcome the nation's leader. Schools and shops closed; milkmaids and cowherds had taken a holiday; the kisan and his helpmate took a temporary respite from their dawn-to-dusk programme of hard work in field and home. In Nehru's name, stocks of soda and lemonade sold out; even water became scarce . . . Special trains were run from out-of-the-way places to carry people to Nehru's meetings, enthusiasts travelling not only on footboards but also on top of carriages. Scores of people fainted in milling crowds.",
"title": "Prime Minister of India (1947–1964)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "In the 1950s, Nehru was admired by world leaders such as British prime minister Winston Churchill, and US President Dwight D. Eisenhower. A letter from Eisenhower to Nehru, dated 27 November 1958, read:",
"title": "Prime Minister of India (1947–1964)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Universally you are recognised as one of the most powerful influences for peace and conciliation in the world. I believe that because you are a world leader for peace in your individual capacity, as well as a representative of the largest neutral nation....",
"title": "Prime Minister of India (1947–1964)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "In 1955, Churchill called Nehru, the light of Asia, and a greater light than Gautama Buddha. Nehru is time and again described as a charismatic leader with a rare charm.",
"title": "Prime Minister of India (1947–1964)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "According to Bhikhu Parekh, Nehru can be regarded as the founder of the modern Indian state. Parekh attributes this to the national philosophy Nehru formulated for India. For him, modernisation was the national philosophy, with seven goals: national unity, parliamentary democracy, industrialisation, socialism, development of the scientific temper, and non-alignment. In Parekh's opinion, the philosophy and the policies that resulted from this benefited a large section of society such as public sector workers, industrial houses, and middle and upper peasantry. However, it failed to benefit the urban and rural poor, the unemployed and the Hindu fundamentalists.",
"title": "Vision and governing policies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "After the exit of Subhash Chandra Bose from mainstream Indian politics (because of his support of violence in driving the British out of India), the power struggle between the socialists and conservatives in the Congress party balanced out. However, the death of Vallabhbhai Patel in 1950 left Nehru as the sole remaining iconic national leader, and soon the situation became such that Nehru could implement many of his basic policies without hindrance. Nehru's daughter, Indira Gandhi, was able to fulfil her father's dream through the 42nd amendment (1976) of the Indian constitution by which India officially became \"socialist\" and \"secular\", during the state of emergency she imposed.",
"title": "Vision and governing policies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Nehru implemented policies based on import substitution industrialisation and advocated a mixed economy where the government-controlled public sector would co-exist with the private sector. He believed the establishment of basic and heavy industry was fundamental to the development and modernisation of the Indian economy. The government, therefore, directed investment primarily into key public sector industries—steel, iron, coal, and power—promoting their development with subsidies and protectionist policies.",
"title": "Vision and governing policies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "The policy of non-alignment during the Cold War meant that Nehru received financial and technical support from both power blocs in building India's industrial base from scratch. Steel mill complexes were built at Bokaro and Rourkela with assistance from the Soviet Union and West Germany. There was substantial industrial development. The industry grew 7.0% annually between 1950 and 1965—almost trebling industrial output and making India the world's seventh-largest industrial country. Nehru's critics, however, contended that India's import substitution industrialisation, which continued long after the Nehru era, weakened the international competitiveness of its manufacturing industries. India's share of world trade fell from 1.4% in 1951–1960 to 0.5% between 1981 and 1990. However, India's export performance is argued to have shown actual sustained improvement over the period. The volume of exports grew at an annual rate of 2.9% in 1951–1960 to 7.6% in 1971–1980.",
"title": "Vision and governing policies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "GDP and GNP grew 3.9 and 4.0% annually between 1950 and 1951 and 1964–1965. It was a radical break from the British colonial period, but the growth rates were considered anaemic at best compared to other industrial powers in Europe and East Asia. India lagged behind the miracle economies (Japan, West Germany, France, and Italy). State planning, controls, and regulations were argued to have impaired economic growth. While India's economy grew faster than both the United Kingdom and the United States, low initial income and rapid population increase meant that growth was inadequate for any sort of catch-up with rich income nations.",
"title": "Vision and governing policies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Under Nehru's leadership, the government attempted to develop India quickly by embarking on agrarian reform and rapid industrialisation. A successful land reform was introduced that abolished giant landholdings, but efforts to redistribute land by placing limits on landownership failed. Attempts to introduce large-scale cooperative farming were frustrated by landowning rural elites, who formed the core of the powerful right-wing of the Congress and had considerable political support in opposing Nehru's efforts. Agricultural production expanded until the early 1960s, as additional land was brought under cultivation and some irrigation projects began to have an effect. The establishment of agricultural universities, modelled after land-grant colleges in the United States, contributed to the development of the economy. These universities worked with high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice, initially developed in Mexico and the Philippines, that in the 1960s began the Green Revolution, an effort to diversify and increase crop production. At the same time, a series of failed monsoons would cause serious food shortages, despite the steady progress and an increase in agricultural production.",
"title": "Vision and governing policies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Nehru was a passionate advocate of education for India's children and youth, believing it essential for India's future progress. His government oversaw the establishment of many institutions of higher learning, including the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, the Indian Institutes of Technology, the Indian Institutes of Management and the National Institutes of Technology. Nehru also outlined a commitment in his five-year plans to guarantee free and compulsory primary education to all of India's children. For this purpose, Nehru oversaw the creation of mass village enrolment programs and the construction of thousands of schools. Nehru also launched initiatives such as the provision of free milk and meals to children to fight malnutrition. Adult education centres and vocational and technical schools were also organised for adults, especially in the rural areas.",
"title": "Vision and governing policies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Under Nehru, the Indian Parliament enacted many changes to Hindu law through the Hindu code bills to criminalise caste discrimination and increase the legal rights and social freedoms of women. The Nehru administration saw such codification as necessary to unify the Hindu community, which ideally would be a first step towards unifying the nation. They succeeded in passing four Hindu code bills in 1955–56: the Hindu Marriage Act, Hindu Succession Act, Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act, and Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Act. Those who practise Sikhism, Jainism, and Buddhism are categorised as Hindus under the jurisdiction of the Code Bill.",
"title": "Vision and governing policies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "Nehru specifically wrote Article 44 of the Indian constitution under the Directive Principles of State Policy which states: \"The State shall endeavor to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India.\" The article has formed the basis of secularism in India. However, Nehru has been criticised for the inconsistent application of the law. Most notably, he allowed Muslims to keep their personal law in matters relating to marriage and inheritance. In the small state of Goa, a civil code based on the old Portuguese Family Laws was allowed to continue, and Nehru prohibited Muslim personal law. This resulted from the annexation of Goa in 1961 by India, when Nehru promised the people that their laws would be left intact. This has led to accusations of selective secularism.",
"title": "Vision and governing policies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "While Nehru exempted Muslim law from legislation and they remained unreformed, he passed the Special Marriage Act in 1954. The idea behind this act was to give everyone in India the ability to marry outside the personal law under a civil marriage. In many respects, the act was almost identical to the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, demonstrating how secularised the law regarding Hindus had become. The Special Marriage Act allowed Muslims to marry under it and keep the protections, generally beneficial to Muslim women, that could not be found in the personal law. Under the act, polygamy was illegal, and inheritance and succession would be governed by the Indian Succession Act, rather than the respective Muslim personal law. Divorce would be governed by secular law, and maintenance of a divorced wife would be along the lines set down in civil law.",
"title": "Vision and governing policies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "A system of reservations in government services and educational institutions was created to eradicate the social inequalities and disadvantages faced by peoples of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Nehru convincingly succeeded in secularism and religious harmony, increasing the representation of minorities in government.",
"title": "Vision and governing policies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Nehru led the faction of the Congress party, which promoted Hindi as the lingua franca of the Indian nation. After an exhaustive and divisive debate with the non-Hindi speakers, Hindi was adopted as the official language of India in 1950, with English continuing as an associate official language for 15 years, after which Hindi would become the sole official language. Efforts by the Indian Government to make Hindi the sole official language after 1965 were unacceptable to many non-Hindi Indian states, which wanted the continued use of English. The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), a descendant of Dravidar Kazhagam, led the opposition to Hindi. To allay their fears, Nehru enacted the Official Languages Act in 1963 to ensure the continuing use of English beyond 1965. The text of the Act did not satisfy the DMK and increased their scepticism that future administrations might not honour his assurances.",
"title": "Vision and governing policies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Throughout his long tenure as the prime minister, Nehru also held the portfolio of External Affairs. His idealistic approach focused on giving India a leadership position in nonalignment. He sought to build support among the newly independent nations of Asia and Africa in opposition to the two hostile superpowers contesting the Cold War.",
"title": "Vision and governing policies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "After independence, Nehru wanted to maintain good relations with Britain and other British Commonwealth countries. As prime minister of the Dominion of India, he signed the 1949 London Declaration, under which India agreed to remain within the Commonwealth of Nations after becoming a republic in January 1950, and to recognise the British monarch as a \"symbol of the free association of its independent member nations and as such the Head of the Commonwealth\". The other nations of the Commonwealth recognised India's continuing membership of the association.",
"title": "Vision and governing policies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "On the international scene, Nehru was an opponent of military action and military alliances. He was a strong supporter of the United Nations, except when it tried to resolve the Kashmir question. He pioneered the policy of non-alignment and co-founded the Non-Aligned Movement of nations professing neutrality between the rival blocs of nations led by the US and the USSR. Recognising the People's Republic of China soon after its founding (while most of the Western bloc continued relations with Taiwan), Nehru argued for its inclusion in the United Nations and refused to brand the Chinese as the aggressors in their conflict with Korea. He sought to establish warm and friendly relations with China in 1950 and hoped to act as an intermediary to bridge the gulf and tensions between the communist states and the Western bloc.",
"title": "Vision and governing policies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Nehru was a key organiser of the Bandung Conference of April 1955, which brought 29 newly independent nations together from Asia and Africa, and was designed to galvanise the nonalignment movement under Nehru's leadership. He envisioned it as his key leadership opportunity on the world stage, where he would bring together emerging nations. He was one of the key participants of the 1st Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961 in Belgrade, FPR Yugoslavia.",
"title": "Vision and governing policies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "While averse to war, Nehru led the campaigns against Pakistan in Kashmir. He used military force to annex Hyderabad in 1948 and Goa in 1961. While laying the foundation stone of the National Defence Academy in 1949, he stated:",
"title": "Vision and governing policies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "We, who for generations had talked about and attempted in everything a peaceful way and practised non-violence, should now be, in a sense, glorifying our army, navy and air force. It means a lot. Though it is odd, yet it simply reflects the oddness of life. Though life is logical, we have to face all contingencies, and unless we are prepared to face them, we will go under. There was no greater prince of peace and apostle of non-violence than Mahatma Gandhi...but yet, he said it was better to take the sword than to surrender, fail or run away. We cannot live carefree assuming that we are safe. Human nature is such. We cannot take the risks and risk our hard-won freedom. We have to be prepared with all modern defence methods and a well-equipped army, navy, and air force.\"",
"title": "Vision and governing policies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "Nehru entrusted Homi J. Bhabha, a nuclear physicist, with complete authority over all nuclear-related affairs and programs and answerable only to the prime minister.",
"title": "Vision and governing policies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "Many hailed Nehru for working to defuse global tensions and the threat of nuclear weapons after the Korean War (1950–1953). He commissioned the first study of the effects of nuclear explosions on human health and campaigned ceaselessly for the abolition of what he called \"these frightful engines of destruction\". He also had pragmatic reasons for promoting de-nuclearization, fearing a nuclear arms race would lead to over-militarisation that would be unaffordable for developing countries such as his own.",
"title": "Vision and governing policies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "At Lord Mountbatten's urging, in 1948, Nehru had promised to hold a plebiscite in Kashmir under the auspices of the UN. Kashmir was a disputed territory between India and Pakistan, the two have gone to war over it in 1947. However, as Pakistan failed to pull back troops in accordance with the UN resolution, and as Nehru grew increasingly wary of the UN, he declined to hold a plebiscite in 1953. His policies on Kashmir and the integration of the state into India were frequently defended before the United Nations by his aide, V. K. Krishna Menon, who earned a reputation in India for his passionate speeches.",
"title": "Vision and governing policies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "In 1953, Nehru orchestrated the ouster and arrest of Sheikh Abdullah, the prime minister of Kashmir, whom he had previously supported but was now suspected of harbouring separatist ambitions; Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad replaced him.",
"title": "Vision and governing policies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "Menon was instructed to deliver an unprecedented eight-hour speech defending India's stand on Kashmir in 1957; to date, the speech is the longest ever delivered in the United Nations Security Council, covering five hours of the 762nd meeting on 23 January, and two hours and forty-eight minutes on the 24th, reportedly concluding with Menon's collapse on the Security Council floor. During the filibuster, Nehru moved swiftly and successfully to consolidate Indian power in Kashmir (then under great unrest). Menon's passionate defence of Indian sovereignty in Kashmir enlarged his base of support in India and led to the Indian press temporarily dubbing him the \"Hero of Kashmir\". Nehru was then at the peak of his popularity in India; the only (minor) criticism came from the far right.",
"title": "Vision and governing policies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "In 1954, Nehru signed with China the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, known in India as the Panchsheel (from the Sanskrit words, panch: five, sheel: virtues), a set of principles to govern relations between the two states. Their first formal codification in treaty form was in an agreement between China and India in 1954, which recognised Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. They were enunciated in the preamble to the \"Agreement (with the exchange of notes) on Trade and Intercourse between Tibet Region of China and India\", which was signed at Peking on 29 April 1954. Negotiations took place in Delhi from December 1953 to April 1954 between the Delegation of the People's Republic of China (PRC) Government and the Delegation of the Indian Government on the relations between the two countries regarding the disputed territories of Aksai Chin and South Tibet. By 1957, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai had also persuaded Nehru to accept the Chinese position on Tibet, thus depriving Tibet of a possible ally, and of the possibility of receiving military aid from India. The treaty was disregarded in the 1960s, but in the 1970s, the Five Principles again came to be seen as important in China–India relations, and more generally as norms of relations between states. They became widely recognised and accepted throughout the region during the premiership of Indira Gandhi and the three-year rule of the Janata Party (1977–1980). Although the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence were the basis of the 1954 Sino-Indian border treaty, in later years, Nehru's foreign policy suffered from increasing Chinese assertiveness over border disputes and his decision to grant asylum to the 14th Dalai Lama.",
"title": "Vision and governing policies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "In 1956, Nehru criticised the joint invasion of the Suez Canal by the British, French, and Israelis. His role, both as Indian prime minister and a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, was significant; he tried to be even-handed between the two sides while vigorously denouncing Anthony Eden and co-sponsors of the invasion. Nehru had a powerful ally in the US President Dwight Eisenhower who, if relatively silent publicly, went to the extent of using America's clout at the International Monetary Fund to make Britain and France back down. During the Suez crisis, Nehru's right-hand man, Menon attempted to persuade a recalcitrant Gamal Nasser to compromise with the West and was instrumental in moving Western powers towards an awareness that Nasser might prove willing to compromise.",
"title": "Vision and governing policies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "There were various assassination attempts on Nehru. The first attempt was made during partition in 1947 while he was visiting the North-West Frontier Province (now in Pakistan) in a car. Second attempt was came from Baburao Laxman Kochale, a knife-wielding rickshaw-puller, near Nagpur in 1955. The third attempt was a plot by Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1955. The fourth attempt took place in Bombay in 1956, and the fifth was a failed bombing attempt on train tracks in Maharashtra in 1961. Despite threats to his life, Nehru despised having too much security around him and did not like to disrupt traffic because of his movements.",
"title": "Assassination attempts and security"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "Nehru's health began declining steadily in 1962. In the spring of 1962, he was affected with a viral infection over which he spent most of April in bed. In the next year, through 1963, he spent months recuperating in Kashmir. Some writers attribute this dramatic decline to his surprise and chagrin over the Sino-Indian War, which he perceived as a betrayal of trust. Upon his return from Dehradun on 26 May 1964, he was feeling quite comfortable and went to bed at about 23:30 as usual. He had a restful night until about 06:30. Soon after he returned from the bathroom, Nehru complained of pain in the back. He spoke to the doctors who attended to him for a brief while, and almost immediately he collapsed. He remained unconscious until he died at 13:44. His death was announced in the Lok Sabha at 14:00 local time on 27 May 1964; the cause of death was believed to be a heart attack. Draped in the Indian national Tri-colour flag, the body of Jawaharlal Nehru was placed for public viewing. \"Raghupati Raghava Rajaram\" was chanted as the body was placed on the platform. On 28 May, Nehru was cremated in accordance with Hindu rites at the Shantivan on the banks of the Yamuna, witnessed by 1.5 million mourners who had flocked into the streets of Delhi and the cremation grounds.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "US President Lyndon B. Johnson remarked on his death:-",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "History has already recorded his monumental contribution to the molding of a strong and independent India. And yet, it is not just as a leader of India that he has served humanity. Perhaps more than any other world leader he has given expression to man's yearning for peace. This is the issue of our age. In his fearless pursuit of a world free from war he has served all humanity.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev remarked:-",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "He was a passionate fighter for peace in the whole world and an ardent champion of the realization of the principles of peaceful coexistence of states; he was the inspirer of the policy of Non-Alignment promoted by the Indian Government. This reasonable policy won India respect and due to it, India is now occupying a worthy place in the international arena.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "Nehru's death left India with no clear political heir to his leadership. Lal Bahadur Shastri later succeeded Nehru as the prime minister.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "The death was announced to the Indian parliament in words similar to Nehru's own at the time of Gandhi's assassination: \"The light is out.\" India's future prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee famously delivered Nehru an acclaimed eulogy. He hailed Nehru as Bharat Mata's \"favourite prince\" and likened him to the Hindu god Rama.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "Nehru served as the prime minister for eighteen years, first as interim prime minister during 1946–1947 during the last year of the British Raj and then as prime minister of independent India from 15 August 1947 to 27 May 1964.",
"title": "Key cabinet members and associates"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "B. R. Ambedkar, the law minister in the interim cabinet, also chaired the Constitution Drafting Committee.",
"title": "Key cabinet members and associates"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "Vallabhbhai Patel served as home minister in the interim government. He was instrumental in getting the Congress party working committee to vote for partition. He is also credited with integrating peacefully most of the princely states of India. Patel was a long-time comrade to Nehru but died in 1950, leaving Nehru as the unchallenged leader of India until his own death in 1964.",
"title": "Key cabinet members and associates"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "Maulana Azad was the First Minister of Education in the Indian government Minister of Human Resource Development (until 25 September 1958, Ministry of Education). His contribution to establishing the education foundation in India is recognised by celebrating his birthday as National Education Day across India.",
"title": "Key cabinet members and associates"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "Jagjivan Ram became the youngest minister in Nehru's Interim Government of India, a labour minister and also a member of the Constituent Assembly of India, where, as a member of the Dalit caste, he ensured that social justice was enshrined in the Constitution. He went on to serve as a minister with various portfolios during Nehru's tenure and in Shastri and Indira Gandhi governments.",
"title": "Key cabinet members and associates"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 115,
"text": "Morarji Desai was a nationalist with anti-corruption leanings but was socially conservative, pro-business, and in favour of free enterprise reforms, as opposed to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's socialistic policies. After serving as chief minister of Bombay State, he joined Nehru's cabinet in 1956 as the finance minister of India. he held that position until 1963 when he along with other senior ministers in the Nehru cabinet resigned under the Kamaraj plan.The plan, as proposed by Madras Chief Minister K.Kamaraj, was to revert government ministers to party positions after a certain tenure and vice versa. With Nehru's age and health failing in the early 1960s, Desai was considered a possible contender for the position of Prime Minister. Later Desai alleged that Nehru used the Kamaraj Plan to remove all possible contenders 'from the path of his daughter, Indira Gandhi. Desai succeeded Indira Gandhi as the prime minister in 1977 when he was selected by the victorious Janata alliance as their parliamentary leader.",
"title": "Key cabinet members and associates"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 116,
"text": "Govind Ballabh Pant (1887–1961) was a key figure in the Indian independence movement and later a pivotal figure in the politics of Uttar Pradesh (UP) and in the Indian Government. Pant served in Nehru's cabinet as Union home minister from 1955 until his death in 1961. As home minister, his chief achievement was the re-organisation of states along linguistic lines. He was also responsible for the establishment of Hindi as the official language of the central government and a few states. During his tenure as the home minister, Pant was awarded the Bharat Ratna.",
"title": "Key cabinet members and associates"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 117,
"text": "C. D. Deshmukh was one of five members of the Planning Commission when it was constituted in 1950 by a cabinet resolution. Deshmukh succeeded John Mathai as the Union Finance Minister in 1950 after Mathai resigned in protest over the transfer of certain powers to the Planning Commission. As finance minister, Deshmukh remained a member of the Planning Commission. Deshmukh's tenure—during which he delivered six budgets and an interim budget—is noted for the effective management of the Indian economy and its steady growth which saw it recover from the impacts of the events of the 1940s. During Deshmukh's tenure, the State Bank of India was formed in 1955 through the nationalisation and amalgamation of the Imperial Bank with several smaller banks. He accomplished the nationalisation of insurance companies and the formation of the Life Insurance Corporation of India through the Life Insurance Corporation of India Act, 1956. Deshmukh resigned over the Government's proposal to move a bill in Parliament bifurcating Bombay State into Gujarat and Maharashtra while designating the city of Bombay a Union territory.",
"title": "Key cabinet members and associates"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 118,
"text": "V. K. Krishna Menon (1896–1974) was a close associate of Nehru and has been described by some as the second most powerful man in India during Nehru's tenure as prime minister. Under Nehru, he served as India's high commissioner to the UK, UN ambassador, and Union minister of defence. He resigned after the debacle of the 1962 China War.",
"title": "Key cabinet members and associates"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 119,
"text": "In the years following independence, Nehru frequently turned to his daughter Indira Gandhi for managing his personal affairs. Indira moved into Nehru's official residence to attend to him and became his constant companion in his travels across India and the world. She would virtually become Nehru's chief of staff. Towards the end of the 1950s, Indira Gandhi served as the president of the Congress. In that capacity, she was instrumental in getting the Communist-led Kerala State Government dismissed in 1959. Indira was elected as Congress party president in 1959, which aroused criticism for alleged nepotism, although Nehru had actually disapproved of her election, partly because he considered that it smacked of \"dynasticism\"; he said, indeed it was \"wholly undemocratic and an undesirable thing\", and refused her a position in his cabinet. Indira herself was at loggerheads with her father over policy; most notably, she used his oft-stated personal deference to the Congress Working Committee to push through the dismissal of the Communist Party of India government in the state of Kerala, over his own objections. Nehru began to be embarrassed by her ruthlessness and disregard for parliamentary tradition and was \"hurt\" by what he saw as an assertiveness with no purpose other than to stake out an identity independent of her father.",
"title": "Key cabinet members and associates"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 120,
"text": "After Kamala's death in 1936, Nehru was rumoured to have relationships with several women. These included Shraddha Mata, Padmaja Naidu and Edwina Mountbatten. Countess Mountbatten's daughter Lady Pamela Hicks acknowledged Nehru's platonic relationship with Lady Mountbatten.",
"title": "Relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 121,
"text": "British historian Philip Ziegler, with access to the private letters and diaries, concludes the relationship:",
"title": "Relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 122,
"text": "was to endure until Edwina Mountbatten's death: intensely loving, romantic, trusting, generous, idealistic, even spiritual. If there was any physical element it can only have been of minor importance to either party. [India's Governor-General] Mountbatten's reaction was one of pleasure....He liked and admired Nehru, it was useful to him that the Prime Minister should find such attractions in the Governor-General's home, it was agreeable to find Edwina almost permanently in good temper: the advantages of the alliance were obvious.",
"title": "Relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 123,
"text": "Nehru's sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit told Pupul Jayakar, Indira Gandhi's friend and biographer, that Padmaja Naidu and Nehru lived together for many years.",
"title": "Relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 124,
"text": "Described as a Hindu agnostic, and styling himself as a \"scientific humanist\", Nehru thought that religious taboos were preventing India from moving forward and adapting to modern conditions: \"No country or people who are slaves to dogma and dogmatic mentality can progress, and unhappily our country and people have become extraordinarily dogmatic and little-minded.\"",
"title": "Religion and personal beliefs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 125,
"text": "The spectacle of what is called religion, or at any rate organised religion, in India and elsewhere, has filled me with horror and I have frequently condemned it and wished to make a clean sweep of it. Almost always it seemed to stand for blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition, exploitation and the preservation of vested interests.",
"title": "Religion and personal beliefs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 126,
"text": "As a humanist, Nehru considered that his afterlife was not in some mystical heaven or reincarnation but in the practical achievements of a life lived fully with and for his fellow human beings: “…Nor am I greatly interested in life after death. I find the problems of this life sufficiently absorbing to fill my mind,” he wrote. In his Last Will and Testament, he wrote: “I wish to declare with all earnestness that I do not want any religious ceremonies performed for me after my death. I do not believe in such ceremonies, and to submit to them, even as a matter of form, would be hypocrisy and an attempt to delude ourselves and others.”",
"title": "Religion and personal beliefs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 127,
"text": "In his autobiography, he analysed Abrahamic and Indian religions and their impact on India. He wanted to model India as a secular country; his secularist policies remain a subject of debate.",
"title": "Religion and personal beliefs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 128,
"text": "Jawaharlal Nehru, next to Mahatma Gandhi, is regarded as the most significant figure of the Indian independence movement that successfully ended British rule over the Indian subcontinent.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 129,
"text": "As India's first Prime minister and external affairs minister, Nehru played a major role in shaping modern India's government and political culture along with the sound foreign policy. He is praised for creating a system providing universal primary education, reaching children in the farthest corners of rural India. Nehru's education policy is also credited for the development of world-class educational institutions like the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Indian Institutes of Technology, and the Indian Institutes of Management.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 130,
"text": "Following the independence, Nehru popularized the credo of 'unity in diversity' and implemented it as state policy. This proved particularly important as post-Independence differences surfaced since British withdrawal from the subcontinent prompted regional leaders to no longer relate to one another as allies against a common adversary. While differences in culture and, especially, language threatened the unity of the new nation, Nehru established programs such as the National Book Trust and the National Literary Academy which promoted the translation of regional works of literatures between languages and organised the transfer of materials between regions. In pursuit of a single, unified India, Nehru warned, \"Integrate or perish.\"",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 131,
"text": "Called an \"architect of Modern India\", he is widely recognized as the greatest figure of modern India after Mahatma Gandhi. On the occasion of his first death anniversary in 1965, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Lal Bahadur Shastri and others described Nehru as the greatest figure of India after Gandhi.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 132,
"text": "Writing in 2005, Ramachandra Guha wrote that while no other Indian prime minister was ever close to the challenges that Nehru dealt with and if Nehru had died in 1958 then he would be remembered as the greatest statesman of the 20th century. However, in recent years, Nehru's reputation has seen re-emergence and he is credited for keeping India together contrary to predictions of many that the country was bound to fall apart.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 133,
"text": "In his lifetime, Jawaharlal Nehru enjoyed an iconic status in India and was generally admired across the world for his idealism and statesmanship. Nehru's ideals and policies continue shaping the Congress Party's manifesto and core political philosophy. His birthday, 14 November is celebrated in India as Bal Divas (\"Children's Day\") in recognition of his lifelong passion and work for the welfare, education and development of children and young people. Children across India remember him as Chacha Nehru (\"Uncle Nehru\"). Nehru remains a popular symbol of the Congress Party which frequently celebrates his memory. people often emulate his style of clothing, especially the Gandhi cap and the Nehru jacket. Nehru's preference for the sherwani ensured it continues to be considered formal wear in North India today.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 134,
"text": "Many public institutions and memorials across India are dedicated to Nehru's memory. The Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi is among the most prestigious universities in India. The Jawaharlal Nehru Port near the city of Mumbai is a modern port and dock designed to handle a huge cargo and traffic load. Nehru's residence in Delhi is preserved as the Teen Murti House now has the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library, and one of five Nehru Planetariums that were set in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Allahabad and Pune. The complex also houses the offices of the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, established in 1964 under the chairmanship of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, then president of India. The foundation also gives away the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fellowship, established in 1968. The Nehru family homes at Anand Bhavan and Swaraj Bhavan are also preserved to commemorate Nehru and his family's legacy. In 1997, Nehru was voted as the greatest Indian since independence in India Today's poll. In 2012, he ranked number four in Outlook's poll of The Greatest Indian.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 135,
"text": "There have been many documentaries about Nehru's life, and he has been portrayed in fictionalised films. The canonical performance is probably that of Roshan Seth, who played him three times: in Richard Attenborough's 1982 film Gandhi, Shyam Benegal's 1988 television series Bharat Ek Khoj, based on Nehru's The Discovery of India, and in a 2007 TV film entitled The Last Days of the Raj. Benegal directed the 1984 documentary film, Nehru, covering his political career. Indian film director Kiran Kumar made a film about Nehru titled Nehru: The Jewel of India in 1990 starring Partap Sharma in the titular role. In Ketan Mehta's film Sardar, Benjamin Gilani portrayed Nehru. Naunihal (lit. 'Young man'), a 1967 Indian Hindi-language drama film by Raj Marbros, follows Raju, an orphan, who believes that Jawaharlal Nehru is his relative and sets out to meet him.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 136,
"text": "Similarly, in the 1957 film Ab Dilli Dur Nahin (lit. 'Now Delhi is not far away') by Amar Kumar, Rattan, a young boy, travels to Delhi and seeks to avert the death sentence of his wrongly convicted father by asking Prime Minister Nehru for help. Another 1957 English language short documentary Our Prime Minister was produced, compiled and directed by Ezra Mir, who also directed Three weeks in the life of Prime Minister Nehru in 1962. Girish Karnad's historical play, Tughlaq (1962) is an allegory about the Nehruvian era. It was staged by Ebrahim Alkazi with the National School of Drama Repertory at Purana Qila, Delhi in the 1970s and later at the Festival of India, London in 1982.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 137,
"text": "Nehru was a prolific writer in English who wrote The Discovery of India, Glimpses of World History, An Autobiography (released in the United States as \"Toward Freedom,\") and Letters from a Father to His Daughter, all written in jail. Letters comprised 30 letters written to his daughter Indira Priyadarshani Nehru (later Gandhi) who was then 10 years old and studying at a boarding school in Mussoorie. It attempted to instruct her about natural history and world civilisations.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 138,
"text": "Nehru's books have been widely read. An Autobiography, in particular, has been critically acclaimed. John Gunther, writing in Inside Asia, contrasted it with Gandhi's autobiography:",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 139,
"text": "The Mahatma's placid story compares to Nehru's as a cornflower to an orchid, a rhyming couplet to a sonnet by MacLeish or Auden, a water pistol to a machine gun. Nehru's autobiography is subtle, complex, discriminating, infinitely cultivated, steeped in doubt, suffused with intellectual passion. Lord Halifax once said that no one could understand India without reading it; it is a kind of 'Education of Henry Adams,' written in superlative prose—hardly a dozen men alive write English as well as Nehru ...",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 140,
"text": "Michael Brecher, who considered Nehru to be an intellectual for whom ideas were important aspects of Indian nationalism, wrote in Political Leadership and Charisma: Nehru, Ben-Gurion, and Other 20th-Century Political Leaders:",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 141,
"text": "Nehru's books were not scholarly, nor were they intended to be. He was not a trained historian, but his feel for the flow of events and his capacity to weave together a wide range of knowledge in a meaningful pattern give to his books qualities of a high order. In these works, he also revealed a sensitive literary style. ... Glimpses of World History is the most illuminating on Nehru as an intellectual. The first of the trilogy, Glimpses, was a series of thinly connected sketches of the story of mankind in the form of letters to his teenage daughter, Indira, later prime minister of India. ... Despite its polemical character in many sections and its shortcomings as an impartial history, Glimpses is a work of great artistic value, a worthy precursor of his noble and magnanimous Autobiography.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 142,
"text": "Michael Crocker thought An Autobiography would have given Nehru literary fame had the political fame eluded him:",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 143,
"text": "It is to his years in prison that we owe his three main books, ... Nehru's writings illustrate a cerebral life, and a power of self-discipline, altogether out of the ordinary. Words by the million bubbled up out of his fullness of mind and spirit. Had he never been prime minister of India he would have been famous as the author of the Autobiography and the autobiographical parts of The Discovery of India. An Autobiography, at least with some excisions here and there, is likely to be read for generations. ... There are, for instance, the characteristic touches of truism and anticlimax, strange in a man who could both think and, at his best, write so well ...",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 144,
"text": "Nehru's speech A Tryst With Destiny was rated by the British newspaper The Guardian to be among the great speeches of the 20th-century. Ian Jack wrote in his introduction to the speech:",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 145,
"text": "Dressed in a golden silk jacket with a red rose in the buttonhole, Nehru rose to speak. His sentences were finely made and memorable – Nehru was a good writer; his Discovery of India stands well above the level reached by most politician-writers. ... The nobility of Nehru's words – their sheer sweep – provided the new India with a lodestone that was ambitious and humane. Post-colonialism began here as well as Indian democracy, which has since outlived many expectations of its death.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 146,
"text": "In 1948, Nehru was conferred an honorary doctorate by the University of Mysore. He later received honorary doctorates from the University of Madras, Columbia University, and Keio University. The Hamburg University had awarded Nehru two honorary degrees of the Faculties of Law and Agriculture. In 1955, he was awarded with Honorary citizen of Belgrade by the Yugoslavian government.",
"title": "Awards and honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 147,
"text": "In 1955, Nehru was awarded the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honour. President Rajendra Prasad awarded him the honour without taking advice from the Prime Minister and added that \"I am taking this step on my own initiative\".",
"title": "Awards and honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 148,
"text": "He was posthumously awarded the Order of the Companions of O. R. Tambo by the Government of South Africa in 2005.",
"title": "Awards and honours"
}
]
| Jawaharlal Nehru was an Indian anti-colonial nationalist, statesman, secular humanist, social democrat, and author who was a central figure in India during the middle of the 20th century. Nehru was a principal leader of the Indian nationalist movement in the 1930s and 1940s. Upon India's independence in 1947, he served as the country's first prime minister for 16 years. Nehru promoted parliamentary democracy, secularism, and science and technology during the 1950s, powerfully influencing India's arc as a modern nation. In international affairs, he steered India clear of the two blocs of the Cold War. A well-regarded author, his books written in prison, such as Letters from a Father to His Daughter (1929), An Autobiography (1936) and The Discovery of India (1946), have been read around the world. The honorific Pandit has been commonly applied before his name. The son of Motilal Nehru, a prominent lawyer and Indian nationalist, Jawaharlal Nehru was educated in England—at Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge, and trained in the law at the Inner Temple. He became a barrister, returned to India, enrolled at the Allahabad High Court and gradually began to take an interest in national politics, which eventually became a full-time occupation. He joined the Indian National Congress, rose to become the leader of a progressive faction during the 1920s, and eventually of the Congress, receiving the support of Mahatma Gandhi who was to designate Nehru as his political heir. As Congress president in 1929, Nehru called for complete independence from the British Raj. Nehru and the Congress dominated Indian politics during the 1930s. Nehru promoted the idea of the secular nation-state in the 1937 provincial elections, allowing the Congress to sweep the elections, and to form governments in several provinces. In September 1939, the Congress ministries resigned to protest Viceroy Lord Linlithgow's decision to join the war without consulting them. After the All India Congress Committee's Quit India Resolution of 8 August 1942, senior Congress leaders were imprisoned and for a time the organisation was suppressed. Nehru, who had reluctantly heeded Gandhi's call for immediate independence, and had desired instead to support the Allied war effort during World War II, came out of a lengthy prison term to a much altered political landscape. The Muslim League, under Muhammad Ali Jinnah, had come to dominate Muslim politics in the interim. In the 1946 provincial elections, Congress won the elections but the League won all the seats reserved for Muslims, which the British interpreted to be a clear mandate for Pakistan in some form. Nehru became the interim prime minister of India in September 1946, with the League joining his government with some hesitancy in October 1946. Upon India's independence on 15 August 1947, Nehru gave a critically acclaimed speech, "Tryst with Destiny"; he was sworn in as the Dominion of India's prime minister and raised the Indian flag at the Red Fort in Delhi. On 26 January 1950, when India became a republic within the Commonwealth of Nations, Nehru became the Republic of India's first prime minister. He embarked on an ambitious program of economic, social, and political reforms. Nehru promoted a pluralistic multi-party democracy. In foreign affairs, he played a leading role in establishing the Non-Aligned Movement, a group of nations that did not seek membership in the two main ideological blocs of the Cold War. Under Nehru's leadership, the Congress emerged as a catch-all party, dominating national and state-level politics and winning elections in 1951, 1957 and 1962. His premiership, spanning 16 years and 286 days—which is, to date, the longest in India—ended with his death in 1964 from a heart attack. Hailed as the "architect of Modern India", his birthday is celebrated as Children's Day in India. | 2001-10-23T04:52:18Z | 2023-12-27T18:24:21Z | [
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16,245 | Janis Joplin | Janis Lyn Joplin (January 19, 1943 – October 4, 1970) was an American singer and songwriter. One of the most successful and widely known rock performers of her era, she was noted for her powerful mezzo-soprano vocals and "electric" stage presence.
In 1967, Joplin rose to prominence following an appearance at Monterey Pop Festival, where she was the lead singer of the then little-known San Francisco psychedelic rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company. After releasing two albums with the band, she left Big Brother to continue as a solo artist with her own backing groups, first the Kozmic Blues Band and then the Full Tilt Boogie Band. She appeared at the 1969 Woodstock festival and on the Festival Express train tour. Five singles by Joplin reached the US Billboard Hot 100, including a cover of the Kris Kristofferson song "Me and Bobby McGee", which posthumously reached number one in March 1971. Her most popular songs include her cover versions of "Piece of My Heart", "Cry Baby", "Down on Me", "Ball and Chain", "Summertime", and her original song "Mercedes Benz", her final recording.
Joplin died of a heroin overdose in 1970, at the age of 27, after releasing three albums (two with Big Brother and the Holding Company and one solo album). A second solo album, Pearl, was released in January 1971, just over three months after her death. It reached number one on the Billboard charts. She was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995. Rolling Stone ranked Joplin number 46 on its 2004 list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time and number 28 on its 2008 list of 100 Greatest Singers of All Time. NPR dubbed Joplin as "The Queen of Rock" and named her one of the 50 Great Voices. She remains one of the top-selling musicians in the United States, with Recording Industry Association of America certifications of 18.5 million albums sold.
Janis Joplin was born in Port Arthur, Texas, on (1943-01-19)January 19, 1943, to Dorothy Bonita East (1913–1998), a registrar at a business college, and her husband, Seth Ward Joplin (1910–1987), an engineer at Texaco. She had two younger siblings, Laura and Michael. The family attended First Christian Church of Port Arthur, a church belonging to the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) denomination.
Her parents felt that Janis needed more attention than their other children. As a teenager, Joplin befriended a group of outcasts, one of whom had albums by blues artists Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Lead Belly, which Joplin later credited with influencing her decision to become a singer. She began singing blues and folk music with friends at Thomas Jefferson High School. In high school, she was a classmate of Pro Football Hall of Fame coach Jimmy Johnson.
Joplin stated that she was ostracized and bullied in high school. As a teen, she became overweight and suffered from acne, leaving her with deep scars that required dermabrasion. Other kids at high school would routinely taunt her and call her names like "pig," "freak," "nigger lover," or "creep." She stated, "I was a misfit. I read, I painted, I thought. I didn't hate niggers."
Joplin graduated from high school in 1960 and attended Lamar State College of Technology in Beaumont, Texas, during the summer and later the University of Texas at Austin (UT), though she did not complete her college studies. The campus newspaper, The Daily Texan, ran a profile of her in the issue dated July 27, 1962, headlined "She Dares to Be Different." The article began, "She goes barefooted when she feels like it, wears Levi's to class because they're more comfortable, and carries her autoharp with her everywhere she goes so that in case she gets the urge to break into song, it will be handy. Her name is Janis Joplin."
While at UT she performed with a folk trio called the Waller Creek Boys and frequently socialized with the staff of the campus humor magazine The Texas Ranger. According to Freak Brothers cartoonist Gilbert Shelton, who befriended her, she used to sell The Texas Ranger, which contained some of Shelton's early comic books, on the campus.
Joplin cultivated a rebellious manner and styled herself partly after her female blues heroines and partly after the Beat poets. Her first song, "What Good Can Drinkin' Do", was recorded on tape in December 1962 at the home of a fellow University of Texas student.
She left Texas in January 1963, "Just to get away," she said, "because my head was in a much different place", hitchhiking with her friend Chet Helms to North Beach, San Francisco. Still in San Francisco in 1964, Joplin and future Jefferson Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen recorded a number of blues standards, which incidentally featured Kaukonen's wife Margareta using a typewriter in the background. This session included seven tracks: "Typewriter Talk", "Trouble in Mind", "Kansas City Blues", "Hesitation Blues", "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out", "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy", and "Long Black Train Blues", and was released long after Joplin's death as the bootleg album The Typewriter Tape.
In 1963, Joplin was arrested in San Francisco for shoplifting. During the two years that followed, her drug use increased and she acquired a reputation as a "speed freak" and occasional heroin user. She also used other psychoactive drugs and was a heavy drinker throughout her career; her favorite alcoholic beverage was Southern Comfort.
In May 1965, Joplin's friends in San Francisco, noticing the detrimental effects on her from regularly injecting methamphetamine, she was described as "skeletal" and "emaciated", persuaded her to return to Port Arthur. During that month, her friends threw her a bus-fare party so she could return to her parents in Texas. Five years later, Joplin told Rolling Stone magazine writer David Dalton the following about her first stint in San Francisco: "I didn't have many friends and I didn't like the ones I had."
Back in Port Arthur in the spring of 1965, after Joplin's parents noticed her weight of 88 pounds (40 kg), she changed her lifestyle. She avoided drugs and alcohol, adopted a beehive hairdo, and enrolled as an anthropology major at Lamar University in nearby Beaumont, Texas. Her sister Laura said in a 2016 interview that social work was her major during her year at Lamar. During her time at Lamar University, she commuted to Austin to sing solo, accompanying herself on acoustic guitar. One of her performances was at a benefit by local musicians for Texas bluesman Mance Lipscomb, who was suffering with ill health.
Joplin became engaged to Peter de Blanc in the fall of 1965. She had begun a relationship with him toward the end of her first stint in San Francisco. Now living in New York where he worked with IBM computers, he visited her to ask her father for her hand in marriage. Joplin and her mother began planning the wedding. De Blanc, who traveled frequently, ended the engagement soon afterward.
In 1965 and 1966, Joplin commuted from her family's Port Arthur home to Beaumont, Texas, where she had regular sessions with a psychiatric social worker named Bernard Giarritano at a counseling agency that was funded by the United Fund, which after her death changed its name to the United Way. Interviewed by biographer Myra Friedman after his client's death, Giarritano said Joplin had been baffled by how she could pursue a professional career as a singer without relapsing into drugs, and her drug-related memories from immediately prior to returning to Port Arthur continued to frighten her. Joplin sometimes brought an acoustic guitar with her to her sessions with Giarritano, and people in other offices within the building could hear her singing.
Giarritano tried to reassure her that she did not have to use narcotics to succeed in the music business. She also said that if she were to avoid singing professionally, she would have to become a keypunch operator, as she had done a few years earlier, or a secretary, and then a wife and mother, and she would have to become similar to all the other women in Port Arthur.
Approximately a year before Joplin joined Big Brother and the Holding Company, she recorded seven studio tracks with her acoustic guitar. Among the songs she recorded were her original composition of the song "Turtle Blues" and an alternate version of "Cod'ine" by Buffy Sainte-Marie. These tracks were later issued as a new album in 1995, titled This is Janis Joplin 1965 by James Gurley.
In 1966, Joplin's bluesy vocal style attracted the attention of the San Francisco-based psychedelic rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company, which had gained some renown among the nascent hippie community in Haight-Ashbury. She was recruited to join the group by Chet Helms, a promoter who was managing Big Brother and with whom she had hitchhiked from Texas to San Francisco a few years earlier. Helms sent his friend Travis Rivers to find her in Austin, Texas, where she had been performing with her acoustic guitar, and to accompany her to San Francisco.
Aware of her previous nightmare with drug addiction in San Francisco, Rivers insisted that she inform her parents face-to-face of her plans, and he drove her from Austin to Port Arthur (he waited in his car while she talked with her startled parents) before they began their long drive to San Francisco. She gave her parents the impression Austin was her final destination and it was the location of the rock band she was joining. Joplin joined Big Brother on June 4, 1966. Her first public performance with them was at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. Soon after that, her parents received a letter from her, and that was how they learned she was in San Francisco, not Austin.
In June 1966, Joplin was photographed at an outdoor concert in San Francisco that celebrated the summer solstice. The image, which was later published in two books by David Dalton, shows her before she relapsed into drugs. Due to persistent persuading by keyboardist and close friend Stephen Ryder, Joplin avoided drugs for several weeks. She shared an apartment with Travis Rivers upon their arrival in San Francisco, and made him promise that using needles would not be allowed there.
When bandmate Dave Getz accompanied her from a rehearsal to her home, Rivers was not there, but "two or three", according to Getz' recollection 25 years later, guests whom Rivers had invited were in the process of injecting drugs. "One of them was about to tie off," recalled Getz. "Janis went nuts! I had never seen anybody explode like that. She was screaming and crying and Travis walked in. She screamed at him: 'We had a pact! You promised me! There wouldn't be any of that in front of me!' I was over my head and I tried to calm her down. I said, 'They're just doing mescaline,' because that's what I thought it was. She said, 'You don't understand! I can't see that! I just can't stand to see that!'"
A San Francisco concert from that summer (1966) was recorded and released on the 1984 album Cheaper Thrills. In July, all five bandmates and guitarist James Gurley's wife Nancy moved to a house in Lagunitas, California, where they lived communally. The band often partied with the Grateful Dead, the members of whom lived less than two miles away. She had a short relationship and longer friendship with founding member Ron "Pigpen" McKernan.
The band went to Chicago for a four-week engagement in August 1966, then found itself stranded after the promoter ran out of money when its concerts did not attract the expected audience levels, and he was unable to pay them. In the unfortunate circumstances the band signed with Bob Shad's record label Mainstream Records; recordings for the label took place in Chicago in September, but these were not satisfactory, and the band returned to San Francisco, continuing to perform live, including at the Love Pageant Rally. The band recorded two tracks, "Blindman" and "All Is Loneliness", in Los Angeles, and these were released by Mainstream as a single that did not sell well. After playing at a happening in Stanford in early December 1966, the band traveled back to Los Angeles to record ten tracks between December 12 and 14, 1966, produced by Bob Shad, which appeared on the band's debut album in August 1967.
In late 1966, Big Brother switched managers from Chet Helms to Julius Karpen. One of Joplin's earliest major performances in 1967 was at the Mantra-Rock Dance, a musical event held on January 29 at the Avalon Ballroom by the San Francisco Hare Krishna temple. Janis Joplin and Big Brother performed there along with the Hare Krishna founder Bhaktivedanta Swami, Allen Ginsberg, Moby Grape, and the Grateful Dead, donating proceeds to the Krishna temple. In early 1967, Joplin met Country Joe McDonald of the group Country Joe and the Fish. The pair lived together as a couple for a few months in her Lyon Street apartment. A driver's license, issued to Joplin in 1967, shows her residence as 122 Lyon Street No. 3, in San Francisco.
Joplin and Big Brother began playing clubs in San Francisco, at the Fillmore West, Winterland, and the Avalon Ballroom. They also played at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, as well as in Seattle, Washington; Vancouver, British Columbia; the Psychedelic Supermarket in Boston, Massachusetts; and the Golden Bear Club in Huntington Beach, California.
The band's debut studio album, Big Brother & the Holding Company, was released by Mainstream Records in August 1967, shortly after the group's breakthrough appearance in June at the Monterey Pop Festival. Two tracks, "Coo Coo" and "The Last Time," were released separately as singles, while the tracks from the previous single, "Blindman" and "All Is Loneliness", were added to the remaining eight tracks. When Columbia Records took over the band's contract and re-released the album, they included "Coo Coo" and "The Last Time", and put "featuring Janis Joplin" on the cover. The debut album spawned four minor hits with the singles "Down on Me", a traditional song arranged by Joplin, "Bye Bye Baby", "Call On Me" and "Coo Coo", on all of which Joplin sang lead vocals.
Two songs from the second of Big Brother's two sets at Monterey, which they played on Sunday, were filmed (their first set, which was on Saturday, was not filmed, though it was audio-recorded). Some sources, including a Joplin biography by Ellis Amburn, claim that she was dressed in thrift store hippie clothes or second-hand Victorian clothes during the band's Saturday set, but still photographs do not appear to have survived. Digitized color film of two songs in the Sunday set, "Combination of the Two" and a version of Big Mama Thornton's "Ball and Chain," appear in the DVD and Blu-ray boxed set of D. A. Pennebaker's documentary Monterey Pop released by The Criterion Collection. She is seen wearing an expensive gold tunic dress with matching pants. They were created for her by San Francisco clothing designer Colin Rose.
Documentary filmmaker Pennebaker inserted two cutaway shots of Cass Elliot of the Mamas & the Papas seated in the audience during Joplin's performance of "Ball and Chain", one in the middle of the song as her eyes, covered by sunglasses, are fixed on Joplin, and also a shot during the applause as she silently mouths "Oh, wow!" and looks at the person seated next to her. Elliot and the audience are seen in sunlight, but Sunday's Big Brother performance was filmed in the evening. An explanation came from Big Brother's road manager John Byrne Cooke, who remembers that Pennebaker discreetly filmed the audience (including Elliot) during Big Brother's Saturday performance when he was not allowed to point a camera at the band.
The prohibition of Pennebaker from filming on Saturday afternoon came from Big Brother's manager Julius Karpen. The band had a bitter argument with Karpen and overruled him as they prepared for their second set that the festival organizers had added on the spur of the moment. Backstage at the festival, the band became acquainted with New York-based talent manager Albert Grossman but did not sign with him until several months later, firing Karpen at that time.
Only "Ball and Chain" was included in the Monterey Pop film that was released to theaters throughout the United States in 1969 and shown on television in the 1970s. Those who did not attend the Monterey Pop Festival saw the band's performance of "Combination of the Two" for the first time in 2002 when The Criterion Collection released the boxed set.
For the remainder of 1967, even after Big Brother signed with Albert Grossman, the band performed mainly in California. On February 16, 1968, the group began its first East Coast tour in Philadelphia, and the following day gave their first performance in New York City at the Anderson Theater. On April 7, 1968—three days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the last day of their East Coast tour—Joplin and Big Brother performed with Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Guy, Joni Mitchell, Richie Havens, Paul Butterfield, and Elvin Bishop at the Wake for Martin Luther King Jr. concert in New York.
Live at Winterland '68, recorded at the Winterland Ballroom on April 12 and 13, 1968, features Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company at the height of their mutual career working through a selection of tracks from their albums. A recording became available to the public for the first time in 1998 when Columbia/Sony Music Entertainment released the compact disc. One month after the Winterland concert, Owsley Stanley recorded them at the Carousel Ballroom, released in 2012 as Live at the Carousel Ballroom 1968.
On July 31, 1968, Joplin made her first nationwide television appearance when the band performed on This Morning, an ABC daytime 90-minute variety show that was hosted by Dick Cavett. Shortly thereafter, network employees wiped the videotape, though the audio survives. In 1969 and 1970, Joplin made three appearances on Cavett's prime-time program. Audio of her 1968 appearance has not been used since then.
Sometime in 1968, the band's billing was changed to "Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company," and the media coverage given to Joplin generated resentment within the band. The other members of Big Brother thought that Joplin was on a "star trip", while others were telling Joplin that Big Brother was a terrible band and that she ought to dump them. Time magazine called Joplin "probably the most powerful singer to emerge from the white rock movement", and Richard Goldstein wrote for the May 1968 issue of Vogue magazine that Joplin was "the most staggering leading woman in rock...she slinks like tar, scowls like war...clutching the knees of a final stanza, begging it not to leave.... Janis Joplin can sing the chic off any listener."
For her first major studio recording, Joplin played a major role in the arrangement and production of the songs that would comprise Big Brother and the Holding Company's second album, Cheap Thrills. Producer John Simon tried recording the band in concert, to capture their energy in a live album, but several attempts showed the band was prone to mistakes. Their imprecision was not helped by moving the sessions to a recording studio. Joplin sang take after take of the same song, with her performances consistently good, and she grew frustrated with the band's sloppiness. Simon was replaced by Elliot Mazer who fixed the songs by overdubbing certain parts. The album featured a cover design by counterculture cartoonist Robert Crumb.
Although Cheap Thrills sounded as if it consisted of concert recordings, like on "Combination of the Two" and "I Need a Man to Love", only "Ball and Chain" was actually recorded in front of a paying audience; the rest of the tracks were studio recordings. The album had a raw quality, including the sound of a drinking glass breaking and the broken shards being swept away during the song "Turtle Blues". Cheap Thrills produced popular hits with "Piece of My Heart" and "Summertime". Together with the premiere of the documentary film Monterey Pop at New York's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts on December 26, 1968, the album launched Joplin as a star.
Cheap Thrills reached number one on the Billboard 200 album chart eight weeks after its release, and was number one for eight (nonconsecutive) weeks. The album was certified gold at release and sold over a million copies in the first month of its release. The lead single from the album, "Piece of My Heart", reached number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the fall of 1968.
The band made another East Coast tour during July–August 1968, performing at the Columbia Records convention in Puerto Rico and the Newport Folk Festival. After returning to San Francisco for two hometown shows at the Palace of Fine Arts Festival on August 31 and September 1, Joplin announced that she would be leaving Big Brother. On September 14, 1968, culminating a three-night engagement together at Fillmore West, fans thronged to a concert that Bill Graham publicized as the last official concert of Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company. The opening acts on this night were Chicago, then still called Chicago Transit Authority, and Santana.
Despite Graham's announcement that the Fillmore West gig was Big Brother's last concert with Joplin, the band—with Joplin still as lead vocalist—toured the U.S. that fall. Reflecting Joplin's crossover appeal, two October 1968 performances at a roller rink in Alexandria, Virginia, were reviewed by John Segraves of the conservative Washington Evening Star at a time when the Washington metropolitan area's hard rock scene was in its infancy. An opera buff at the time, he wrote:
Miss Joplin, in her early 20s, has been for the last year or two the vocalist with Big Brother and the Holding Company, a rock quintet of superior electric expertise. Shortly she will be merely Janis Joplin, a vocalist singing folk rock on her first album as a single. Whatever she does and whatever she sings she'll do it well because her vocal talents are boundless. This is the way she came across in a huge, high-ceilinged roller skating rink without any acoustics but, thankfully a good enough sound system behind her. In a proper room, I would imagine there would be no adjectives to describe her.
Later in October 1968, Big Brother performed at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and played at the Syracuse War Memorial as part of Syracuse University's Fall Homecoming on October 11, with Janis joining openers the Butterfield Blues Band for their closing song. Aside from two 1970 reunions, Joplin's last performance with Big Brother was at a Chet Helms benefit in San Francisco on December 1, 1968.
After splitting from Big Brother and the Holding Company, Joplin formed a new backup group, the Kozmic Blues Band, composed of session musicians like keyboardist Stephen Ryder and saxophonist Cornelius "Snooky" Flowers, as well as former Big Brother and the Holding Company guitarist Sam Andrew and future Full Tilt Boogie Band bassist Brad Campbell. The band was influenced by the Stax-Volt rhythm and blues (R&B) and soul bands of the 1960s, as exemplified by Otis Redding and the Bar-Kays. The Stax-Volt R&B sound was typified by the use of horns and had a funky, pop-oriented sound in contrast to many of the psychedelic/hard rock bands of the period.
By early 1969, Joplin was allegedly shooting at least $200 worth of heroin per day (equivalent to $1,596 in 2022) although efforts were made to keep her clean during the recording of I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama! Gabriel Mekler, who produced the album, told publicist-turned-biographer Myra Friedman after Joplin's death that she had lived in his Los Angeles house during the June 1969 recording sessions at his insistence so he could keep her away from drugs and her drug-using friends.
Joplin's appearances with the Kozmic Blues Band in Europe were released in theaters, in multiple documentaries. Janis, which was reviewed by The Washington Post on March 21, 1975, shows Joplin arriving in Frankfurt by plane and waiting inside a bus next to the Frankfurt venue, while an American female fan who is visiting Germany expresses enthusiasm to the camera. No security was used in Frankfurt, so by the end of the concert, the stage was so packed with people the band members could not see each other. Janis includes interviews with Joplin in Stockholm and from her visit to London, for her gig at Royal Albert Hall. The London interview was dubbed with a voiceover in the German language for broadcast on German television. John Byrne Cooke, road manager for Joplin and the Kozmic Blues Band, wrote a book published in 2014 in which he discussed her knowledge of the risks of her ongoing use of narcotics, particularly when she was outside the United States.
On the episode of The Dick Cavett Show that was telecast in the United States on the night of July 18, 1969, Joplin and her band performed "Try (Just a Little Bit Harder)" as well as "To Love Somebody".
Released in September 1969, the Kozmic Blues album was certified gold later that year but did not match the success of Cheap Thrills. Reviews of the new group were mixed.
Some music critics, however, including Ralph J. Gleason of the San Francisco Chronicle, were negative. Gleason wrote that the new band was a "drag" and Joplin should "scrap" her new band and "go right back to being a member of Big Brother ... (if they'll have her)."
Other reviewers, such as reporter Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post, devoted entire articles to celebrating the singer's magic. Bernstein's review said that Joplin "has finally assembled a group of first-rate musicians with whom she is totally at ease and whose abilities complement the incredible range of her voice."
Columbia Records released "Kozmic Blues" as a single, which peaked at number 41 on the Billboard Hot 100, and a live rendition of "Raise Your Hand" was released in Germany and became a top ten hit there. Containing other hits like "Try (Just a Little Bit Harder)", "To Love Somebody", and "Little Girl Blue", I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama! reached number five on the Billboard 200 soon after its release.
Joplin appeared at Woodstock starting at approximately 2:00 am, on Sunday, August 17, 1969. Joplin informed her band that they would be performing at the concert as if it were just another gig. On Saturday afternoon, when she and the band were flown by helicopter with the pregnant Joan Baez and Baez's mother from a nearby motel to the festival site and Joplin saw the enormous crowd, she instantly became extremely nervous and giddy. Upon landing and getting off the helicopter, Joplin was approached by reporters asking her questions. She referred them to her friend and sometime lover Peggy Caserta as she was too excited to speak.
Initially, Joplin was eager to get on the stage and perform but was repeatedly delayed as bands were contractually obliged to perform ahead of Joplin. Faced with a ten-hour wait after arriving at the backstage area, Joplin spent some of that time shooting heroin and drinking alcohol with Caserta in a tent. The director's cut of the Woodstock movie shows Joplin and Jefferson Airplane singer Grace Slick standing together near amplifiers watching the band Canned Heat's performance, which started at 7:30 pm. Saturday. Caserta does not appear within camera range. When Joplin reached the stage at approximately 2:00 am. Sunday, she was "three sheets to the wind", according to biographer Alice Echols. During her performance, Joplin's voice became slightly hoarse and wheezy, and she struggled to dance.
Joplin pulled through, and engaged frequently with the crowd, asking them if they had everything they needed and if they were staying stoned. The audience cheered for an encore, to which Joplin replied and sang "Ball and Chain". Pete Townshend, who performed with the Who later in the same morning after Joplin finished, witnessed her performance and said the following in his 2012 memoir: "She had been amazing at Monterey, but tonight she wasn't at her best, due, probably, to the long delay, and probably, too, to the amount of booze and heroin she'd consumed while she waited. But even Janis on an off-night was incredible."
Janis remained at Woodstock for the remainder of the festival. Starting at approximately 3:00 a.m. on Monday, August 18, Joplin was among many Woodstock performers who stood in a circle behind Crosby, Stills & Nash during their performance, which was the first time anyone at Woodstock ever had heard the group perform. This information was published by David Crosby in 1988. Later in the morning of August 18, Joplin and Joan Baez sat in Joe Cocker's van and witnessed Hendrix's close-of-show performance, according to Baez's memoir And a Voice to Sing With (1989).
Still photographs in color show Joplin backstage with Grace Slick the day after Joplin's performance, wherein Joplin appears to be very happy. She was ultimately unhappy with her performance, however, and blamed Caserta. Her singing was not included, by her own insistence, in the 1970 documentary film or the soundtrack for Woodstock: Music from the Original Soundtrack and More, although the 25th anniversary director's cut of Woodstock includes her performance of "Work Me, Lord". The documentary film of the festival that was released in theaters during 1970 includes, on the left side of a split screen, 37 seconds of footage of Joplin and Caserta walking toward Joplin's dressing room tent.
In addition to Woodstock, Joplin had problems at Madison Square Garden, in 1969. Biographer Myra Friedman said she had witnessed a duet Joplin sang with Tina Turner during the Rolling Stones concert at the Garden on Thanksgiving Day. Friedman said Joplin was "so drunk, so stoned, so out of control, that she could have been an institutionalized psychotic rent by mania." An audio recording of the duet exists online. During another Garden concert where she had solo billing on December 19, some observers believed Joplin tried to incite the audience to riot. For part of this concert she was joined onstage by Johnny Winter and Paul Butterfield.
Joplin was arrested for "vulgar and indecent language" on November 16, 1969 at the Curtis Hixon Hall after yelling "Don't fuck with those people" towards the police doing crowd control during her performance. An hour after being booked, Joplin was released on a $504 bond. Joplin failed to attend the trial, and was subsequently found guilty and fined $200 plus court cost.
Joplin told rock journalist David Dalton that Garden audiences watched and listened to "every note [she sang] with 'Is she gonna make it?' in their eyes." In her interview with Dalton she added that she felt most comfortable performing at small, cheap venues in San Francisco that were associated with the counterculture.
At the time of the June 1970 interview with Dalton, she had already performed in the Bay Area for what turned out to be the last time. Sam Andrew, the lead guitarist who had left Big Brother with Joplin in December 1968 to form her back-up band, quit in late summer 1969 and returned to Big Brother. At the end of the year, the Kozmic Blues Band broke up. Their final gig with Joplin was the one at Madison Square Garden with Winter and Butterfield.
In February 1970, Joplin traveled to Brazil, where she stopped her drug and alcohol use. She was accompanied on vacation there by her friend Linda Gravenites (wife of songwriter Nick Gravenites), who had designed Janis's stage costumes from 1967 to 1969.
In Brazil, Joplin was romanced by a fellow American tourist named David (George) Niehaus, who was traveling around the world. A Joplin biography written by her sister Laura said, "David was an upper-middle-class Cincinnati kid who had studied communications at Notre Dame. ... [and] had joined the Peace Corps after college and worked in a small village in Turkey. ... He tried law school, but when he met Janis he was taking time off."
Niehaus and Joplin were photographed by the press at Rio Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. Gravenites also took color photographs of the two during their Brazilian vacation. According to Joplin biographer Ellis Amburn, in Gravenites' snapshots they "look like a carefree, happy, healthy young couple having a tremendously good time."
Rolling Stone magazine interviewed Joplin during an international phone call, quoting her: "I'm going into the jungle with a big bear of a beatnik named David Niehaus. I finally remembered I don't have to be on stage twelve months a year. I've decided to go and dig some other jungles for a couple of weeks." Amburn added in 1992, "Janis was trying to kick heroin in Brazil, and one of the nicest things about David was that he wasn't into drugs."
When Joplin returned to the U.S., she began using heroin again. Her relationship with Niehaus soon ended because he witnessed her shooting drugs at her new home in Larkspur, California. The relationship was also complicated by her ongoing romantic relationship with Peggy Caserta, who also was an intravenous addict, and Joplin's refusal to take some time off and travel the world with him.
Around this time, she formed her new band, known for a short time as Main Squeeze, then renamed the Full Tilt Boogie Band. The band comprised mostly young Canadian musicians previously associated with Ronnie Hawkins and featured an organ, but no horn section. Joplin took a more active role in putting together the Full Tilt Boogie band than she had with her prior group. She was quoted as saying, "It's my band. Finally it's my band!" In May 1970, after performing under the name Main Squeeze at a Hells Angels event, the renamed Full Tilt Boogie Band began a nationwide tour. Joplin became very happy with her new group, which eventually received mostly positive feedback from both her fans and the critics.
Prior to beginning a summer tour with Full Tilt Boogie, she performed in a reunion with Big Brother at the Fillmore West, in San Francisco, on April 4, 1970. Recordings from this concert were included on Joplin in Concert released posthumously in 1972. She again appeared with Big Brother on April 12 at Winterland, where she and Big Brother were reported to be in excellent form. She performed with the band, billed as Main Squeeze, at a party for the Hells Angels at a venue in San Rafael, California on May 21, 1970, according to a web site maintained by Big Brother guitarist Sam Andrew. Andrew's web site quotes him as saying, "This will be the first time that Janis' old band and her new band will be at the same venue, so everyone is a little on edge."
According to Joplin's biographer Ellis Amburn, Big Brother with its lead singer Nick Gravenites was the opening act at the party that was attended by 2,300 people. The Hells Angels, who had known Joplin since 1966, paid her a fee of $240 to perform. Gravenites and Sam Andrew (who had resumed playing guitar with Big Brother) differed in their opinions of her performance and how substance abuse affected it. Gravenites described her singing as "stupendous," according to Amburn. Amburn quoted Andrew twenty years later: "She was visibly deteriorating and she looked bloated. She was like a parody of what she was at her best. I put it down to her drinking too much and I felt a tinge of fear for her well-being. Her singing was real flabby, no edge at all."
Shortly thereafter, Joplin began wearing multi-colored feather boas in her hair. (She had not worn them at the May 21 Hells Angels party / concert in San Rafael). By the time she began touring with Full Tilt Boogie, Joplin told people she was drug-free, but her drinking increased.
From June 28 to July 4, 1970, during the Festival Express tour, Joplin and Full Tilt Boogie performed alongside Buddy Guy, The Band, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Ten Years After, the Grateful Dead, Delaney & Bonnie, Eric Andersen, and Ian & Sylvia. They played concerts in Toronto, Winnipeg, and Calgary. Joplin jammed with the other performers on the train, and her performances on this tour are considered to be among her greatest.
Joplin headlined the festival on all three nights. At the last stop in Calgary, she took to the stage with Jerry Garcia while her band was tuning up. Film footage shows her telling the audience how great the tour was and shows her and Garcia presenting the organizers with a case of tequila. She then burst into a two-hour set, starting with "Tell Mama". Throughout this performance, Joplin engaged in several banters about her love life. In one, she reminisced about living in a San Francisco apartment and competing with a female neighbor in flirting with men on the street. She finished the Calgary concert with long versions of "Get It While You Can" and "Ball and Chain".
Footage of her performance of "Tell Mama" in Calgary became an MTV video in the early 1980s, and the audio from the same film footage was included on the Farewell Song (1982) album. The audio of other Festival Express performances was included on Joplin's In Concert (1972) album. Video of the performances was also included on the Festival Express DVD.
In the "Tell Mama" video shown on MTV in the 1980s, Joplin wore a psychedelically colored, loose-fitting costume and feathers in her hair. This was her standard stage costume in the spring and summer of 1970. She chose the new costumes after her friend and designer, Linda Gravenites (whom Joplin had praised in Vogue's profile of her in its May 1968 edition), cut ties with Joplin shortly after their return from Brazil, due largely to Joplin's continued use of heroin.
Among Joplin's last public appearances were two broadcasts of The Dick Cavett Show. In her June 25, 1970, appearance, she announced that she would attend her ten-year high school class reunion. When asked if she had been popular in school, she admitted that when in high school, her schoolmates "laughed me out of class, out of town and out of the state" (during the year she had spent at the University of Texas at Austin, Joplin had been voted "Ugliest Man on Campus" by frat boys). In the subsequent Cavett Show broadcast, on August 3, 1970, and featuring Gloria Swanson, Joplin discussed her upcoming performance at the Festival for Peace to be held at Shea Stadium in Queens, New York, three days later.
On July 11, 1970, Full Tilt Boogie and Big Brother and the Holding Company both performed at the same concert in the San Diego Sports Arena, which was decades later renamed the Valley View Casino Center. Joplin sang with Full Tilt Boogie and appeared briefly onstage with Big Brother without singing, according to a July 13 review of the concert in the San Diego Union.
On August 7, 1970, a tombstone—jointly paid for by Joplin and Juanita Green, who as a child had done housework for Bessie Smith—was erected at Smith's previously unmarked grave. The following day, the Associated Press circulated this news, and the August 9 edition of The New York Times carried it. The lead paragraph of the AP story said Joplin and Green had "shared the cost of a stone for the 'Empress of the Blues,'" but, according to publicist/biographer Myra Friedman, the two women never met. Joplin had been at home in Larkspur, California when she had received a long-distance phone call with an explanation of the need to finance a gravestone for Bessie Smith, whom Joplin had frequently cited as a musical influence. Joplin immediately wrote a check and mailed it to the name and address provided by the phone caller.
On August 8, 1970, as the Associated Press circulated the news about Smith's new gravestone, Joplin performed at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York. It was there that she first performed "Mercedes Benz", a song partially inspired by a Michael McClure poem, that she had composed with fellow musician and friend Bob Neuwirth a very short time earlier. According to Myra Friedman's account, Joplin performed two shows at the Capitol Theatre, the first of which was attended by actors Geraldine Page and her husband Rip Torn. Between the shows, at a "gin mill" [Friedman's words] close to this concert venue, Joplin and Neuwirth penned the lyrics to the song and she performed it at the second show, according to Friedman.
Neuwirth was quoted by The Wall Street Journal in 2015: "Around 7 p.m., after the Capitol sound check, we had a couple of hours to kill before [acts that opened for Joplin] Seatrain and Runt finished their sets. So the four of us [Joplin, Neuwirth, Geraldine Page, Rip Torn] walked to a bar about three minutes away called Vahsen’s [at 30 Broad Street in Port Chester]." While in Vahsen's, "Janis came up with words for the first verse. I was in charge of writing them down on bar napkins with a ballpoint pen. She came up with the second verse, too, about a color TV. I suggested words here and there, and came up with the third verse—about asking the Lord to buy us a night on the town and another round."
Joplin's last public performance with the Full Tilt Boogie Band took place on August 12, 1970, at the Harvard Stadium in Boston. The Harvard Crimson gave the performance a positive, front-page review, despite the fact that Full Tilt Boogie had performed with makeshift amplifiers after their regular sound equipment was stolen in Boston.
Joplin attended her high school reunion on August 14, accompanied by Neuwirth, road manager John Cooke, and sister Laura, but it was reportedly an unhappy experience for her. Joplin held a press conference in Port Arthur during her reunion visit. When asked by a reporter if she ever entertained at Thomas Jefferson High School when she was a student there, Joplin replied, "Only when I walked down the aisles." Joplin denigrated Port Arthur and the classmates who had humiliated her a decade earlier.
During late August, September, and early October 1970, Joplin and her band rehearsed and recorded a new album in Los Angeles with producer Paul A. Rothchild, best known for his lengthy relationship with The Doors. Although Joplin died before all the tracks were fully completed, there was enough usable material to compile an LP.
The posthumous Pearl (1971) became the biggest-selling album of her career and featured her biggest hit single, a cover of Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster's "Me and Bobby McGee" (Kristofferson had previously been one of Joplin's lovers). The opening track, "Move Over", was written by Joplin, reflecting the way that she felt men treated women in relationships. Also included was the social commentary of "Mercedes Benz", presented in an a cappella arrangement; the track on the album features the first and only take that Joplin recorded. A cover of Nick Gravenites's "Buried Alive in the Blues", to which Joplin had been scheduled to add her vocals on the day she was found dead, was included as an instrumental.
Joplin checked into the Landmark Motor Hotel in Hollywood on August 24, 1970, near Sunset Sound Recorders, where she began rehearsing and recording her album. During the sessions, Joplin continued a relationship with Seth Morgan, a 21-year-old UC Berkeley student, cocaine dealer, and future novelist who had visited her new home in Larkspur in July and August. She and Morgan were engaged to be married in early September, although he visited Sunset Sound Recorders for just eight of Joplin's many rehearsals and sessions.
Morgan later told biographer Myra Friedman that, as a non-musician, he had felt excluded whenever he had visited Sunset Sound Recorders. Instead, he stayed at Joplin's Larkspur home while she stayed alone at the Landmark, although several times she visited Larkspur to be with him and to check the progress of renovations she was having done on the house. She told her construction crew to design a carport to be shaped like a flying saucer, according to biographer Ellis Amburn, the concrete foundation for which was poured the day before she died.
Peggy Caserta claimed in her book, Going Down With Janis (1973), that she and Joplin had decided mutually in April 1970 to stay away from each other to avoid enabling each other's drug use. Caserta, a former Delta Air Lines flight attendant and owner of Mnasidika, one of the first clothing boutiques in the Haight Ashbury, said in the book that by September 1970, she was smuggling cannabis throughout California and had checked into the Landmark Motor Hotel because it attracted drug users.
For approximately the first two weeks of Joplin's stay at the Landmark, she did not know Caserta was in Los Angeles. Joplin learned of Caserta's presence at the Landmark from a heroin dealer who made deliveries there. Joplin begged Caserta for heroin, and when Caserta refused to provide it, Joplin reportedly admonished her by saying, "Don't think if you can get it, I can't get it." Joplin's publicist Myra Friedman was unaware during Joplin's lifetime that this had happened. Later, while Friedman was working on her book Buried Alive, she determined that the time frame of the Joplin-Caserta encounter was one week before Jimi Hendrix's death.
Within a few days, Joplin became a regular customer of the same heroin dealer who had been supplying Caserta.
Joplin's manager Albert Grossman and his assistant/publicist Friedman had staged an intervention with Joplin the previous winter while Joplin was in New York. In September 1970, Grossman and Friedman, who worked out of a New York office, knew Joplin was staying at a Los Angeles hotel, but were unaware it was a haven for drug users and dealers.
Grossman and Friedman knew during Joplin's lifetime that her friend Caserta, whom Friedman met during the New York sessions for Cheap Thrills and on later occasions, used heroin. During the many long-distance telephone conversations that Joplin and Friedman had in September 1970 and on October 1, Joplin never mentioned Caserta, and Friedman assumed Caserta had been out of Joplin's life for a while. Friedman, who had more time than Grossman to monitor the situation, never visited California. She thought Joplin sounded on the phone like she was less depressed than she had been over the summer.
When Joplin was not at Sunset Sound Recorders, she liked to drive her Porsche over the speed limit "on the winding part of Sunset Blvd.", according to a statement made by her attorney Robert Gordon in 1995 at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Friedman wrote that the only Full Tilt Boogie member who rode as her passenger, Ken Pearson, often hesitated to join her, though he did on the night she died. He was not interested in using hard drugs.
On September 26, 1970, Joplin recorded vocals for "Half Moon" and "Cry Baby". The session ended with Joplin, organist Ken Pearson, and drummer Clark Pierson making a special one-minute recording as a birthday gift to John Lennon. Joplin was among several singers who had been contacted by Yoko Ono with a request for a taped greeting for Lennon's 30th birthday, on October 9. Joplin, Pearson, and Pierson chose the Dale Evans composition "Happy Trails" as part of the greeting. Lennon told Dick Cavett on-camera the following year that Joplin's recorded birthday wishes arrived at his home after her death.
On October 1, 1970, Joplin completed her last recording, "Mercedes Benz", which was recorded in a single take. On Saturday, October 3, Joplin visited Sunset Sound Recorders to listen to the instrumental track for Nick Gravenites's song "Buried Alive in the Blues", which the band had recorded earlier that day. She and Paul Rothchild agreed she would record the vocal the following day.
At some point on Saturday, she learned by telephone, to her dismay, that Seth Morgan had met other women at a Marin County, California, restaurant, invited them to her home, and was shooting pool with them using her pool table. People at Sunset Sound Recorders overheard Joplin expressing anger about the state of her relationship with Morgan, as well as joy about the progress of the sessions.
Joplin and Ken Pearson later left the studio together and she drove him in her Porsche to the West Hollywood landmark called Barney's Beanery. Friedman wrote, "At the bar, she drank vodka and orange juice, only two." Bennett Glotzer, a business partner of Joplin's manager Albert Grossman, was present at Barney's Beanery, according to what he told John Byrne Cooke immediately after he (Glotzer) learned of her death. Evidently, Joplin had a friendly conversation with a young man whom she did not know, and he expressed admiration for her music.
After midnight, she drove Ken Pearson and the male fan to the Landmark where she and Pearson were staying in separate rooms. During the car ride, the fan asked Joplin questions "about her singing style," according to Friedman, and "she mostly ignored him" so she could converse with Pearson. As Joplin and Pearson prepared to part in the lobby of the Landmark, she expressed a fear, possibly in jest, that he and the other Full Tilt Boogie musicians might decide to stop making music with her. Pearson was the second-to-last person to see her alive. The last was the Landmark's night shift desk clerk. He had met her several times but did not know her.
Joplin's significant relationships with men included ones with Peter de Blanc, Country Joe McDonald (who wrote the song "Janis" at Joplin's request), David (George) Niehaus, Kris Kristofferson, and Seth Morgan (from July 1970 until her death, at which time they were allegedly engaged).
She also had relationships with women. During her first stint in San Francisco in 1963, Joplin met and briefly lived with Jae Whitaker, a woman whom she had met while playing pool at the bar Gino & Carlo in North Beach. Whitaker broke off their relationship because of Joplin's hard drug use and sexual relationships with other people. Whitaker was first identified by name in connection with Joplin in 1999, when Alice Echols' biography Scars of Sweet Paradise was published.
Joplin had an on-again-off-again romantic relationship with Peggy Caserta. They first met in November 1966 when Big Brother performed at a San Francisco venue called The Matrix. Caserta was one of 15 people in the audience, and at the time, she ran Mnasidika, a clothing boutique in the Haight Ashbury. Approximately a month after Caserta attended the concert, Joplin visited her boutique and said she could not afford to buy a pair of jeans that was for sale, instead asking to put down the first 50 cents on the $5 item.
Caserta was amazed that such a talented singer could not afford a $5 item, and gave her a pair for free. Their friendship was platonic for more than a year. Before it moved to the next level, Caserta was in love with Big Brother guitarist Sam Andrew, and sometime during the first half of 1968 traveled from San Francisco to New York to be with him. He did not want a serious relationship, and Joplin sympathized with Caserta's disappointment.
The Woodstock concert film includes 37 seconds of Joplin and Caserta walking together before they reached the tent where Joplin waited for her turn to perform. By the time the festival took place in August 1969, both were intravenous heroin addicts.
According to Caserta's book Going Down With Janis, which Caserta has since disowned, Joplin introduced her to her boyfriend Seth Morgan in Joplin's room at the Landmark Motor Hotel on September 29, 1970. Caserta "had seen him around" in San Francisco but had not met him before. At some point, an agreement was made for a threesome to take place the following Friday, although Caserta later said that she immediately abandoned the idea once she understood that it was Morgan who would be with Joplin. Morgan made alternate plans, believing that Caserta would be with Joplin that evening. Each one, however, was unaware that the other had bowed out.
The day after Joplin introduced Caserta to Morgan, Caserta saw Joplin briefly, again in Joplin's room, when Caserta accommodated her new Los Angeles friend Debbie Nuciforo, age 19, an aspiring hard rock drummer who wanted to meet Joplin. Nuciforo was high on heroin at the time, and the three women's encounter was brief and unpleasant. Caserta suspected that the reason for Joplin's foul mood was that Morgan had abandoned her earlier that day after having spent less than 24 hours with her.
Caserta did not see nor communicate by phone with Joplin again, although she later claimed she had made several attempts to reach her by phone at the Landmark Motor Hotel and at Sunset Sound Recorders. Caserta and Morgan lost touch with each other; each had independently made alternate plans for Friday night, October 2. Joplin mentioned her disappointment over both of her friends' bailing out of their ménage à trois to her drug dealer on Saturday, while he was selling her the dose of heroin that killed her, as Caserta later learned from the drug dealer.
Biographer Myra Friedman commented in her original version of Buried Alive (1973):
Given the near-infinite potentials of infancy, it is really impossible to make generalizations about what lies behind sexual practices. This, however, is probable: to become clearly homosexual, to make the choice that one honestly prefers relations with one's own sex, no matter the origins of such preference, requires a certain integration, a stability of psychic development, a tidiness of personality organization. The ridicule and the humiliation that took place at that most delicate period in [Joplin's] early teens, her own inability to surmount the obstacles to regular growth, devastated her a great deal more than most people comprehended. Janis was not heir to an ego so cohesive as to permit her an identity one way or the other. She was, as [the psychiatric social worker she saw regularly in Beaumont, Texas in 1965 and 1966] Mr. [Bernard] Giarritano put it [in an interview with Friedman], "diffused" -- spewing, splattering, splaying all over, without a center to hold. That had as much to do with her original use of drugs [before she first met Giarritano] as did the critical component of guilt and its multiplicity of sources above and beyond the contribution made by her relationships with women. Were she so simple as the lesbians wished her to be or so free as her associates imagined!
Kim France reported in her May 2, 1999, The New York Times article, "Nothin' Left to Lose" : "Once she became famous, Joplin cursed like a truck driver, did not believe in wearing undergarments, was rarely seen without her bottle of Southern Comfort and delighted in playing the role of sexual predator."
On July 11, 1970, Joplin made a revealing statement about her sexuality to her friend Richard Hundgen, the Grateful Dead's San Francisco-based road manager whom she had known since 1966. When Joplin and Hundgen were offstage during a San Diego gig for both Full Tilt Boogie and Big Brother and the Holding Company, she said the following that he later repeated to Myra Friedman:
I hear a rumor that somebody in San Francisco is spreading stories that I'm a dyke. You go back there and find out who it is and tell them that Janis says she's gotten it on with a couple of thousand cats in her life and a few hundred chicks and see what they can do with that!
On Sunday evening, October 4, 1970, Joplin was found dead on the floor of her room at the Landmark Motor Hotel by her road manager and close friend John Byrne Cooke.
Alcohol was present in the room. Newspapers reported that no other drugs or paraphernalia were present. According to a 1983 book authored by Joseph DiMona and Los Angeles County coroner Thomas Noguchi, evidence of narcotics was removed from the scene by a friend of Joplin and later put back after the person realized that an autopsy was going to reveal that narcotics were in her system. The book adds that prior to Joplin's death, Noguchi had investigated other fatal drug overdoses in Los Angeles where friends believed they were doing favors for decedents by removing evidence of narcotics, then they "thought things over" and returned to put back the evidence. Noguchi performed an autopsy on Joplin and determined the cause of death to be a heroin overdose, possibly compounded by alcohol.
John Byrne Cooke believed Joplin had been given heroin that was much more potent than what she and other L.A. heroin users had received on previous occasions, as was indicated by overdoses of several of her dealer's other customers during the same weekend. Her death was ruled accidental.
Both Peggy Caserta, Joplin's close friend, and Seth Morgan, Joplin's fiancé, had failed to meet Joplin the Friday immediately prior to her death, October 2; Joplin had been expecting both of them to keep her company that night. According to Caserta, Joplin was saddened that neither of her friends visited her at the Landmark as they had promised. During the 24 hours Joplin lived after this disappointment, Caserta did not phone her to explain why she had failed to show up.
Caserta admitted to waiting until late Saturday night to dial the Landmark switchboard, only to learn that Joplin had instructed the desk clerk not to accept any incoming phone calls for her after midnight. Morgan did speak to Joplin via telephone within the 24 hours prior to her death, but little is known about that call. She used a phone at Sunset Sound Recorders where her colleagues ("there were perhaps twenty to twenty-five people present," wrote biographer Myra Friedman) noticed that whatever Morgan said to her made her very angry.
Peggy Caserta has insisted that Joplin's death was not an accidental overdose, but rather a result of a head gash suffered after the "hourglass heel" of her slingback sandal caught in the shag carpet, causing her to lose her balance. Caserta does concede, however, that drugs and/or alcohol may have played a role in hastening her death that night.
Joplin was cremated at Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park and Mortuary in Los Angeles, and her ashes were scattered from a plane into the Pacific Ocean.
Joplin's death in October 1970 at age 27 stunned her fans and shocked the music world, especially when coupled with the deaths of Canned Heat singer Alan Wilson a month earlier, and rock icon Jimi Hendrix, just 16 days earlier, both aged 27. All three musicians performed at the two biggest rock festivals of the 1960s: Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock. (This would later cause some people to attribute significance to the death of musicians at the age of 27, as celebrated in the "27 Club.") Music historian Tom Moon wrote that Joplin had "a devastatingly original voice," music columnist Jon Pareles of The New York Times wrote that Joplin as an artist was "overpowering and deeply vulnerable" and author Megan Terry said that Joplin was the female version of Elvis Presley in her ability to captivate an audience.
A book about Joplin by her publicist Myra Friedman titled Buried Alive: The Biography of Janis Joplin (1973) was excerpted in many newspapers. At the same time, Peggy Caserta's memoir, Going Down With Janis (1973), attracted much attention; its provocative title is a reference to Caserta's claim that she had engaged in oral sex with Joplin while they were high on heroin in September 1970. The description provided by Dan Knapp, Caserta's co-author whom she denounced decades later, repelled many people in 1973 when few books or filmed interviews of Joplin or her loved ones were accessible to the public. Joplin's bandmate Sam Andrew described Caserta as "halfway between a groupie and a friend" in an interview with writer Ellis Amburn. Soon after the 1973 publication of Going Down With Janis, Joplin's friends learned that graphic descriptions of sexual acts and intravenous drug use were not the only portions of the book that would haunt them.
According to Kim Chappell, a close friend of Caserta and Joplin, Caserta's book angered the Los Angeles heroin dealer whom she had described in detail in her book, including the make and model of his car. According to Amburn, in 1973 a "carful of dope dealers" visited a Los Angeles lesbian bar that Caserta had been frequenting. Chappell, who was in the alley behind the bar, stated: "I was stabbed because, when Peggy's book came out, her dealer, the same one who'd given Janis her last fix, didn't like it that he was referred to and was out to get Peggy. He couldn't find her, so he went for her lover. When they realized who I was, they felt that my death would also hit Peggy, and so they stabbed me." Despite being "stabbed three times in the chest, puncturing both lungs," Chappell eventually recovered.
According to Joplin's biographers, Caserta was among many friends of Joplin who did not become clean and sober until a long time after Joplin's death, while others died from overdoses. Although the wife of Big Brother guitarist James Gurley, who was Joplin's close friend, died from a heroin overdose in 1969, devastating Joplin, Gurley himself did not become clean and sober until 1984. Caserta survived "a near-fatal OD in December 1995," wrote Alice Echols. On January 13, 2000, Caserta appeared during a segment about Joplin on 20/20. In 2018, Caserta denounced Going Down With Janis as the pornographic fantasy of Dan Knapp, her co-author, and largely unreliable. During that year, the public had its first access to her own story via a memoir she co-wrote with Maggie Falcon titled I Ran into Some Trouble. It describes a long, friendly relationship with Joplin that only occasionally featured sexuality.
Joplin's body art, with a wristlet and a small heart on her left breast by the San Francisco tattoo artist Lyle Tuttle, marked an early moment in the popular culture's acceptance of tattoos as art. Another trademark was her flamboyant hair styles, which often included colored streaks and accessories such as scarves, beads and feathers.
The Mamas & the Papas' song "Pearl" (1971), from their People Like Us album, was a tribute. Leonard Cohen's song "Chelsea Hotel#2" (1974) is about Joplin. Lyricist Robert Hunter has commented that Jerry Garcia's "Birdsong" from his first solo album, Garcia (1972), is about Joplin and the end of her suffering through death. Mimi Farina's composition "In the Quiet Morning", most famously covered by Joan Baez on her Come from the Shadows (1972) album, was a tribute to Joplin. Another song by Baez, "Children of the Eighties," mentioned Joplin. A Serge Gainsbourg-penned French language song by English singer Jane Birkin, "Ex fan des sixties" (1978), references Joplin along with other disappeared "idols" such as Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones and Marc Bolan. When Joplin was alive, Country Joe McDonald released a song called "Janis" on his band's album I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die (1967).
The film The Rose (1979) is loosely based on Joplin's life. Originally planned to be titled Pearl—Joplin's nickname and the title of her last album—the film was fictionalized after her family declined to allow the producers the rights to her story. Bette Midler won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture-Female and earned nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actress, the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role, the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress, and the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actress for her performance in the film.
In 1988, on what would have been Joplin's 45th birthday, the Janis Joplin Memorial, with an original gold, multi-image sculpture of Joplin by Douglas Clark, was dedicated during a ceremony in Port Arthur, Texas.
In 1992, the first major biography of Joplin in two decades, Love, Janis, authored by her younger sister Laura Joplin, was published. In an interview, Laura stated that Joplin enjoyed being on the Dick Cavett Show, that Joplin had difficulties with some, but not all, people at Thomas Jefferson High School and that Joplin enthusiastically talked about Woodstock with her parents and siblings during a visit to their Texas home a few weeks after she had performed at the festival.
In 1995, Joplin was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 2005, she received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. In November 2009, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum honored her as part of its annual American Music Masters Series; among the artifacts at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum exhibition are Joplin's scarf and necklaces, her psychedelically painted 1965 Porsche 356 Cabriolet and a sheet of LSD blotting paper designed by Robert Crumb, designer of the Cheap Thrills cover. Also in 2009, Joplin was the honoree at the Rock Hall's American Music Master concert and lecture series.
In the late 1990s, the musical play Love, Janis was created and directed by Randal Myler, with input from Janis' younger sister Laura and Big Brother guitarist Sam Andrew, with an aim to take it to Off-Broadway. Opening in the summer of 2001 and scheduled for only a few weeks of performances, the show won acclaim, played to packed houses and was held over several times.
In 2013, Washington's Arena Stage featured a production of A Night with Janis Joplin, starring Mary Bridget Davies. In it, Joplin performs a concert for the audience while telling stories of her past inspirations, including those of Odetta and Aretha Franklin. The production transferred to Broadway, then went on tour in 2016.
On November 4, 2013, Joplin was awarded with the 2,510th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contributions to the music industry. Her star is located at 6752 Hollywood Boulevard, in front of Musicians Institute.
On August 8, 2014, the U.S. Postal Service revealed a commemorative stamp honoring Joplin as part of its Music Icons stamp series during a first-day-of-issue ceremony at the Outside Lands Music Festival at Golden Gate Park.
Among the memorabilia Joplin left behind is a Gibson Hummingbird guitar.
In 2015, the biographical documentary film Janis: Little Girl Blue, directed by Amy J. Berg and narrated by Cat Power, was released. It was a New York Times Critics' Pick.
In 2023, Rolling Stone ranked Joplin at number 78 on its list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time.
Joplin had a profound influence on many singers.
Pink said about Joplin: "She was so inspiring by singing blues music when it wasn't culturally acceptable for white women, and she wore her heart on her sleeve. She was so witty and charming and intelligent, but she also battled an ugly-duckling syndrome. I would love to play her in a movie." In a tribute performance on her Try This Tour, Pink called Joplin "a woman who inspired me when everyone else ... didn't!"
Janis Joplin recorded four albums in her four-year career. The first two albums were recorded with and credited to Big Brother and the Holding Company; the later two were recorded with different backing bands and released as solo albums. Posthumous releases have included previously unreleased studio and live material. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Janis Lyn Joplin (January 19, 1943 – October 4, 1970) was an American singer and songwriter. One of the most successful and widely known rock performers of her era, she was noted for her powerful mezzo-soprano vocals and \"electric\" stage presence.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "In 1967, Joplin rose to prominence following an appearance at Monterey Pop Festival, where she was the lead singer of the then little-known San Francisco psychedelic rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company. After releasing two albums with the band, she left Big Brother to continue as a solo artist with her own backing groups, first the Kozmic Blues Band and then the Full Tilt Boogie Band. She appeared at the 1969 Woodstock festival and on the Festival Express train tour. Five singles by Joplin reached the US Billboard Hot 100, including a cover of the Kris Kristofferson song \"Me and Bobby McGee\", which posthumously reached number one in March 1971. Her most popular songs include her cover versions of \"Piece of My Heart\", \"Cry Baby\", \"Down on Me\", \"Ball and Chain\", \"Summertime\", and her original song \"Mercedes Benz\", her final recording.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Joplin died of a heroin overdose in 1970, at the age of 27, after releasing three albums (two with Big Brother and the Holding Company and one solo album). A second solo album, Pearl, was released in January 1971, just over three months after her death. It reached number one on the Billboard charts. She was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995. Rolling Stone ranked Joplin number 46 on its 2004 list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time and number 28 on its 2008 list of 100 Greatest Singers of All Time. NPR dubbed Joplin as \"The Queen of Rock\" and named her one of the 50 Great Voices. She remains one of the top-selling musicians in the United States, with Recording Industry Association of America certifications of 18.5 million albums sold.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Janis Joplin was born in Port Arthur, Texas, on (1943-01-19)January 19, 1943, to Dorothy Bonita East (1913–1998), a registrar at a business college, and her husband, Seth Ward Joplin (1910–1987), an engineer at Texaco. She had two younger siblings, Laura and Michael. The family attended First Christian Church of Port Arthur, a church belonging to the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) denomination.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Her parents felt that Janis needed more attention than their other children. As a teenager, Joplin befriended a group of outcasts, one of whom had albums by blues artists Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Lead Belly, which Joplin later credited with influencing her decision to become a singer. She began singing blues and folk music with friends at Thomas Jefferson High School. In high school, she was a classmate of Pro Football Hall of Fame coach Jimmy Johnson.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Joplin stated that she was ostracized and bullied in high school. As a teen, she became overweight and suffered from acne, leaving her with deep scars that required dermabrasion. Other kids at high school would routinely taunt her and call her names like \"pig,\" \"freak,\" \"nigger lover,\" or \"creep.\" She stated, \"I was a misfit. I read, I painted, I thought. I didn't hate niggers.\"",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Joplin graduated from high school in 1960 and attended Lamar State College of Technology in Beaumont, Texas, during the summer and later the University of Texas at Austin (UT), though she did not complete her college studies. The campus newspaper, The Daily Texan, ran a profile of her in the issue dated July 27, 1962, headlined \"She Dares to Be Different.\" The article began, \"She goes barefooted when she feels like it, wears Levi's to class because they're more comfortable, and carries her autoharp with her everywhere she goes so that in case she gets the urge to break into song, it will be handy. Her name is Janis Joplin.\"",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "While at UT she performed with a folk trio called the Waller Creek Boys and frequently socialized with the staff of the campus humor magazine The Texas Ranger. According to Freak Brothers cartoonist Gilbert Shelton, who befriended her, she used to sell The Texas Ranger, which contained some of Shelton's early comic books, on the campus.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Joplin cultivated a rebellious manner and styled herself partly after her female blues heroines and partly after the Beat poets. Her first song, \"What Good Can Drinkin' Do\", was recorded on tape in December 1962 at the home of a fellow University of Texas student.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "She left Texas in January 1963, \"Just to get away,\" she said, \"because my head was in a much different place\", hitchhiking with her friend Chet Helms to North Beach, San Francisco. Still in San Francisco in 1964, Joplin and future Jefferson Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen recorded a number of blues standards, which incidentally featured Kaukonen's wife Margareta using a typewriter in the background. This session included seven tracks: \"Typewriter Talk\", \"Trouble in Mind\", \"Kansas City Blues\", \"Hesitation Blues\", \"Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out\", \"Daddy, Daddy, Daddy\", and \"Long Black Train Blues\", and was released long after Joplin's death as the bootleg album The Typewriter Tape.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In 1963, Joplin was arrested in San Francisco for shoplifting. During the two years that followed, her drug use increased and she acquired a reputation as a \"speed freak\" and occasional heroin user. She also used other psychoactive drugs and was a heavy drinker throughout her career; her favorite alcoholic beverage was Southern Comfort.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In May 1965, Joplin's friends in San Francisco, noticing the detrimental effects on her from regularly injecting methamphetamine, she was described as \"skeletal\" and \"emaciated\", persuaded her to return to Port Arthur. During that month, her friends threw her a bus-fare party so she could return to her parents in Texas. Five years later, Joplin told Rolling Stone magazine writer David Dalton the following about her first stint in San Francisco: \"I didn't have many friends and I didn't like the ones I had.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Back in Port Arthur in the spring of 1965, after Joplin's parents noticed her weight of 88 pounds (40 kg), she changed her lifestyle. She avoided drugs and alcohol, adopted a beehive hairdo, and enrolled as an anthropology major at Lamar University in nearby Beaumont, Texas. Her sister Laura said in a 2016 interview that social work was her major during her year at Lamar. During her time at Lamar University, she commuted to Austin to sing solo, accompanying herself on acoustic guitar. One of her performances was at a benefit by local musicians for Texas bluesman Mance Lipscomb, who was suffering with ill health.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Joplin became engaged to Peter de Blanc in the fall of 1965. She had begun a relationship with him toward the end of her first stint in San Francisco. Now living in New York where he worked with IBM computers, he visited her to ask her father for her hand in marriage. Joplin and her mother began planning the wedding. De Blanc, who traveled frequently, ended the engagement soon afterward.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In 1965 and 1966, Joplin commuted from her family's Port Arthur home to Beaumont, Texas, where she had regular sessions with a psychiatric social worker named Bernard Giarritano at a counseling agency that was funded by the United Fund, which after her death changed its name to the United Way. Interviewed by biographer Myra Friedman after his client's death, Giarritano said Joplin had been baffled by how she could pursue a professional career as a singer without relapsing into drugs, and her drug-related memories from immediately prior to returning to Port Arthur continued to frighten her. Joplin sometimes brought an acoustic guitar with her to her sessions with Giarritano, and people in other offices within the building could hear her singing.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Giarritano tried to reassure her that she did not have to use narcotics to succeed in the music business. She also said that if she were to avoid singing professionally, she would have to become a keypunch operator, as she had done a few years earlier, or a secretary, and then a wife and mother, and she would have to become similar to all the other women in Port Arthur.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Approximately a year before Joplin joined Big Brother and the Holding Company, she recorded seven studio tracks with her acoustic guitar. Among the songs she recorded were her original composition of the song \"Turtle Blues\" and an alternate version of \"Cod'ine\" by Buffy Sainte-Marie. These tracks were later issued as a new album in 1995, titled This is Janis Joplin 1965 by James Gurley.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In 1966, Joplin's bluesy vocal style attracted the attention of the San Francisco-based psychedelic rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company, which had gained some renown among the nascent hippie community in Haight-Ashbury. She was recruited to join the group by Chet Helms, a promoter who was managing Big Brother and with whom she had hitchhiked from Texas to San Francisco a few years earlier. Helms sent his friend Travis Rivers to find her in Austin, Texas, where she had been performing with her acoustic guitar, and to accompany her to San Francisco.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Aware of her previous nightmare with drug addiction in San Francisco, Rivers insisted that she inform her parents face-to-face of her plans, and he drove her from Austin to Port Arthur (he waited in his car while she talked with her startled parents) before they began their long drive to San Francisco. She gave her parents the impression Austin was her final destination and it was the location of the rock band she was joining. Joplin joined Big Brother on June 4, 1966. Her first public performance with them was at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. Soon after that, her parents received a letter from her, and that was how they learned she was in San Francisco, not Austin.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In June 1966, Joplin was photographed at an outdoor concert in San Francisco that celebrated the summer solstice. The image, which was later published in two books by David Dalton, shows her before she relapsed into drugs. Due to persistent persuading by keyboardist and close friend Stephen Ryder, Joplin avoided drugs for several weeks. She shared an apartment with Travis Rivers upon their arrival in San Francisco, and made him promise that using needles would not be allowed there.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "When bandmate Dave Getz accompanied her from a rehearsal to her home, Rivers was not there, but \"two or three\", according to Getz' recollection 25 years later, guests whom Rivers had invited were in the process of injecting drugs. \"One of them was about to tie off,\" recalled Getz. \"Janis went nuts! I had never seen anybody explode like that. She was screaming and crying and Travis walked in. She screamed at him: 'We had a pact! You promised me! There wouldn't be any of that in front of me!' I was over my head and I tried to calm her down. I said, 'They're just doing mescaline,' because that's what I thought it was. She said, 'You don't understand! I can't see that! I just can't stand to see that!'\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "A San Francisco concert from that summer (1966) was recorded and released on the 1984 album Cheaper Thrills. In July, all five bandmates and guitarist James Gurley's wife Nancy moved to a house in Lagunitas, California, where they lived communally. The band often partied with the Grateful Dead, the members of whom lived less than two miles away. She had a short relationship and longer friendship with founding member Ron \"Pigpen\" McKernan.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The band went to Chicago for a four-week engagement in August 1966, then found itself stranded after the promoter ran out of money when its concerts did not attract the expected audience levels, and he was unable to pay them. In the unfortunate circumstances the band signed with Bob Shad's record label Mainstream Records; recordings for the label took place in Chicago in September, but these were not satisfactory, and the band returned to San Francisco, continuing to perform live, including at the Love Pageant Rally. The band recorded two tracks, \"Blindman\" and \"All Is Loneliness\", in Los Angeles, and these were released by Mainstream as a single that did not sell well. After playing at a happening in Stanford in early December 1966, the band traveled back to Los Angeles to record ten tracks between December 12 and 14, 1966, produced by Bob Shad, which appeared on the band's debut album in August 1967.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "In late 1966, Big Brother switched managers from Chet Helms to Julius Karpen. One of Joplin's earliest major performances in 1967 was at the Mantra-Rock Dance, a musical event held on January 29 at the Avalon Ballroom by the San Francisco Hare Krishna temple. Janis Joplin and Big Brother performed there along with the Hare Krishna founder Bhaktivedanta Swami, Allen Ginsberg, Moby Grape, and the Grateful Dead, donating proceeds to the Krishna temple. In early 1967, Joplin met Country Joe McDonald of the group Country Joe and the Fish. The pair lived together as a couple for a few months in her Lyon Street apartment. A driver's license, issued to Joplin in 1967, shows her residence as 122 Lyon Street No. 3, in San Francisco.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Joplin and Big Brother began playing clubs in San Francisco, at the Fillmore West, Winterland, and the Avalon Ballroom. They also played at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, as well as in Seattle, Washington; Vancouver, British Columbia; the Psychedelic Supermarket in Boston, Massachusetts; and the Golden Bear Club in Huntington Beach, California.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The band's debut studio album, Big Brother & the Holding Company, was released by Mainstream Records in August 1967, shortly after the group's breakthrough appearance in June at the Monterey Pop Festival. Two tracks, \"Coo Coo\" and \"The Last Time,\" were released separately as singles, while the tracks from the previous single, \"Blindman\" and \"All Is Loneliness\", were added to the remaining eight tracks. When Columbia Records took over the band's contract and re-released the album, they included \"Coo Coo\" and \"The Last Time\", and put \"featuring Janis Joplin\" on the cover. The debut album spawned four minor hits with the singles \"Down on Me\", a traditional song arranged by Joplin, \"Bye Bye Baby\", \"Call On Me\" and \"Coo Coo\", on all of which Joplin sang lead vocals.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Two songs from the second of Big Brother's two sets at Monterey, which they played on Sunday, were filmed (their first set, which was on Saturday, was not filmed, though it was audio-recorded). Some sources, including a Joplin biography by Ellis Amburn, claim that she was dressed in thrift store hippie clothes or second-hand Victorian clothes during the band's Saturday set, but still photographs do not appear to have survived. Digitized color film of two songs in the Sunday set, \"Combination of the Two\" and a version of Big Mama Thornton's \"Ball and Chain,\" appear in the DVD and Blu-ray boxed set of D. A. Pennebaker's documentary Monterey Pop released by The Criterion Collection. She is seen wearing an expensive gold tunic dress with matching pants. They were created for her by San Francisco clothing designer Colin Rose.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Documentary filmmaker Pennebaker inserted two cutaway shots of Cass Elliot of the Mamas & the Papas seated in the audience during Joplin's performance of \"Ball and Chain\", one in the middle of the song as her eyes, covered by sunglasses, are fixed on Joplin, and also a shot during the applause as she silently mouths \"Oh, wow!\" and looks at the person seated next to her. Elliot and the audience are seen in sunlight, but Sunday's Big Brother performance was filmed in the evening. An explanation came from Big Brother's road manager John Byrne Cooke, who remembers that Pennebaker discreetly filmed the audience (including Elliot) during Big Brother's Saturday performance when he was not allowed to point a camera at the band.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The prohibition of Pennebaker from filming on Saturday afternoon came from Big Brother's manager Julius Karpen. The band had a bitter argument with Karpen and overruled him as they prepared for their second set that the festival organizers had added on the spur of the moment. Backstage at the festival, the band became acquainted with New York-based talent manager Albert Grossman but did not sign with him until several months later, firing Karpen at that time.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Only \"Ball and Chain\" was included in the Monterey Pop film that was released to theaters throughout the United States in 1969 and shown on television in the 1970s. Those who did not attend the Monterey Pop Festival saw the band's performance of \"Combination of the Two\" for the first time in 2002 when The Criterion Collection released the boxed set.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "For the remainder of 1967, even after Big Brother signed with Albert Grossman, the band performed mainly in California. On February 16, 1968, the group began its first East Coast tour in Philadelphia, and the following day gave their first performance in New York City at the Anderson Theater. On April 7, 1968—three days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the last day of their East Coast tour—Joplin and Big Brother performed with Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Guy, Joni Mitchell, Richie Havens, Paul Butterfield, and Elvin Bishop at the Wake for Martin Luther King Jr. concert in New York.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Live at Winterland '68, recorded at the Winterland Ballroom on April 12 and 13, 1968, features Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company at the height of their mutual career working through a selection of tracks from their albums. A recording became available to the public for the first time in 1998 when Columbia/Sony Music Entertainment released the compact disc. One month after the Winterland concert, Owsley Stanley recorded them at the Carousel Ballroom, released in 2012 as Live at the Carousel Ballroom 1968.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "On July 31, 1968, Joplin made her first nationwide television appearance when the band performed on This Morning, an ABC daytime 90-minute variety show that was hosted by Dick Cavett. Shortly thereafter, network employees wiped the videotape, though the audio survives. In 1969 and 1970, Joplin made three appearances on Cavett's prime-time program. Audio of her 1968 appearance has not been used since then.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Sometime in 1968, the band's billing was changed to \"Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company,\" and the media coverage given to Joplin generated resentment within the band. The other members of Big Brother thought that Joplin was on a \"star trip\", while others were telling Joplin that Big Brother was a terrible band and that she ought to dump them. Time magazine called Joplin \"probably the most powerful singer to emerge from the white rock movement\", and Richard Goldstein wrote for the May 1968 issue of Vogue magazine that Joplin was \"the most staggering leading woman in rock...she slinks like tar, scowls like war...clutching the knees of a final stanza, begging it not to leave.... Janis Joplin can sing the chic off any listener.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "For her first major studio recording, Joplin played a major role in the arrangement and production of the songs that would comprise Big Brother and the Holding Company's second album, Cheap Thrills. Producer John Simon tried recording the band in concert, to capture their energy in a live album, but several attempts showed the band was prone to mistakes. Their imprecision was not helped by moving the sessions to a recording studio. Joplin sang take after take of the same song, with her performances consistently good, and she grew frustrated with the band's sloppiness. Simon was replaced by Elliot Mazer who fixed the songs by overdubbing certain parts. The album featured a cover design by counterculture cartoonist Robert Crumb.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Although Cheap Thrills sounded as if it consisted of concert recordings, like on \"Combination of the Two\" and \"I Need a Man to Love\", only \"Ball and Chain\" was actually recorded in front of a paying audience; the rest of the tracks were studio recordings. The album had a raw quality, including the sound of a drinking glass breaking and the broken shards being swept away during the song \"Turtle Blues\". Cheap Thrills produced popular hits with \"Piece of My Heart\" and \"Summertime\". Together with the premiere of the documentary film Monterey Pop at New York's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts on December 26, 1968, the album launched Joplin as a star.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Cheap Thrills reached number one on the Billboard 200 album chart eight weeks after its release, and was number one for eight (nonconsecutive) weeks. The album was certified gold at release and sold over a million copies in the first month of its release. The lead single from the album, \"Piece of My Heart\", reached number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the fall of 1968.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "The band made another East Coast tour during July–August 1968, performing at the Columbia Records convention in Puerto Rico and the Newport Folk Festival. After returning to San Francisco for two hometown shows at the Palace of Fine Arts Festival on August 31 and September 1, Joplin announced that she would be leaving Big Brother. On September 14, 1968, culminating a three-night engagement together at Fillmore West, fans thronged to a concert that Bill Graham publicized as the last official concert of Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company. The opening acts on this night were Chicago, then still called Chicago Transit Authority, and Santana.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Despite Graham's announcement that the Fillmore West gig was Big Brother's last concert with Joplin, the band—with Joplin still as lead vocalist—toured the U.S. that fall. Reflecting Joplin's crossover appeal, two October 1968 performances at a roller rink in Alexandria, Virginia, were reviewed by John Segraves of the conservative Washington Evening Star at a time when the Washington metropolitan area's hard rock scene was in its infancy. An opera buff at the time, he wrote:",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Miss Joplin, in her early 20s, has been for the last year or two the vocalist with Big Brother and the Holding Company, a rock quintet of superior electric expertise. Shortly she will be merely Janis Joplin, a vocalist singing folk rock on her first album as a single. Whatever she does and whatever she sings she'll do it well because her vocal talents are boundless. This is the way she came across in a huge, high-ceilinged roller skating rink without any acoustics but, thankfully a good enough sound system behind her. In a proper room, I would imagine there would be no adjectives to describe her.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Later in October 1968, Big Brother performed at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and played at the Syracuse War Memorial as part of Syracuse University's Fall Homecoming on October 11, with Janis joining openers the Butterfield Blues Band for their closing song. Aside from two 1970 reunions, Joplin's last performance with Big Brother was at a Chet Helms benefit in San Francisco on December 1, 1968.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "After splitting from Big Brother and the Holding Company, Joplin formed a new backup group, the Kozmic Blues Band, composed of session musicians like keyboardist Stephen Ryder and saxophonist Cornelius \"Snooky\" Flowers, as well as former Big Brother and the Holding Company guitarist Sam Andrew and future Full Tilt Boogie Band bassist Brad Campbell. The band was influenced by the Stax-Volt rhythm and blues (R&B) and soul bands of the 1960s, as exemplified by Otis Redding and the Bar-Kays. The Stax-Volt R&B sound was typified by the use of horns and had a funky, pop-oriented sound in contrast to many of the psychedelic/hard rock bands of the period.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "By early 1969, Joplin was allegedly shooting at least $200 worth of heroin per day (equivalent to $1,596 in 2022) although efforts were made to keep her clean during the recording of I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama! Gabriel Mekler, who produced the album, told publicist-turned-biographer Myra Friedman after Joplin's death that she had lived in his Los Angeles house during the June 1969 recording sessions at his insistence so he could keep her away from drugs and her drug-using friends.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Joplin's appearances with the Kozmic Blues Band in Europe were released in theaters, in multiple documentaries. Janis, which was reviewed by The Washington Post on March 21, 1975, shows Joplin arriving in Frankfurt by plane and waiting inside a bus next to the Frankfurt venue, while an American female fan who is visiting Germany expresses enthusiasm to the camera. No security was used in Frankfurt, so by the end of the concert, the stage was so packed with people the band members could not see each other. Janis includes interviews with Joplin in Stockholm and from her visit to London, for her gig at Royal Albert Hall. The London interview was dubbed with a voiceover in the German language for broadcast on German television. John Byrne Cooke, road manager for Joplin and the Kozmic Blues Band, wrote a book published in 2014 in which he discussed her knowledge of the risks of her ongoing use of narcotics, particularly when she was outside the United States.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "On the episode of The Dick Cavett Show that was telecast in the United States on the night of July 18, 1969, Joplin and her band performed \"Try (Just a Little Bit Harder)\" as well as \"To Love Somebody\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Released in September 1969, the Kozmic Blues album was certified gold later that year but did not match the success of Cheap Thrills. Reviews of the new group were mixed.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Some music critics, however, including Ralph J. Gleason of the San Francisco Chronicle, were negative. Gleason wrote that the new band was a \"drag\" and Joplin should \"scrap\" her new band and \"go right back to being a member of Big Brother ... (if they'll have her).\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Other reviewers, such as reporter Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post, devoted entire articles to celebrating the singer's magic. Bernstein's review said that Joplin \"has finally assembled a group of first-rate musicians with whom she is totally at ease and whose abilities complement the incredible range of her voice.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Columbia Records released \"Kozmic Blues\" as a single, which peaked at number 41 on the Billboard Hot 100, and a live rendition of \"Raise Your Hand\" was released in Germany and became a top ten hit there. Containing other hits like \"Try (Just a Little Bit Harder)\", \"To Love Somebody\", and \"Little Girl Blue\", I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama! reached number five on the Billboard 200 soon after its release.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Joplin appeared at Woodstock starting at approximately 2:00 am, on Sunday, August 17, 1969. Joplin informed her band that they would be performing at the concert as if it were just another gig. On Saturday afternoon, when she and the band were flown by helicopter with the pregnant Joan Baez and Baez's mother from a nearby motel to the festival site and Joplin saw the enormous crowd, she instantly became extremely nervous and giddy. Upon landing and getting off the helicopter, Joplin was approached by reporters asking her questions. She referred them to her friend and sometime lover Peggy Caserta as she was too excited to speak.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Initially, Joplin was eager to get on the stage and perform but was repeatedly delayed as bands were contractually obliged to perform ahead of Joplin. Faced with a ten-hour wait after arriving at the backstage area, Joplin spent some of that time shooting heroin and drinking alcohol with Caserta in a tent. The director's cut of the Woodstock movie shows Joplin and Jefferson Airplane singer Grace Slick standing together near amplifiers watching the band Canned Heat's performance, which started at 7:30 pm. Saturday. Caserta does not appear within camera range. When Joplin reached the stage at approximately 2:00 am. Sunday, she was \"three sheets to the wind\", according to biographer Alice Echols. During her performance, Joplin's voice became slightly hoarse and wheezy, and she struggled to dance.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Joplin pulled through, and engaged frequently with the crowd, asking them if they had everything they needed and if they were staying stoned. The audience cheered for an encore, to which Joplin replied and sang \"Ball and Chain\". Pete Townshend, who performed with the Who later in the same morning after Joplin finished, witnessed her performance and said the following in his 2012 memoir: \"She had been amazing at Monterey, but tonight she wasn't at her best, due, probably, to the long delay, and probably, too, to the amount of booze and heroin she'd consumed while she waited. But even Janis on an off-night was incredible.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Janis remained at Woodstock for the remainder of the festival. Starting at approximately 3:00 a.m. on Monday, August 18, Joplin was among many Woodstock performers who stood in a circle behind Crosby, Stills & Nash during their performance, which was the first time anyone at Woodstock ever had heard the group perform. This information was published by David Crosby in 1988. Later in the morning of August 18, Joplin and Joan Baez sat in Joe Cocker's van and witnessed Hendrix's close-of-show performance, according to Baez's memoir And a Voice to Sing With (1989).",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Still photographs in color show Joplin backstage with Grace Slick the day after Joplin's performance, wherein Joplin appears to be very happy. She was ultimately unhappy with her performance, however, and blamed Caserta. Her singing was not included, by her own insistence, in the 1970 documentary film or the soundtrack for Woodstock: Music from the Original Soundtrack and More, although the 25th anniversary director's cut of Woodstock includes her performance of \"Work Me, Lord\". The documentary film of the festival that was released in theaters during 1970 includes, on the left side of a split screen, 37 seconds of footage of Joplin and Caserta walking toward Joplin's dressing room tent.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "In addition to Woodstock, Joplin had problems at Madison Square Garden, in 1969. Biographer Myra Friedman said she had witnessed a duet Joplin sang with Tina Turner during the Rolling Stones concert at the Garden on Thanksgiving Day. Friedman said Joplin was \"so drunk, so stoned, so out of control, that she could have been an institutionalized psychotic rent by mania.\" An audio recording of the duet exists online. During another Garden concert where she had solo billing on December 19, some observers believed Joplin tried to incite the audience to riot. For part of this concert she was joined onstage by Johnny Winter and Paul Butterfield.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Joplin was arrested for \"vulgar and indecent language\" on November 16, 1969 at the Curtis Hixon Hall after yelling \"Don't fuck with those people\" towards the police doing crowd control during her performance. An hour after being booked, Joplin was released on a $504 bond. Joplin failed to attend the trial, and was subsequently found guilty and fined $200 plus court cost.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Joplin told rock journalist David Dalton that Garden audiences watched and listened to \"every note [she sang] with 'Is she gonna make it?' in their eyes.\" In her interview with Dalton she added that she felt most comfortable performing at small, cheap venues in San Francisco that were associated with the counterculture.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "At the time of the June 1970 interview with Dalton, she had already performed in the Bay Area for what turned out to be the last time. Sam Andrew, the lead guitarist who had left Big Brother with Joplin in December 1968 to form her back-up band, quit in late summer 1969 and returned to Big Brother. At the end of the year, the Kozmic Blues Band broke up. Their final gig with Joplin was the one at Madison Square Garden with Winter and Butterfield.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "In February 1970, Joplin traveled to Brazil, where she stopped her drug and alcohol use. She was accompanied on vacation there by her friend Linda Gravenites (wife of songwriter Nick Gravenites), who had designed Janis's stage costumes from 1967 to 1969.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "In Brazil, Joplin was romanced by a fellow American tourist named David (George) Niehaus, who was traveling around the world. A Joplin biography written by her sister Laura said, \"David was an upper-middle-class Cincinnati kid who had studied communications at Notre Dame. ... [and] had joined the Peace Corps after college and worked in a small village in Turkey. ... He tried law school, but when he met Janis he was taking time off.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Niehaus and Joplin were photographed by the press at Rio Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. Gravenites also took color photographs of the two during their Brazilian vacation. According to Joplin biographer Ellis Amburn, in Gravenites' snapshots they \"look like a carefree, happy, healthy young couple having a tremendously good time.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Rolling Stone magazine interviewed Joplin during an international phone call, quoting her: \"I'm going into the jungle with a big bear of a beatnik named David Niehaus. I finally remembered I don't have to be on stage twelve months a year. I've decided to go and dig some other jungles for a couple of weeks.\" Amburn added in 1992, \"Janis was trying to kick heroin in Brazil, and one of the nicest things about David was that he wasn't into drugs.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "When Joplin returned to the U.S., she began using heroin again. Her relationship with Niehaus soon ended because he witnessed her shooting drugs at her new home in Larkspur, California. The relationship was also complicated by her ongoing romantic relationship with Peggy Caserta, who also was an intravenous addict, and Joplin's refusal to take some time off and travel the world with him.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Around this time, she formed her new band, known for a short time as Main Squeeze, then renamed the Full Tilt Boogie Band. The band comprised mostly young Canadian musicians previously associated with Ronnie Hawkins and featured an organ, but no horn section. Joplin took a more active role in putting together the Full Tilt Boogie band than she had with her prior group. She was quoted as saying, \"It's my band. Finally it's my band!\" In May 1970, after performing under the name Main Squeeze at a Hells Angels event, the renamed Full Tilt Boogie Band began a nationwide tour. Joplin became very happy with her new group, which eventually received mostly positive feedback from both her fans and the critics.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Prior to beginning a summer tour with Full Tilt Boogie, she performed in a reunion with Big Brother at the Fillmore West, in San Francisco, on April 4, 1970. Recordings from this concert were included on Joplin in Concert released posthumously in 1972. She again appeared with Big Brother on April 12 at Winterland, where she and Big Brother were reported to be in excellent form. She performed with the band, billed as Main Squeeze, at a party for the Hells Angels at a venue in San Rafael, California on May 21, 1970, according to a web site maintained by Big Brother guitarist Sam Andrew. Andrew's web site quotes him as saying, \"This will be the first time that Janis' old band and her new band will be at the same venue, so everyone is a little on edge.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "According to Joplin's biographer Ellis Amburn, Big Brother with its lead singer Nick Gravenites was the opening act at the party that was attended by 2,300 people. The Hells Angels, who had known Joplin since 1966, paid her a fee of $240 to perform. Gravenites and Sam Andrew (who had resumed playing guitar with Big Brother) differed in their opinions of her performance and how substance abuse affected it. Gravenites described her singing as \"stupendous,\" according to Amburn. Amburn quoted Andrew twenty years later: \"She was visibly deteriorating and she looked bloated. She was like a parody of what she was at her best. I put it down to her drinking too much and I felt a tinge of fear for her well-being. Her singing was real flabby, no edge at all.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Shortly thereafter, Joplin began wearing multi-colored feather boas in her hair. (She had not worn them at the May 21 Hells Angels party / concert in San Rafael). By the time she began touring with Full Tilt Boogie, Joplin told people she was drug-free, but her drinking increased.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "From June 28 to July 4, 1970, during the Festival Express tour, Joplin and Full Tilt Boogie performed alongside Buddy Guy, The Band, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Ten Years After, the Grateful Dead, Delaney & Bonnie, Eric Andersen, and Ian & Sylvia. They played concerts in Toronto, Winnipeg, and Calgary. Joplin jammed with the other performers on the train, and her performances on this tour are considered to be among her greatest.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Joplin headlined the festival on all three nights. At the last stop in Calgary, she took to the stage with Jerry Garcia while her band was tuning up. Film footage shows her telling the audience how great the tour was and shows her and Garcia presenting the organizers with a case of tequila. She then burst into a two-hour set, starting with \"Tell Mama\". Throughout this performance, Joplin engaged in several banters about her love life. In one, she reminisced about living in a San Francisco apartment and competing with a female neighbor in flirting with men on the street. She finished the Calgary concert with long versions of \"Get It While You Can\" and \"Ball and Chain\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Footage of her performance of \"Tell Mama\" in Calgary became an MTV video in the early 1980s, and the audio from the same film footage was included on the Farewell Song (1982) album. The audio of other Festival Express performances was included on Joplin's In Concert (1972) album. Video of the performances was also included on the Festival Express DVD.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "In the \"Tell Mama\" video shown on MTV in the 1980s, Joplin wore a psychedelically colored, loose-fitting costume and feathers in her hair. This was her standard stage costume in the spring and summer of 1970. She chose the new costumes after her friend and designer, Linda Gravenites (whom Joplin had praised in Vogue's profile of her in its May 1968 edition), cut ties with Joplin shortly after their return from Brazil, due largely to Joplin's continued use of heroin.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Among Joplin's last public appearances were two broadcasts of The Dick Cavett Show. In her June 25, 1970, appearance, she announced that she would attend her ten-year high school class reunion. When asked if she had been popular in school, she admitted that when in high school, her schoolmates \"laughed me out of class, out of town and out of the state\" (during the year she had spent at the University of Texas at Austin, Joplin had been voted \"Ugliest Man on Campus\" by frat boys). In the subsequent Cavett Show broadcast, on August 3, 1970, and featuring Gloria Swanson, Joplin discussed her upcoming performance at the Festival for Peace to be held at Shea Stadium in Queens, New York, three days later.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "On July 11, 1970, Full Tilt Boogie and Big Brother and the Holding Company both performed at the same concert in the San Diego Sports Arena, which was decades later renamed the Valley View Casino Center. Joplin sang with Full Tilt Boogie and appeared briefly onstage with Big Brother without singing, according to a July 13 review of the concert in the San Diego Union.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "On August 7, 1970, a tombstone—jointly paid for by Joplin and Juanita Green, who as a child had done housework for Bessie Smith—was erected at Smith's previously unmarked grave. The following day, the Associated Press circulated this news, and the August 9 edition of The New York Times carried it. The lead paragraph of the AP story said Joplin and Green had \"shared the cost of a stone for the 'Empress of the Blues,'\" but, according to publicist/biographer Myra Friedman, the two women never met. Joplin had been at home in Larkspur, California when she had received a long-distance phone call with an explanation of the need to finance a gravestone for Bessie Smith, whom Joplin had frequently cited as a musical influence. Joplin immediately wrote a check and mailed it to the name and address provided by the phone caller.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "On August 8, 1970, as the Associated Press circulated the news about Smith's new gravestone, Joplin performed at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York. It was there that she first performed \"Mercedes Benz\", a song partially inspired by a Michael McClure poem, that she had composed with fellow musician and friend Bob Neuwirth a very short time earlier. According to Myra Friedman's account, Joplin performed two shows at the Capitol Theatre, the first of which was attended by actors Geraldine Page and her husband Rip Torn. Between the shows, at a \"gin mill\" [Friedman's words] close to this concert venue, Joplin and Neuwirth penned the lyrics to the song and she performed it at the second show, according to Friedman.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Neuwirth was quoted by The Wall Street Journal in 2015: \"Around 7 p.m., after the Capitol sound check, we had a couple of hours to kill before [acts that opened for Joplin] Seatrain and Runt finished their sets. So the four of us [Joplin, Neuwirth, Geraldine Page, Rip Torn] walked to a bar about three minutes away called Vahsen’s [at 30 Broad Street in Port Chester].\" While in Vahsen's, \"Janis came up with words for the first verse. I was in charge of writing them down on bar napkins with a ballpoint pen. She came up with the second verse, too, about a color TV. I suggested words here and there, and came up with the third verse—about asking the Lord to buy us a night on the town and another round.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Joplin's last public performance with the Full Tilt Boogie Band took place on August 12, 1970, at the Harvard Stadium in Boston. The Harvard Crimson gave the performance a positive, front-page review, despite the fact that Full Tilt Boogie had performed with makeshift amplifiers after their regular sound equipment was stolen in Boston.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Joplin attended her high school reunion on August 14, accompanied by Neuwirth, road manager John Cooke, and sister Laura, but it was reportedly an unhappy experience for her. Joplin held a press conference in Port Arthur during her reunion visit. When asked by a reporter if she ever entertained at Thomas Jefferson High School when she was a student there, Joplin replied, \"Only when I walked down the aisles.\" Joplin denigrated Port Arthur and the classmates who had humiliated her a decade earlier.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "During late August, September, and early October 1970, Joplin and her band rehearsed and recorded a new album in Los Angeles with producer Paul A. Rothchild, best known for his lengthy relationship with The Doors. Although Joplin died before all the tracks were fully completed, there was enough usable material to compile an LP.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "The posthumous Pearl (1971) became the biggest-selling album of her career and featured her biggest hit single, a cover of Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster's \"Me and Bobby McGee\" (Kristofferson had previously been one of Joplin's lovers). The opening track, \"Move Over\", was written by Joplin, reflecting the way that she felt men treated women in relationships. Also included was the social commentary of \"Mercedes Benz\", presented in an a cappella arrangement; the track on the album features the first and only take that Joplin recorded. A cover of Nick Gravenites's \"Buried Alive in the Blues\", to which Joplin had been scheduled to add her vocals on the day she was found dead, was included as an instrumental.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Joplin checked into the Landmark Motor Hotel in Hollywood on August 24, 1970, near Sunset Sound Recorders, where she began rehearsing and recording her album. During the sessions, Joplin continued a relationship with Seth Morgan, a 21-year-old UC Berkeley student, cocaine dealer, and future novelist who had visited her new home in Larkspur in July and August. She and Morgan were engaged to be married in early September, although he visited Sunset Sound Recorders for just eight of Joplin's many rehearsals and sessions.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Morgan later told biographer Myra Friedman that, as a non-musician, he had felt excluded whenever he had visited Sunset Sound Recorders. Instead, he stayed at Joplin's Larkspur home while she stayed alone at the Landmark, although several times she visited Larkspur to be with him and to check the progress of renovations she was having done on the house. She told her construction crew to design a carport to be shaped like a flying saucer, according to biographer Ellis Amburn, the concrete foundation for which was poured the day before she died.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Peggy Caserta claimed in her book, Going Down With Janis (1973), that she and Joplin had decided mutually in April 1970 to stay away from each other to avoid enabling each other's drug use. Caserta, a former Delta Air Lines flight attendant and owner of Mnasidika, one of the first clothing boutiques in the Haight Ashbury, said in the book that by September 1970, she was smuggling cannabis throughout California and had checked into the Landmark Motor Hotel because it attracted drug users.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "For approximately the first two weeks of Joplin's stay at the Landmark, she did not know Caserta was in Los Angeles. Joplin learned of Caserta's presence at the Landmark from a heroin dealer who made deliveries there. Joplin begged Caserta for heroin, and when Caserta refused to provide it, Joplin reportedly admonished her by saying, \"Don't think if you can get it, I can't get it.\" Joplin's publicist Myra Friedman was unaware during Joplin's lifetime that this had happened. Later, while Friedman was working on her book Buried Alive, she determined that the time frame of the Joplin-Caserta encounter was one week before Jimi Hendrix's death.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Within a few days, Joplin became a regular customer of the same heroin dealer who had been supplying Caserta.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "Joplin's manager Albert Grossman and his assistant/publicist Friedman had staged an intervention with Joplin the previous winter while Joplin was in New York. In September 1970, Grossman and Friedman, who worked out of a New York office, knew Joplin was staying at a Los Angeles hotel, but were unaware it was a haven for drug users and dealers.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "Grossman and Friedman knew during Joplin's lifetime that her friend Caserta, whom Friedman met during the New York sessions for Cheap Thrills and on later occasions, used heroin. During the many long-distance telephone conversations that Joplin and Friedman had in September 1970 and on October 1, Joplin never mentioned Caserta, and Friedman assumed Caserta had been out of Joplin's life for a while. Friedman, who had more time than Grossman to monitor the situation, never visited California. She thought Joplin sounded on the phone like she was less depressed than she had been over the summer.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "When Joplin was not at Sunset Sound Recorders, she liked to drive her Porsche over the speed limit \"on the winding part of Sunset Blvd.\", according to a statement made by her attorney Robert Gordon in 1995 at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Friedman wrote that the only Full Tilt Boogie member who rode as her passenger, Ken Pearson, often hesitated to join her, though he did on the night she died. He was not interested in using hard drugs.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "On September 26, 1970, Joplin recorded vocals for \"Half Moon\" and \"Cry Baby\". The session ended with Joplin, organist Ken Pearson, and drummer Clark Pierson making a special one-minute recording as a birthday gift to John Lennon. Joplin was among several singers who had been contacted by Yoko Ono with a request for a taped greeting for Lennon's 30th birthday, on October 9. Joplin, Pearson, and Pierson chose the Dale Evans composition \"Happy Trails\" as part of the greeting. Lennon told Dick Cavett on-camera the following year that Joplin's recorded birthday wishes arrived at his home after her death.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "On October 1, 1970, Joplin completed her last recording, \"Mercedes Benz\", which was recorded in a single take. On Saturday, October 3, Joplin visited Sunset Sound Recorders to listen to the instrumental track for Nick Gravenites's song \"Buried Alive in the Blues\", which the band had recorded earlier that day. She and Paul Rothchild agreed she would record the vocal the following day.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "At some point on Saturday, she learned by telephone, to her dismay, that Seth Morgan had met other women at a Marin County, California, restaurant, invited them to her home, and was shooting pool with them using her pool table. People at Sunset Sound Recorders overheard Joplin expressing anger about the state of her relationship with Morgan, as well as joy about the progress of the sessions.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "Joplin and Ken Pearson later left the studio together and she drove him in her Porsche to the West Hollywood landmark called Barney's Beanery. Friedman wrote, \"At the bar, she drank vodka and orange juice, only two.\" Bennett Glotzer, a business partner of Joplin's manager Albert Grossman, was present at Barney's Beanery, according to what he told John Byrne Cooke immediately after he (Glotzer) learned of her death. Evidently, Joplin had a friendly conversation with a young man whom she did not know, and he expressed admiration for her music.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "After midnight, she drove Ken Pearson and the male fan to the Landmark where she and Pearson were staying in separate rooms. During the car ride, the fan asked Joplin questions \"about her singing style,\" according to Friedman, and \"she mostly ignored him\" so she could converse with Pearson. As Joplin and Pearson prepared to part in the lobby of the Landmark, she expressed a fear, possibly in jest, that he and the other Full Tilt Boogie musicians might decide to stop making music with her. Pearson was the second-to-last person to see her alive. The last was the Landmark's night shift desk clerk. He had met her several times but did not know her.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "Joplin's significant relationships with men included ones with Peter de Blanc, Country Joe McDonald (who wrote the song \"Janis\" at Joplin's request), David (George) Niehaus, Kris Kristofferson, and Seth Morgan (from July 1970 until her death, at which time they were allegedly engaged).",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "She also had relationships with women. During her first stint in San Francisco in 1963, Joplin met and briefly lived with Jae Whitaker, a woman whom she had met while playing pool at the bar Gino & Carlo in North Beach. Whitaker broke off their relationship because of Joplin's hard drug use and sexual relationships with other people. Whitaker was first identified by name in connection with Joplin in 1999, when Alice Echols' biography Scars of Sweet Paradise was published.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "Joplin had an on-again-off-again romantic relationship with Peggy Caserta. They first met in November 1966 when Big Brother performed at a San Francisco venue called The Matrix. Caserta was one of 15 people in the audience, and at the time, she ran Mnasidika, a clothing boutique in the Haight Ashbury. Approximately a month after Caserta attended the concert, Joplin visited her boutique and said she could not afford to buy a pair of jeans that was for sale, instead asking to put down the first 50 cents on the $5 item.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "Caserta was amazed that such a talented singer could not afford a $5 item, and gave her a pair for free. Their friendship was platonic for more than a year. Before it moved to the next level, Caserta was in love with Big Brother guitarist Sam Andrew, and sometime during the first half of 1968 traveled from San Francisco to New York to be with him. He did not want a serious relationship, and Joplin sympathized with Caserta's disappointment.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "The Woodstock concert film includes 37 seconds of Joplin and Caserta walking together before they reached the tent where Joplin waited for her turn to perform. By the time the festival took place in August 1969, both were intravenous heroin addicts.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "According to Caserta's book Going Down With Janis, which Caserta has since disowned, Joplin introduced her to her boyfriend Seth Morgan in Joplin's room at the Landmark Motor Hotel on September 29, 1970. Caserta \"had seen him around\" in San Francisco but had not met him before. At some point, an agreement was made for a threesome to take place the following Friday, although Caserta later said that she immediately abandoned the idea once she understood that it was Morgan who would be with Joplin. Morgan made alternate plans, believing that Caserta would be with Joplin that evening. Each one, however, was unaware that the other had bowed out.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "The day after Joplin introduced Caserta to Morgan, Caserta saw Joplin briefly, again in Joplin's room, when Caserta accommodated her new Los Angeles friend Debbie Nuciforo, age 19, an aspiring hard rock drummer who wanted to meet Joplin. Nuciforo was high on heroin at the time, and the three women's encounter was brief and unpleasant. Caserta suspected that the reason for Joplin's foul mood was that Morgan had abandoned her earlier that day after having spent less than 24 hours with her.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "Caserta did not see nor communicate by phone with Joplin again, although she later claimed she had made several attempts to reach her by phone at the Landmark Motor Hotel and at Sunset Sound Recorders. Caserta and Morgan lost touch with each other; each had independently made alternate plans for Friday night, October 2. Joplin mentioned her disappointment over both of her friends' bailing out of their ménage à trois to her drug dealer on Saturday, while he was selling her the dose of heroin that killed her, as Caserta later learned from the drug dealer.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "Biographer Myra Friedman commented in her original version of Buried Alive (1973):",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "Given the near-infinite potentials of infancy, it is really impossible to make generalizations about what lies behind sexual practices. This, however, is probable: to become clearly homosexual, to make the choice that one honestly prefers relations with one's own sex, no matter the origins of such preference, requires a certain integration, a stability of psychic development, a tidiness of personality organization. The ridicule and the humiliation that took place at that most delicate period in [Joplin's] early teens, her own inability to surmount the obstacles to regular growth, devastated her a great deal more than most people comprehended. Janis was not heir to an ego so cohesive as to permit her an identity one way or the other. She was, as [the psychiatric social worker she saw regularly in Beaumont, Texas in 1965 and 1966] Mr. [Bernard] Giarritano put it [in an interview with Friedman], \"diffused\" -- spewing, splattering, splaying all over, without a center to hold. That had as much to do with her original use of drugs [before she first met Giarritano] as did the critical component of guilt and its multiplicity of sources above and beyond the contribution made by her relationships with women. Were she so simple as the lesbians wished her to be or so free as her associates imagined!",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "Kim France reported in her May 2, 1999, The New York Times article, \"Nothin' Left to Lose\" : \"Once she became famous, Joplin cursed like a truck driver, did not believe in wearing undergarments, was rarely seen without her bottle of Southern Comfort and delighted in playing the role of sexual predator.\"",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "On July 11, 1970, Joplin made a revealing statement about her sexuality to her friend Richard Hundgen, the Grateful Dead's San Francisco-based road manager whom she had known since 1966. When Joplin and Hundgen were offstage during a San Diego gig for both Full Tilt Boogie and Big Brother and the Holding Company, she said the following that he later repeated to Myra Friedman:",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "I hear a rumor that somebody in San Francisco is spreading stories that I'm a dyke. You go back there and find out who it is and tell them that Janis says she's gotten it on with a couple of thousand cats in her life and a few hundred chicks and see what they can do with that!",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "On Sunday evening, October 4, 1970, Joplin was found dead on the floor of her room at the Landmark Motor Hotel by her road manager and close friend John Byrne Cooke.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "Alcohol was present in the room. Newspapers reported that no other drugs or paraphernalia were present. According to a 1983 book authored by Joseph DiMona and Los Angeles County coroner Thomas Noguchi, evidence of narcotics was removed from the scene by a friend of Joplin and later put back after the person realized that an autopsy was going to reveal that narcotics were in her system. The book adds that prior to Joplin's death, Noguchi had investigated other fatal drug overdoses in Los Angeles where friends believed they were doing favors for decedents by removing evidence of narcotics, then they \"thought things over\" and returned to put back the evidence. Noguchi performed an autopsy on Joplin and determined the cause of death to be a heroin overdose, possibly compounded by alcohol.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "John Byrne Cooke believed Joplin had been given heroin that was much more potent than what she and other L.A. heroin users had received on previous occasions, as was indicated by overdoses of several of her dealer's other customers during the same weekend. Her death was ruled accidental.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "Both Peggy Caserta, Joplin's close friend, and Seth Morgan, Joplin's fiancé, had failed to meet Joplin the Friday immediately prior to her death, October 2; Joplin had been expecting both of them to keep her company that night. According to Caserta, Joplin was saddened that neither of her friends visited her at the Landmark as they had promised. During the 24 hours Joplin lived after this disappointment, Caserta did not phone her to explain why she had failed to show up.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "Caserta admitted to waiting until late Saturday night to dial the Landmark switchboard, only to learn that Joplin had instructed the desk clerk not to accept any incoming phone calls for her after midnight. Morgan did speak to Joplin via telephone within the 24 hours prior to her death, but little is known about that call. She used a phone at Sunset Sound Recorders where her colleagues (\"there were perhaps twenty to twenty-five people present,\" wrote biographer Myra Friedman) noticed that whatever Morgan said to her made her very angry.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "Peggy Caserta has insisted that Joplin's death was not an accidental overdose, but rather a result of a head gash suffered after the \"hourglass heel\" of her slingback sandal caught in the shag carpet, causing her to lose her balance. Caserta does concede, however, that drugs and/or alcohol may have played a role in hastening her death that night.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "Joplin was cremated at Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park and Mortuary in Los Angeles, and her ashes were scattered from a plane into the Pacific Ocean.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "Joplin's death in October 1970 at age 27 stunned her fans and shocked the music world, especially when coupled with the deaths of Canned Heat singer Alan Wilson a month earlier, and rock icon Jimi Hendrix, just 16 days earlier, both aged 27. All three musicians performed at the two biggest rock festivals of the 1960s: Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock. (This would later cause some people to attribute significance to the death of musicians at the age of 27, as celebrated in the \"27 Club.\") Music historian Tom Moon wrote that Joplin had \"a devastatingly original voice,\" music columnist Jon Pareles of The New York Times wrote that Joplin as an artist was \"overpowering and deeply vulnerable\" and author Megan Terry said that Joplin was the female version of Elvis Presley in her ability to captivate an audience.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "A book about Joplin by her publicist Myra Friedman titled Buried Alive: The Biography of Janis Joplin (1973) was excerpted in many newspapers. At the same time, Peggy Caserta's memoir, Going Down With Janis (1973), attracted much attention; its provocative title is a reference to Caserta's claim that she had engaged in oral sex with Joplin while they were high on heroin in September 1970. The description provided by Dan Knapp, Caserta's co-author whom she denounced decades later, repelled many people in 1973 when few books or filmed interviews of Joplin or her loved ones were accessible to the public. Joplin's bandmate Sam Andrew described Caserta as \"halfway between a groupie and a friend\" in an interview with writer Ellis Amburn. Soon after the 1973 publication of Going Down With Janis, Joplin's friends learned that graphic descriptions of sexual acts and intravenous drug use were not the only portions of the book that would haunt them.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 115,
"text": "According to Kim Chappell, a close friend of Caserta and Joplin, Caserta's book angered the Los Angeles heroin dealer whom she had described in detail in her book, including the make and model of his car. According to Amburn, in 1973 a \"carful of dope dealers\" visited a Los Angeles lesbian bar that Caserta had been frequenting. Chappell, who was in the alley behind the bar, stated: \"I was stabbed because, when Peggy's book came out, her dealer, the same one who'd given Janis her last fix, didn't like it that he was referred to and was out to get Peggy. He couldn't find her, so he went for her lover. When they realized who I was, they felt that my death would also hit Peggy, and so they stabbed me.\" Despite being \"stabbed three times in the chest, puncturing both lungs,\" Chappell eventually recovered.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 116,
"text": "According to Joplin's biographers, Caserta was among many friends of Joplin who did not become clean and sober until a long time after Joplin's death, while others died from overdoses. Although the wife of Big Brother guitarist James Gurley, who was Joplin's close friend, died from a heroin overdose in 1969, devastating Joplin, Gurley himself did not become clean and sober until 1984. Caserta survived \"a near-fatal OD in December 1995,\" wrote Alice Echols. On January 13, 2000, Caserta appeared during a segment about Joplin on 20/20. In 2018, Caserta denounced Going Down With Janis as the pornographic fantasy of Dan Knapp, her co-author, and largely unreliable. During that year, the public had its first access to her own story via a memoir she co-wrote with Maggie Falcon titled I Ran into Some Trouble. It describes a long, friendly relationship with Joplin that only occasionally featured sexuality.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 117,
"text": "Joplin's body art, with a wristlet and a small heart on her left breast by the San Francisco tattoo artist Lyle Tuttle, marked an early moment in the popular culture's acceptance of tattoos as art. Another trademark was her flamboyant hair styles, which often included colored streaks and accessories such as scarves, beads and feathers.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 118,
"text": "The Mamas & the Papas' song \"Pearl\" (1971), from their People Like Us album, was a tribute. Leonard Cohen's song \"Chelsea Hotel#2\" (1974) is about Joplin. Lyricist Robert Hunter has commented that Jerry Garcia's \"Birdsong\" from his first solo album, Garcia (1972), is about Joplin and the end of her suffering through death. Mimi Farina's composition \"In the Quiet Morning\", most famously covered by Joan Baez on her Come from the Shadows (1972) album, was a tribute to Joplin. Another song by Baez, \"Children of the Eighties,\" mentioned Joplin. A Serge Gainsbourg-penned French language song by English singer Jane Birkin, \"Ex fan des sixties\" (1978), references Joplin along with other disappeared \"idols\" such as Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones and Marc Bolan. When Joplin was alive, Country Joe McDonald released a song called \"Janis\" on his band's album I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die (1967).",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 119,
"text": "The film The Rose (1979) is loosely based on Joplin's life. Originally planned to be titled Pearl—Joplin's nickname and the title of her last album—the film was fictionalized after her family declined to allow the producers the rights to her story. Bette Midler won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture-Female and earned nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actress, the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role, the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress, and the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actress for her performance in the film.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 120,
"text": "In 1988, on what would have been Joplin's 45th birthday, the Janis Joplin Memorial, with an original gold, multi-image sculpture of Joplin by Douglas Clark, was dedicated during a ceremony in Port Arthur, Texas.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 121,
"text": "In 1992, the first major biography of Joplin in two decades, Love, Janis, authored by her younger sister Laura Joplin, was published. In an interview, Laura stated that Joplin enjoyed being on the Dick Cavett Show, that Joplin had difficulties with some, but not all, people at Thomas Jefferson High School and that Joplin enthusiastically talked about Woodstock with her parents and siblings during a visit to their Texas home a few weeks after she had performed at the festival.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 122,
"text": "In 1995, Joplin was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 2005, she received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. In November 2009, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum honored her as part of its annual American Music Masters Series; among the artifacts at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum exhibition are Joplin's scarf and necklaces, her psychedelically painted 1965 Porsche 356 Cabriolet and a sheet of LSD blotting paper designed by Robert Crumb, designer of the Cheap Thrills cover. Also in 2009, Joplin was the honoree at the Rock Hall's American Music Master concert and lecture series.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 123,
"text": "In the late 1990s, the musical play Love, Janis was created and directed by Randal Myler, with input from Janis' younger sister Laura and Big Brother guitarist Sam Andrew, with an aim to take it to Off-Broadway. Opening in the summer of 2001 and scheduled for only a few weeks of performances, the show won acclaim, played to packed houses and was held over several times.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 124,
"text": "In 2013, Washington's Arena Stage featured a production of A Night with Janis Joplin, starring Mary Bridget Davies. In it, Joplin performs a concert for the audience while telling stories of her past inspirations, including those of Odetta and Aretha Franklin. The production transferred to Broadway, then went on tour in 2016.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 125,
"text": "On November 4, 2013, Joplin was awarded with the 2,510th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contributions to the music industry. Her star is located at 6752 Hollywood Boulevard, in front of Musicians Institute.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 126,
"text": "On August 8, 2014, the U.S. Postal Service revealed a commemorative stamp honoring Joplin as part of its Music Icons stamp series during a first-day-of-issue ceremony at the Outside Lands Music Festival at Golden Gate Park.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 127,
"text": "Among the memorabilia Joplin left behind is a Gibson Hummingbird guitar.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 128,
"text": "In 2015, the biographical documentary film Janis: Little Girl Blue, directed by Amy J. Berg and narrated by Cat Power, was released. It was a New York Times Critics' Pick.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 129,
"text": "In 2023, Rolling Stone ranked Joplin at number 78 on its list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 130,
"text": "Joplin had a profound influence on many singers.",
"title": "Influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 131,
"text": "Pink said about Joplin: \"She was so inspiring by singing blues music when it wasn't culturally acceptable for white women, and she wore her heart on her sleeve. She was so witty and charming and intelligent, but she also battled an ugly-duckling syndrome. I would love to play her in a movie.\" In a tribute performance on her Try This Tour, Pink called Joplin \"a woman who inspired me when everyone else ... didn't!\"",
"title": "Influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 132,
"text": "Janis Joplin recorded four albums in her four-year career. The first two albums were recorded with and credited to Big Brother and the Holding Company; the later two were recorded with different backing bands and released as solo albums. Posthumous releases have included previously unreleased studio and live material.",
"title": "Discography"
}
]
| Janis Lyn Joplin was an American singer and songwriter. One of the most successful and widely known rock performers of her era, she was noted for her powerful mezzo-soprano vocals and "electric" stage presence. In 1967, Joplin rose to prominence following an appearance at Monterey Pop Festival, where she was the lead singer of the then little-known San Francisco psychedelic rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company. After releasing two albums with the band, she left Big Brother to continue as a solo artist with her own backing groups, first the Kozmic Blues Band and then the Full Tilt Boogie Band. She appeared at the 1969 Woodstock festival and on the Festival Express train tour. Five singles by Joplin reached the US Billboard Hot 100, including a cover of the Kris Kristofferson song "Me and Bobby McGee", which posthumously reached number one in March 1971. Her most popular songs include her cover versions of "Piece of My Heart", "Cry Baby", "Down on Me", "Ball and Chain", "Summertime", and her original song "Mercedes Benz", her final recording. Joplin died of a heroin overdose in 1970, at the age of 27, after releasing three albums. A second solo album, Pearl, was released in January 1971, just over three months after her death. It reached number one on the Billboard charts. She was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995. Rolling Stone ranked Joplin number 46 on its 2004 list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time and number 28 on its 2008 list of 100 Greatest Singers of All Time. NPR dubbed Joplin as "The Queen of Rock" and named her one of the 50 Great Voices. She remains one of the top-selling musicians in the United States, with Recording Industry Association of America certifications of 18.5 million albums sold. | 2001-10-23T07:31:43Z | 2023-12-23T19:41:12Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janis_Joplin |
16,247 | John van Melle | John van Melle (11 February 1887 – 8 November 1953) was the pen name of a Dutch-born South African writer. His real name was Johannes van Melle.
Van Melle was born in Goes. He arrived in South Africa in 1906, and after a short sojourn in the Netherlands East Indies, settled in South Africa permanently in 1913. He worked as a teacher in many rural schools and soon started to publish in both Dutch and the newly emerging Afrikaans language.
Van Melle's best known work is the novel Bart Nel, a classic of Afrikaans literature. It tells the tale of a farmer whose indomitable spirit allows him to survive the destruction and loss of his farm in wartime and being abandoned by his wife and family. | [
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"text": "John van Melle (11 February 1887 – 8 November 1953) was the pen name of a Dutch-born South African writer. His real name was Johannes van Melle.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Van Melle was born in Goes. He arrived in South Africa in 1906, and after a short sojourn in the Netherlands East Indies, settled in South Africa permanently in 1913. He worked as a teacher in many rural schools and soon started to publish in both Dutch and the newly emerging Afrikaans language.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Van Melle's best known work is the novel Bart Nel, a classic of Afrikaans literature. It tells the tale of a farmer whose indomitable spirit allows him to survive the destruction and loss of his farm in wartime and being abandoned by his wife and family.",
"title": ""
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| John van Melle was the pen name of a Dutch-born South African writer. His real name was Johannes van Melle. Van Melle was born in Goes. He arrived in South Africa in 1906, and after a short sojourn in the Netherlands East Indies, settled in South Africa permanently in 1913. He worked as a teacher in many rural schools and soon started to publish in both Dutch and the newly emerging Afrikaans language. Van Melle's best known work is the novel Bart Nel, a classic of Afrikaans literature. It tells the tale of a farmer whose indomitable spirit allows him to survive the destruction and loss of his farm in wartime and being abandoned by his wife and family. | 2001-10-23T21:03:21Z | 2023-12-15T13:18:30Z | [
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"Template:Use South African English",
"Template:Infobox writer",
"Template:Authority control",
"Template:SouthAfrica-writer-stub"
]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_van_Melle |
16,249 | John Fink | John Fink (born February 11, 1940) is an American film and television actor.
He is known for his roles in two Batman movies, Batman Forever (1995) and Batman & Robin (1997), and his other film credits include Loving (1970), The Carey Treatment (1972), Home for the Holidays (1972), The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case (1976), Flatliners (1990), What's Love Got to Do with It (1993) and The Client (1994). He has also had minor roles in Saved by the Bell, Ally McBeal, McMillan & Wife, Columbo, and various other series since the 1970s.
While he was billed as a supporting actor in the 1978 Battlestar Galactica pilot, a majority of his scenes were cut mainly because those scenes dealt with Serina's (Jane Seymour) "space cancer" B-story which had been excised from the final cut. | [
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"text": "He is known for his roles in two Batman movies, Batman Forever (1995) and Batman & Robin (1997), and his other film credits include Loving (1970), The Carey Treatment (1972), Home for the Holidays (1972), The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case (1976), Flatliners (1990), What's Love Got to Do with It (1993) and The Client (1994). He has also had minor roles in Saved by the Bell, Ally McBeal, McMillan & Wife, Columbo, and various other series since the 1970s.",
"title": ""
},
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"text": "While he was billed as a supporting actor in the 1978 Battlestar Galactica pilot, a majority of his scenes were cut mainly because those scenes dealt with Serina's (Jane Seymour) \"space cancer\" B-story which had been excised from the final cut.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "",
"title": "External links"
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| John Fink is an American film and television actor. He is known for his roles in two Batman movies, Batman Forever (1995) and Batman & Robin (1997), and his other film credits include Loving (1970), The Carey Treatment (1972), Home for the Holidays (1972), The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case (1976), Flatliners (1990), What's Love Got to Do with It (1993) and The Client (1994). He has also had minor roles in Saved by the Bell, Ally McBeal, McMillan & Wife, Columbo, and various other series since the 1970s. While he was billed as a supporting actor in the 1978 Battlestar Galactica pilot, a majority of his scenes were cut mainly because those scenes dealt with Serina's "space cancer" B-story which had been excised from the final cut. | 2023-05-12T21:54:21Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Fink |
|
16,252 | Jacques Cousteau | Jacques-Yves Cousteau, AC (/kuːˈstoʊ/, also UK: /ˈkuːstoʊ/, French: [ʒak iv kusto]; 11 June 1910 – 25 June 1997) was a French naval officer, oceanographer, filmmaker and author. He co-invented the first successful open-circuit self-contained underwater breathing apparatus (SCUBA), called the Aqua-Lung, which assisted him in producing some of the first underwater documentaries.
Cousteau wrote many books describing his undersea explorations. In his first book, The Silent World: A Story of Undersea Discovery and Adventure, Cousteau surmised the existence of the echolocation abilities of porpoises. The book was adapted into an underwater documentary called The Silent World. Co-directed by Cousteau and Louis Malle, it was one of the first films to use underwater cinematography to document the ocean depths in color. The film won the 1956 Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and remained the only documentary to do so until 2004 (when Fahrenheit 9/11 received the award). It was also awarded the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1957.
From 1966 to 1976, he hosted The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, a documentary television series, presented on American commercial television stations. A second documentary series, The Cousteau Odyssey, ran from 1977 to 1982 on public television stations.
"The sea, the great unifier, is man's only hope. Now, as never before, the old phrase has a literal meaning: We are all in the same boat."
Jacques Cousteau
Cousteau was born on 11 June 1910, in Saint-André-de-Cubzac, Gironde, France, to Daniel and Élisabeth Cousteau. He had one brother, Pierre-Antoine. Cousteau completed his preparatory studies at the Collège Stanislas in Paris. In 1930, he entered the École navale and graduated as a gunnery officer. However, an automobile accident, which broke both his arms, cut short his career in naval aviation. The accident forced Cousteau to change his plans to become a naval pilot, so he then indulged his passion for the ocean.
In Toulon, where he was serving on the Condorcet, Cousteau carried out his first underwater experiments, thanks to his friend Philippe Tailliez who in 1936 lent him some Fernez underwater goggles, predecessors of modern swimming goggles. Cousteau also belonged to the information service of the French Navy, and was sent on missions to Shanghai and Japan (1935–1938) and in the USSR (1939).
On 12 July 1937, he married Simone Melchior, his business partner, with whom he had two sons, Jean-Michel (born 1938) and Philippe (1940–1979). His sons took part in the adventures of the Calypso. In 1991, six months after his wife Simone's death from cancer, he married Francine Triplet. They already had a daughter Diane Cousteau (born 1980) and a son, Pierre-Yves Cousteau (born 1982, during Cousteau's marriage to his first wife).
The years of World War II were decisive for the history of diving. After the armistice of 1940, the family of Simone and Jacques-Yves Cousteau took refuge in Megève, where he became a friend of the Ichac family who also lived there. Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Marcel Ichac shared the same desire to reveal to the general public unknown and inaccessible places — for Cousteau the underwater world and for Ichac the high mountains. The two neighbors took the first ex-aequo prize of the Congress of Documentary Film in 1943, for the first French underwater film: Par dix-huit mètres de fond (18 meters deep), made without breathing apparatus the previous year in the Embiez islands in Var, with Philippe Tailliez and Frédéric Dumas, using a depth-pressure-proof camera case developed by mechanical engineer Léon Vèche, an engineer of Arts and Measures at the Naval College.
In 1943, they made the film Épaves (Shipwrecks), in which they used two of the very first Aqua-Lung prototypes. These prototypes were made in Boulogne-Billancourt by the Air Liquide company, following instructions from Cousteau and Émile Gagnan. When making Épaves, Cousteau could not find the necessary blank reels of movie film, but had to buy hundreds of small still camera film reels the same width, intended for a make of child's camera, and cemented them together to make long reels.
Having kept bonds with the English speakers (he spent part of his childhood in the United States and usually spoke English) and with French soldiers in North Africa (under Admiral Lemonnier), Jacques-Yves Cousteau (whose villa "Baobab" at Sanary (Var) was opposite Admiral Darlan's villa "Reine"), helped the French Navy to join again with the Allies; he assembled a commando operation against the Italian espionage services in France, and received several military decorations for his deeds. At that time, he kept his distance from his brother Pierre-Antoine Cousteau, a "pen anti-semite" who edited the collaborationist newspaper Je suis partout (I am everywhere) and who received the death sentence in 1946. However, this was later commuted to a life sentence, and Pierre-Antoine was released in 1954.
During the 1940s, Cousteau is credited with improving the Aqua-Lung design which gave birth to the open-circuit scuba technology used today. According to his first book, The Silent World: A Story of Undersea Discovery and Adventure (1953), Cousteau started diving with Fernez goggles in 1936, and in 1939 used the self-contained underwater breathing apparatus invented in 1926 by Commander Yves le Prieur. Cousteau was not satisfied with the length of time he could spend underwater with the Le Prieur apparatus so he improved it to extend underwater duration by adding a demand regulator, invented in 1942 by Émile Gagnan. In 1943 Cousteau tried out the first prototype Aqua-Lung which finally made extended underwater exploration possible.
In 1946, Cousteau and Tailliez showed the film Épaves ("Shipwrecks") to Admiral Lemonnier, who gave them the responsibility of setting up the GRS (Groupement de Recherches Sous-marines, Underwater Research Group) of the French Navy in Toulon. A little later it became the GERS (Groupe d'Études et de Recherches Sous-Marines, Underwater Studies and Research Group), then the COMISMER (Commandement des Interventions Sous la Mer, Undersea Interventions Command), and finally the CEPHISMER (Centre Expert Plongée Humaine et Intervention Sous la Mer, Expert Centre for Human Diving and Undersea Intervention). In 1947, Chief Petty Officer Maurice Fargues became the first diver to die using an Aqua-Lung, while attempting a new depth record to 120 m with the GERS near Toulon.
In 1948, between missions of mine clearance, underwater exploration and technological and physiological tests, Cousteau undertook a first campaign in the Mediterranean on board the sloop Élie Monnier, with Philippe Tailliez, Frédéric Dumas, Jean Alinat and the scenario writer Marcel Ichac. The small team also undertook the exploration of the Roman wreck of Mahdia (Tunisia). It was the first underwater archaeology operation using autonomous diving, opening the way for scientific underwater archaeology. Cousteau and Marcel Ichac brought back from there the Carnets diving film (presented and preceded with the Cannes Film Festival 1951).
Cousteau and the Élie Monnier then took part in the rescue of Professor Jacques Piccard's bathyscaphe, the FNRS-2, during the 1949 expedition to Dakar. Thanks to this rescue, the French Navy was able to reuse the sphere of the bathyscaphe to construct the FNRS-3.
The adventures of this period are told in the two books The Silent World (1953, by Cousteau and Dumas) and Plongées sans câble (1954, by Philippe Tailliez).
In 1949, Cousteau left the French Navy.
In 1950, he founded the French Oceanographic Campaigns (FOC), and leased a ship called Calypso from Thomas Loel Guinness for a symbolic one franc a year. Cousteau refitted the Calypso as a mobile laboratory for field research and as his principal vessel for diving and filming. He also carried out underwater archaeological excavations in the Mediterranean, in particular at Grand-Congloué (1952).
With the publication of his first book in 1953, The Silent World, Cousteau correctly predicted the existence of the echolocation abilities of porpoises. He reported that his research vessel, the Élie Monier, was heading to the Straits of Gibraltar and noticed a group of porpoises following them. Cousteau changed course a few degrees off the optimal course to the center of the strait, and the porpoises followed for a few minutes, then diverged toward mid-channel again. It was evident that they knew where the optimal course lay, even if the humans did not. Cousteau concluded that the cetaceans had something like sonar, which was a relatively new feature on submarines.
In 1954, Cousteau conducted a survey of Abu Dhabi waters on behalf of British Petroleum. Among those accompanying him was Louis Malle who made a black-and-white film of the expedition for the company. Cousteau won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1956 for The Silent World co-produced with Malle. In 1957, Cousteau took over as leader of the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco. Afterward, with the assistance of Jean Mollard, he made a "diving saucer" SP-350, an experimental underwater vehicle which could reach a depth of 350 meters. The successful experiment was quickly repeated in 1965 with two vehicles which reached 500 meters.
In 1957, he was elected as director of the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco. He directed Précontinent, about the experiments of diving in saturation (long-duration immersion, houses under the sea), and was admitted to the United States National Academy of Sciences.
He was involved in the creation of Confédération Mondiale des Activités Subaquatiques and served as its inaugural president from 1959 to 1973.
Cousteau also took part in inventing the "SP-350 Denise Diving Saucer" in 1959 which was an invention best for exploring the ocean floor, as it allowed one to explore on solid ground.
In October 1960, a large amount of radioactive waste was going to be discarded in the Mediterranean Sea by the Commissariat à l'énergie atomique (CEA). The CEA argued that the dumps were experimental in nature, and that French oceanographers such as Vsevelod Romanovsky had recommended it. Romanovsky and other French scientists, including Louis Fage and Jacques Cousteau, repudiated the claim, saying that Romanovsky had in mind a much smaller amount. The CEA claimed that there was little circulation (and hence little need for concern) at the dump site between Nice and Corsica, but French public opinion sided with the oceanographers rather than with the CEA atomic energy scientists. The CEA chief, Francis Perrin, decided to postpone the dump. Cousteau organized a publicity campaign which in less than two weeks gained wide popular support. The train carrying the waste was stopped by women and children sitting on the railway tracks, and it was sent back to its origin.
In the 1960s, Cousteau was involved with a set of three projects to build underwater "villages"; the projects were named Precontinent I, Precontinent II and Precontinent III. Each ensuing project was aimed at increasing the depth at which people continuously lived under water, and were an attempt at creating an environment in which men could live and work on the sea floor. The projects are best known as Conshelf I (1962), Conshelf II (1963), and Conshelf III (1965). The names "Precontinent", and "Continental Shelf Station" (Conshelf) were used interchangeably by Cousteau.
A meeting with American television companies (ABC, Métromédia, NBC) created the series The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, with the character of the commander in the red bonnet inherited from standard diving dress intended to give the films a "personalized adventure" style. This documentary television series ran for ten years from 1966 to 1976. A second documentary series, The Cousteau Odyssey, ran from 1977 to 1982 on public television stations.
In 1970, he wrote the book The Shark: Splendid Savage of the Sea with his son Philippe. In this book, Cousteau described the oceanic whitetip shark as "the most dangerous of all sharks".
In December 1972, two years after the volcano's last eruption, The Cousteau Society was filming Voyage au bout du monde on Deception Island, Antarctica, when Michel Laval, Calypso's second in command, was struck and killed by a rotor of the helicopter that was ferrying between Calypso and the island.
In 1973, along with his two sons and Frederick Hyman, he created the Cousteau Society for the Protection of Ocean Life, Frederick Hyman being its first President.
In 1975, John Denver released the tribute song "Calypso" on his album Windsong, and on the B-side of his hit song "I'm Sorry". "Calypso" became a hit on its own and was later considered the new A-side, reaching No. 2 on the charts.
In 1976, Cousteau located the wreck of HMHS Britannic. He also found the wreck of the French 17th-century ship-of-the-line La Therese in coastal waters of Crete.
In 1977, together with Peter Scott, he received the UN International Environment prize.
On 28 June 1979, while the Calypso was on an expedition to Portugal, his second son Philippe, his preferred and designated successor and with whom he had co-produced all his films since 1969, died in a PBY Catalina flying boat crash in the Tagus river near Lisbon. Cousteau was deeply affected. He called his eldest son, the architect Jean-Michel, to his side. This collaboration lasted 14 years.
From 1980 to 1981, he was a regular on the animal reality show Those Amazing Animals, along with Burgess Meredith, Priscilla Presley, and Jim Stafford.
In 1980, Cousteau traveled to Canada to make two films on the Saint Lawrence River and the Great Lakes, Cries from the Deep and St. Lawrence: Stairway to the Sea.
In 1985, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from U.S. President Ronald Reagan.
From 1986 to 1992, Cousteau released Rediscovery of the World.
On 24 November 1988, he was elected to the Académie française, chair 17, succeeding Jean Delay. His official reception under the cupola took place on 22 June 1989, the response to his speech of reception being given by Bertrand Poirot-Delpech. After his death, he was replaced by Érik Orsenna on 28 May 1998.
In June 1990, the composer Jean Michel Jarre paid homage to the commander by entitling his new album Waiting for Cousteau. He also composed the music for Cousteau's documentary "Palawan, the last refuge".
On 2 December 1990, his wife, Simone Cousteau died of cancer.
In June 1991, in Paris, Jacques-Yves Cousteau remarried, to Francine Triplet, with whom he had (before this marriage) two children, Diane and Pierre-Yves. Francine Cousteau currently continues her husband's work as the head of the Cousteau Foundation and Cousteau Society. From that point, the relations between Jacques-Yves and his elder son, who is 8 years older than Francine, worsened.
In November 1991, Cousteau gave an interview to the UNESCO Courier, in which he stated that he was in favour of human population control and population decrease. Widely quoted on the Internet are these two paragraphs from the interview: "What should we do to eliminate suffering and disease? It's a wonderful idea but perhaps not altogether a beneficial one in the long run. If we try to implement it we may jeopardize the future of our species...It's terrible to have to say this. World population must be stabilized and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. This is so horrible to contemplate that we shouldn't even say it. But the general situation in which we are involved is lamentable".
In 1992, he was invited to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for the United Nations' International Conference on Environment and Development, and then he became a regular consultant for the UN and the World Bank.
In 1993, a brief biography, as well as an introduction by Cousteau was featured in interactive educational software program Undersea Adventure, developed by former game developer Knowledge Adventure.
In 1995, Cousteau became involved in a legal battle with his son Jean-Michel, who was advertising the "Cousteau Fiji Islands Resort" in the South Pacific, to prevent him from using the Cousteau name for business purposes in the United States. This resulted in Jean-Michel Cousteau being ordered by the court to not encourage confusion between his for-profit business and his father's non-profit endeavours.
On 11 January 1996, Calypso was accidentally rammed and sunk in the port of Singapore by a barge. The Calypso was refloated and towed home to France.
Archbishop Jean-Marie Lustiger celebrated his funeral Mass at Notre-Dame in Paris. In his homily he stated, "Without betraying any confidences, Father Carré told me of his respect for Jacques-Yves Cousteau. He discovered in him a man of prayer whom he accompanied in his last months of his life, giving him, through the sacraments of the Church, the strength of his passage towards eternity."
In a chapter entitled "The Holy Scriptures and the Environment" in the posthumous work The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus, he is quoted as stating that "The glory of nature provides evidence that God exists".
Cousteau said that just because fish are cold-blooded does not mean they do not feel pain, and that recreational fishermen only say so to reassure their conscience.
Jacques-Yves Cousteau died of a heart attack on 25 June 1997 in Paris, two weeks after his 87th birthday. He was buried in the family vault at Saint-André-de-Cubzac, his birthplace. An homage was paid to him by the town by naming the street which runs out to the house of his birth "rue du Commandant Cousteau", where a commemorative plaque was placed.
Cousteau's legacy includes more than 120 television documentaries, more than 50 books, and an environmental protection foundation with 300,000 members.
Cousteau liked to call himself an "oceanographic technician". He was, in reality, a sophisticated showman, teacher, and lover of nature. His work permitted many people to explore the resources of the oceans.
His work also created a new kind of scientific communication, criticized at the time by some academics. The so-called "divulgationism", a simple way of sharing scientific concepts, was soon employed in other disciplines and became one of the most important characteristics of modern television broadcasting.
His Oceanographic Museum in Monaco, and perhaps even he himself, has been identified as introducing the "Killer Algae" Caulerpa taxifolia, which is negatively affecting the Mediterranean's ecosystem.
The Cousteau Society and its French counterpart, l'Équipe Cousteau, both of which Jacques-Yves Cousteau founded, are still active today. The Society is currently attempting to turn the original Calypso into a museum and it is raising funds to build a successor vessel, the Calypso II.
In 2007, the International Watch Company introduced the IWC Aquatimer Chronograph "Cousteau Divers" Special Edition. The timepiece incorporated a sliver of wood from the interior of Cousteau's Calypso research vessel. Having developed the diver's watch, IWC offered support to The Cousteau Society. The proceeds from the timepieces' sales were partially donated to the non-profit organization involved in conservation of marine life and preservation of tropical coral reefs.
Fabien Cousteau, the grandson of Jacques Cousteau, is in the process of constructing a community of ocean flooring analysis stations, called Proteus, off Curaçao at a depth of about 20 m in a marine-protected area. Aquanauts could reside and work in these underwater habitats. Front-end engineering has started in 2022 with the habitat put on the sea bottom in 2025.
During his lifetime, Jacques-Yves Cousteau received these distinctions:
Jacques Cousteau has been portrayed in films: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Jacques-Yves Cousteau, AC (/kuːˈstoʊ/, also UK: /ˈkuːstoʊ/, French: [ʒak iv kusto]; 11 June 1910 – 25 June 1997) was a French naval officer, oceanographer, filmmaker and author. He co-invented the first successful open-circuit self-contained underwater breathing apparatus (SCUBA), called the Aqua-Lung, which assisted him in producing some of the first underwater documentaries.",
"title": ""
},
{
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"text": "Cousteau wrote many books describing his undersea explorations. In his first book, The Silent World: A Story of Undersea Discovery and Adventure, Cousteau surmised the existence of the echolocation abilities of porpoises. The book was adapted into an underwater documentary called The Silent World. Co-directed by Cousteau and Louis Malle, it was one of the first films to use underwater cinematography to document the ocean depths in color. The film won the 1956 Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and remained the only documentary to do so until 2004 (when Fahrenheit 9/11 received the award). It was also awarded the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1957.",
"title": ""
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"text": "From 1966 to 1976, he hosted The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, a documentary television series, presented on American commercial television stations. A second documentary series, The Cousteau Odyssey, ran from 1977 to 1982 on public television stations.",
"title": ""
},
{
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"text": "\"The sea, the great unifier, is man's only hope. Now, as never before, the old phrase has a literal meaning: We are all in the same boat.\"",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Jacques Cousteau",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Cousteau was born on 11 June 1910, in Saint-André-de-Cubzac, Gironde, France, to Daniel and Élisabeth Cousteau. He had one brother, Pierre-Antoine. Cousteau completed his preparatory studies at the Collège Stanislas in Paris. In 1930, he entered the École navale and graduated as a gunnery officer. However, an automobile accident, which broke both his arms, cut short his career in naval aviation. The accident forced Cousteau to change his plans to become a naval pilot, so he then indulged his passion for the ocean.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In Toulon, where he was serving on the Condorcet, Cousteau carried out his first underwater experiments, thanks to his friend Philippe Tailliez who in 1936 lent him some Fernez underwater goggles, predecessors of modern swimming goggles. Cousteau also belonged to the information service of the French Navy, and was sent on missions to Shanghai and Japan (1935–1938) and in the USSR (1939).",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "On 12 July 1937, he married Simone Melchior, his business partner, with whom he had two sons, Jean-Michel (born 1938) and Philippe (1940–1979). His sons took part in the adventures of the Calypso. In 1991, six months after his wife Simone's death from cancer, he married Francine Triplet. They already had a daughter Diane Cousteau (born 1980) and a son, Pierre-Yves Cousteau (born 1982, during Cousteau's marriage to his first wife).",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The years of World War II were decisive for the history of diving. After the armistice of 1940, the family of Simone and Jacques-Yves Cousteau took refuge in Megève, where he became a friend of the Ichac family who also lived there. Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Marcel Ichac shared the same desire to reveal to the general public unknown and inaccessible places — for Cousteau the underwater world and for Ichac the high mountains. The two neighbors took the first ex-aequo prize of the Congress of Documentary Film in 1943, for the first French underwater film: Par dix-huit mètres de fond (18 meters deep), made without breathing apparatus the previous year in the Embiez islands in Var, with Philippe Tailliez and Frédéric Dumas, using a depth-pressure-proof camera case developed by mechanical engineer Léon Vèche, an engineer of Arts and Measures at the Naval College.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In 1943, they made the film Épaves (Shipwrecks), in which they used two of the very first Aqua-Lung prototypes. These prototypes were made in Boulogne-Billancourt by the Air Liquide company, following instructions from Cousteau and Émile Gagnan. When making Épaves, Cousteau could not find the necessary blank reels of movie film, but had to buy hundreds of small still camera film reels the same width, intended for a make of child's camera, and cemented them together to make long reels.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Having kept bonds with the English speakers (he spent part of his childhood in the United States and usually spoke English) and with French soldiers in North Africa (under Admiral Lemonnier), Jacques-Yves Cousteau (whose villa \"Baobab\" at Sanary (Var) was opposite Admiral Darlan's villa \"Reine\"), helped the French Navy to join again with the Allies; he assembled a commando operation against the Italian espionage services in France, and received several military decorations for his deeds. At that time, he kept his distance from his brother Pierre-Antoine Cousteau, a \"pen anti-semite\" who edited the collaborationist newspaper Je suis partout (I am everywhere) and who received the death sentence in 1946. However, this was later commuted to a life sentence, and Pierre-Antoine was released in 1954.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "During the 1940s, Cousteau is credited with improving the Aqua-Lung design which gave birth to the open-circuit scuba technology used today. According to his first book, The Silent World: A Story of Undersea Discovery and Adventure (1953), Cousteau started diving with Fernez goggles in 1936, and in 1939 used the self-contained underwater breathing apparatus invented in 1926 by Commander Yves le Prieur. Cousteau was not satisfied with the length of time he could spend underwater with the Le Prieur apparatus so he improved it to extend underwater duration by adding a demand regulator, invented in 1942 by Émile Gagnan. In 1943 Cousteau tried out the first prototype Aqua-Lung which finally made extended underwater exploration possible.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In 1946, Cousteau and Tailliez showed the film Épaves (\"Shipwrecks\") to Admiral Lemonnier, who gave them the responsibility of setting up the GRS (Groupement de Recherches Sous-marines, Underwater Research Group) of the French Navy in Toulon. A little later it became the GERS (Groupe d'Études et de Recherches Sous-Marines, Underwater Studies and Research Group), then the COMISMER (Commandement des Interventions Sous la Mer, Undersea Interventions Command), and finally the CEPHISMER (Centre Expert Plongée Humaine et Intervention Sous la Mer, Expert Centre for Human Diving and Undersea Intervention). In 1947, Chief Petty Officer Maurice Fargues became the first diver to die using an Aqua-Lung, while attempting a new depth record to 120 m with the GERS near Toulon.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In 1948, between missions of mine clearance, underwater exploration and technological and physiological tests, Cousteau undertook a first campaign in the Mediterranean on board the sloop Élie Monnier, with Philippe Tailliez, Frédéric Dumas, Jean Alinat and the scenario writer Marcel Ichac. The small team also undertook the exploration of the Roman wreck of Mahdia (Tunisia). It was the first underwater archaeology operation using autonomous diving, opening the way for scientific underwater archaeology. Cousteau and Marcel Ichac brought back from there the Carnets diving film (presented and preceded with the Cannes Film Festival 1951).",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Cousteau and the Élie Monnier then took part in the rescue of Professor Jacques Piccard's bathyscaphe, the FNRS-2, during the 1949 expedition to Dakar. Thanks to this rescue, the French Navy was able to reuse the sphere of the bathyscaphe to construct the FNRS-3.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The adventures of this period are told in the two books The Silent World (1953, by Cousteau and Dumas) and Plongées sans câble (1954, by Philippe Tailliez).",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In 1949, Cousteau left the French Navy.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In 1950, he founded the French Oceanographic Campaigns (FOC), and leased a ship called Calypso from Thomas Loel Guinness for a symbolic one franc a year. Cousteau refitted the Calypso as a mobile laboratory for field research and as his principal vessel for diving and filming. He also carried out underwater archaeological excavations in the Mediterranean, in particular at Grand-Congloué (1952).",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "With the publication of his first book in 1953, The Silent World, Cousteau correctly predicted the existence of the echolocation abilities of porpoises. He reported that his research vessel, the Élie Monier, was heading to the Straits of Gibraltar and noticed a group of porpoises following them. Cousteau changed course a few degrees off the optimal course to the center of the strait, and the porpoises followed for a few minutes, then diverged toward mid-channel again. It was evident that they knew where the optimal course lay, even if the humans did not. Cousteau concluded that the cetaceans had something like sonar, which was a relatively new feature on submarines.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In 1954, Cousteau conducted a survey of Abu Dhabi waters on behalf of British Petroleum. Among those accompanying him was Louis Malle who made a black-and-white film of the expedition for the company. Cousteau won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1956 for The Silent World co-produced with Malle. In 1957, Cousteau took over as leader of the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco. Afterward, with the assistance of Jean Mollard, he made a \"diving saucer\" SP-350, an experimental underwater vehicle which could reach a depth of 350 meters. The successful experiment was quickly repeated in 1965 with two vehicles which reached 500 meters.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In 1957, he was elected as director of the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco. He directed Précontinent, about the experiments of diving in saturation (long-duration immersion, houses under the sea), and was admitted to the United States National Academy of Sciences.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "He was involved in the creation of Confédération Mondiale des Activités Subaquatiques and served as its inaugural president from 1959 to 1973.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Cousteau also took part in inventing the \"SP-350 Denise Diving Saucer\" in 1959 which was an invention best for exploring the ocean floor, as it allowed one to explore on solid ground.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "In October 1960, a large amount of radioactive waste was going to be discarded in the Mediterranean Sea by the Commissariat à l'énergie atomique (CEA). The CEA argued that the dumps were experimental in nature, and that French oceanographers such as Vsevelod Romanovsky had recommended it. Romanovsky and other French scientists, including Louis Fage and Jacques Cousteau, repudiated the claim, saying that Romanovsky had in mind a much smaller amount. The CEA claimed that there was little circulation (and hence little need for concern) at the dump site between Nice and Corsica, but French public opinion sided with the oceanographers rather than with the CEA atomic energy scientists. The CEA chief, Francis Perrin, decided to postpone the dump. Cousteau organized a publicity campaign which in less than two weeks gained wide popular support. The train carrying the waste was stopped by women and children sitting on the railway tracks, and it was sent back to its origin.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In the 1960s, Cousteau was involved with a set of three projects to build underwater \"villages\"; the projects were named Precontinent I, Precontinent II and Precontinent III. Each ensuing project was aimed at increasing the depth at which people continuously lived under water, and were an attempt at creating an environment in which men could live and work on the sea floor. The projects are best known as Conshelf I (1962), Conshelf II (1963), and Conshelf III (1965). The names \"Precontinent\", and \"Continental Shelf Station\" (Conshelf) were used interchangeably by Cousteau.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "A meeting with American television companies (ABC, Métromédia, NBC) created the series The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, with the character of the commander in the red bonnet inherited from standard diving dress intended to give the films a \"personalized adventure\" style. This documentary television series ran for ten years from 1966 to 1976. A second documentary series, The Cousteau Odyssey, ran from 1977 to 1982 on public television stations.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In 1970, he wrote the book The Shark: Splendid Savage of the Sea with his son Philippe. In this book, Cousteau described the oceanic whitetip shark as \"the most dangerous of all sharks\".",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In December 1972, two years after the volcano's last eruption, The Cousteau Society was filming Voyage au bout du monde on Deception Island, Antarctica, when Michel Laval, Calypso's second in command, was struck and killed by a rotor of the helicopter that was ferrying between Calypso and the island.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In 1973, along with his two sons and Frederick Hyman, he created the Cousteau Society for the Protection of Ocean Life, Frederick Hyman being its first President.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In 1975, John Denver released the tribute song \"Calypso\" on his album Windsong, and on the B-side of his hit song \"I'm Sorry\". \"Calypso\" became a hit on its own and was later considered the new A-side, reaching No. 2 on the charts.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "In 1976, Cousteau located the wreck of HMHS Britannic. He also found the wreck of the French 17th-century ship-of-the-line La Therese in coastal waters of Crete.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In 1977, together with Peter Scott, he received the UN International Environment prize.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "On 28 June 1979, while the Calypso was on an expedition to Portugal, his second son Philippe, his preferred and designated successor and with whom he had co-produced all his films since 1969, died in a PBY Catalina flying boat crash in the Tagus river near Lisbon. Cousteau was deeply affected. He called his eldest son, the architect Jean-Michel, to his side. This collaboration lasted 14 years.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "From 1980 to 1981, he was a regular on the animal reality show Those Amazing Animals, along with Burgess Meredith, Priscilla Presley, and Jim Stafford.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In 1980, Cousteau traveled to Canada to make two films on the Saint Lawrence River and the Great Lakes, Cries from the Deep and St. Lawrence: Stairway to the Sea.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "In 1985, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from U.S. President Ronald Reagan.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "From 1986 to 1992, Cousteau released Rediscovery of the World.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "On 24 November 1988, he was elected to the Académie française, chair 17, succeeding Jean Delay. His official reception under the cupola took place on 22 June 1989, the response to his speech of reception being given by Bertrand Poirot-Delpech. After his death, he was replaced by Érik Orsenna on 28 May 1998.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "In June 1990, the composer Jean Michel Jarre paid homage to the commander by entitling his new album Waiting for Cousteau. He also composed the music for Cousteau's documentary \"Palawan, the last refuge\".",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "On 2 December 1990, his wife, Simone Cousteau died of cancer.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "In June 1991, in Paris, Jacques-Yves Cousteau remarried, to Francine Triplet, with whom he had (before this marriage) two children, Diane and Pierre-Yves. Francine Cousteau currently continues her husband's work as the head of the Cousteau Foundation and Cousteau Society. From that point, the relations between Jacques-Yves and his elder son, who is 8 years older than Francine, worsened.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "In November 1991, Cousteau gave an interview to the UNESCO Courier, in which he stated that he was in favour of human population control and population decrease. Widely quoted on the Internet are these two paragraphs from the interview: \"What should we do to eliminate suffering and disease? It's a wonderful idea but perhaps not altogether a beneficial one in the long run. If we try to implement it we may jeopardize the future of our species...It's terrible to have to say this. World population must be stabilized and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. This is so horrible to contemplate that we shouldn't even say it. But the general situation in which we are involved is lamentable\".",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "In 1992, he was invited to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for the United Nations' International Conference on Environment and Development, and then he became a regular consultant for the UN and the World Bank.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "In 1993, a brief biography, as well as an introduction by Cousteau was featured in interactive educational software program Undersea Adventure, developed by former game developer Knowledge Adventure.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "In 1995, Cousteau became involved in a legal battle with his son Jean-Michel, who was advertising the \"Cousteau Fiji Islands Resort\" in the South Pacific, to prevent him from using the Cousteau name for business purposes in the United States. This resulted in Jean-Michel Cousteau being ordered by the court to not encourage confusion between his for-profit business and his father's non-profit endeavours.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "On 11 January 1996, Calypso was accidentally rammed and sunk in the port of Singapore by a barge. The Calypso was refloated and towed home to France.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Archbishop Jean-Marie Lustiger celebrated his funeral Mass at Notre-Dame in Paris. In his homily he stated, \"Without betraying any confidences, Father Carré told me of his respect for Jacques-Yves Cousteau. He discovered in him a man of prayer whom he accompanied in his last months of his life, giving him, through the sacraments of the Church, the strength of his passage towards eternity.\"",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "In a chapter entitled \"The Holy Scriptures and the Environment\" in the posthumous work The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus, he is quoted as stating that \"The glory of nature provides evidence that God exists\".",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Cousteau said that just because fish are cold-blooded does not mean they do not feel pain, and that recreational fishermen only say so to reassure their conscience.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Jacques-Yves Cousteau died of a heart attack on 25 June 1997 in Paris, two weeks after his 87th birthday. He was buried in the family vault at Saint-André-de-Cubzac, his birthplace. An homage was paid to him by the town by naming the street which runs out to the house of his birth \"rue du Commandant Cousteau\", where a commemorative plaque was placed.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Cousteau's legacy includes more than 120 television documentaries, more than 50 books, and an environmental protection foundation with 300,000 members.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Cousteau liked to call himself an \"oceanographic technician\". He was, in reality, a sophisticated showman, teacher, and lover of nature. His work permitted many people to explore the resources of the oceans.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "His work also created a new kind of scientific communication, criticized at the time by some academics. The so-called \"divulgationism\", a simple way of sharing scientific concepts, was soon employed in other disciplines and became one of the most important characteristics of modern television broadcasting.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "His Oceanographic Museum in Monaco, and perhaps even he himself, has been identified as introducing the \"Killer Algae\" Caulerpa taxifolia, which is negatively affecting the Mediterranean's ecosystem.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "The Cousteau Society and its French counterpart, l'Équipe Cousteau, both of which Jacques-Yves Cousteau founded, are still active today. The Society is currently attempting to turn the original Calypso into a museum and it is raising funds to build a successor vessel, the Calypso II.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "In 2007, the International Watch Company introduced the IWC Aquatimer Chronograph \"Cousteau Divers\" Special Edition. The timepiece incorporated a sliver of wood from the interior of Cousteau's Calypso research vessel. Having developed the diver's watch, IWC offered support to The Cousteau Society. The proceeds from the timepieces' sales were partially donated to the non-profit organization involved in conservation of marine life and preservation of tropical coral reefs.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Fabien Cousteau, the grandson of Jacques Cousteau, is in the process of constructing a community of ocean flooring analysis stations, called Proteus, off Curaçao at a depth of about 20 m in a marine-protected area. Aquanauts could reside and work in these underwater habitats. Front-end engineering has started in 2022 with the habitat put on the sea bottom in 2025.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "During his lifetime, Jacques-Yves Cousteau received these distinctions:",
"title": "Awards and honors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Jacques Cousteau has been portrayed in films:",
"title": "Media portrayals"
}
]
| Jacques-Yves Cousteau, was a French naval officer, oceanographer, filmmaker and author. He co-invented the first successful open-circuit self-contained underwater breathing apparatus (SCUBA), called the Aqua-Lung, which assisted him in producing some of the first underwater documentaries. Cousteau wrote many books describing his undersea explorations. In his first book, The Silent World: A Story of Undersea Discovery and Adventure, Cousteau surmised the existence of the echolocation abilities of porpoises. The book was adapted into an underwater documentary called The Silent World. Co-directed by Cousteau and Louis Malle, it was one of the first films to use underwater cinematography to document the ocean depths in color. The film won the 1956 Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and remained the only documentary to do so until 2004. It was also awarded the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1957. From 1966 to 1976, he hosted The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, a documentary television series, presented on American commercial television stations. A second documentary series, The Cousteau Odyssey, ran from 1977 to 1982 on public television stations. | 2002-02-25T15:51:15Z | 2023-12-17T22:05:01Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Cousteau |
16,253 | J. Philippe Rushton | John Philippe Rushton (December 3, 1943 – October 2, 2012) was a Canadian psychologist and author. He taught at the University of Western Ontario until the early 1990s, and became known to the general public during the 1980s and 1990s for research on race and intelligence, race and crime, and other purported racial correlations.
Rushton's work has been heavily criticized by the scientific community for the questionable quality of its research, with many academics arguing that it was conducted under a racist agenda. From 2002 until his death, he served as the head of the Pioneer Fund, an organization founded in 1937 to promote eugenics, which has been described as racist and white supremacist in nature, and as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. He also published articles in and spoke at conferences organized by the white supremacist magazine American Renaissance.
Rushton was a Fellow of the Canadian Psychological Association and a onetime Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2020, the Department of Psychology of the University of Western Ontario released a statement stating that "much of [Rushton's] research was racist", was "deeply flawed from a scientific standpoint", and "Rushton's legacy shows that the impact of flawed science lingers on, even after qualified scholars have condemned its scientific integrity." As of 2021, Rushton has had six research publications retracted for being scientifically flawed, unethical, and not replicable, and for advancing a racist agenda despite contradictory evidence.
Rushton was born in Bournemouth, England. During his childhood, he emigrated with his family to South Africa, where he lived from age four to eight (1948–1952). His father was a building contractor and his mother came from France. The family moved to Canada, where Rushton spent most of his teen years. He returned to England for university, receiving a B.Sc. in psychology from Birkbeck College at the University of London in 1970, and, in 1973, his Ph.D. in social psychology from the London School of Economics for work on altruism in children. He continued his work at the University of Oxford until 1974.
Rushton taught at York University in Canada from 1974 to 1976 and the University of Toronto until 1977. He moved to the University of Western Ontario and was made full professor (with tenure) in 1985. He received a D.Sc. from the University of London in 1992. His controversial research has sparked political debates, and Ontario Premier David Peterson called Rushton a racist. In 2005, The Ottawa Citizen described Rushton as the most famous university professor in Canada.
He published more than 250 articles and six books, including two on altruism, and one on scientific excellence, and co-authored an introductory psychology textbook. He was a signatory of the opinion piece "Mainstream Science on Intelligence."
Rushton died of cancer on October 2, 2012, at the age of 68.
Early in his career, Rushton did research on altruism. He theorized a heritable component in altruism and developed Genetic Similarity Theory, which is an extension of W.D. Hamilton's theory of kin selection. It holds that individuals tend to be more altruistic to individuals who are genetically similar to themselves even if they are not kin, and less altruistic, and sometimes outwardly hostile, to individuals who are less genetically similar. Rushton describes "ethnic conflict and rivalry" as "one of the great themes of historical and contemporary society", and suggests that this may have its roots in the evolutionary impact on individuals from groups "giving preferential treatment to genetically similar others". According to Rushton: "the makeup of a gene pool [i.e., a human population's total reservoir of alternative genes] causally affects the probability of any particular ideology being adopted".
Articles in a 1989 issue of Behavioral and Brain Sciences criticized the theory. Judith Anderson said his work was based on statistically flawed evidence, John Archer and others said that Rushton failed to understand and misapplied the theory of kin selection, Judith Economos said that Rushton's analysis was speculative, that he failed to define the concept of altruistic behavior in a way that it can become manifest, and that he failed to show any plausible mechanism by which members of a species can detect the "altruism gene" in other members of the species. Steven Gangestad criticized Rushton's theory for not being compelling in terms of its attractiveness as an explanatory model. C.R. Hallpike said Rushton's theory failed to take into account that many other traits, ranging from age, sex, social and political group membership, are observably more important in predicting altruistic behavior between non-kin than genetic similarity. John Hartung criticized Rushton for failing to conduct an adequate control group study and for ignoring contradictory evidence.
Littlefield and Rushton (1984) examined degree of bereavement among parents after the death of a child. They found that children perceived as more physically similar to their parents were grieved for more intensely than less similar children.
Russell, Wells, and Rushton (1985) reanalyzed several previous studies on similarities between spouses and concluded there is higher similarity on the more heritable characteristics. Rushton examined blood group genes and found that sexually interacting couples had more similar blood group genes than randomly paired individuals.
Rushton and Bons (2005) examined personality, attitude, and demographic characteristics for similarity among different groups of people. Monozygotic twins resembled one another (r = 0.53) more than dizygotic twins (r = 0.32), pairs of spouses (r = 0.32), and pairs of best friends (r = 0.20). The monozygotic twins also chose spouses and best friends who were more similar to their co-twins' friends and spouses than did dizygotic twins. The authors said there was a substantial genetic contribution to these effects in the twins. Similarity to social partners was higher on more heritable characteristics than on less.
Rushton spent much of his career arguing that average IQ differences between racial groups are due to genetic causes, a view that was controversial at the time and is now broadly rejected by the scientific consensus. His research areas included studying brain size and the effects of racial admixture.
In a 2020 statement, his former department at Western Ontario University stated: "Rushton's works linking race and intelligence are based on an incorrect assumption that fuels systemic racism, the notion that racialized groups are concordant with patterns of human ancestry and genetic population structure." Furthermore, they stated that Rushton's work on the topic is "characterized by a complete misunderstanding of population genetic measures, including fundamental misconceptions about the nature of heritability."
Rushton's book Race, Evolution, and Behavior (1995) attempted to use r/K selection theory to explain what he described as an evolutionary scale of characteristics indicative of nurturing behavior in which East Asian people consistently averaged high, black people low, and white people in the middle. He first published this theory in 1984. Rushton argued that East Asians and their descendants average a larger brain size, greater intelligence, more sexual restraint, slower rates of maturation, and greater law abidingness and social organization than do Europeans and their descendants, whom he argued average higher scores on these measures than Africans and their descendants. He hypothesized that r/K selection theory explains these differences.
Rushton's application of r/K selection theory to explain differences among racial groups has been widely criticized. Differential K theory in particular was described in a 2020 statement by Rushton's former department at Western Ontario University as "thoroughly debunked."
One of his many critics is the evolutionary biologist Joseph L. Graves, who has done extensive testing of the r/K selection theory with species of Drosophila flies. Graves argues that not only is r/K selection theory considered to be virtually useless when applied to human life history evolution, but Rushton does not apply the theory correctly, and displays a lack of understanding of evolutionary theory in general. Graves also says that Rushton misrepresented the sources for the biological data he gathered in support of his hypothesis, and that much of his social science data was collected by dubious means. Other scholars have argued against Rushton's hypothesis on the basis that the concept of race is not supported by genetic evidence about the diversity of human populations, and that his research was based on folk taxonomies.
Later studies by Rushton and other researchers have argued that there is empirical support for the theory, though these studies too have been criticized.
Psychologist David P. Barash observed that r- and K-selection may have some validity when considering the so-called demographic transition, whereby economic development characteristically leads to reduced family size and other K traits. "But this is a pan-human phenomenon, a flexible, adaptive response to changed environmental conditions ... Rushton wields r- and K-selection as a Procrustean bed, doing what he can to make the available data fit ... Bad science and virulent racial prejudice drip like pus from nearly every page of this despicable book."
Beginning in 2008, Rushton researched the structure of personality. Over about a dozen papers, he argued that variation in personality can be explained by variation in a single underlying "general factor," similar to the g factor of psychometrics.
In 2009 Rushton spoke at the Preserving Western Civilization conference in Baltimore. It was organized by Michael H. Hart for the stated purpose of "addressing the need" to defend "America's Judeo-Christian heritage and European identity" from immigrants, Muslims, and African Americans. The Anti-Defamation League described the conference attendees as "racist academics, conservative pundits and anti-immigrant activists".
Rushton prompted controversy for years, attracting coverage from the press as well as comments and criticism by scientists of his books and journal articles.
First-year psychology students who took Rushton's classes said that he had conducted a survey of students' sexual habits in 1988, asking "such questions as how large their penises are, how many sex partners they have had, and how far they can ejaculate". First-year psychology students at the University of Western Ontario are required "to participate in approved surveys as a condition of their studies. If they choose not to, they must write one research paper. Also, many students feel subtle pressure to participate in order not to offend professors who may later be grading their work. However, if a study is not approved, these requirements do not apply at all." For his failing to tell students they had the option not to participate in his studies without incurring additional work, the university barred Rushton for two years from using students as research subjects. He had tenure at UWO.
In a 2005 Ottawa Citizen article, Rushton stated that the public perceives disproportionately negative effects caused by black residents "in every bloody city in Canada where you have black people." In the same article, Rushton suggested that equalizing outcomes across groups was "impossible". The Southern Poverty Law Center called the piece "yet another attack" by Rushton, and it criticized those who published his work and that of other "race scientists".
In a 1991 work, the Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson (one of the two co-founders of the r/K selection theory which Rushton uses) was quoted as having said about him:
I think Phil is an honest and capable researcher. The basic reasoning by Rushton is solid evolutionary reasoning; that is, it is logically sound. If he had seen some apparent geographic variation for a non-human species – a species of sparrow or sparrow hawk, for example – no one would have batted an eye. ... [W]hen it comes to [human] racial differences, especially in the inflamed situation in this country, special safeguards and conventions need to be developed.
Three years after the publication of Wilson's 1975 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, Rushton had already begun a long correspondence with Wilson. The letters became particularly extensive between 1987 and 1995 (Wilson's letters have now been archived by the Library of Congress). After Wilson's death at the end of 2021, historians of science Mark Borrello and David Sepkoski have reassessed how Wilson's thinking on issues of race and evolution was influenced by Rushton.
In a 1995 review of Rushton's Race, Evolution, and Behavior, anthropologist and population geneticist Henry Harpending expressed doubt as to whether all of Rushton's data fit the r/K model he proposed, but nonetheless praised the book for its proposing of a theoretical model that makes testable predictions about differences between human groups. He concludes that "Perhaps there will ultimately be some serious contribution from the traditional smoke-and-mirrors social science treatment of IQ, but for now Rushton's framework is essentially the only game in town." In their 2009 book The 10,000 Year Explosion, Harpending and Gregory Cochran later described Rushton as one of the researchers to whom they are indebted.
The psychologists Arthur Jensen, Hans Eysenck, Richard Lynn, Linda Gottfredson and Thomas Bouchard had a high opinion of Rushton's Race, Evolution and Behavior, describing Rushton's work as rigorous and impressive. However, many of these researchers are themselves controversial and they all received money from the Pioneer Fund, which had funded much of Rushton's work when these reviews were written.
Some criminologists who study the relationship between race and crime regard Rushton's r/K theory as one of several possible explanations for racial disparities in crime rates. Others, such as the criminologist Shaun L. Gabbidon, think that Rushton has developed one of the more controversial biosocial theories related to race and crime; he says that it has been criticized for failing to explain all of the data and for its potential to support racist ideologies. The criminologist Anthony Walsh has defended Rushton, claiming that none of Rushton's critics has supplied data indicating anything other than the racial gradient he identifies, and that it is unscientific to dismiss Rushton's ideas on the basis of their political implications.
On 22 June 2020, the Department of Psychology at the University of Western Ontario issued a statement regarding their former faculty member, which read in part:
Despite its deeply flawed assumptions and methodologies, Rushton's work and other so-called "race science" (currently under the pseudonym of "race realism") continues to be misused by white supremacists and promoted by eugenic organizations. Thus, Rushton's legacy shows that the impact of flawed science lingers on, even after qualified scholars have condemned its scientific integrity. Academic freedom and freedom of expression are critical to free scientific inquiry. However, the notion of academic freedom is disrespected and abused when it is used to promote the dissemination of racist and discriminatory concepts. Scientists have an obligation to society to speak loudly and actively in opposition of such abuse.
Also in 2020, Andrew Winston summarized Rushton's scholarly reception as follows: "Rushton's work was heavily criticized by psychologists, evolutionary biologists, anthropologists, and geneticists for severe scientific inadequacies, fundamental errors, inappropriate conceptualization of race, inappropriate statistical comparisons, misuse of sources, and serious logical errors and flaws."
In 1989, geneticist and media personality David Suzuki criticized Rushton's racial theories in a live televised debate at the University of Western Ontario. He said: "There will always be Rushtons in science, and we must always be prepared to root them out". At the same occasion, Rushton rejected believing in racial superiority, saying "we've got to realize that each of these populations is perfectly, beautifully adapted to their own ancestral environments".
Also in 1989, Michael Lynn published a paper in the Journal of Research in Personality criticizing a study by Rushton & Bogaert that had been published in the same journal two years earlier. Lynn cited four reasons he considered Rushton & Bogaert's study to be flawed:
First, they did not explain why natural selection would have favored different reproductive strategies for different races. Second, their data on race differences are of questionable validity because their literature review was selective and their original analyses were based on self-reports. Third, they provided no evidence that these race differences had significant effects on reproduction or that sexual restraint is a K characteristic. Finally, they did not adequately rule out environmental explanations for their data.
Marvin Zuckerman, psychology professor of the University of Delaware, criticized Rushton's research on methodological grounds, observing that more variation exists in personality traits within racial groups than between them and arguing that Rushton selectively cited data from the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire.
Critical psychologist Thomas Teo argued that Rushton's "substantial success and influence in the discipline" and use of "accepted usage of empirical mainstream methods" pointed to broader problems in academic psychology.
Biologist Garland E. Allen argued in 1990 that Rushton "selectively cites and misrepresents his sources to support his conclusions. Far from being an 'honest attempt' to follow the Truth wherever it leads, Rushton seems to be putting a ring through Truth's nose and leading it toward his own barn...He has used, abused, distorted, and in some cases virtually falsified his sources."
According to Charles Lane, in 1988, Rushton conducted a survey at the Eaton Centre mall in Toronto, where he paid 50 whites, 50 blacks, and 50 Asians to answer questions about their sexual habits. Because he did not clear his survey and proposed to pay for answers with the university committee at UWO, the administration reprimanded Rushton, calling his transgression "a serious breach of scholarly procedure", said University President, George Pederson.
A 1993 study reanalyzed data from a study Rushton had published on the relationship between race and crime and found no strong relationship between the two.
Rushton's work was criticized in the scholarly literature; he generally responded, sometimes in the same journal. In 1995, in the Journal of Black Studies, Zack Cernovsky wrote: "some of Rushton's references to scientific literature with respects to racial differences in sexual characteristics turned out to be references to a nonscientific semi-pornographic book and to an article by Philip Nobile in the Penthouse magazine's Forum."
In 1995, two researchers published a review and meta-analysis concluding that racial differences in behavior were accounted for entirely by environmental factors, which contradicts Rushton's evolutionary theory for the origin of such differences.
Anti-racism activist Tim Wise criticized Rushton's application of r/K selection theory to crime rates and IQ, charging that Rushton ignored things such as systematic/institutional discrimination, racial profiling, economic disparities and unequal access to judicial defense in his attempt to apply r/K Theory and IQ theories to explain racial disparities in American crime rates. He also criticized Rushton and others like him of ignoring things like white-collar crime rates,
Corporate criminals, after all, are usually highly educated, and probably would score highly on just about any standardized test you chose to give them. And what of it? Virtually all the stock manipulators, unethical derivatives traders and shady money managers on Wall Street, whose actions have brought the economy to its knees of late — and who it might be worth noting are pretty much all white men — would likely do well on the Stanford-Binet or Wonderlich Industrial Aptitude Test. They probably were above-average students. But what are we to make of these facts? Clearly they say little about the value of such persons to the nation or the world. The Unabomber was a certified genius and Ted Bundy was of well-above-average intelligence... But I'm having a hard time discerning what we should conclude about these truths, in terms of how much emphasis we place on intelligence, as opposed to other human traits.
The biological anthropologist C. Loring Brace criticized Rushton in his 1996 review of the book, Race, Evolution, and Behavior (1996):
Virtually every kind of anthropologist may be put in the position of being asked to comment on what is contained in this book, so, whatever our individual specialty, we should all be prepared to discuss what it represents. Race, Evolution, and Behavior is an amalgamation of bad biology and inexcusable anthropology. It is not science but advocacy, and advocacy for the promotion of "racialism." Tzvetan Todorov explains "racialism," in contrast to "racism," as belief in the existence of typological essences called "races" whose characteristics can be rated in hierarchical fashion (On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993, p. 31). "Racism," then, is the use of racialist assumptions to promote social or political ends, a course that Todorov regards as leading to "particularly catastrophic results." Perpetuating catastrophe is not the stated aim of Rushton's book, but current promoters of racist agendas will almost certainly regard it as a welcome weapon to apply for their noxious purposes.
Robert Sussman, an evolutionary anthropologist and the editor-in-chief of American Anthropologist, explained why the journal did not accept ads for Rushton's 1998 book:
This is an insidious attempt to legitimize Rushton's racist propaganda and is tantamount to publishing ads for white supremacy and the neo-Nazi party. If you have any question about the validity of the "science" of Rushton's trash you should read any one of his articles and the many rebuttals by ashamed scientists.
In 2000, after Rushton mailed a booklet on his work to psychology, sociology, and anthropology professors across North America, Hermann Helmuth, a professor of anthropology at Trent University, said: "It is in a way personal and political propaganda. There is no basis to his scientific research." Rushton responded, "It's not racist; it's a matter of science and recognizing variation in all groups of people."
From 2002, Rushton was the president of the Pioneer Fund. Tax records show that in 2002 his Charles Darwin Research Institute was awarded $473,835, or 73% of the fund's total grants that year. The Southern Poverty Law Center, an American civil rights organization, characterizes the Pioneer Fund as a hate group. Rushton had spoken on eugenics several times at conferences of the American Renaissance magazine, a monthly white supremacist magazine, in which he had also published a number of general articles.
Rushton published articles on the website VDARE, which advocates for reduced immigration into the United States. Stefan Kühl wrote in his book, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (2002), that Rushton was part of the revival in the 1980s of public interest in scientific racism.
William H. Tucker, a professor of psychology and expert on the history of scientific racism, observed in 2002:
Rushton has not only contributed to American Renaissance publications and graced their conferences with his presence but also offered praise and support for the "scholarly" work on racial differences of Henry Garrett, who spent the last two decades of his life opposing the extension of the Constitution to blacks on the basis that the "normal" black resembled a European after frontal lobotomy. Informed of Garrett's assertion that blacks were not entitled to equality because their "ancestors were ... savages in an African jungle," Rushton dismissed the observation as quoted "selectively from Garrett's writing", finding nothing opprobrious in such sentiments because the leader of the scientific opposition to civil rights had made other statements about black inferiority that were, according to Rushton, "quite objective in tone and backed by standard social science evidence." Quite apart from the questionable logic in defending a blatant call to deprive citizens of their rights by citing Garrett's less offensive writing—as if it were evidence of Ted Bundy's innocence that there were some women he had met and not killed—there was no sense on Rushton's part that all of Garrett's assertions, whether or not "objective," were utterly irrelevant to constitutional guarantees, which are not predicated on scientific demonstrations of intellectual equality.
A 2003 study in Evolution and Human Behavior found no evidence to support Rushton's hypothesized relationship between race and behavior.
In 2005, Lisa Suzuki and Joshua Aronson of New York University wrote an article for Psychology, Public Policy, and Law noting that Rushton ignored evidence that failed to support his position that IQ test score gaps represent a genetic racial hierarchy. He did not change his position on this matter for 30 years. Rushton replied in the same issue of the journal.
In a paper for the International Journal of Selection and Assessment in 2006, Steven Cronshaw and colleagues wrote that psychologists need to critically examine the science used by Rushton in his "race-realist" research. Their re-analysis of the validity criteria for test bias, using data reported in the Rushton et al. paper, led them to conclude that the testing methods were biased against Black Africans. They disagree with other aspects of Rushton's methodology, such as his use of non-equivalent groups in test samples. Rushton responded in the next issue of the journal. He said why he believed his results were valid, and why he thought the criticisms incorrect.
Scott McGreal (2012) in Psychology Today criticized the science of Rushton's "Race Differences in Sexual Behavior: Testing an Evolutionary Hypothesis". He cited Weizmann, Wiener, Wiesenthal, & Ziegle, which argued that Rushton's theory relied on flawed science. McGreal faulted Rushton and his use of Nobile's penis size study.
On 17 June 2020, Elsevier announced it was retracting an article that Rushton and Donald Templer had published in 2012 in the Elsevier journal Personality and Individual Differences. The article falsely claimed that there was scientific evidence that skin color was related to aggression and sexuality in humans.
On 24 December 2020, the academic journal Psychological Reports retracted two Rushton articles about intelligence and race. Review of the articles, which were originally published in the 1990s, "found that the research was unethical, scientifically flawed, and based on racist ideas and agenda". On 23 August 2021, it retracted three more.
Notes
Further reading | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "John Philippe Rushton (December 3, 1943 – October 2, 2012) was a Canadian psychologist and author. He taught at the University of Western Ontario until the early 1990s, and became known to the general public during the 1980s and 1990s for research on race and intelligence, race and crime, and other purported racial correlations.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Rushton's work has been heavily criticized by the scientific community for the questionable quality of its research, with many academics arguing that it was conducted under a racist agenda. From 2002 until his death, he served as the head of the Pioneer Fund, an organization founded in 1937 to promote eugenics, which has been described as racist and white supremacist in nature, and as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. He also published articles in and spoke at conferences organized by the white supremacist magazine American Renaissance.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Rushton was a Fellow of the Canadian Psychological Association and a onetime Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2020, the Department of Psychology of the University of Western Ontario released a statement stating that \"much of [Rushton's] research was racist\", was \"deeply flawed from a scientific standpoint\", and \"Rushton's legacy shows that the impact of flawed science lingers on, even after qualified scholars have condemned its scientific integrity.\" As of 2021, Rushton has had six research publications retracted for being scientifically flawed, unethical, and not replicable, and for advancing a racist agenda despite contradictory evidence.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Rushton was born in Bournemouth, England. During his childhood, he emigrated with his family to South Africa, where he lived from age four to eight (1948–1952). His father was a building contractor and his mother came from France. The family moved to Canada, where Rushton spent most of his teen years. He returned to England for university, receiving a B.Sc. in psychology from Birkbeck College at the University of London in 1970, and, in 1973, his Ph.D. in social psychology from the London School of Economics for work on altruism in children. He continued his work at the University of Oxford until 1974.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Rushton taught at York University in Canada from 1974 to 1976 and the University of Toronto until 1977. He moved to the University of Western Ontario and was made full professor (with tenure) in 1985. He received a D.Sc. from the University of London in 1992. His controversial research has sparked political debates, and Ontario Premier David Peterson called Rushton a racist. In 2005, The Ottawa Citizen described Rushton as the most famous university professor in Canada.",
"title": "Later life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "He published more than 250 articles and six books, including two on altruism, and one on scientific excellence, and co-authored an introductory psychology textbook. He was a signatory of the opinion piece \"Mainstream Science on Intelligence.\"",
"title": "Later life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Rushton died of cancer on October 2, 2012, at the age of 68.",
"title": "Later life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Early in his career, Rushton did research on altruism. He theorized a heritable component in altruism and developed Genetic Similarity Theory, which is an extension of W.D. Hamilton's theory of kin selection. It holds that individuals tend to be more altruistic to individuals who are genetically similar to themselves even if they are not kin, and less altruistic, and sometimes outwardly hostile, to individuals who are less genetically similar. Rushton describes \"ethnic conflict and rivalry\" as \"one of the great themes of historical and contemporary society\", and suggests that this may have its roots in the evolutionary impact on individuals from groups \"giving preferential treatment to genetically similar others\". According to Rushton: \"the makeup of a gene pool [i.e., a human population's total reservoir of alternative genes] causally affects the probability of any particular ideology being adopted\".",
"title": "Work and opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Articles in a 1989 issue of Behavioral and Brain Sciences criticized the theory. Judith Anderson said his work was based on statistically flawed evidence, John Archer and others said that Rushton failed to understand and misapplied the theory of kin selection, Judith Economos said that Rushton's analysis was speculative, that he failed to define the concept of altruistic behavior in a way that it can become manifest, and that he failed to show any plausible mechanism by which members of a species can detect the \"altruism gene\" in other members of the species. Steven Gangestad criticized Rushton's theory for not being compelling in terms of its attractiveness as an explanatory model. C.R. Hallpike said Rushton's theory failed to take into account that many other traits, ranging from age, sex, social and political group membership, are observably more important in predicting altruistic behavior between non-kin than genetic similarity. John Hartung criticized Rushton for failing to conduct an adequate control group study and for ignoring contradictory evidence.",
"title": "Work and opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Littlefield and Rushton (1984) examined degree of bereavement among parents after the death of a child. They found that children perceived as more physically similar to their parents were grieved for more intensely than less similar children.",
"title": "Work and opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Russell, Wells, and Rushton (1985) reanalyzed several previous studies on similarities between spouses and concluded there is higher similarity on the more heritable characteristics. Rushton examined blood group genes and found that sexually interacting couples had more similar blood group genes than randomly paired individuals.",
"title": "Work and opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Rushton and Bons (2005) examined personality, attitude, and demographic characteristics for similarity among different groups of people. Monozygotic twins resembled one another (r = 0.53) more than dizygotic twins (r = 0.32), pairs of spouses (r = 0.32), and pairs of best friends (r = 0.20). The monozygotic twins also chose spouses and best friends who were more similar to their co-twins' friends and spouses than did dizygotic twins. The authors said there was a substantial genetic contribution to these effects in the twins. Similarity to social partners was higher on more heritable characteristics than on less.",
"title": "Work and opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Rushton spent much of his career arguing that average IQ differences between racial groups are due to genetic causes, a view that was controversial at the time and is now broadly rejected by the scientific consensus. His research areas included studying brain size and the effects of racial admixture.",
"title": "Work and opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In a 2020 statement, his former department at Western Ontario University stated: \"Rushton's works linking race and intelligence are based on an incorrect assumption that fuels systemic racism, the notion that racialized groups are concordant with patterns of human ancestry and genetic population structure.\" Furthermore, they stated that Rushton's work on the topic is \"characterized by a complete misunderstanding of population genetic measures, including fundamental misconceptions about the nature of heritability.\"",
"title": "Work and opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Rushton's book Race, Evolution, and Behavior (1995) attempted to use r/K selection theory to explain what he described as an evolutionary scale of characteristics indicative of nurturing behavior in which East Asian people consistently averaged high, black people low, and white people in the middle. He first published this theory in 1984. Rushton argued that East Asians and their descendants average a larger brain size, greater intelligence, more sexual restraint, slower rates of maturation, and greater law abidingness and social organization than do Europeans and their descendants, whom he argued average higher scores on these measures than Africans and their descendants. He hypothesized that r/K selection theory explains these differences.",
"title": "Work and opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Rushton's application of r/K selection theory to explain differences among racial groups has been widely criticized. Differential K theory in particular was described in a 2020 statement by Rushton's former department at Western Ontario University as \"thoroughly debunked.\"",
"title": "Work and opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "One of his many critics is the evolutionary biologist Joseph L. Graves, who has done extensive testing of the r/K selection theory with species of Drosophila flies. Graves argues that not only is r/K selection theory considered to be virtually useless when applied to human life history evolution, but Rushton does not apply the theory correctly, and displays a lack of understanding of evolutionary theory in general. Graves also says that Rushton misrepresented the sources for the biological data he gathered in support of his hypothesis, and that much of his social science data was collected by dubious means. Other scholars have argued against Rushton's hypothesis on the basis that the concept of race is not supported by genetic evidence about the diversity of human populations, and that his research was based on folk taxonomies.",
"title": "Work and opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Later studies by Rushton and other researchers have argued that there is empirical support for the theory, though these studies too have been criticized.",
"title": "Work and opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Psychologist David P. Barash observed that r- and K-selection may have some validity when considering the so-called demographic transition, whereby economic development characteristically leads to reduced family size and other K traits. \"But this is a pan-human phenomenon, a flexible, adaptive response to changed environmental conditions ... Rushton wields r- and K-selection as a Procrustean bed, doing what he can to make the available data fit ... Bad science and virulent racial prejudice drip like pus from nearly every page of this despicable book.\"",
"title": "Work and opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Beginning in 2008, Rushton researched the structure of personality. Over about a dozen papers, he argued that variation in personality can be explained by variation in a single underlying \"general factor,\" similar to the g factor of psychometrics.",
"title": "Work and opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In 2009 Rushton spoke at the Preserving Western Civilization conference in Baltimore. It was organized by Michael H. Hart for the stated purpose of \"addressing the need\" to defend \"America's Judeo-Christian heritage and European identity\" from immigrants, Muslims, and African Americans. The Anti-Defamation League described the conference attendees as \"racist academics, conservative pundits and anti-immigrant activists\".",
"title": "Work and opinions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Rushton prompted controversy for years, attracting coverage from the press as well as comments and criticism by scientists of his books and journal articles.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "First-year psychology students who took Rushton's classes said that he had conducted a survey of students' sexual habits in 1988, asking \"such questions as how large their penises are, how many sex partners they have had, and how far they can ejaculate\". First-year psychology students at the University of Western Ontario are required \"to participate in approved surveys as a condition of their studies. If they choose not to, they must write one research paper. Also, many students feel subtle pressure to participate in order not to offend professors who may later be grading their work. However, if a study is not approved, these requirements do not apply at all.\" For his failing to tell students they had the option not to participate in his studies without incurring additional work, the university barred Rushton for two years from using students as research subjects. He had tenure at UWO.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "In a 2005 Ottawa Citizen article, Rushton stated that the public perceives disproportionately negative effects caused by black residents \"in every bloody city in Canada where you have black people.\" In the same article, Rushton suggested that equalizing outcomes across groups was \"impossible\". The Southern Poverty Law Center called the piece \"yet another attack\" by Rushton, and it criticized those who published his work and that of other \"race scientists\".",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In a 1991 work, the Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson (one of the two co-founders of the r/K selection theory which Rushton uses) was quoted as having said about him:",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "I think Phil is an honest and capable researcher. The basic reasoning by Rushton is solid evolutionary reasoning; that is, it is logically sound. If he had seen some apparent geographic variation for a non-human species – a species of sparrow or sparrow hawk, for example – no one would have batted an eye. ... [W]hen it comes to [human] racial differences, especially in the inflamed situation in this country, special safeguards and conventions need to be developed.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Three years after the publication of Wilson's 1975 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, Rushton had already begun a long correspondence with Wilson. The letters became particularly extensive between 1987 and 1995 (Wilson's letters have now been archived by the Library of Congress). After Wilson's death at the end of 2021, historians of science Mark Borrello and David Sepkoski have reassessed how Wilson's thinking on issues of race and evolution was influenced by Rushton.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In a 1995 review of Rushton's Race, Evolution, and Behavior, anthropologist and population geneticist Henry Harpending expressed doubt as to whether all of Rushton's data fit the r/K model he proposed, but nonetheless praised the book for its proposing of a theoretical model that makes testable predictions about differences between human groups. He concludes that \"Perhaps there will ultimately be some serious contribution from the traditional smoke-and-mirrors social science treatment of IQ, but for now Rushton's framework is essentially the only game in town.\" In their 2009 book The 10,000 Year Explosion, Harpending and Gregory Cochran later described Rushton as one of the researchers to whom they are indebted.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The psychologists Arthur Jensen, Hans Eysenck, Richard Lynn, Linda Gottfredson and Thomas Bouchard had a high opinion of Rushton's Race, Evolution and Behavior, describing Rushton's work as rigorous and impressive. However, many of these researchers are themselves controversial and they all received money from the Pioneer Fund, which had funded much of Rushton's work when these reviews were written.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Some criminologists who study the relationship between race and crime regard Rushton's r/K theory as one of several possible explanations for racial disparities in crime rates. Others, such as the criminologist Shaun L. Gabbidon, think that Rushton has developed one of the more controversial biosocial theories related to race and crime; he says that it has been criticized for failing to explain all of the data and for its potential to support racist ideologies. The criminologist Anthony Walsh has defended Rushton, claiming that none of Rushton's critics has supplied data indicating anything other than the racial gradient he identifies, and that it is unscientific to dismiss Rushton's ideas on the basis of their political implications.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "On 22 June 2020, the Department of Psychology at the University of Western Ontario issued a statement regarding their former faculty member, which read in part:",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Despite its deeply flawed assumptions and methodologies, Rushton's work and other so-called \"race science\" (currently under the pseudonym of \"race realism\") continues to be misused by white supremacists and promoted by eugenic organizations. Thus, Rushton's legacy shows that the impact of flawed science lingers on, even after qualified scholars have condemned its scientific integrity. Academic freedom and freedom of expression are critical to free scientific inquiry. However, the notion of academic freedom is disrespected and abused when it is used to promote the dissemination of racist and discriminatory concepts. Scientists have an obligation to society to speak loudly and actively in opposition of such abuse.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Also in 2020, Andrew Winston summarized Rushton's scholarly reception as follows: \"Rushton's work was heavily criticized by psychologists, evolutionary biologists, anthropologists, and geneticists for severe scientific inadequacies, fundamental errors, inappropriate conceptualization of race, inappropriate statistical comparisons, misuse of sources, and serious logical errors and flaws.\"",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "In 1989, geneticist and media personality David Suzuki criticized Rushton's racial theories in a live televised debate at the University of Western Ontario. He said: \"There will always be Rushtons in science, and we must always be prepared to root them out\". At the same occasion, Rushton rejected believing in racial superiority, saying \"we've got to realize that each of these populations is perfectly, beautifully adapted to their own ancestral environments\".",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Also in 1989, Michael Lynn published a paper in the Journal of Research in Personality criticizing a study by Rushton & Bogaert that had been published in the same journal two years earlier. Lynn cited four reasons he considered Rushton & Bogaert's study to be flawed:",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "First, they did not explain why natural selection would have favored different reproductive strategies for different races. Second, their data on race differences are of questionable validity because their literature review was selective and their original analyses were based on self-reports. Third, they provided no evidence that these race differences had significant effects on reproduction or that sexual restraint is a K characteristic. Finally, they did not adequately rule out environmental explanations for their data.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Marvin Zuckerman, psychology professor of the University of Delaware, criticized Rushton's research on methodological grounds, observing that more variation exists in personality traits within racial groups than between them and arguing that Rushton selectively cited data from the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Critical psychologist Thomas Teo argued that Rushton's \"substantial success and influence in the discipline\" and use of \"accepted usage of empirical mainstream methods\" pointed to broader problems in academic psychology.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Biologist Garland E. Allen argued in 1990 that Rushton \"selectively cites and misrepresents his sources to support his conclusions. Far from being an 'honest attempt' to follow the Truth wherever it leads, Rushton seems to be putting a ring through Truth's nose and leading it toward his own barn...He has used, abused, distorted, and in some cases virtually falsified his sources.\"",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "According to Charles Lane, in 1988, Rushton conducted a survey at the Eaton Centre mall in Toronto, where he paid 50 whites, 50 blacks, and 50 Asians to answer questions about their sexual habits. Because he did not clear his survey and proposed to pay for answers with the university committee at UWO, the administration reprimanded Rushton, calling his transgression \"a serious breach of scholarly procedure\", said University President, George Pederson.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "A 1993 study reanalyzed data from a study Rushton had published on the relationship between race and crime and found no strong relationship between the two.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Rushton's work was criticized in the scholarly literature; he generally responded, sometimes in the same journal. In 1995, in the Journal of Black Studies, Zack Cernovsky wrote: \"some of Rushton's references to scientific literature with respects to racial differences in sexual characteristics turned out to be references to a nonscientific semi-pornographic book and to an article by Philip Nobile in the Penthouse magazine's Forum.\"",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "In 1995, two researchers published a review and meta-analysis concluding that racial differences in behavior were accounted for entirely by environmental factors, which contradicts Rushton's evolutionary theory for the origin of such differences.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Anti-racism activist Tim Wise criticized Rushton's application of r/K selection theory to crime rates and IQ, charging that Rushton ignored things such as systematic/institutional discrimination, racial profiling, economic disparities and unequal access to judicial defense in his attempt to apply r/K Theory and IQ theories to explain racial disparities in American crime rates. He also criticized Rushton and others like him of ignoring things like white-collar crime rates,",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Corporate criminals, after all, are usually highly educated, and probably would score highly on just about any standardized test you chose to give them. And what of it? Virtually all the stock manipulators, unethical derivatives traders and shady money managers on Wall Street, whose actions have brought the economy to its knees of late — and who it might be worth noting are pretty much all white men — would likely do well on the Stanford-Binet or Wonderlich Industrial Aptitude Test. They probably were above-average students. But what are we to make of these facts? Clearly they say little about the value of such persons to the nation or the world. The Unabomber was a certified genius and Ted Bundy was of well-above-average intelligence... But I'm having a hard time discerning what we should conclude about these truths, in terms of how much emphasis we place on intelligence, as opposed to other human traits.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The biological anthropologist C. Loring Brace criticized Rushton in his 1996 review of the book, Race, Evolution, and Behavior (1996):",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Virtually every kind of anthropologist may be put in the position of being asked to comment on what is contained in this book, so, whatever our individual specialty, we should all be prepared to discuss what it represents. Race, Evolution, and Behavior is an amalgamation of bad biology and inexcusable anthropology. It is not science but advocacy, and advocacy for the promotion of \"racialism.\" Tzvetan Todorov explains \"racialism,\" in contrast to \"racism,\" as belief in the existence of typological essences called \"races\" whose characteristics can be rated in hierarchical fashion (On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993, p. 31). \"Racism,\" then, is the use of racialist assumptions to promote social or political ends, a course that Todorov regards as leading to \"particularly catastrophic results.\" Perpetuating catastrophe is not the stated aim of Rushton's book, but current promoters of racist agendas will almost certainly regard it as a welcome weapon to apply for their noxious purposes.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Robert Sussman, an evolutionary anthropologist and the editor-in-chief of American Anthropologist, explained why the journal did not accept ads for Rushton's 1998 book:",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "This is an insidious attempt to legitimize Rushton's racist propaganda and is tantamount to publishing ads for white supremacy and the neo-Nazi party. If you have any question about the validity of the \"science\" of Rushton's trash you should read any one of his articles and the many rebuttals by ashamed scientists.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "In 2000, after Rushton mailed a booklet on his work to psychology, sociology, and anthropology professors across North America, Hermann Helmuth, a professor of anthropology at Trent University, said: \"It is in a way personal and political propaganda. There is no basis to his scientific research.\" Rushton responded, \"It's not racist; it's a matter of science and recognizing variation in all groups of people.\"",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "From 2002, Rushton was the president of the Pioneer Fund. Tax records show that in 2002 his Charles Darwin Research Institute was awarded $473,835, or 73% of the fund's total grants that year. The Southern Poverty Law Center, an American civil rights organization, characterizes the Pioneer Fund as a hate group. Rushton had spoken on eugenics several times at conferences of the American Renaissance magazine, a monthly white supremacist magazine, in which he had also published a number of general articles.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Rushton published articles on the website VDARE, which advocates for reduced immigration into the United States. Stefan Kühl wrote in his book, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (2002), that Rushton was part of the revival in the 1980s of public interest in scientific racism.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "William H. Tucker, a professor of psychology and expert on the history of scientific racism, observed in 2002:",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Rushton has not only contributed to American Renaissance publications and graced their conferences with his presence but also offered praise and support for the \"scholarly\" work on racial differences of Henry Garrett, who spent the last two decades of his life opposing the extension of the Constitution to blacks on the basis that the \"normal\" black resembled a European after frontal lobotomy. Informed of Garrett's assertion that blacks were not entitled to equality because their \"ancestors were ... savages in an African jungle,\" Rushton dismissed the observation as quoted \"selectively from Garrett's writing\", finding nothing opprobrious in such sentiments because the leader of the scientific opposition to civil rights had made other statements about black inferiority that were, according to Rushton, \"quite objective in tone and backed by standard social science evidence.\" Quite apart from the questionable logic in defending a blatant call to deprive citizens of their rights by citing Garrett's less offensive writing—as if it were evidence of Ted Bundy's innocence that there were some women he had met and not killed—there was no sense on Rushton's part that all of Garrett's assertions, whether or not \"objective,\" were utterly irrelevant to constitutional guarantees, which are not predicated on scientific demonstrations of intellectual equality.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "A 2003 study in Evolution and Human Behavior found no evidence to support Rushton's hypothesized relationship between race and behavior.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "In 2005, Lisa Suzuki and Joshua Aronson of New York University wrote an article for Psychology, Public Policy, and Law noting that Rushton ignored evidence that failed to support his position that IQ test score gaps represent a genetic racial hierarchy. He did not change his position on this matter for 30 years. Rushton replied in the same issue of the journal.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "In a paper for the International Journal of Selection and Assessment in 2006, Steven Cronshaw and colleagues wrote that psychologists need to critically examine the science used by Rushton in his \"race-realist\" research. Their re-analysis of the validity criteria for test bias, using data reported in the Rushton et al. paper, led them to conclude that the testing methods were biased against Black Africans. They disagree with other aspects of Rushton's methodology, such as his use of non-equivalent groups in test samples. Rushton responded in the next issue of the journal. He said why he believed his results were valid, and why he thought the criticisms incorrect.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Scott McGreal (2012) in Psychology Today criticized the science of Rushton's \"Race Differences in Sexual Behavior: Testing an Evolutionary Hypothesis\". He cited Weizmann, Wiener, Wiesenthal, & Ziegle, which argued that Rushton's theory relied on flawed science. McGreal faulted Rushton and his use of Nobile's penis size study.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "On 17 June 2020, Elsevier announced it was retracting an article that Rushton and Donald Templer had published in 2012 in the Elsevier journal Personality and Individual Differences. The article falsely claimed that there was scientific evidence that skin color was related to aggression and sexuality in humans.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "On 24 December 2020, the academic journal Psychological Reports retracted two Rushton articles about intelligence and race. Review of the articles, which were originally published in the 1990s, \"found that the research was unethical, scientifically flawed, and based on racist ideas and agenda\". On 23 August 2021, it retracted three more.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Notes",
"title": "References"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Further reading",
"title": "References"
}
]
| John Philippe Rushton was a Canadian psychologist and author. He taught at the University of Western Ontario until the early 1990s, and became known to the general public during the 1980s and 1990s for research on race and intelligence, race and crime, and other purported racial correlations. Rushton's work has been heavily criticized by the scientific community for the questionable quality of its research, with many academics arguing that it was conducted under a racist agenda. From 2002 until his death, he served as the head of the Pioneer Fund, an organization founded in 1937 to promote eugenics, which has been described as racist and white supremacist in nature, and as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. He also published articles in and spoke at conferences organized by the white supremacist magazine American Renaissance. Rushton was a Fellow of the Canadian Psychological Association and a onetime Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2020, the Department of Psychology of the University of Western Ontario released a statement stating that "much of [Rushton's] research was racist", was "deeply flawed from a scientific standpoint", and "Rushton's legacy shows that the impact of flawed science lingers on, even after qualified scholars have condemned its scientific integrity." As of 2021, Rushton has had six research publications retracted for being scientifically flawed, unethical, and not replicable, and for advancing a racist agenda despite contradictory evidence. | 2001-10-24T02:31:19Z | 2023-12-30T21:45:45Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Philippe_Rushton |
16,254 | Joseph Smith (disambiguation) | Joseph or Joe Smith may refer to: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Joseph or Joe Smith may refer to:",
"title": ""
}
]
| Joseph or Joe Smith may refer to: | 2001-10-24T23:02:18Z | 2023-12-10T10:16:42Z | [
"Template:TOC right",
"Template:Dab"
]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Smith_(disambiguation) |
16,261 | Juliana Hatfield | Juliana Hatfield (born July 27, 1967) is an American musician and singer-songwriter from the Boston area, formerly of the indie rock bands Blake Babies, Some Girls, and The Lemonheads. She also fronted her own band, The Juliana Hatfield Three, along with bassist Dean Fisher and drummer Todd Philips, which was active in the mid-1990s and again in the mid-2010s. It was with the Juliana Hatfield Three that she produced her best-charting work, including the critically acclaimed albums Become What You Are (1993) and Whatever, My Love (2015) and the singles "My Sister" (1993) and "Spin the Bottle" (1994).
She has performed and recorded as a solo artist and as one half of Minor Alps with Matthew Caws of Nada Surf. In December 2014, Paste named her cover of Elliott Smith’s "Needle in the Hay" number 10 in a list of the 20 Best Cover Songs of 2014. In 2014, she reformed The Juliana Hatfield Three, announcing the new album Whatever, My Love for 2015. In late December, Stereogum named the album "one of their most anticipated albums of 2015", and on January 4, 2015, Consequence of Sound named it "one of the 50 most anticipated albums of 2015."
In 2016, she formed a collaboration with Paul Westerberg under the moniker The I Don't Cares to release the album Wild Stab. More recently, she has released an album of original work titled Weird in 2019, sandwiched between two albums of cover songs, Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton-John (2018) and Juliana Hatfield Sings The Police (2019).
Hatfield was born in Wiscasset, Maine, to Phillip M. Hatfield, a radiologist, and Julie Hatfield, a former fashion editor for The Boston Globe. She grew up in the Boston suburb of Duxbury, Massachusetts. Despite recording a song titled "My Sister", Hatfield has no sisters but she does have two brothers.
Her father claimed his family descended from the West Virginia Hatfields of the Hatfield–McCoy feud following the Civil War. Her father served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War.
Hatfield went to Duxbury High School in Duxbury, Massachusetts. She attended Boston University before transferring to Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts.
Hatfield also attended art school at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2012 in a year-long, post-baccalaureate certificate program, to study painting.
Hatfield acquired a love of rock music during the 1970s, having been introduced by a babysitter to the music of the Los Angeles punk rock band X, which proved a life-changing experience. She was also attracted to the music of more mainstream artists like Olivia Newton-John and The Police.
While still at Berklee College of Music in 1986, she formed the band Blake Babies with John Strohm and Freda Love. The band released 4 albums between 1987 and 1991, and gained critical notice in Rolling Stone and the Village Voice, local radio airplay and press, and label support from Mammoth Records in North Carolina. The band broke up in 1992, but had a brief reunion in 2001 to produce another album.
After the break-up of the Blake Babies, she joined The Lemonheads as their bass player, replacing founding bassist Jesse Peretz, and played on their breakthrough album It's a Shame About Ray in 1992. She left the band after about a year, but returned in 1993 as a guest vocalist on several tracks of Come on Feel the Lemonheads.
In 1992, she released her debut solo album Hey Babe.
Her commercial breakthrough came in 1993 with the formation of the band The Juliana Hatfield Three along with high-school friend Dean Fisher on bass and former Bullet LaVolta drummer Todd Philips, with herself performing lead vocal and lead guitar duties. The band produced the album Become What You Are and two hit singles, "My Sister" and "Spin the Bottle".
"My Sister" was based on Hatfield's older brother's girlfriend, Maggie Rafferty, who lived with the family while Hatfield was in high school. She enjoyed Rafferty's eclectic record collection. Rafferty also took Hatfield to see the Del Fuegos and the Violent Femmes, which inspired her to form a band.
"Spin the Bottle" was used in the soundtrack of the Hollywood film Reality Bites (1994). Hatfield also made the cover of Spin magazine.
Hatfield was profiled in a number of girls' magazines, most notably Sassy, at this time and addressed serious issues faced by young women in her songs and interviews. About this period she says: "I was never comfortable with the attention. I thought it had come too soon. I hadn’t earned it yet." She gained notoriety in 1992 for saying that she was still a virgin in her mid-twenties in Interview magazine. In a 1994 interview for the magazine Vox, she said she was surprised by the effect 'outing' herself had: "I think there are a lot of people out there who don't care about sex, but who you never hear from, so I thought I should say it. The magazine I did the interview for is full of beef-cake hunky guys and scantily-clad models, so I thought it would be really funny to say that I didn't care about sex in a magazine that's full of sex and beauty – but no one really got the joke."
Over the years Hatfield's virginity became a recurring theme in her press coverage, often accompanied by speculation that she had lost her virginity to The Lemonheads' leader Evan Dando who had referred to her as his "friend and sometimes girlfriend." In 2006, Hatfield sent a letter to The Weekly Dig in critique of writer Debbie Driscoll's scathing review of Soul Asylum's latest album, The Silver Lining. Kevin Dean from the newspaper responded by bringing up the subject of Hatfield losing her virginity to Dando; Hatfield fired back at Dean for bringing up her sex life, while stating that she and Dando never had sex, and that it was in fact Spike Jonze that she had lost her virginity to. She later admitted that she lost her virginity when she was 26 and "damn ready."
The Juliana Hatfield Three only remained together through 1994, by 1995 she had returned to solo status and released the album Only Everything, in which she "turned up the volume and the distortion and had a lot of fun". One reviewer describes it as "a fun, engaging pop album". The album spawned another alternative radio hit for Hatfield in "Universal Heartbeat". In the video Hatfield portrayed a demanding aerobics instructor. Before the tour for Only Everything, she released Phillips and hired Jason Sutter on drums, Ed Slanker on guitar, and Lisa Mednick on keyboards. Two weeks into the tour, she canceled the tour due to depression.
In her memoir, Hatfield writes that she was suffering from depression severe enough to be suicidal. She disagreed with the decision to avoid talking about her depression. The drummer was replaced by Phillips, and touring resumed with Jeff Buckley as the opening act.
In 1996, she traveled to Woodstock, New York where she recorded tracks for God's Foot, which was to be her fourth solo album (third if not counting Become What You Are, which was recorded with the Juliana Hatfield Three), intended for 1997 release. After three failures to satisfy requests by Atlantic Records to come up with a single, she asked to be released from her contract. The label obliged but kept the rights to the songs recorded during these sessions. Atlantic had paid $180,000 on the recordings. "Mountains of Love" and "Fade Away" were released on a greatest hits collection entitled Gold Stars, while "Can't Kill Myself" was available for download from Hatfield's website. The remaining tracks surfaced on bootlegs, which she disapproved of, and she has rarely played them live.
In 1997 Hatfield toured with Lilith Fair, an all-female rock festival founded by singer Sarah McLachlan.
After the experience of God's Foot, and freed from her label obligations, Hatfield recorded the EP Please Do Not Disturb for the independent label Bar/None. Produced by Hatfield, the album included drummer Todd Phillips, guitarists Ed Slanker and Mike Leahy, and bassist Mikey Welsh of Weezer. The EP included "Trying Not to Think About It," a tribute to her friend, deceased musician Jeff Buckley.
Almost as a reaction to the seemingly endless studio sessions surrounding God's Foot, Hatfield recorded the album Bed in 1998 in six days, about which she said on her website, "It sounds as raw as I felt. It has no pretty sheen. The mistakes and unattractive parts were left in, not erased. Just like my career. Just like life."
In 2000, she released Beautiful Creature. This album left the rockier side of Hatfield's musical personality unexpressed, however, so simultaneously she released Juliana's Pony: Total System Failure with Zephan Courtney and Mikey Welsh. She called the latter album "a loud release of tension" with "lots of long sloppy guitar solos. And no love songs...a not-at-all attractive reaction to the ugly side of humanity, specifically American culture." Billboard called the first "a collection of plaintive demos" and the second "chock-a-block with punk guitar missives." Juliana's Pony: Total System Failure was panned by some critics who preferred the more acoustic Beautiful Creature. On Beautiful Creature, Hatfield worked with musician Davíd Garza who co-produced much of the album. Wally Gagel, a producer for Sebadoh and Tanya Donelly, helped Hatfield record her most electronica-influenced songs, "Cool Rock Boy" and "Don't Rush Me", which added texture to the otherwise acoustic album.
In 2002, Hatfield released Gold Stars 1992–2002: The Juliana Hatfield Collection. It contained singles from her solo albums, two songs from the unreleased God's Foot, a cover of Neil Young's "Only Love Can Break Your Heart", and new songs.
In 2004, Hatfield released In Exile Deo, an attempt at a more commercial sound with input from producers and engineers who had worked with Pink and Avril Lavigne. Hatfield produced the album with David Leonard, receiving co-production credits on "Jamie's in Town" and the bright rocker "Sunshine". The critics praised it, with some calling it her best work since the start of her solo career.
By contrast, the 2005 album Made in China was recorded in Bellows Falls, Vermont and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was released on her own record label, Ye Olde Records. The record had a much rawer feel, with Hatfield playing instruments accompanied by the band Unbusted and other contributors. For the first time, Hatfield also played drums on at least one track.
John Doe of the band X described the disc as "a frighteningly dark and beautiful record filled with stark, angular, truly brutal songs and guitars. This is surely a 'Woman Under the Influence', though I'm not sure of what." Reviews were mixed, with some liking the lo-fi sound and others seeing it as slackness.
The release of Made in China started a trend where Hatfield licensed her music, selling it via her website and with a distribution deal through Red Eye.
In December 2005, Hatfield toured the United States with the band X, whom she idolized during her teenage years.
In 2006, Hatfield released her first live album. Titled The White Broken Line: Live Recordings, the album featured performances from her tour with X. It was Hatfield's third release for her record label.
Hatfield's 9th studio album, How to Walk Away, was released on August 19, 2008, on Ye Olde Records. The album's heartfelt subject on the break-up of a relationship resonated with critics, who gave the album largely positive reviews, with some hailing it as her best album since In Exile Deo.
Hatfield returned two years later as her 10th studio album Peace & Love was released on Ye Olde Records, February 16, 2010. The album's composition, arrangement, performance, production, engineering, and mixing were solely credited to Hatfield. The album received mixed reviews, with several complaining the album's low-key moody nature working against the potential of the songs.
Hatfield offered, via her website, to write custom songs in order to fund a couple of projects; one of which was to release archive material. About halfway through the project, Hatfield stated that it had "completely re-energized and inspired" her again.
In October 2010, Hatfield and Evan Dando played two sold-out acoustic live shows together at The Mercury Lounge in New York. The following month, the duo played sold-out shows in Allston. This tour was followed in January 2011 by five dates on the American East Coast.
In April 2011, Hatfield announced her intention to work on a new album via fan-funding platform website PledgeMusic, from which she asked fans to help fund the project in exchange for personal artwork and memorabilia ranging from posters, CDs, and demos to one of Juliana's First Act guitars (used during the recording sessions) and even locks of her hair. The project also included donations for the Save a Sato foundation to which Hatfield is a major contributor. Fan response was enthusiastic, going over 400% of the original project cost. The album was originally going to be titled Speeches Delivered to Animals and Plants, in reference to a passage in the John Irving novel The World According to Garp, but later Hatfield herself changed it to There's Always Another Girl, in reference to a song in the album of the same name she had written as a defense for Lindsay Lohan after watching her flop I Know Who Killed Me.
There's Always Another Girl was released on August 30, 2011, again independently on her Ye Olde Records label, though a downloadable version was made available to contributors a month before on July 27, which was Juliana's birthday. The album has received mostly positive reviews from critics.
On August 28, 2012, Juliana Hatfield released a covers record titled Juliana Hatfield on her Ye Olde Records label. The album features covers of songs originally performed by The Who, Liz Phair, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Ryan Adams, I Blame Coco, and Led Zeppelin.
As of July 2013, Juliana Hatfield has finished recording her thirteenth solo album, Wild Animals, with crowd-funding—for the third time—through PledgeMusic.
In December 2014, Paste Magazine named her track "Needle in the Hay," an Elliott Smith cover, as No. 10 one of the "20 Best Cover Songs of 2014." The review called the cover "a more upbeat, approachable take on Smith’s disparate, wrought-iron classic. But even though it now employs bass, drums, tambourine and synth, the songs stays true to the sorrowful, tension-riddled original." Also that month, SPIN Magazine named the cover one of the "40 Best 2014 Songs by 1994 Artists ," where it came it at No. 36. The review stated "The tempo's a bit quicker, and she double-tracks herself for the song’s entirety. But the (tasteful) inclusion of chintzy drum programming and mellotron cleverly point to Smith's eventual creative direction."
In 2014, The Juliana Hatfield Three reunited two decades after it disbanded. She used PledgeMusic to raise funds for the new album, titled Whatever, My Love, the trio's first since 1993's Become What You Are. Hatfield said, "We haven't totally reinvented the wheel or anything," and that the tracks exhibit the "stuff I am sort of known for, I guess. But I am a lot more confident now than I was then with the first album. And I had more fun recording this one." The twelve tracks for Whatever, My Love were recorded at Nuthouse Recording in Hoboken, New Jersey with Beaujour and Hatfield co-producing. The lead single, "If I Could," was released in December 2014 and was premiered in Rolling Stone. That month the album was made available for pre-order on American Laundromat Records with an announced release date of February 17, 2015. The band announced they would tour the album in the United States throughout February, visiting cities on both coasts and in the midwest, and appearing at the Bowery Ballroom in New York City, and The Roxy Theatre in Los Angeles.
In late December 2014, Stereogum named the album "one of their most anticipated albums of 2015," and on January 4, 2015, Consequence of Sound named it "one of the 50 most anticipated albums of 2015." On January 9, 2015, Hatfield was featured at Nylon.com, which wrote that the upcoming album came off as "unforced, and with its sly lyrics and mega-hooky coffeehouse-grunge aesthetic." The album's second single "Ordinary Guy" premiered on Consequence of Sound on January 14, 2015.
In 2015, Hatfield and Paul Westerberg announced that they have formed a new group, called the I Don't Cares. They released the album Wild Stab in 2016.
Since then, Hatfield has released a number of solo albums, including two albums of all cover songs, Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton-John (2018) and Juliana Hatfield Sings The Police (2019) and three albums of original work, Pussycat (2017), Weird (2019) and Blood (2021).
In 2019, Hatfield hinted that her next covers album would take on the work of an American artist, having already done an Australian (Newton-John) and an English band (The Police). In an interview for the book I'm Your Fan: The Songs of Leonard Cohen, Hatfield revealed that she was considering R.E.M. for her next cover album installment. The follow-up ended up being Electric Light Orchestra. The album, Juliana Hatfield Sings ELO, was released on November 17, 2023.
From her work with the Blake Babies to the present, Hatfield's output has been characterized by an alternation between heavy, rocking tunes and songs written in a gentler, more melodic or folk-oriented style. Hatfield has stated that in the 1990s she tried smoking cigarettes for a short time in the hope of giving her voice a rougher quality, but eventually reconciled herself with her distinctive vocal instrument.
Hatfield's musical influences are diverse, ranging from punk groups like X, The Stooges, and The Replacements to more folk-oriented rock artists like Neil Young, whose songs the Blake Babies frequently covered in live shows. Her work has also cross-fertilized with some other contemporaneous indie rock bands such as Dinosaur Jr. and Lemonheads, whose musicians are also friends of Hatfield's. From an early age, she has also had a special love for pretty-sounding pop music. In a 1998 interview, she stated, "I just always liked pop music and really good melodies and major chords. That's just the type of music that comes naturally to me". In a 1993 interview in Melody Maker magazine, Hatfield stated that her enthusiasm for the music of the pop group Wilson Phillips apparently led, at least in part, to the breakup of the Blake Babies.
Hatfield nonetheless describes herself as very shy and somewhat of a loner, and has said that "happy lyrics don't come naturally to me." She has described her music and songwriting as a form of therapy, an outlet that helps her to overcome rough periods and depression.
Hatfield has also recorded with The Lemonheads, living for a time with Evan Dando in the college neighborhood of Allston in Boston, and contributed backing vocals to recordings by Belly, Giant Sand, Susanna Hoffs, Aimee Mann, and Mary Lou Lord. She teamed up with Dando in 1999 to record Gram Parsons's song "$1,000 Wedding" on the compilation, Return of the Grievous Angel: A Tribute to Gram Parsons.
In 2001, she joined with Freda Love and Heidi Gluck (of The Pieces and The Only Children) to form the trio Some Girls, with which she performs in addition to her solo work; the group has toured the United States twice and has released two albums. The trio is another outlet for Hatfield's more lighthearted material. Their first album, entitled Feel It, was released by Koch Records in 2003. The lead single "Necessito" is a funky affirmation of the power of music, sung in a mixture of English and Spanish. Some Girls' second album, Crushing Love, was released in July 2006.
In 2007 Hatfield signed the Boston (now Austin)-based band Frank Smith to her record label, Ye Olde Records. Along with releasing their 2007 album Heavy Handed Peace and Love, Hatfield also recorded an EP with the band titled Sittin' in a Tree. The EP, produced by Frank Smith's Aaron Sinclair, features banjos, pedal steel, and other instruments normally associated with country music.
Hatfield and Matthew Caws of Nada Surf formed a band called Minor Alps whose first album, Get There, was released October 29, 2013, on Barsuk Records.
Hatfield and Paul Westerberg formed The I Don't Cares, releasing "Wild Stab" January 22, 2016, on Dry Wood Records.
Beyond her musical accomplishments, Hatfield has also guest-starred on several television shows, including The Adventures of Pete & Pete as a lunch lady and on the cult classic My So-Called Life's 1994 Christmas episode as a deceased homeless girl who has become an angel. During the mid-1990s, she was a staple on MTV's 120 Minutes alternative music program, and she performed on the Late Show with David Letterman and Late Night with Conan O'Brien in 1995.
On March 25, 2008, Hatfield began her own blog through her website titled An Arm and A Leg. The blogs lasted about a year before being removed. Each week, or thereabouts, she revealed the influences behind one of her songs.
Hatfield briefly appeared on an episode of Space Ghost Coast to Coast entitled "Surprise", which aired on June 19, 1996. Instead of being interviewed, she simply said "uhh" and then was zapped by Zorak.
Hatfield released the book When I Grow Up: A Memoir on September 22, 2008.
Hatfield has been a vegetarian for many years. She has been open about her struggles with depression, anorexia, and disordered eating. In 2008, she briefly dated musician and collaborator Ryan Adams. In 2006, she moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she continues to live. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Juliana Hatfield (born July 27, 1967) is an American musician and singer-songwriter from the Boston area, formerly of the indie rock bands Blake Babies, Some Girls, and The Lemonheads. She also fronted her own band, The Juliana Hatfield Three, along with bassist Dean Fisher and drummer Todd Philips, which was active in the mid-1990s and again in the mid-2010s. It was with the Juliana Hatfield Three that she produced her best-charting work, including the critically acclaimed albums Become What You Are (1993) and Whatever, My Love (2015) and the singles \"My Sister\" (1993) and \"Spin the Bottle\" (1994).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "She has performed and recorded as a solo artist and as one half of Minor Alps with Matthew Caws of Nada Surf. In December 2014, Paste named her cover of Elliott Smith’s \"Needle in the Hay\" number 10 in a list of the 20 Best Cover Songs of 2014. In 2014, she reformed The Juliana Hatfield Three, announcing the new album Whatever, My Love for 2015. In late December, Stereogum named the album \"one of their most anticipated albums of 2015\", and on January 4, 2015, Consequence of Sound named it \"one of the 50 most anticipated albums of 2015.\"",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In 2016, she formed a collaboration with Paul Westerberg under the moniker The I Don't Cares to release the album Wild Stab. More recently, she has released an album of original work titled Weird in 2019, sandwiched between two albums of cover songs, Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton-John (2018) and Juliana Hatfield Sings The Police (2019).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Hatfield was born in Wiscasset, Maine, to Phillip M. Hatfield, a radiologist, and Julie Hatfield, a former fashion editor for The Boston Globe. She grew up in the Boston suburb of Duxbury, Massachusetts. Despite recording a song titled \"My Sister\", Hatfield has no sisters but she does have two brothers.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Her father claimed his family descended from the West Virginia Hatfields of the Hatfield–McCoy feud following the Civil War. Her father served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Hatfield went to Duxbury High School in Duxbury, Massachusetts. She attended Boston University before transferring to Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Hatfield also attended art school at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2012 in a year-long, post-baccalaureate certificate program, to study painting.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Hatfield acquired a love of rock music during the 1970s, having been introduced by a babysitter to the music of the Los Angeles punk rock band X, which proved a life-changing experience. She was also attracted to the music of more mainstream artists like Olivia Newton-John and The Police.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "While still at Berklee College of Music in 1986, she formed the band Blake Babies with John Strohm and Freda Love. The band released 4 albums between 1987 and 1991, and gained critical notice in Rolling Stone and the Village Voice, local radio airplay and press, and label support from Mammoth Records in North Carolina. The band broke up in 1992, but had a brief reunion in 2001 to produce another album.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "After the break-up of the Blake Babies, she joined The Lemonheads as their bass player, replacing founding bassist Jesse Peretz, and played on their breakthrough album It's a Shame About Ray in 1992. She left the band after about a year, but returned in 1993 as a guest vocalist on several tracks of Come on Feel the Lemonheads.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In 1992, she released her debut solo album Hey Babe.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Her commercial breakthrough came in 1993 with the formation of the band The Juliana Hatfield Three along with high-school friend Dean Fisher on bass and former Bullet LaVolta drummer Todd Philips, with herself performing lead vocal and lead guitar duties. The band produced the album Become What You Are and two hit singles, \"My Sister\" and \"Spin the Bottle\".",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "\"My Sister\" was based on Hatfield's older brother's girlfriend, Maggie Rafferty, who lived with the family while Hatfield was in high school. She enjoyed Rafferty's eclectic record collection. Rafferty also took Hatfield to see the Del Fuegos and the Violent Femmes, which inspired her to form a band.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "\"Spin the Bottle\" was used in the soundtrack of the Hollywood film Reality Bites (1994). Hatfield also made the cover of Spin magazine.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Hatfield was profiled in a number of girls' magazines, most notably Sassy, at this time and addressed serious issues faced by young women in her songs and interviews. About this period she says: \"I was never comfortable with the attention. I thought it had come too soon. I hadn’t earned it yet.\" She gained notoriety in 1992 for saying that she was still a virgin in her mid-twenties in Interview magazine. In a 1994 interview for the magazine Vox, she said she was surprised by the effect 'outing' herself had: \"I think there are a lot of people out there who don't care about sex, but who you never hear from, so I thought I should say it. The magazine I did the interview for is full of beef-cake hunky guys and scantily-clad models, so I thought it would be really funny to say that I didn't care about sex in a magazine that's full of sex and beauty – but no one really got the joke.\"",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Over the years Hatfield's virginity became a recurring theme in her press coverage, often accompanied by speculation that she had lost her virginity to The Lemonheads' leader Evan Dando who had referred to her as his \"friend and sometimes girlfriend.\" In 2006, Hatfield sent a letter to The Weekly Dig in critique of writer Debbie Driscoll's scathing review of Soul Asylum's latest album, The Silver Lining. Kevin Dean from the newspaper responded by bringing up the subject of Hatfield losing her virginity to Dando; Hatfield fired back at Dean for bringing up her sex life, while stating that she and Dando never had sex, and that it was in fact Spike Jonze that she had lost her virginity to. She later admitted that she lost her virginity when she was 26 and \"damn ready.\"",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The Juliana Hatfield Three only remained together through 1994, by 1995 she had returned to solo status and released the album Only Everything, in which she \"turned up the volume and the distortion and had a lot of fun\". One reviewer describes it as \"a fun, engaging pop album\". The album spawned another alternative radio hit for Hatfield in \"Universal Heartbeat\". In the video Hatfield portrayed a demanding aerobics instructor. Before the tour for Only Everything, she released Phillips and hired Jason Sutter on drums, Ed Slanker on guitar, and Lisa Mednick on keyboards. Two weeks into the tour, she canceled the tour due to depression.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In her memoir, Hatfield writes that she was suffering from depression severe enough to be suicidal. She disagreed with the decision to avoid talking about her depression. The drummer was replaced by Phillips, and touring resumed with Jeff Buckley as the opening act.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In 1996, she traveled to Woodstock, New York where she recorded tracks for God's Foot, which was to be her fourth solo album (third if not counting Become What You Are, which was recorded with the Juliana Hatfield Three), intended for 1997 release. After three failures to satisfy requests by Atlantic Records to come up with a single, she asked to be released from her contract. The label obliged but kept the rights to the songs recorded during these sessions. Atlantic had paid $180,000 on the recordings. \"Mountains of Love\" and \"Fade Away\" were released on a greatest hits collection entitled Gold Stars, while \"Can't Kill Myself\" was available for download from Hatfield's website. The remaining tracks surfaced on bootlegs, which she disapproved of, and she has rarely played them live.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In 1997 Hatfield toured with Lilith Fair, an all-female rock festival founded by singer Sarah McLachlan.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "After the experience of God's Foot, and freed from her label obligations, Hatfield recorded the EP Please Do Not Disturb for the independent label Bar/None. Produced by Hatfield, the album included drummer Todd Phillips, guitarists Ed Slanker and Mike Leahy, and bassist Mikey Welsh of Weezer. The EP included \"Trying Not to Think About It,\" a tribute to her friend, deceased musician Jeff Buckley.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Almost as a reaction to the seemingly endless studio sessions surrounding God's Foot, Hatfield recorded the album Bed in 1998 in six days, about which she said on her website, \"It sounds as raw as I felt. It has no pretty sheen. The mistakes and unattractive parts were left in, not erased. Just like my career. Just like life.\"",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In 2000, she released Beautiful Creature. This album left the rockier side of Hatfield's musical personality unexpressed, however, so simultaneously she released Juliana's Pony: Total System Failure with Zephan Courtney and Mikey Welsh. She called the latter album \"a loud release of tension\" with \"lots of long sloppy guitar solos. And no love songs...a not-at-all attractive reaction to the ugly side of humanity, specifically American culture.\" Billboard called the first \"a collection of plaintive demos\" and the second \"chock-a-block with punk guitar missives.\" Juliana's Pony: Total System Failure was panned by some critics who preferred the more acoustic Beautiful Creature. On Beautiful Creature, Hatfield worked with musician Davíd Garza who co-produced much of the album. Wally Gagel, a producer for Sebadoh and Tanya Donelly, helped Hatfield record her most electronica-influenced songs, \"Cool Rock Boy\" and \"Don't Rush Me\", which added texture to the otherwise acoustic album.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "In 2002, Hatfield released Gold Stars 1992–2002: The Juliana Hatfield Collection. It contained singles from her solo albums, two songs from the unreleased God's Foot, a cover of Neil Young's \"Only Love Can Break Your Heart\", and new songs.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In 2004, Hatfield released In Exile Deo, an attempt at a more commercial sound with input from producers and engineers who had worked with Pink and Avril Lavigne. Hatfield produced the album with David Leonard, receiving co-production credits on \"Jamie's in Town\" and the bright rocker \"Sunshine\". The critics praised it, with some calling it her best work since the start of her solo career.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "By contrast, the 2005 album Made in China was recorded in Bellows Falls, Vermont and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was released on her own record label, Ye Olde Records. The record had a much rawer feel, with Hatfield playing instruments accompanied by the band Unbusted and other contributors. For the first time, Hatfield also played drums on at least one track.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "John Doe of the band X described the disc as \"a frighteningly dark and beautiful record filled with stark, angular, truly brutal songs and guitars. This is surely a 'Woman Under the Influence', though I'm not sure of what.\" Reviews were mixed, with some liking the lo-fi sound and others seeing it as slackness.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The release of Made in China started a trend where Hatfield licensed her music, selling it via her website and with a distribution deal through Red Eye.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In December 2005, Hatfield toured the United States with the band X, whom she idolized during her teenage years.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In 2006, Hatfield released her first live album. Titled The White Broken Line: Live Recordings, the album featured performances from her tour with X. It was Hatfield's third release for her record label.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Hatfield's 9th studio album, How to Walk Away, was released on August 19, 2008, on Ye Olde Records. The album's heartfelt subject on the break-up of a relationship resonated with critics, who gave the album largely positive reviews, with some hailing it as her best album since In Exile Deo.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Hatfield returned two years later as her 10th studio album Peace & Love was released on Ye Olde Records, February 16, 2010. The album's composition, arrangement, performance, production, engineering, and mixing were solely credited to Hatfield. The album received mixed reviews, with several complaining the album's low-key moody nature working against the potential of the songs.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Hatfield offered, via her website, to write custom songs in order to fund a couple of projects; one of which was to release archive material. About halfway through the project, Hatfield stated that it had \"completely re-energized and inspired\" her again.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "In October 2010, Hatfield and Evan Dando played two sold-out acoustic live shows together at The Mercury Lounge in New York. The following month, the duo played sold-out shows in Allston. This tour was followed in January 2011 by five dates on the American East Coast.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In April 2011, Hatfield announced her intention to work on a new album via fan-funding platform website PledgeMusic, from which she asked fans to help fund the project in exchange for personal artwork and memorabilia ranging from posters, CDs, and demos to one of Juliana's First Act guitars (used during the recording sessions) and even locks of her hair. The project also included donations for the Save a Sato foundation to which Hatfield is a major contributor. Fan response was enthusiastic, going over 400% of the original project cost. The album was originally going to be titled Speeches Delivered to Animals and Plants, in reference to a passage in the John Irving novel The World According to Garp, but later Hatfield herself changed it to There's Always Another Girl, in reference to a song in the album of the same name she had written as a defense for Lindsay Lohan after watching her flop I Know Who Killed Me.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "There's Always Another Girl was released on August 30, 2011, again independently on her Ye Olde Records label, though a downloadable version was made available to contributors a month before on July 27, which was Juliana's birthday. The album has received mostly positive reviews from critics.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "On August 28, 2012, Juliana Hatfield released a covers record titled Juliana Hatfield on her Ye Olde Records label. The album features covers of songs originally performed by The Who, Liz Phair, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Ryan Adams, I Blame Coco, and Led Zeppelin.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "As of July 2013, Juliana Hatfield has finished recording her thirteenth solo album, Wild Animals, with crowd-funding—for the third time—through PledgeMusic.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "In December 2014, Paste Magazine named her track \"Needle in the Hay,\" an Elliott Smith cover, as No. 10 one of the \"20 Best Cover Songs of 2014.\" The review called the cover \"a more upbeat, approachable take on Smith’s disparate, wrought-iron classic. But even though it now employs bass, drums, tambourine and synth, the songs stays true to the sorrowful, tension-riddled original.\" Also that month, SPIN Magazine named the cover one of the \"40 Best 2014 Songs by 1994 Artists ,\" where it came it at No. 36. The review stated \"The tempo's a bit quicker, and she double-tracks herself for the song’s entirety. But the (tasteful) inclusion of chintzy drum programming and mellotron cleverly point to Smith's eventual creative direction.\"",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "In 2014, The Juliana Hatfield Three reunited two decades after it disbanded. She used PledgeMusic to raise funds for the new album, titled Whatever, My Love, the trio's first since 1993's Become What You Are. Hatfield said, \"We haven't totally reinvented the wheel or anything,\" and that the tracks exhibit the \"stuff I am sort of known for, I guess. But I am a lot more confident now than I was then with the first album. And I had more fun recording this one.\" The twelve tracks for Whatever, My Love were recorded at Nuthouse Recording in Hoboken, New Jersey with Beaujour and Hatfield co-producing. The lead single, \"If I Could,\" was released in December 2014 and was premiered in Rolling Stone. That month the album was made available for pre-order on American Laundromat Records with an announced release date of February 17, 2015. The band announced they would tour the album in the United States throughout February, visiting cities on both coasts and in the midwest, and appearing at the Bowery Ballroom in New York City, and The Roxy Theatre in Los Angeles.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "In late December 2014, Stereogum named the album \"one of their most anticipated albums of 2015,\" and on January 4, 2015, Consequence of Sound named it \"one of the 50 most anticipated albums of 2015.\" On January 9, 2015, Hatfield was featured at Nylon.com, which wrote that the upcoming album came off as \"unforced, and with its sly lyrics and mega-hooky coffeehouse-grunge aesthetic.\" The album's second single \"Ordinary Guy\" premiered on Consequence of Sound on January 14, 2015.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "In 2015, Hatfield and Paul Westerberg announced that they have formed a new group, called the I Don't Cares. They released the album Wild Stab in 2016.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Since then, Hatfield has released a number of solo albums, including two albums of all cover songs, Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton-John (2018) and Juliana Hatfield Sings The Police (2019) and three albums of original work, Pussycat (2017), Weird (2019) and Blood (2021).",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "In 2019, Hatfield hinted that her next covers album would take on the work of an American artist, having already done an Australian (Newton-John) and an English band (The Police). In an interview for the book I'm Your Fan: The Songs of Leonard Cohen, Hatfield revealed that she was considering R.E.M. for her next cover album installment. The follow-up ended up being Electric Light Orchestra. The album, Juliana Hatfield Sings ELO, was released on November 17, 2023.",
"title": "Music career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "From her work with the Blake Babies to the present, Hatfield's output has been characterized by an alternation between heavy, rocking tunes and songs written in a gentler, more melodic or folk-oriented style. Hatfield has stated that in the 1990s she tried smoking cigarettes for a short time in the hope of giving her voice a rougher quality, but eventually reconciled herself with her distinctive vocal instrument.",
"title": "Musical style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Hatfield's musical influences are diverse, ranging from punk groups like X, The Stooges, and The Replacements to more folk-oriented rock artists like Neil Young, whose songs the Blake Babies frequently covered in live shows. Her work has also cross-fertilized with some other contemporaneous indie rock bands such as Dinosaur Jr. and Lemonheads, whose musicians are also friends of Hatfield's. From an early age, she has also had a special love for pretty-sounding pop music. In a 1998 interview, she stated, \"I just always liked pop music and really good melodies and major chords. That's just the type of music that comes naturally to me\". In a 1993 interview in Melody Maker magazine, Hatfield stated that her enthusiasm for the music of the pop group Wilson Phillips apparently led, at least in part, to the breakup of the Blake Babies.",
"title": "Musical style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Hatfield nonetheless describes herself as very shy and somewhat of a loner, and has said that \"happy lyrics don't come naturally to me.\" She has described her music and songwriting as a form of therapy, an outlet that helps her to overcome rough periods and depression.",
"title": "Musical style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Hatfield has also recorded with The Lemonheads, living for a time with Evan Dando in the college neighborhood of Allston in Boston, and contributed backing vocals to recordings by Belly, Giant Sand, Susanna Hoffs, Aimee Mann, and Mary Lou Lord. She teamed up with Dando in 1999 to record Gram Parsons's song \"$1,000 Wedding\" on the compilation, Return of the Grievous Angel: A Tribute to Gram Parsons.",
"title": "Collaborations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "In 2001, she joined with Freda Love and Heidi Gluck (of The Pieces and The Only Children) to form the trio Some Girls, with which she performs in addition to her solo work; the group has toured the United States twice and has released two albums. The trio is another outlet for Hatfield's more lighthearted material. Their first album, entitled Feel It, was released by Koch Records in 2003. The lead single \"Necessito\" is a funky affirmation of the power of music, sung in a mixture of English and Spanish. Some Girls' second album, Crushing Love, was released in July 2006.",
"title": "Collaborations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "In 2007 Hatfield signed the Boston (now Austin)-based band Frank Smith to her record label, Ye Olde Records. Along with releasing their 2007 album Heavy Handed Peace and Love, Hatfield also recorded an EP with the band titled Sittin' in a Tree. The EP, produced by Frank Smith's Aaron Sinclair, features banjos, pedal steel, and other instruments normally associated with country music.",
"title": "Collaborations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Hatfield and Matthew Caws of Nada Surf formed a band called Minor Alps whose first album, Get There, was released October 29, 2013, on Barsuk Records.",
"title": "Collaborations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Hatfield and Paul Westerberg formed The I Don't Cares, releasing \"Wild Stab\" January 22, 2016, on Dry Wood Records.",
"title": "Collaborations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Beyond her musical accomplishments, Hatfield has also guest-starred on several television shows, including The Adventures of Pete & Pete as a lunch lady and on the cult classic My So-Called Life's 1994 Christmas episode as a deceased homeless girl who has become an angel. During the mid-1990s, she was a staple on MTV's 120 Minutes alternative music program, and she performed on the Late Show with David Letterman and Late Night with Conan O'Brien in 1995.",
"title": "Writing and acting"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "On March 25, 2008, Hatfield began her own blog through her website titled An Arm and A Leg. The blogs lasted about a year before being removed. Each week, or thereabouts, she revealed the influences behind one of her songs.",
"title": "Writing and acting"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Hatfield briefly appeared on an episode of Space Ghost Coast to Coast entitled \"Surprise\", which aired on June 19, 1996. Instead of being interviewed, she simply said \"uhh\" and then was zapped by Zorak.",
"title": "Writing and acting"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Hatfield released the book When I Grow Up: A Memoir on September 22, 2008.",
"title": "Writing and acting"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Hatfield has been a vegetarian for many years. She has been open about her struggles with depression, anorexia, and disordered eating. In 2008, she briefly dated musician and collaborator Ryan Adams. In 2006, she moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she continues to live.",
"title": "Personal life"
}
]
| Juliana Hatfield is an American musician and singer-songwriter from the Boston area, formerly of the indie rock bands Blake Babies, Some Girls, and The Lemonheads. She also fronted her own band, The Juliana Hatfield Three, along with bassist Dean Fisher and drummer Todd Philips, which was active in the mid-1990s and again in the mid-2010s. It was with the Juliana Hatfield Three that she produced her best-charting work, including the critically acclaimed albums Become What You Are (1993) and Whatever, My Love (2015) and the singles "My Sister" (1993) and "Spin the Bottle" (1994). She has performed and recorded as a solo artist and as one half of Minor Alps with Matthew Caws of Nada Surf. In December 2014, Paste named her cover of Elliott Smith’s "Needle in the Hay" number 10 in a list of the 20 Best Cover Songs of 2014. In 2014, she reformed The Juliana Hatfield Three, announcing the new album Whatever, My Love for 2015. In late December, Stereogum named the album "one of their most anticipated albums of 2015", and on January 4, 2015, Consequence of Sound named it "one of the 50 most anticipated albums of 2015." In 2016, she formed a collaboration with Paul Westerberg under the moniker The I Don't Cares to release the album Wild Stab. More recently, she has released an album of original work titled Weird in 2019, sandwiched between two albums of cover songs, Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton-John (2018) and Juliana Hatfield Sings The Police (2019). | 2001-10-27T06:21:54Z | 2023-12-26T02:29:05Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juliana_Hatfield |
16,263 | Joint Political Military Group | On November 29, 1983 a memorandum of agreement was set up between Israel and the United States regarding political, military and economic cooperation. Part of the agreement was for a Joint Political Military Group (JPMG) as a high-level planning forum to discuss and implement combined planning, joint exercises, and logistics. The JPMG is co-chaired by the director general of the Israeli Ministry of Defense and the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs. The JPMG meets biannually, alternating between Israel and the United States.
The JPMG was originally intended to discuss means of countering Soviet involvement in the Middle East. But more recently the concern has been over the spread of chemical weapons and ballistic missiles.
Military relations between the United States and Israel improved under the Reagan Administration. The Reagan Administration sought to build an "anti-Soviet strategic consensus in the Middle East." At the time, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Israeli Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon signed a memorandum of understanding in 1981 "establishing a framework for continued consultation and cooperation to enhance" national security. This agreement led to the establishment of the Joint Political Military Group, which has since met regularly to "address" foreign military sales to Israel, joint exercises and simulations, and logistical arrangements. Joint air and sea exercises started in 1984.
As part of the agreement, the United States and Israel meet twice a year to honor the obligations of the memorandum of understanding. In 2001 an annual "inter-agency strategic dialogue" including representatives from all areas of defense and intelligence was created. | [
{
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"text": "On November 29, 1983 a memorandum of agreement was set up between Israel and the United States regarding political, military and economic cooperation. Part of the agreement was for a Joint Political Military Group (JPMG) as a high-level planning forum to discuss and implement combined planning, joint exercises, and logistics. The JPMG is co-chaired by the director general of the Israeli Ministry of Defense and the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs. The JPMG meets biannually, alternating between Israel and the United States.",
"title": ""
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"text": "The JPMG was originally intended to discuss means of countering Soviet involvement in the Middle East. But more recently the concern has been over the spread of chemical weapons and ballistic missiles.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Military relations between the United States and Israel improved under the Reagan Administration. The Reagan Administration sought to build an \"anti-Soviet strategic consensus in the Middle East.\" At the time, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Israeli Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon signed a memorandum of understanding in 1981 \"establishing a framework for continued consultation and cooperation to enhance\" national security. This agreement led to the establishment of the Joint Political Military Group, which has since met regularly to \"address\" foreign military sales to Israel, joint exercises and simulations, and logistical arrangements. Joint air and sea exercises started in 1984.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "As part of the agreement, the United States and Israel meet twice a year to honor the obligations of the memorandum of understanding. In 2001 an annual \"inter-agency strategic dialogue\" including representatives from all areas of defense and intelligence was created.",
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"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "",
"title": "References"
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"paragraph_id": 5,
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| On November 29, 1983 a memorandum of agreement was set up between Israel and the United States regarding political, military and economic cooperation. Part of the agreement was for a Joint Political Military Group (JPMG) as a high-level planning forum to discuss and implement combined planning, joint exercises, and logistics. The JPMG is co-chaired by the director general of the Israeli Ministry of Defense and the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs. The JPMG meets biannually, alternating between Israel and the United States. The JPMG was originally intended to discuss means of countering Soviet involvement in the Middle East. But more recently the concern has been over the spread of chemical weapons and ballistic missiles. | 2020-03-15T20:57:15Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Political_Military_Group |
|
16,265 | Jug (disambiguation) | A jug is a type of container commonly used to hold a liquid.
Jug or JUG may also refer to: | [
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| A jug is a type of container commonly used to hold a liquid. Jug or JUG may also refer to: | 2001-10-26T16:59:18Z | 2023-07-27T14:42:24Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jug_(disambiguation) |
16,266 | John William Polidori | John William Polidori (7 September 1795 – 24 August 1821) was a British writer and physician. He is known for his associations with the Romantic movement and credited by some as the creator of the vampire genre of fantasy fiction. His most successful work was the short story "The Vampyre" (1819), the first published modern vampire story. Although the story was at first erroneously credited to Lord Byron, both Byron and Polidori affirmed that the author was Polidori.
John William Polidori was born on 7 September 1795 in Westminster, the oldest son of Gaetano Polidori, an Italian political émigré scholar, and his wife Anna Maria Pierce, an English governess. He had three brothers and four sisters.
His sister Frances Polidori, married the exiled Italian scholar Gabriele Rossetti, and thus Polidori, posthumously, became the uncle of Maria Francesca Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, and Christina Georgina Rossetti. William Michael Rossetti published Polidori's journal in 1911.
Polidori was one of the earliest pupils at the recently established Ampleforth College in North Yorkshire from 1804. In 1810 he went up to the University of Edinburgh, where he wrote a thesis on sleepwalking and received his degree as a doctor of medicine on 1 August 1815, at the age of 19.
In 1816, which became known as the Year Without a Summer, Polidori entered Lord Byron's service as his personal physician and accompanied him on a trip through Europe. Publisher John Murray offered Polidori 500 English pounds to keep a diary of their travels, which Polidori's nephew William Michael Rossetti later edited. At the Villa Diodati, a house Byron rented by Lake Geneva in Switzerland, the pair met with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, her husband-to-be, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and their companion (Mary's stepsister) Claire Clairmont.
One night in June after the company had read aloud from Fantasmagoriana, a French collection of German horror tales, Byron suggested they each write a ghost story. Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote "A Fragment of a Ghost Story" and wrote down five ghost stories recounted by Matthew Gregory "Monk" Lewis, published posthumously as the Journal at Geneva (including ghost stories) and on return to England, 1816, the journal entries beginning on 18 August 1816. Mary Shelley worked on a tale that would later evolve into Frankenstein. Byron wrote (and quickly abandoned) a fragment of a story, "A Fragment", featuring the main character Augustus Darvell, which Polidori used later as the basis for his own tale, "The Vampyre", the first published modern vampire story in English.
Polidori's conversation with Percy Bysshe Shelley on 15 June 1816, as recounted in The Diary, is regarded as the origin or genesis of Frankenstein. They discussed "the nature of the principle of life": "June 15 - ... Shelley etc. came in the evening ... Afterwards, Shelley and I had a conversation about principles — whether man was to be thought merely an instrument."
Dismissed by Byron, Polidori travelled in Italy and then returned to England. His story, "The Vampyre", which featured the main character Lord Ruthven, was published in the April 1819 issue of New Monthly Magazine without his permission. Whilst in London he lived on Great Pulteney Street in Soho. Much to both his and Byron's chagrin, "The Vampyre" was released as a new work by Byron. Byron's own vampire story "Fragment of a Novel" or "A Fragment" was published in 1819 in an attempt to clear up the confusion, but, for better or worse, "The Vampyre" continued to be attributed to him.
Polidori's long, Byron-influenced theological poem The Fall of the Angels was published anonymously in 1821.
Polidori died at his father's London house on 24 August 1821, weighed down by depression and gambling debts. Despite conjecture from his family that he died by suicide by means of prussic acid, the coroner gave a verdict of death by natural causes.
His sister Charlotte transcribed Polidori's diaries, but censored "peccant passages" and destroyed the original. Based only on the transcription, The Diary of John Polidori was edited by William Michael Rossetti and first published in 1911 by Elkin Mathews (London). Reprints of this book, The Diary of Dr. John William Polidori, 1816, relating to Byron, Shelley, etc., was published by Folcroft Library Editions (Folcroft, PA) in 1975, and by Norwood Editions (Norwood, PA) in 1978. A new edition of The Diary of John William Polidori was reprinted by Cornell University in 2009.
A memorial plaque on Polidori's home at 38 Great Pulteney Street was unveiled on 15 July 1998 by the Italian Ambassador, Paolo Galli.
Multiple films have depicted John Polidori, and the genesis of the Frankenstein and "Vampyre" stories in 1816:
Additionally, Polidori's name was used for fictional characters in the following films: | [
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"text": "One night in June after the company had read aloud from Fantasmagoriana, a French collection of German horror tales, Byron suggested they each write a ghost story. Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote \"A Fragment of a Ghost Story\" and wrote down five ghost stories recounted by Matthew Gregory \"Monk\" Lewis, published posthumously as the Journal at Geneva (including ghost stories) and on return to England, 1816, the journal entries beginning on 18 August 1816. Mary Shelley worked on a tale that would later evolve into Frankenstein. Byron wrote (and quickly abandoned) a fragment of a story, \"A Fragment\", featuring the main character Augustus Darvell, which Polidori used later as the basis for his own tale, \"The Vampyre\", the first published modern vampire story in English.",
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"text": "Dismissed by Byron, Polidori travelled in Italy and then returned to England. His story, \"The Vampyre\", which featured the main character Lord Ruthven, was published in the April 1819 issue of New Monthly Magazine without his permission. Whilst in London he lived on Great Pulteney Street in Soho. Much to both his and Byron's chagrin, \"The Vampyre\" was released as a new work by Byron. Byron's own vampire story \"Fragment of a Novel\" or \"A Fragment\" was published in 1819 in an attempt to clear up the confusion, but, for better or worse, \"The Vampyre\" continued to be attributed to him.",
"title": "Biography"
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"text": "Polidori's long, Byron-influenced theological poem The Fall of the Angels was published anonymously in 1821.",
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"text": "Polidori died at his father's London house on 24 August 1821, weighed down by depression and gambling debts. Despite conjecture from his family that he died by suicide by means of prussic acid, the coroner gave a verdict of death by natural causes.",
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"title": "Legacy"
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"text": "Additionally, Polidori's name was used for fictional characters in the following films:",
"title": "Legacy"
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| John William Polidori was a British writer and physician. He is known for his associations with the Romantic movement and credited by some as the creator of the vampire genre of fantasy fiction. His most successful work was the short story "The Vampyre" (1819), the first published modern vampire story. Although the story was at first erroneously credited to Lord Byron, both Byron and Polidori affirmed that the author was Polidori. | 2001-10-31T17:28:17Z | 2023-12-28T18:42:19Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_William_Polidori |
16,267 | Joke | A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, and ends in a punch line, whereby the humorous element of the story is revealed; this can be done using a pun or other type of word play, irony or sarcasm, logical incompatibility, hyperbole, or other means. Linguist Robert Hetzron offers the definition:
A joke is a short humorous piece of oral literature in which the funniness culminates in the final sentence, called the punchline… In fact, the main condition is that the tension should reach its highest level at the very end. No continuation relieving the tension should be added. As for its being "oral," it is true that jokes may appear printed, but when further transferred, there is no obligation to reproduce the text verbatim, as in the case of poetry.
It is generally held that jokes benefit from brevity, containing no more detail than is needed to set the scene for the punchline at the end. In the case of riddle jokes or one-liners, the setting is implicitly understood, leaving only the dialogue and punchline to be verbalised. However, subverting these and other common guidelines can also be a source of humour—the shaggy dog story is an example of an anti-joke; although presented as a joke, it contains a long drawn-out narrative of time, place and character, rambles through many pointless inclusions and finally fails to deliver a punchline. Jokes are a form of humour, but not all humour is in the form of a joke. Some humorous forms which are not verbal jokes are: involuntary humour, situational humour, practical jokes, slapstick and anecdotes.
Identified as one of the simple forms of oral literature by the Dutch linguist André Jolles, jokes are passed along anonymously. They are told in both private and public settings; a single person tells a joke to his friend in the natural flow of conversation, or a set of jokes is told to a group as part of scripted entertainment. Jokes are also passed along in written form or, more recently, through the internet.
Stand-up comics, comedians and slapstick work with comic timing and rhythm in their performance, and may rely on actions as well as on the verbal punchline to evoke laughter. This distinction has been formulated in the popular saying "A comic says funny things; a comedian says things funny".
Any joke documented from the past has been saved through happenstance rather than design. Jokes do not belong to refined culture, but rather to the entertainment and leisure of all classes. As such, any printed versions were considered ephemera, i.e., temporary documents created for a specific purpose and intended to be thrown away. Many of these early jokes deal with scatological and sexual topics, entertaining to all social classes but not to be valued and saved.
Various kinds of jokes have been identified in ancient pre-classical texts. The oldest identified joke is an ancient Sumerian proverb from 1900 BC containing toilet humour: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." Its records were dated to the Old Babylonian period and the joke may go as far back as 2300 BC. The second oldest joke found, discovered on the Westcar Papyrus and believed to be about Sneferu, was from Ancient Egypt c. 1600 BC: "How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish." The tale of the three ox drivers from Adab completes the three known oldest jokes in the world. This is a comic triple dating back to 1200 BC Adab. It concerns three men seeking justice from a king on the matter of ownership over a newborn calf, for whose birth they all consider themselves to be partially responsible. The king seeks advice from a priestess on how to rule the case, and she suggests a series of events involving the men's households and wives. The final portion of the story (which included the punch line), has not survived intact, though legible fragments suggest it was bawdy in nature.
Jokes can be notoriously difficult to translate from language to language; particularly puns, which depend on specific words and not just on their meanings. For instance, Julius Caesar once sold land at a surprisingly cheap price to his lover Servilia, who was rumoured to be prostituting her daughter Tertia to Caesar in order to keep his favour. Cicero remarked that "conparavit Servilia hunc fundum tertia deducta." The punny phrase, "tertia deducta", can be translated as "with one-third off (in price)", or "with Tertia putting out."
The earliest extant joke book is the Philogelos (Greek for The Laughter-Lover), a collection of 265 jokes written in crude ancient Greek dating to the fourth or fifth century AD. The author of the collection is obscure and a number of different authors are attributed to it, including "Hierokles and Philagros the grammatikos", just "Hierokles", or, in the Suda, "Philistion". British classicist Mary Beard states that the Philogelos may have been intended as a jokester's handbook of quips to say on the fly, rather than a book meant to be read straight through. Many of the jokes in this collection are surprisingly familiar, even though the typical protagonists are less recognisable to contemporary readers: the absent-minded professor, the eunuch, and people with hernias or bad breath. The Philogelos even contains a joke similar to Monty Python's "Dead Parrot Sketch".
During the 15th century, the printing revolution spread across Europe following the development of the movable type printing press. This was coupled with the growth of literacy in all social classes. Printers turned out Jestbooks along with Bibles to meet both lowbrow and highbrow interests of the populace. One early anthology of jokes was the Facetiae by the Italian Poggio Bracciolini, first published in 1470. The popularity of this jest book can be measured on the twenty editions of the book documented alone for the 15th century. Another popular form was a collection of jests, jokes and funny situations attributed to a single character in a more connected, narrative form of the picaresque novel. Examples of this are the characters of Rabelais in France, Till Eulenspiegel in Germany, Lazarillo de Tormes in Spain and Master Skelton in England. There is also a jest book ascribed to William Shakespeare, the contents of which appear to both inform and borrow from his plays. All of these early jestbooks corroborate both the rise in the literacy of the European populations and the general quest for leisure activities during the Renaissance in Europe.
The practice of printers using jokes and cartoons as page fillers was also widely used in the broadsides and chapbooks of the 19th century and earlier. With the increase in literacy in the general population and the growth of the printing industry, these publications were the most common forms of printed material between the 16th and 19th centuries throughout Europe and North America. Along with reports of events, executions, ballads and verse, they also contained jokes. Only one of many broadsides archived in the Harvard library is described as "1706. Grinning made easy; or, Funny Dick's unrivalled collection of curious, comical, odd, droll, humorous, witty, whimsical, laughable, and eccentric jests, jokes, bulls, epigrams, &c. With many other descriptions of wit and humour." These cheap publications, ephemera intended for mass distribution, were read alone, read aloud, posted and discarded.
There are many types of joke books in print today; a search on the internet provides a plethora of titles available for purchase. They can be read alone for solitary entertainment, or used to stock up on new jokes to entertain friends. Some people try to find a deeper meaning in jokes, as in "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar... Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes". However a deeper meaning is not necessary to appreciate their inherent entertainment value. Magazines frequently use jokes and cartoons as filler for the printed page. Reader's Digest closes out many articles with an (unrelated) joke at the bottom of the article. The New Yorker was first published in 1925 with the stated goal of being a "sophisticated humour magazine" and is still known for its cartoons.
Telling a joke is a cooperative effort; it requires that the teller and the audience mutually agree in one form or another to understand the narrative which follows as a joke. In a study of conversation analysis, the sociologist Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in the telling of a single joke. "This telling is composed, as for stories, of three serially ordered and adjacently placed types of sequences … the preface [framing], the telling, and the response sequences." Folklorists expand this to include the context of the joking. Who is telling what jokes to whom? And why is he telling them when? The context of the joke-telling in turn leads into a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who engage in institutionalised banter and joking.
Framing is done with a (frequently formulaic) expression which keys the audience in to expect a joke. "Have you heard the one…", "Reminds me of a joke I heard…", "So, a lawyer and a doctor…"; these conversational markers are just a few examples of linguistic frames used to start a joke. Regardless of the frame used, it creates a social space and clear boundaries around the narrative which follows. Audience response to this initial frame can be acknowledgement and anticipation of the joke to follow. It can also be a dismissal, as in "this is no joking matter" or "this is no time for jokes".
The performance frame serves to label joke-telling as a culturally marked form of communication. Both the performer and audience understand it to be set apart from the "real" world. "An elephant walks into a bar…"; a person sufficiently familiar with both the English language and the way jokes are told automatically understands that such a compressed and formulaic story, being told with no substantiating details, and placing an unlikely combination of characters into an unlikely setting and involving them in an unrealistic plot, is the start of a joke, and the story that follows is not meant to be taken at face value (i.e. it is non-bona-fide communication). The framing itself invokes a play mode; if the audience is unable or unwilling to move into play, then nothing will seem funny.
Following its linguistic framing the joke, in the form of a story, can be told. It is not required to be verbatim text like other forms of oral literature such as riddles and proverbs. The teller can and does modify the text of the joke, depending both on memory and the present audience. The important characteristic is that the narrative is succinct, containing only those details which lead directly to an understanding and decoding of the punchline. This requires that it support the same (or similar) divergent scripts which are to be embodied in the punchline.
The narrative always contains a protagonist who becomes the "butt" or target of the joke. This labelling serves to develop and solidify stereotypes within the culture. It also enables researchers to group and analyse the creation, persistence and interpretation of joke cycles around a certain character. Some people are naturally better performers than others; however, anyone can tell a joke because the comic trigger is contained in the narrative text and punchline. A joke poorly told is still funny, unless errors or omissions make the intended relationship between the narrative and the punchline unintelligible.
The punchline is intended to make the audience laugh. A linguistic interpretation of this punchline/response is elucidated by Victor Raskin in his Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour. Humour is evoked when a trigger contained in the punchline causes the audience to abruptly shift its understanding of the story from the primary (or more obvious) interpretation to a secondary, opposing interpretation. "The punchline is the pivot on which the joke text turns as it signals the shift between the [semantic] scripts necessary to interpret [re-interpret] the joke text." To produce the humour in the verbal joke, the two interpretations (i.e. scripts) need to both be compatible with the joke text and opposite or incompatible with each other. Thomas R. Shultz, a psychologist, independently expands Raskin's linguistic theory to include "two stages of incongruity: perception and resolution." He explains that "… incongruity alone is insufficient to account for the structure of humour. […] Within this framework, humour appreciation is conceptualized as a biphasic sequence involving first the discovery of incongruity followed by a resolution of the incongruity." In the case of a joke, that resolution generates laughter.
This is the point at which the field of neurolinguistics offers some insight into the cognitive processing involved in this abrupt laughter at the punchline. Studies by the cognitive science researchers Coulson and Kutas directly address the theory of script switching articulated by Raskin in their work. The article "Getting it: Human event-related brain response to jokes in good and poor comprehenders" measures brain activity in response to reading jokes. Additional studies by others in the field support more generally the theory of two-stage processing of humour, as evidenced in the longer processing time they require. In the related field of neuroscience, it has been shown that the expression of laughter is caused by two partially independent neuronal pathways: an "involuntary" or "emotionally driven" system and a "voluntary" system. This study adds credence to the common experience when exposed to an off-colour joke; a laugh is followed in the next breath by a disclaimer: "Oh, that's bad…" Here the multiple steps in cognition are clearly evident in the stepped response, the perception being processed just a breath faster than the resolution of the moral/ethical content in the joke.
Expected response to a joke is laughter. The joke teller hopes the audience "gets it" and is entertained. This leads to the premise that a joke is actually an "understanding test" between individuals and groups. If the listeners do not get the joke, they are not understanding the two scripts which are contained in the narrative as they were intended. Or they do "get it" and do not laugh; it might be too obscene, too gross or too dumb for the current audience. A woman might respond differently to a joke told by a male colleague around the water cooler than she would to the same joke overheard in a women's lavatory. A joke involving toilet humour may be funnier told on the playground at elementary school than on a college campus. The same joke will elicit different responses in different settings. The punchline in the joke remains the same, however, it is more or less appropriate depending on the current context.
The context explores the specific social situation in which joking occurs. The narrator automatically modifies the text of the joke to be acceptable to different audiences, while at the same time supporting the same divergent scripts in the punchline. The vocabulary used in telling the same joke at a university fraternity party and to one's grandmother might well vary. In each situation, it is important to identify both the narrator and the audience as well as their relationship with each other. This varies to reflect the complexities of a matrix of different social factors: age, sex, race, ethnicity, kinship, political views, religion, power relationships, etc. When all the potential combinations of such factors between the narrator and the audience are considered, then a single joke can take on infinite shades of meaning for each unique social setting.
The context, however, should not be confused with the function of the joking. "Function is essentially an abstraction made on the basis of a number of contexts". In one long-term observation of men coming off the late shift at a local café, joking with the waitresses was used to ascertain sexual availability for the evening. Different types of jokes, going from general to topical into explicitly sexual humour signalled openness on the part of the waitress for a connection. This study describes how jokes and joking are used to communicate much more than just good humour. That is a single example of the function of joking in a social setting, but there are others. Sometimes jokes are used simply to get to know someone better. What makes them laugh, what do they find funny? Jokes concerning politics, religion or sexual topics can be used effectively to gauge the attitude of the audience to any one of these topics. They can also be used as a marker of group identity, signalling either inclusion or exclusion for the group. Among pre-adolescents, "dirty" jokes allow them to share information about their changing bodies. And sometimes joking is just simple entertainment for a group of friends.
The context of joking in turn leads to a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who take part in institutionalised banter and joking. These relationships can be either one-way or a mutual back and forth between partners.
The joking relationship is defined as a peculiar combination of friendliness and antagonism. The behaviour is such that in any other social context it would express and arouse hostility; but it is not meant seriously and must not be taken seriously. There is a pretence of hostility along with a real friendliness. To put it in another way, the relationship is one of permitted disrespect.
Joking relationships were first described by anthropologists within kinship groups in Africa. But they have since been identified in cultures around the world, where jokes and joking are used to mark and reinforce appropriate boundaries of a relationship.
The advent of electronic communications at the end of the 20th century introduced new traditions into jokes. A verbal joke or cartoon is emailed to a friend or posted on a bulletin board; reactions include a replied email with a :-) or LOL, or a forward on to further recipients. Interaction is limited to the computer screen and for the most part solitary. While preserving the text of a joke, both context and variants are lost in internet joking; for the most part, emailed jokes are passed along verbatim. The framing of the joke frequently occurs in the subject line: "RE: laugh for the day" or something similar. The forward of an email joke can increase the number of recipients exponentially.
Internet joking forces a re-evaluation of social spaces and social groups. They are no longer only defined by physical presence and locality, they also exist in the connectivity in cyberspace. "The computer networks appear to make possible communities that, although physically dispersed, display attributes of the direct, unconstrained, unofficial exchanges folklorists typically concern themselves with". This is particularly evident in the spread of topical jokes, "that genre of lore in which whole crops of jokes spring up seemingly overnight around some sensational event … flourish briefly and then disappear, as the mass media move on to fresh maimings and new collective tragedies". This correlates with the new understanding of the internet as an "active folkloric space" with evolving social and cultural forces and clearly identifiable performers and audiences.
A study by the folklorist Bill Ellis documented how an evolving cycle was circulated over the internet. By accessing message boards that specialised in humour immediately following the 9/11 disaster, Ellis was able to observe in real-time both the topical jokes being posted electronically and responses to the jokes.
Previous folklore research has been limited to collecting and documenting successful jokes, and only after they had emerged and come to folklorists' attention. Now, an Internet-enhanced collection creates a time machine, as it were, where we can observe what happens in the period before the risible moment, when attempts at humour are unsuccessful
Access to archived message boards also enables us to track the development of a single joke thread in the context of a more complicated virtual conversation.
A joke cycle is a collection of jokes about a single target or situation which displays consistent narrative structure and type of humour. Some well-known cycles are elephant jokes using nonsense humour, dead baby jokes incorporating black humour, and light bulb jokes, which describe all kinds of operational stupidity. Joke cycles can centre on ethnic groups, professions (viola jokes), catastrophes, settings (…walks into a bar), absurd characters (wind-up dolls), or logical mechanisms which generate the humour (knock-knock jokes). A joke can be reused in different joke cycles; an example of this is the same Head & Shoulders joke refitted to the tragedies of Vic Morrow, Admiral Mountbatten and the crew of the Challenger space shuttle. These cycles seem to appear spontaneously, spread rapidly across countries and borders only to dissipate after some time. Folklorists and others have studied individual joke cycles in an attempt to understand their function and significance within the culture.
Joke cycles circulated in the recent past include:
As with the 9/11 disaster discussed above, cycles attach themselves to celebrities or national catastrophes such as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the death of Michael Jackson, and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. These cycles arise regularly as a response to terrible unexpected events which command the national news. An in-depth analysis of the Challenger joke cycle documents a change in the type of humour circulated following the disaster, from February to March 1986. "It shows that the jokes appeared in distinct 'waves', the first responding to the disaster with clever wordplay and the second playing with grim and troubling images associated with the event…The primary social function of disaster jokes appears to be to provide closure to an event that provoked communal grieving, by signalling that it was time to move on and pay attention to more immediate concerns".
The sociologist Christie Davies has written extensively on ethnic jokes told in countries around the world. In ethnic jokes he finds that the "stupid" ethnic target in the joke is no stranger to the culture, but rather a peripheral social group (geographic, economic, cultural, linguistic) well known to the joke tellers. So Americans tell jokes about Polacks and Italians, Germans tell jokes about Ostfriesens, and the English tell jokes about the Irish. In a review of Davies' theories it is said that "For Davies, [ethnic] jokes are more about how joke tellers imagine themselves than about how they imagine those others who serve as their putative targets…The jokes thus serve to center one in the world – to remind people of their place and to reassure them that they are in it."
A third category of joke cycles identifies absurd characters as the butt: for example the grape, the dead baby or the elephant. Beginning in the 1960s, social and cultural interpretations of these joke cycles, spearheaded by the folklorist Alan Dundes, began to appear in academic journals. Dead baby jokes are posited to reflect societal changes and guilt caused by widespread use of contraception and abortion beginning in the 1960s. Elephant jokes have been interpreted variously as stand-ins for American blacks during the Civil Rights Era or as an "image of something large and wild abroad in the land captur[ing] the sense of counterculture" of the sixties. These interpretations strive for a cultural understanding of the themes of these jokes which go beyond the simple collection and documentation undertaken previously by folklorists and ethnologists.
As folktales and other types of oral literature became collectables throughout Europe in the 19th century (Brothers Grimm et al.), folklorists and anthropologists of the time needed a system to organise these items. The Aarne–Thompson classification system was first published in 1910 by Antti Aarne, and later expanded by Stith Thompson to become the most renowned classification system for European folktales and other types of oral literature. Its final section addresses anecdotes and jokes, listing traditional humorous tales ordered by their protagonist; "This section of the Index is essentially a classification of the older European jests, or merry tales – humorous stories characterized by short, fairly simple plots. …" Due to its focus on older tale types and obsolete actors (e.g., numbskull), the Aarne–Thompson Index does not provide much help in identifying and classifying the modern joke.
A more granular classification system used widely by folklorists and cultural anthropologists is the Thompson Motif Index, which separates tales into their individual story elements. This system enables jokes to be classified according to individual motifs included in the narrative: actors, items and incidents. It does not provide a system to classify the text by more than one element at a time while at the same time making it theoretically possible to classify the same text under multiple motifs.
The Thompson Motif Index has spawned further specialised motif indices, each of which focuses on a single aspect of one subset of jokes. A sampling of just a few of these specialised indices have been listed under other motif indices. Here one can select an index for medieval Spanish folk narratives, another index for linguistic verbal jokes, and a third one for sexual humour. To assist the researcher with this increasingly confusing situation, there are also multiple bibliographies of indices as well as a how-to guide on creating your own index.
Several difficulties have been identified with these systems of identifying oral narratives according to either tale types or story elements. A first major problem is their hierarchical organisation; one element of the narrative is selected as the major element, while all other parts are arrayed subordinate to this. A second problem with these systems is that the listed motifs are not qualitatively equal; actors, items and incidents are all considered side-by-side. And because incidents will always have at least one actor and usually have an item, most narratives can be ordered under multiple headings. This leads to confusion about both where to order an item and where to find it. A third significant problem is that the "excessive prudery" common in the middle of the 20th century means that obscene, sexual and scatological elements were regularly ignored in many of the indices.
The folklorist Robert Georges has summed up the concerns with these existing classification systems:
…Yet what the multiplicity and variety of sets and subsets reveal is that folklore [jokes] not only takes many forms, but that it is also multifaceted, with purpose, use, structure, content, style, and function all being relevant and important. Any one or combination of these multiple and varied aspects of a folklore example [such as jokes] might emerge as dominant in a specific situation or for a particular inquiry.
It has proven difficult to organise all different elements of a joke into a multi-dimensional classification system which could be of real value in the study and evaluation of this (primarily oral) complex narrative form.
The General Theory of Verbal Humour or GTVH, developed by the linguists Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo, attempts to do exactly this. This classification system was developed specifically for jokes and later expanded to include longer types of humorous narratives. Six different aspects of the narrative, labelled Knowledge Resources or KRs, can be evaluated largely independently of each other, and then combined into a concatenated classification label. These six KRs of the joke structure include:
As development of the GTVH progressed, a hierarchy of the KRs was established to partially restrict the options for lower-level KRs depending on the KRs defined above them. For example, a lightbulb joke (SI) will always be in the form of a riddle (NS). Outside of these restrictions, the KRs can create a multitude of combinations, enabling a researcher to select jokes for analysis which contain only one or two defined KRs. It also allows for an evaluation of the similarity or dissimilarity of jokes depending on the similarity of their labels. "The GTVH presents itself as a mechanism … of generating [or describing] an infinite number of jokes by combining the various values that each parameter can take. … Descriptively, to analyze a joke in the GTVH consists of listing the values of the 6 KRs (with the caveat that TA and LM may be empty)." This classification system provides a functional multi-dimensional label for any joke, and indeed any verbal humour.
Many academic disciplines lay claim to the study of jokes (and other forms of humour) as within their purview. Fortunately, there are enough jokes, good, bad and worse, to go around. The studies of jokes from each of the interested disciplines bring to mind the tale of the blind men and an elephant where the observations, although accurate reflections of their own competent methodological inquiry, frequently fail to grasp the beast in its entirety. This attests to the joke as a traditional narrative form which is indeed complex, concise and complete in and of itself. It requires a "multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary field of inquiry" to truly appreciate these nuggets of cultural insight.
Sigmund Freud was one of the first modern scholars to recognise jokes as an important object of investigation. In his 1905 study Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious Freud describes the social nature of humour and illustrates his text with many examples of contemporary Viennese jokes. His work is particularly noteworthy in this context because Freud distinguishes in his writings between jokes, humour and the comic. These are distinctions which become easily blurred in many subsequent studies where everything funny tends to be gathered under the umbrella term of "humour", making for a much more diffuse discussion.
Since the publication of Freud's study, psychologists have continued to explore humour and jokes in their quest to explain, predict and control an individual's "sense of humour". Why do people laugh? Why do people find something funny? Can jokes predict character, or vice versa, can character predict the jokes an individual laughs at? What is a "sense of humour"? A current review of the popular magazine Psychology Today lists over 200 articles discussing various aspects of humour; in psychological jargon, the subject area has become both an emotion to measure and a tool to use in diagnostics and treatment. A new psychological assessment tool, the Values in Action Inventory developed by the American psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman includes humour (and playfulness) as one of the core character strengths of an individual. As such, it could be a good predictor of life satisfaction. For psychologists, it would be useful to measure both how much of this strength an individual has and how it can be measurably increased.
A 2007 survey of existing tools to measure humour identified more than 60 psychological measurement instruments. These measurement tools use many different approaches to quantify humour along with its related states and traits. There are tools to measure an individual's physical response by their smile; the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is one of several tools used to identify any one of multiple types of smiles. Or the laugh can be measured to calculate the funniness response of an individual; multiple types of laughter have been identified. It must be stressed here that both smiles and laughter are not always a response to something funny. In trying to develop a measurement tool, most systems use "jokes and cartoons" as their test materials. However, because no two tools use the same jokes, and across languages this would not be feasible, how does one determine that the assessment objects are comparable? Moving on, whom does one ask to rate the sense of humour of an individual? Does one ask the person themselves, an impartial observer, or their family, friends and colleagues? Furthermore, has the current mood of the test subjects been considered; someone with a recent death in the family might not be much prone to laughter. Given the plethora of variants revealed by even a superficial glance at the problem, it becomes evident that these paths of scientific inquiry are mined with problematic pitfalls and questionable solutions.
The psychologist Willibald Ruch [de] has been very active in the research of humour. He has collaborated with the linguists Raskin and Attardo on their General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) classification system. Their goal is to empirically test both the six autonomous classification types (KRs) and the hierarchical ordering of these KRs. Advancement in this direction would be a win-win for both fields of study; linguistics would have empirical verification of this multi-dimensional classification system for jokes, and psychology would have a standardised joke classification with which they could develop verifiably comparable measurement tools.
"The linguistics of humor has made gigantic strides forward in the last decade and a half and replaced the psychology of humor as the most advanced theoretical approach to the study of this important and universal human faculty." This recent statement by one noted linguist and humour researcher describes, from his perspective, contemporary linguistic humour research. Linguists study words, how words are strung together to build sentences, how sentences create meaning which can be communicated from one individual to another, and how our interaction with each other using words creates discourse. Jokes have been defined above as oral narratives in which words and sentences are engineered to build toward a punchline. The linguist's question is: what exactly makes the punchline funny? This question focuses on how the words used in the punchline create humour, in contrast to the psychologist's concern (see above) with the audience's response to the punchline. The assessment of humour by psychologists "is made from the individual's perspective; e.g. the phenomenon associated with responding to or creating humor and not a description of humor itself." Linguistics, on the other hand, endeavours to provide a precise description of what makes a text funny.
Two major new linguistic theories have been developed and tested within the last decades. The first was advanced by Victor Raskin in "Semantic Mechanisms of Humor", published 1985. While being a variant on the more general concepts of the incongruity theory of humour, it is the first theory to identify its approach as exclusively linguistic. The Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour (SSTH) begins by identifying two linguistic conditions which make a text funny. It then goes on to identify the mechanisms involved in creating the punchline. This theory established the semantic/pragmatic foundation of humour as well as the humour competence of speakers.
Several years later the SSTH was incorporated into a more expansive theory of jokes put forth by Raskin and his colleague Salvatore Attardo. In the General Theory of Verbal Humour, the SSTH was relabelled as a Logical Mechanism (LM) (referring to the mechanism which connects the different linguistic scripts in the joke) and added to five other independent Knowledge Resources (KR). Together these six KRs could now function as a multi-dimensional descriptive label for any piece of humorous text.
Linguistics has developed further methodological tools which can be applied to jokes: discourse analysis and conversation analysis of joking. Both of these subspecialties within the field focus on "naturally occurring" language use, i.e. the analysis of real (usually recorded) conversations. One of these studies has already been discussed above, where Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in telling a single joke. Discourse analysis emphasises the entire context of social joking, the social interaction which cradles the words.
Folklore and cultural anthropology have perhaps the strongest claims on jokes as belonging to their bailiwick. Jokes remain one of the few remaining forms of traditional folk literature transmitted orally in western cultures. Identified as one of the "simple forms" of oral literature by André Jolles in 1930, they have been collected and studied since there were folklorists and anthropologists abroad in the lands. As a genre they were important enough at the beginning of the 20th century to be included under their own heading in the Aarne–Thompson index first published in 1910: Anecdotes and jokes.
Beginning in the 1960s, cultural researchers began to expand their role from collectors and archivists of "folk ideas" to a more active role of interpreters of cultural artefacts. One of the foremost scholars active during this transitional time was the folklorist Alan Dundes. He started asking questions of tradition and transmission with the key observation that "No piece of folklore continues to be transmitted unless it means something, even if neither the speaker nor the audience can articulate what that meaning might be." In the context of jokes, this then becomes the basis for further research. Why is the joke told right now? Only in this expanded perspective is an understanding of its meaning to the participants possible.
This questioning resulted in a blossoming of monographs to explore the significance of many joke cycles. What is so funny about absurd nonsense elephant jokes? Why make light of dead babies? In an article on contemporary German jokes about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Dundes justifies this research:
Whether one finds Auschwitz jokes funny or not is not an issue. This material exists and should be recorded. Jokes are always an important barometer of the attitudes of a group. The jokes exist and they obviously must fill some psychic need for those individuals who tell them and those who listen to them.
A stimulating generation of new humour theories flourishes like mushrooms in the undergrowth: Elliott Oring's theoretical discussions on "appropriate ambiguity" and Amy Carrell's hypothesis of an "audience-based theory of verbal humor (1993)" to name just a few.
In his book Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach, the anthropologist Mahadev Apte presents a solid case for his own academic perspective. "Two axioms underlie my discussion, namely, that humor is by and large culture based and that humor can be a major conceptual and methodological tool for gaining insights into cultural systems." Apte goes on to call for legitimising the field of humour research as "humorology"; this would be a field of study incorporating an interdisciplinary character of humour studies.
While the label "humorology" has yet to become a household word, great strides are being made in the international recognition of this interdisciplinary field of research. The International Society for Humor Studies was founded in 1989 with the stated purpose to "promote, stimulate and encourage the interdisciplinary study of humour; to support and cooperate with local, national, and international organizations having similar purposes; to organize and arrange meetings; and to issue and encourage publications concerning the purpose of the society". It also publishes Humor: International Journal of Humor Research and holds yearly conferences to promote and inform its speciality.
In 1872, Charles Darwin published one of the first "comprehensive and in many ways remarkably accurate description of laughter in terms of respiration, vocalization, facial action and gesture and posture" (Laughter). In this early study Darwin raises further questions about who laughs and why they laugh; the myriad responses since then illustrate the complexities of this behaviour. To understand laughter in humans and other primates, the science of gelotology (from the Greek gelos, meaning laughter) has been established; it is the study of laughter and its effects on the body from both a psychological and physiological perspective. While jokes can provoke laughter, laughter cannot be used as a one-to-one marker of jokes because there are multiple stimuli to laughter, humour being just one of them. The other six causes of laughter listed are social context, ignorance, anxiety, derision, acting apology, and tickling. As such, the study of laughter is a secondary albeit entertaining perspective in an understanding of jokes.
Computational humour is a new field of study which uses computers to model humour; it bridges the disciplines of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. A primary ambition of this field is to develop computer programs which can both generate a joke and recognise a text snippet as a joke. Early programming attempts have dealt almost exclusively with punning because this lends itself to simple straightforward rules. These primitive programs display no intelligence; instead, they work off a template with a finite set of pre-defined punning options upon which to build.
More sophisticated computer joke programs have yet to be developed. Based on our understanding of the SSTH / GTVH humour theories, it is easy to see why. The linguistic scripts (a.k.a. frames) referenced in these theories include, for any given word, a "large chunk of semantic information surrounding the word and evoked by it [...] a cognitive structure internalized by the native speaker". These scripts extend much further than the lexical definition of a word; they contain the speaker's complete knowledge of the concept as it exists in his world. As insentient machines, computers lack the encyclopaedic scripts which humans gain through life experience. They also lack the ability to gather the experiences needed to build wide-ranging semantic scripts and understand language in a broader context, a context that any child picks up in daily interaction with his environment.
Further development in this field must wait until computational linguists have succeeded in programming a computer with an ontological semantic natural language processing system. It is only "the most complex linguistic structures [which] can serve any formal and/or computational treatment of humor well". Toy systems (i.e. dummy punning programs) are completely inadequate to the task. Despite the fact that the field of computational humour is small and underdeveloped, it is encouraging to note the many interdisciplinary efforts which are currently underway. As this field grows in both understanding and methodology, it provides an ideal testbed for humour theories; the rules must firstly be clearly defined in order to write a computer program around a theory.
1 July is celebrated around the world as International Joke Day. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, and ends in a punch line, whereby the humorous element of the story is revealed; this can be done using a pun or other type of word play, irony or sarcasm, logical incompatibility, hyperbole, or other means. Linguist Robert Hetzron offers the definition:",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "A joke is a short humorous piece of oral literature in which the funniness culminates in the final sentence, called the punchline… In fact, the main condition is that the tension should reach its highest level at the very end. No continuation relieving the tension should be added. As for its being \"oral,\" it is true that jokes may appear printed, but when further transferred, there is no obligation to reproduce the text verbatim, as in the case of poetry.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "It is generally held that jokes benefit from brevity, containing no more detail than is needed to set the scene for the punchline at the end. In the case of riddle jokes or one-liners, the setting is implicitly understood, leaving only the dialogue and punchline to be verbalised. However, subverting these and other common guidelines can also be a source of humour—the shaggy dog story is an example of an anti-joke; although presented as a joke, it contains a long drawn-out narrative of time, place and character, rambles through many pointless inclusions and finally fails to deliver a punchline. Jokes are a form of humour, but not all humour is in the form of a joke. Some humorous forms which are not verbal jokes are: involuntary humour, situational humour, practical jokes, slapstick and anecdotes.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Identified as one of the simple forms of oral literature by the Dutch linguist André Jolles, jokes are passed along anonymously. They are told in both private and public settings; a single person tells a joke to his friend in the natural flow of conversation, or a set of jokes is told to a group as part of scripted entertainment. Jokes are also passed along in written form or, more recently, through the internet.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Stand-up comics, comedians and slapstick work with comic timing and rhythm in their performance, and may rely on actions as well as on the verbal punchline to evoke laughter. This distinction has been formulated in the popular saying \"A comic says funny things; a comedian says things funny\".",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Any joke documented from the past has been saved through happenstance rather than design. Jokes do not belong to refined culture, but rather to the entertainment and leisure of all classes. As such, any printed versions were considered ephemera, i.e., temporary documents created for a specific purpose and intended to be thrown away. Many of these early jokes deal with scatological and sexual topics, entertaining to all social classes but not to be valued and saved.",
"title": "History in print"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Various kinds of jokes have been identified in ancient pre-classical texts. The oldest identified joke is an ancient Sumerian proverb from 1900 BC containing toilet humour: \"Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap.\" Its records were dated to the Old Babylonian period and the joke may go as far back as 2300 BC. The second oldest joke found, discovered on the Westcar Papyrus and believed to be about Sneferu, was from Ancient Egypt c. 1600 BC: \"How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish.\" The tale of the three ox drivers from Adab completes the three known oldest jokes in the world. This is a comic triple dating back to 1200 BC Adab. It concerns three men seeking justice from a king on the matter of ownership over a newborn calf, for whose birth they all consider themselves to be partially responsible. The king seeks advice from a priestess on how to rule the case, and she suggests a series of events involving the men's households and wives. The final portion of the story (which included the punch line), has not survived intact, though legible fragments suggest it was bawdy in nature.",
"title": "History in print"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Jokes can be notoriously difficult to translate from language to language; particularly puns, which depend on specific words and not just on their meanings. For instance, Julius Caesar once sold land at a surprisingly cheap price to his lover Servilia, who was rumoured to be prostituting her daughter Tertia to Caesar in order to keep his favour. Cicero remarked that \"conparavit Servilia hunc fundum tertia deducta.\" The punny phrase, \"tertia deducta\", can be translated as \"with one-third off (in price)\", or \"with Tertia putting out.\"",
"title": "History in print"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The earliest extant joke book is the Philogelos (Greek for The Laughter-Lover), a collection of 265 jokes written in crude ancient Greek dating to the fourth or fifth century AD. The author of the collection is obscure and a number of different authors are attributed to it, including \"Hierokles and Philagros the grammatikos\", just \"Hierokles\", or, in the Suda, \"Philistion\". British classicist Mary Beard states that the Philogelos may have been intended as a jokester's handbook of quips to say on the fly, rather than a book meant to be read straight through. Many of the jokes in this collection are surprisingly familiar, even though the typical protagonists are less recognisable to contemporary readers: the absent-minded professor, the eunuch, and people with hernias or bad breath. The Philogelos even contains a joke similar to Monty Python's \"Dead Parrot Sketch\".",
"title": "History in print"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "During the 15th century, the printing revolution spread across Europe following the development of the movable type printing press. This was coupled with the growth of literacy in all social classes. Printers turned out Jestbooks along with Bibles to meet both lowbrow and highbrow interests of the populace. One early anthology of jokes was the Facetiae by the Italian Poggio Bracciolini, first published in 1470. The popularity of this jest book can be measured on the twenty editions of the book documented alone for the 15th century. Another popular form was a collection of jests, jokes and funny situations attributed to a single character in a more connected, narrative form of the picaresque novel. Examples of this are the characters of Rabelais in France, Till Eulenspiegel in Germany, Lazarillo de Tormes in Spain and Master Skelton in England. There is also a jest book ascribed to William Shakespeare, the contents of which appear to both inform and borrow from his plays. All of these early jestbooks corroborate both the rise in the literacy of the European populations and the general quest for leisure activities during the Renaissance in Europe.",
"title": "History in print"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The practice of printers using jokes and cartoons as page fillers was also widely used in the broadsides and chapbooks of the 19th century and earlier. With the increase in literacy in the general population and the growth of the printing industry, these publications were the most common forms of printed material between the 16th and 19th centuries throughout Europe and North America. Along with reports of events, executions, ballads and verse, they also contained jokes. Only one of many broadsides archived in the Harvard library is described as \"1706. Grinning made easy; or, Funny Dick's unrivalled collection of curious, comical, odd, droll, humorous, witty, whimsical, laughable, and eccentric jests, jokes, bulls, epigrams, &c. With many other descriptions of wit and humour.\" These cheap publications, ephemera intended for mass distribution, were read alone, read aloud, posted and discarded.",
"title": "History in print"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "There are many types of joke books in print today; a search on the internet provides a plethora of titles available for purchase. They can be read alone for solitary entertainment, or used to stock up on new jokes to entertain friends. Some people try to find a deeper meaning in jokes, as in \"Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar... Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes\". However a deeper meaning is not necessary to appreciate their inherent entertainment value. Magazines frequently use jokes and cartoons as filler for the printed page. Reader's Digest closes out many articles with an (unrelated) joke at the bottom of the article. The New Yorker was first published in 1925 with the stated goal of being a \"sophisticated humour magazine\" and is still known for its cartoons.",
"title": "History in print"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Telling a joke is a cooperative effort; it requires that the teller and the audience mutually agree in one form or another to understand the narrative which follows as a joke. In a study of conversation analysis, the sociologist Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in the telling of a single joke. \"This telling is composed, as for stories, of three serially ordered and adjacently placed types of sequences … the preface [framing], the telling, and the response sequences.\" Folklorists expand this to include the context of the joking. Who is telling what jokes to whom? And why is he telling them when? The context of the joke-telling in turn leads into a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who engage in institutionalised banter and joking.",
"title": "Telling jokes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Framing is done with a (frequently formulaic) expression which keys the audience in to expect a joke. \"Have you heard the one…\", \"Reminds me of a joke I heard…\", \"So, a lawyer and a doctor…\"; these conversational markers are just a few examples of linguistic frames used to start a joke. Regardless of the frame used, it creates a social space and clear boundaries around the narrative which follows. Audience response to this initial frame can be acknowledgement and anticipation of the joke to follow. It can also be a dismissal, as in \"this is no joking matter\" or \"this is no time for jokes\".",
"title": "Telling jokes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The performance frame serves to label joke-telling as a culturally marked form of communication. Both the performer and audience understand it to be set apart from the \"real\" world. \"An elephant walks into a bar…\"; a person sufficiently familiar with both the English language and the way jokes are told automatically understands that such a compressed and formulaic story, being told with no substantiating details, and placing an unlikely combination of characters into an unlikely setting and involving them in an unrealistic plot, is the start of a joke, and the story that follows is not meant to be taken at face value (i.e. it is non-bona-fide communication). The framing itself invokes a play mode; if the audience is unable or unwilling to move into play, then nothing will seem funny.",
"title": "Telling jokes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Following its linguistic framing the joke, in the form of a story, can be told. It is not required to be verbatim text like other forms of oral literature such as riddles and proverbs. The teller can and does modify the text of the joke, depending both on memory and the present audience. The important characteristic is that the narrative is succinct, containing only those details which lead directly to an understanding and decoding of the punchline. This requires that it support the same (or similar) divergent scripts which are to be embodied in the punchline.",
"title": "Telling jokes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The narrative always contains a protagonist who becomes the \"butt\" or target of the joke. This labelling serves to develop and solidify stereotypes within the culture. It also enables researchers to group and analyse the creation, persistence and interpretation of joke cycles around a certain character. Some people are naturally better performers than others; however, anyone can tell a joke because the comic trigger is contained in the narrative text and punchline. A joke poorly told is still funny, unless errors or omissions make the intended relationship between the narrative and the punchline unintelligible.",
"title": "Telling jokes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The punchline is intended to make the audience laugh. A linguistic interpretation of this punchline/response is elucidated by Victor Raskin in his Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour. Humour is evoked when a trigger contained in the punchline causes the audience to abruptly shift its understanding of the story from the primary (or more obvious) interpretation to a secondary, opposing interpretation. \"The punchline is the pivot on which the joke text turns as it signals the shift between the [semantic] scripts necessary to interpret [re-interpret] the joke text.\" To produce the humour in the verbal joke, the two interpretations (i.e. scripts) need to both be compatible with the joke text and opposite or incompatible with each other. Thomas R. Shultz, a psychologist, independently expands Raskin's linguistic theory to include \"two stages of incongruity: perception and resolution.\" He explains that \"… incongruity alone is insufficient to account for the structure of humour. […] Within this framework, humour appreciation is conceptualized as a biphasic sequence involving first the discovery of incongruity followed by a resolution of the incongruity.\" In the case of a joke, that resolution generates laughter.",
"title": "Telling jokes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "This is the point at which the field of neurolinguistics offers some insight into the cognitive processing involved in this abrupt laughter at the punchline. Studies by the cognitive science researchers Coulson and Kutas directly address the theory of script switching articulated by Raskin in their work. The article \"Getting it: Human event-related brain response to jokes in good and poor comprehenders\" measures brain activity in response to reading jokes. Additional studies by others in the field support more generally the theory of two-stage processing of humour, as evidenced in the longer processing time they require. In the related field of neuroscience, it has been shown that the expression of laughter is caused by two partially independent neuronal pathways: an \"involuntary\" or \"emotionally driven\" system and a \"voluntary\" system. This study adds credence to the common experience when exposed to an off-colour joke; a laugh is followed in the next breath by a disclaimer: \"Oh, that's bad…\" Here the multiple steps in cognition are clearly evident in the stepped response, the perception being processed just a breath faster than the resolution of the moral/ethical content in the joke.",
"title": "Telling jokes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Expected response to a joke is laughter. The joke teller hopes the audience \"gets it\" and is entertained. This leads to the premise that a joke is actually an \"understanding test\" between individuals and groups. If the listeners do not get the joke, they are not understanding the two scripts which are contained in the narrative as they were intended. Or they do \"get it\" and do not laugh; it might be too obscene, too gross or too dumb for the current audience. A woman might respond differently to a joke told by a male colleague around the water cooler than she would to the same joke overheard in a women's lavatory. A joke involving toilet humour may be funnier told on the playground at elementary school than on a college campus. The same joke will elicit different responses in different settings. The punchline in the joke remains the same, however, it is more or less appropriate depending on the current context.",
"title": "Telling jokes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The context explores the specific social situation in which joking occurs. The narrator automatically modifies the text of the joke to be acceptable to different audiences, while at the same time supporting the same divergent scripts in the punchline. The vocabulary used in telling the same joke at a university fraternity party and to one's grandmother might well vary. In each situation, it is important to identify both the narrator and the audience as well as their relationship with each other. This varies to reflect the complexities of a matrix of different social factors: age, sex, race, ethnicity, kinship, political views, religion, power relationships, etc. When all the potential combinations of such factors between the narrator and the audience are considered, then a single joke can take on infinite shades of meaning for each unique social setting.",
"title": "Telling jokes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The context, however, should not be confused with the function of the joking. \"Function is essentially an abstraction made on the basis of a number of contexts\". In one long-term observation of men coming off the late shift at a local café, joking with the waitresses was used to ascertain sexual availability for the evening. Different types of jokes, going from general to topical into explicitly sexual humour signalled openness on the part of the waitress for a connection. This study describes how jokes and joking are used to communicate much more than just good humour. That is a single example of the function of joking in a social setting, but there are others. Sometimes jokes are used simply to get to know someone better. What makes them laugh, what do they find funny? Jokes concerning politics, religion or sexual topics can be used effectively to gauge the attitude of the audience to any one of these topics. They can also be used as a marker of group identity, signalling either inclusion or exclusion for the group. Among pre-adolescents, \"dirty\" jokes allow them to share information about their changing bodies. And sometimes joking is just simple entertainment for a group of friends.",
"title": "Telling jokes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The context of joking in turn leads to a study of joking relationships, a term coined by anthropologists to refer to social groups within a culture who take part in institutionalised banter and joking. These relationships can be either one-way or a mutual back and forth between partners.",
"title": "Relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The joking relationship is defined as a peculiar combination of friendliness and antagonism. The behaviour is such that in any other social context it would express and arouse hostility; but it is not meant seriously and must not be taken seriously. There is a pretence of hostility along with a real friendliness. To put it in another way, the relationship is one of permitted disrespect.",
"title": "Relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Joking relationships were first described by anthropologists within kinship groups in Africa. But they have since been identified in cultures around the world, where jokes and joking are used to mark and reinforce appropriate boundaries of a relationship.",
"title": "Relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The advent of electronic communications at the end of the 20th century introduced new traditions into jokes. A verbal joke or cartoon is emailed to a friend or posted on a bulletin board; reactions include a replied email with a :-) or LOL, or a forward on to further recipients. Interaction is limited to the computer screen and for the most part solitary. While preserving the text of a joke, both context and variants are lost in internet joking; for the most part, emailed jokes are passed along verbatim. The framing of the joke frequently occurs in the subject line: \"RE: laugh for the day\" or something similar. The forward of an email joke can increase the number of recipients exponentially.",
"title": "Electronic"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Internet joking forces a re-evaluation of social spaces and social groups. They are no longer only defined by physical presence and locality, they also exist in the connectivity in cyberspace. \"The computer networks appear to make possible communities that, although physically dispersed, display attributes of the direct, unconstrained, unofficial exchanges folklorists typically concern themselves with\". This is particularly evident in the spread of topical jokes, \"that genre of lore in which whole crops of jokes spring up seemingly overnight around some sensational event … flourish briefly and then disappear, as the mass media move on to fresh maimings and new collective tragedies\". This correlates with the new understanding of the internet as an \"active folkloric space\" with evolving social and cultural forces and clearly identifiable performers and audiences.",
"title": "Electronic"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "A study by the folklorist Bill Ellis documented how an evolving cycle was circulated over the internet. By accessing message boards that specialised in humour immediately following the 9/11 disaster, Ellis was able to observe in real-time both the topical jokes being posted electronically and responses to the jokes.",
"title": "Electronic"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Previous folklore research has been limited to collecting and documenting successful jokes, and only after they had emerged and come to folklorists' attention. Now, an Internet-enhanced collection creates a time machine, as it were, where we can observe what happens in the period before the risible moment, when attempts at humour are unsuccessful",
"title": "Electronic"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Access to archived message boards also enables us to track the development of a single joke thread in the context of a more complicated virtual conversation.",
"title": "Electronic"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "A joke cycle is a collection of jokes about a single target or situation which displays consistent narrative structure and type of humour. Some well-known cycles are elephant jokes using nonsense humour, dead baby jokes incorporating black humour, and light bulb jokes, which describe all kinds of operational stupidity. Joke cycles can centre on ethnic groups, professions (viola jokes), catastrophes, settings (…walks into a bar), absurd characters (wind-up dolls), or logical mechanisms which generate the humour (knock-knock jokes). A joke can be reused in different joke cycles; an example of this is the same Head & Shoulders joke refitted to the tragedies of Vic Morrow, Admiral Mountbatten and the crew of the Challenger space shuttle. These cycles seem to appear spontaneously, spread rapidly across countries and borders only to dissipate after some time. Folklorists and others have studied individual joke cycles in an attempt to understand their function and significance within the culture.",
"title": "Joke cycles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Joke cycles circulated in the recent past include:",
"title": "Joke cycles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "As with the 9/11 disaster discussed above, cycles attach themselves to celebrities or national catastrophes such as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the death of Michael Jackson, and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. These cycles arise regularly as a response to terrible unexpected events which command the national news. An in-depth analysis of the Challenger joke cycle documents a change in the type of humour circulated following the disaster, from February to March 1986. \"It shows that the jokes appeared in distinct 'waves', the first responding to the disaster with clever wordplay and the second playing with grim and troubling images associated with the event…The primary social function of disaster jokes appears to be to provide closure to an event that provoked communal grieving, by signalling that it was time to move on and pay attention to more immediate concerns\".",
"title": "Joke cycles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The sociologist Christie Davies has written extensively on ethnic jokes told in countries around the world. In ethnic jokes he finds that the \"stupid\" ethnic target in the joke is no stranger to the culture, but rather a peripheral social group (geographic, economic, cultural, linguistic) well known to the joke tellers. So Americans tell jokes about Polacks and Italians, Germans tell jokes about Ostfriesens, and the English tell jokes about the Irish. In a review of Davies' theories it is said that \"For Davies, [ethnic] jokes are more about how joke tellers imagine themselves than about how they imagine those others who serve as their putative targets…The jokes thus serve to center one in the world – to remind people of their place and to reassure them that they are in it.\"",
"title": "Joke cycles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "A third category of joke cycles identifies absurd characters as the butt: for example the grape, the dead baby or the elephant. Beginning in the 1960s, social and cultural interpretations of these joke cycles, spearheaded by the folklorist Alan Dundes, began to appear in academic journals. Dead baby jokes are posited to reflect societal changes and guilt caused by widespread use of contraception and abortion beginning in the 1960s. Elephant jokes have been interpreted variously as stand-ins for American blacks during the Civil Rights Era or as an \"image of something large and wild abroad in the land captur[ing] the sense of counterculture\" of the sixties. These interpretations strive for a cultural understanding of the themes of these jokes which go beyond the simple collection and documentation undertaken previously by folklorists and ethnologists.",
"title": "Joke cycles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "As folktales and other types of oral literature became collectables throughout Europe in the 19th century (Brothers Grimm et al.), folklorists and anthropologists of the time needed a system to organise these items. The Aarne–Thompson classification system was first published in 1910 by Antti Aarne, and later expanded by Stith Thompson to become the most renowned classification system for European folktales and other types of oral literature. Its final section addresses anecdotes and jokes, listing traditional humorous tales ordered by their protagonist; \"This section of the Index is essentially a classification of the older European jests, or merry tales – humorous stories characterized by short, fairly simple plots. …\" Due to its focus on older tale types and obsolete actors (e.g., numbskull), the Aarne–Thompson Index does not provide much help in identifying and classifying the modern joke.",
"title": "Classification systems"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "A more granular classification system used widely by folklorists and cultural anthropologists is the Thompson Motif Index, which separates tales into their individual story elements. This system enables jokes to be classified according to individual motifs included in the narrative: actors, items and incidents. It does not provide a system to classify the text by more than one element at a time while at the same time making it theoretically possible to classify the same text under multiple motifs.",
"title": "Classification systems"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "The Thompson Motif Index has spawned further specialised motif indices, each of which focuses on a single aspect of one subset of jokes. A sampling of just a few of these specialised indices have been listed under other motif indices. Here one can select an index for medieval Spanish folk narratives, another index for linguistic verbal jokes, and a third one for sexual humour. To assist the researcher with this increasingly confusing situation, there are also multiple bibliographies of indices as well as a how-to guide on creating your own index.",
"title": "Classification systems"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Several difficulties have been identified with these systems of identifying oral narratives according to either tale types or story elements. A first major problem is their hierarchical organisation; one element of the narrative is selected as the major element, while all other parts are arrayed subordinate to this. A second problem with these systems is that the listed motifs are not qualitatively equal; actors, items and incidents are all considered side-by-side. And because incidents will always have at least one actor and usually have an item, most narratives can be ordered under multiple headings. This leads to confusion about both where to order an item and where to find it. A third significant problem is that the \"excessive prudery\" common in the middle of the 20th century means that obscene, sexual and scatological elements were regularly ignored in many of the indices.",
"title": "Classification systems"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The folklorist Robert Georges has summed up the concerns with these existing classification systems:",
"title": "Classification systems"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "…Yet what the multiplicity and variety of sets and subsets reveal is that folklore [jokes] not only takes many forms, but that it is also multifaceted, with purpose, use, structure, content, style, and function all being relevant and important. Any one or combination of these multiple and varied aspects of a folklore example [such as jokes] might emerge as dominant in a specific situation or for a particular inquiry.",
"title": "Classification systems"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "It has proven difficult to organise all different elements of a joke into a multi-dimensional classification system which could be of real value in the study and evaluation of this (primarily oral) complex narrative form.",
"title": "Classification systems"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The General Theory of Verbal Humour or GTVH, developed by the linguists Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo, attempts to do exactly this. This classification system was developed specifically for jokes and later expanded to include longer types of humorous narratives. Six different aspects of the narrative, labelled Knowledge Resources or KRs, can be evaluated largely independently of each other, and then combined into a concatenated classification label. These six KRs of the joke structure include:",
"title": "Classification systems"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "As development of the GTVH progressed, a hierarchy of the KRs was established to partially restrict the options for lower-level KRs depending on the KRs defined above them. For example, a lightbulb joke (SI) will always be in the form of a riddle (NS). Outside of these restrictions, the KRs can create a multitude of combinations, enabling a researcher to select jokes for analysis which contain only one or two defined KRs. It also allows for an evaluation of the similarity or dissimilarity of jokes depending on the similarity of their labels. \"The GTVH presents itself as a mechanism … of generating [or describing] an infinite number of jokes by combining the various values that each parameter can take. … Descriptively, to analyze a joke in the GTVH consists of listing the values of the 6 KRs (with the caveat that TA and LM may be empty).\" This classification system provides a functional multi-dimensional label for any joke, and indeed any verbal humour.",
"title": "Classification systems"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Many academic disciplines lay claim to the study of jokes (and other forms of humour) as within their purview. Fortunately, there are enough jokes, good, bad and worse, to go around. The studies of jokes from each of the interested disciplines bring to mind the tale of the blind men and an elephant where the observations, although accurate reflections of their own competent methodological inquiry, frequently fail to grasp the beast in its entirety. This attests to the joke as a traditional narrative form which is indeed complex, concise and complete in and of itself. It requires a \"multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary field of inquiry\" to truly appreciate these nuggets of cultural insight.",
"title": "Joke and humour research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Sigmund Freud was one of the first modern scholars to recognise jokes as an important object of investigation. In his 1905 study Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious Freud describes the social nature of humour and illustrates his text with many examples of contemporary Viennese jokes. His work is particularly noteworthy in this context because Freud distinguishes in his writings between jokes, humour and the comic. These are distinctions which become easily blurred in many subsequent studies where everything funny tends to be gathered under the umbrella term of \"humour\", making for a much more diffuse discussion.",
"title": "Joke and humour research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Since the publication of Freud's study, psychologists have continued to explore humour and jokes in their quest to explain, predict and control an individual's \"sense of humour\". Why do people laugh? Why do people find something funny? Can jokes predict character, or vice versa, can character predict the jokes an individual laughs at? What is a \"sense of humour\"? A current review of the popular magazine Psychology Today lists over 200 articles discussing various aspects of humour; in psychological jargon, the subject area has become both an emotion to measure and a tool to use in diagnostics and treatment. A new psychological assessment tool, the Values in Action Inventory developed by the American psychologists Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman includes humour (and playfulness) as one of the core character strengths of an individual. As such, it could be a good predictor of life satisfaction. For psychologists, it would be useful to measure both how much of this strength an individual has and how it can be measurably increased.",
"title": "Joke and humour research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "A 2007 survey of existing tools to measure humour identified more than 60 psychological measurement instruments. These measurement tools use many different approaches to quantify humour along with its related states and traits. There are tools to measure an individual's physical response by their smile; the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is one of several tools used to identify any one of multiple types of smiles. Or the laugh can be measured to calculate the funniness response of an individual; multiple types of laughter have been identified. It must be stressed here that both smiles and laughter are not always a response to something funny. In trying to develop a measurement tool, most systems use \"jokes and cartoons\" as their test materials. However, because no two tools use the same jokes, and across languages this would not be feasible, how does one determine that the assessment objects are comparable? Moving on, whom does one ask to rate the sense of humour of an individual? Does one ask the person themselves, an impartial observer, or their family, friends and colleagues? Furthermore, has the current mood of the test subjects been considered; someone with a recent death in the family might not be much prone to laughter. Given the plethora of variants revealed by even a superficial glance at the problem, it becomes evident that these paths of scientific inquiry are mined with problematic pitfalls and questionable solutions.",
"title": "Joke and humour research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The psychologist Willibald Ruch [de] has been very active in the research of humour. He has collaborated with the linguists Raskin and Attardo on their General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) classification system. Their goal is to empirically test both the six autonomous classification types (KRs) and the hierarchical ordering of these KRs. Advancement in this direction would be a win-win for both fields of study; linguistics would have empirical verification of this multi-dimensional classification system for jokes, and psychology would have a standardised joke classification with which they could develop verifiably comparable measurement tools.",
"title": "Joke and humour research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "\"The linguistics of humor has made gigantic strides forward in the last decade and a half and replaced the psychology of humor as the most advanced theoretical approach to the study of this important and universal human faculty.\" This recent statement by one noted linguist and humour researcher describes, from his perspective, contemporary linguistic humour research. Linguists study words, how words are strung together to build sentences, how sentences create meaning which can be communicated from one individual to another, and how our interaction with each other using words creates discourse. Jokes have been defined above as oral narratives in which words and sentences are engineered to build toward a punchline. The linguist's question is: what exactly makes the punchline funny? This question focuses on how the words used in the punchline create humour, in contrast to the psychologist's concern (see above) with the audience's response to the punchline. The assessment of humour by psychologists \"is made from the individual's perspective; e.g. the phenomenon associated with responding to or creating humor and not a description of humor itself.\" Linguistics, on the other hand, endeavours to provide a precise description of what makes a text funny.",
"title": "Joke and humour research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Two major new linguistic theories have been developed and tested within the last decades. The first was advanced by Victor Raskin in \"Semantic Mechanisms of Humor\", published 1985. While being a variant on the more general concepts of the incongruity theory of humour, it is the first theory to identify its approach as exclusively linguistic. The Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour (SSTH) begins by identifying two linguistic conditions which make a text funny. It then goes on to identify the mechanisms involved in creating the punchline. This theory established the semantic/pragmatic foundation of humour as well as the humour competence of speakers.",
"title": "Joke and humour research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Several years later the SSTH was incorporated into a more expansive theory of jokes put forth by Raskin and his colleague Salvatore Attardo. In the General Theory of Verbal Humour, the SSTH was relabelled as a Logical Mechanism (LM) (referring to the mechanism which connects the different linguistic scripts in the joke) and added to five other independent Knowledge Resources (KR). Together these six KRs could now function as a multi-dimensional descriptive label for any piece of humorous text.",
"title": "Joke and humour research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Linguistics has developed further methodological tools which can be applied to jokes: discourse analysis and conversation analysis of joking. Both of these subspecialties within the field focus on \"naturally occurring\" language use, i.e. the analysis of real (usually recorded) conversations. One of these studies has already been discussed above, where Harvey Sacks describes in detail the sequential organisation in telling a single joke. Discourse analysis emphasises the entire context of social joking, the social interaction which cradles the words.",
"title": "Joke and humour research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Folklore and cultural anthropology have perhaps the strongest claims on jokes as belonging to their bailiwick. Jokes remain one of the few remaining forms of traditional folk literature transmitted orally in western cultures. Identified as one of the \"simple forms\" of oral literature by André Jolles in 1930, they have been collected and studied since there were folklorists and anthropologists abroad in the lands. As a genre they were important enough at the beginning of the 20th century to be included under their own heading in the Aarne–Thompson index first published in 1910: Anecdotes and jokes.",
"title": "Joke and humour research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Beginning in the 1960s, cultural researchers began to expand their role from collectors and archivists of \"folk ideas\" to a more active role of interpreters of cultural artefacts. One of the foremost scholars active during this transitional time was the folklorist Alan Dundes. He started asking questions of tradition and transmission with the key observation that \"No piece of folklore continues to be transmitted unless it means something, even if neither the speaker nor the audience can articulate what that meaning might be.\" In the context of jokes, this then becomes the basis for further research. Why is the joke told right now? Only in this expanded perspective is an understanding of its meaning to the participants possible.",
"title": "Joke and humour research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "This questioning resulted in a blossoming of monographs to explore the significance of many joke cycles. What is so funny about absurd nonsense elephant jokes? Why make light of dead babies? In an article on contemporary German jokes about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Dundes justifies this research:",
"title": "Joke and humour research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Whether one finds Auschwitz jokes funny or not is not an issue. This material exists and should be recorded. Jokes are always an important barometer of the attitudes of a group. The jokes exist and they obviously must fill some psychic need for those individuals who tell them and those who listen to them.",
"title": "Joke and humour research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "A stimulating generation of new humour theories flourishes like mushrooms in the undergrowth: Elliott Oring's theoretical discussions on \"appropriate ambiguity\" and Amy Carrell's hypothesis of an \"audience-based theory of verbal humor (1993)\" to name just a few.",
"title": "Joke and humour research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "In his book Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach, the anthropologist Mahadev Apte presents a solid case for his own academic perspective. \"Two axioms underlie my discussion, namely, that humor is by and large culture based and that humor can be a major conceptual and methodological tool for gaining insights into cultural systems.\" Apte goes on to call for legitimising the field of humour research as \"humorology\"; this would be a field of study incorporating an interdisciplinary character of humour studies.",
"title": "Joke and humour research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "While the label \"humorology\" has yet to become a household word, great strides are being made in the international recognition of this interdisciplinary field of research. The International Society for Humor Studies was founded in 1989 with the stated purpose to \"promote, stimulate and encourage the interdisciplinary study of humour; to support and cooperate with local, national, and international organizations having similar purposes; to organize and arrange meetings; and to issue and encourage publications concerning the purpose of the society\". It also publishes Humor: International Journal of Humor Research and holds yearly conferences to promote and inform its speciality.",
"title": "Joke and humour research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "In 1872, Charles Darwin published one of the first \"comprehensive and in many ways remarkably accurate description of laughter in terms of respiration, vocalization, facial action and gesture and posture\" (Laughter). In this early study Darwin raises further questions about who laughs and why they laugh; the myriad responses since then illustrate the complexities of this behaviour. To understand laughter in humans and other primates, the science of gelotology (from the Greek gelos, meaning laughter) has been established; it is the study of laughter and its effects on the body from both a psychological and physiological perspective. While jokes can provoke laughter, laughter cannot be used as a one-to-one marker of jokes because there are multiple stimuli to laughter, humour being just one of them. The other six causes of laughter listed are social context, ignorance, anxiety, derision, acting apology, and tickling. As such, the study of laughter is a secondary albeit entertaining perspective in an understanding of jokes.",
"title": "Joke and humour research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Computational humour is a new field of study which uses computers to model humour; it bridges the disciplines of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. A primary ambition of this field is to develop computer programs which can both generate a joke and recognise a text snippet as a joke. Early programming attempts have dealt almost exclusively with punning because this lends itself to simple straightforward rules. These primitive programs display no intelligence; instead, they work off a template with a finite set of pre-defined punning options upon which to build.",
"title": "Joke and humour research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "More sophisticated computer joke programs have yet to be developed. Based on our understanding of the SSTH / GTVH humour theories, it is easy to see why. The linguistic scripts (a.k.a. frames) referenced in these theories include, for any given word, a \"large chunk of semantic information surrounding the word and evoked by it [...] a cognitive structure internalized by the native speaker\". These scripts extend much further than the lexical definition of a word; they contain the speaker's complete knowledge of the concept as it exists in his world. As insentient machines, computers lack the encyclopaedic scripts which humans gain through life experience. They also lack the ability to gather the experiences needed to build wide-ranging semantic scripts and understand language in a broader context, a context that any child picks up in daily interaction with his environment.",
"title": "Joke and humour research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Further development in this field must wait until computational linguists have succeeded in programming a computer with an ontological semantic natural language processing system. It is only \"the most complex linguistic structures [which] can serve any formal and/or computational treatment of humor well\". Toy systems (i.e. dummy punning programs) are completely inadequate to the task. Despite the fact that the field of computational humour is small and underdeveloped, it is encouraging to note the many interdisciplinary efforts which are currently underway. As this field grows in both understanding and methodology, it provides an ideal testbed for humour theories; the rules must firstly be clearly defined in order to write a computer program around a theory.",
"title": "Joke and humour research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "1 July is celebrated around the world as International Joke Day.",
"title": "International Joke Day"
}
]
| A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes the form of a story, often with dialogue, and ends in a punch line, whereby the humorous element of the story is revealed; this can be done using a pun or other type of word play, irony or sarcasm, logical incompatibility, hyperbole, or other means. Linguist Robert Hetzron offers the definition: It is generally held that jokes benefit from brevity, containing no more detail than is needed to set the scene for the punchline at the end. In the case of riddle jokes or one-liners, the setting is implicitly understood, leaving only the dialogue and punchline to be verbalised. However, subverting these and other common guidelines can also be a source of humour—the shaggy dog story is an example of an anti-joke; although presented as a joke, it contains a long drawn-out narrative of time, place and character, rambles through many pointless inclusions and finally fails to deliver a punchline. Jokes are a form of humour, but not all humour is in the form of a joke. Some humorous forms which are not verbal jokes are: involuntary humour, situational humour, practical jokes, slapstick and anecdotes. Identified as one of the simple forms of oral literature by the Dutch linguist André Jolles, jokes are passed along anonymously. They are told in both private and public settings; a single person tells a joke to his friend in the natural flow of conversation, or a set of jokes is told to a group as part of scripted entertainment. Jokes are also passed along in written form or, more recently, through the internet. Stand-up comics, comedians and slapstick work with comic timing and rhythm in their performance, and may rely on actions as well as on the verbal punchline to evoke laughter. This distinction has been formulated in the popular saying "A comic says funny things; a comedian says things funny". | 2001-10-27T02:55:07Z | 2023-12-16T03:10:49Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke |
16,268 | Jacob Lawrence | Jacob Armstead Lawrence (September 7, 1917 – June 9, 2000) was an American painter known for his portrayal of African-American historical subjects and contemporary life. Lawrence referred to his style as "dynamic cubism," an art form popularized in Europe which drew great inspiration from West African and Meso-American art. For his compositions, Lawrence found inspiration in everyday life in Harlem. He brought the African-American experience to life using blacks and browns juxtaposed with vivid colors. He also taught and spent 16 years as a professor at the University of Washington.
Lawrence is among the best known twentieth-century African-American painters, known for his modernist illustrations of everyday life as well as narratives of African-American history and historical figures. At the age of 23 he gained national recognition with his 60-panel The Migration Series, which depicted the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North. The series was purchased jointly by the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Lawrence's works are in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Reynolda House Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Northwest Art. His 1947 painting The Builders hangs in the White House.
Jacob Lawrence was born September 7, 1917, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where his parents had migrated from the rural south. They divorced in 1924. His mother put him and his two younger siblings into foster care in Philadelphia. When he was 13, he and his siblings moved to New York City, where he reconnected with his mother in Harlem. Lawrence was introduced to art shortly after that when their mother enrolled him in after-school classes at an arts and crafts settlement house in Harlem, called Utopia Children's Center, in an effort to keep him busy. The young Lawrence often drew patterns with crayons. In the beginning, he copied the patterns of his mother's carpets.
After dropping out of school at 16, Lawrence worked in a laundromat and a printing plant. He continued with art, attending classes at the Harlem Art Workshop, taught by the noted African-American artist Charles Alston. Alston urged him to attend the Harlem Community Art Center, led by the sculptor Augusta Savage. Savage secured a scholarship to the American Artists School for Lawrence and a paid position with the Works Progress Administration, established during the Great Depression by the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Lawrence continued his studies as well, working with Alston and Henry Bannarn, another Harlem Renaissance artist, in the Alston-Bannarn workshop. He also studied at Harlem Art Workshop in New York in 1937. Harlem provided crucial training for the majority of Black artists in the United States. Lawrence was one of the first artists trained in and by the African-American community in Harlem. Throughout his lengthy artistic career, Lawrence concentrated on exploring the history and struggles of African Americans.
The "hard, bright, brittle" aspects of Harlem during the Great Depression inspired Lawrence as much as the colors, shapes, and patterns inside the homes of its residents. "Even in my mother's home," Lawrence told historian Paul Karlstrom, "people of my mother's generation would decorate their homes in all sorts of color... so you'd think in terms of Matisse." He used water-based media throughout his career. Lawrence started to gain some notice for his dramatic and lively portrayals of both contemporary scenes of African-American urban life as well as historical events, all of which he depicted in crisp shapes, bright, clear colors, dynamic patterns, and through revealing posture and gestures.
At the very start of his career he developed the approach that made his reputation and remained his touchstone: creating series of paintings that told a story or, less often, depicted many aspects of a subject. His first were biographical accounts of key figures of the African diaspora. He was just 21 years old when his series of 41 paintings of the Haitian general Toussaint L’Ouverture, who led the revolution of the slaves that eventually gained independence, was shown in an exhibit of African-American artists at the Baltimore Museum of Art. This was followed by a series of paintings of the lives of Harriet Tubman (1938–39) and Frederick Douglass (1939–40).
His teacher Charles Alston assesses Lawrence's work in an essay for an exhibition at the Harlem YMCA 1938:
Having thus far miraculously escaped the imprint of academic ideas and current vogues in art,... he has followed a course of development dictated by his own inner motivations... Working in the very limited medium of flat tempera he achieved a richness and brilliance of color harmonies both remarkable and exciting... Lawrence symbolizes more than anyone I know, the vitality, the seriousness and promise of a new and socially conscious generation of Negro artists.
On July 24, 1941, Lawrence married the painter Gwendolyn Knight, also a student of Savage. She helped prepare the gesso panels for his paintings and contributed to the captions for the paintings in his multi-painting works.
Lawrence completed the 60-panel set of narrative paintings entitled Migration of the Negro or And the Migrants Kept Coming, now called the Migration Series, in 1940–41. The series portrayed the Great Migration, when hundreds of thousands of African Americans moved from the rural South to the urban North after World War I. Because he was working in tempera, which dries rapidly, he planned all the paintings in advance and then applied a single color wherever he was using it across all the scenes to maintain tonal consistency. Only then did he proceed to the next color. The series was exhibited at the Downtown Gallery in Greenwich Village, which made him the first African-American artist represented by a New York gallery. This brought him national recognition. Selections from this series were featured in a 1941 issue of Fortune. The entire series was purchased jointly and divided by the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., which holds the odd-numbered paintings, and New York's Museum of Modern Art, which holds the even-numbered. His early work involved general depictions of everyday life in Harlem and also a major series dedicated to African-American history (1940–1941).
Another biographical series of twenty-two panels devoted to the abolitionist John Brown followed in 1941–42. When these pairings became too fragile to display, Lawrence, working on commission, recreated the paintings as a portfolio of silkscreen prints in 1977.
In 1943, Howard Devree, writing in The New York Times, thought Lawrence in his next series of thirty images had "even more successfully concentrated his attention on the many-sided life of his people in Harlem". He called the set "an amazing social document" and wrote:
Lawrence's color is fittingly vivid for his interpretations. A strong semi-abstract approach aids him in arriving at his basic or archetypal statements. Confronting this work one feels as if vouchsafed an extraordinary elemental experience. Lawrence has grown in his use of rhythm as well as in sheer design and fluency.
In October 1943, during the Second World War, Lawrence was drafted into the United States Coast Guard and served as a public affairs specialist with the first racially integrated crew on the USCGC Sea Cloud, under Carlton Skinner. He continued to paint and sketch while in the Coast Guard, documenting the experience of war around the world. He produced 48 paintings during this time, all of which have been lost. He achieved the rank of petty officer third class.
In October and November 1944, MOMA exhibited all 60 migration panels plus 8 of the paintings Lawrence created aboard the Sea Cloud. He posed, still in his uniform, in front of a sign that read: "Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series and Works Created in the US Coast Guard". The Coast Guard sent the eight paintings to exhibits around the United States. In the disorder and personnel changes that came with demobilization at the end of the war they went missing.
In 1945, he was awarded a fellowship in the fine arts by the Guggenheim Foundation. In 1946, Josef Albers recruited Lawrence to join the faculty of the summer art program at Black Mountain College.
Returning to New York, Lawrence continued to paint but grew depressed; in 1949, he checked himself into Hillside Hospital in Queens, where he remained for eleven months. Painting there, he produced his Hospital Series, works that were uncharacteristic of him in their focus of his subjects' emotional states as an inpatient.
Between 1954 and 1956 Lawrence produced a 30-panel series called "Struggle: From the History of the American People" that depicted historical scenes from 1775 to 1817. The series, originally planned to include sixty panels, includes references to current events like the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, and they sometimes explore relatively obscure or neglected aspects of American history, like a woman, Margaret Cochran Corbin, in combat or the wall built by unseen enslaved Blacks that protected the American forces at the Battle of New Orleans. Rather than traditional titles, Lawrence labeled each panel with a quote, either to add an individual voice to his work or inject weighted vocabulary. Patrick Henry's speech, famous for the phrase "Give me liberty or give me death", he captioned with a different passage: "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery." A panel showing Blacks fighting against the British is captioned with the words of a man who sued for emancipation from slavery in 1773: "We have no property! We have no wives! No children! We have no city! No country!" Three panels (Panels 14, 20 and 29) are lost, and three others were only located in 2017, 2020, and 2021. The fraught politics of the mid-1950s prevented the series from finding a museum purchaser, and the panels had been sold to a private collector who re-sold them as individual works.
The Brooklyn Museum of Art mounted a retrospective exhibition of his work in 1960. In 1969, he was among 200 Black artists in a premier show sponsored by the Philadelphia School District and the Pennsylvania Civic Center Museum. The show featured some of the top names in the country, including Ellen Powell Tiberino, Horace Pippin, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Barbara Bullock, Jacob Lawrence, Benny Andrews, Roland Ayers, Romare Bearden, Avel de Knight, Barkley Hendricks, Paul Keene, Raymond Saunders, Louis B. Sloan, Ed Wilson, Henry Ossawa Tanner and Joshua Johnson.
Lawrence illustrated several works for children. Harriet and the Promised Land appeared in 1968 and used the series of paintings that told the story of Harriet Tubman. It was listed as one of the year's best illustrated books by The New York Times and praised by the Boston Globe: "The author's artistic talents, sensitivity and insight into the black experience have resulted in a book that actually creates, within the reader, a spiritual experience." Two similar volumes based on his John Brown and Great Migration series followed. Lawrence created illustrations for a selection of 18 of Aesop's Fables for Windmill Press in 1970, and the University of Washington Press published the full set of 23 tales in 1998.
Lawrence taught at several schools after his first stint teaching at Black Mountain College, including the New School for Social Research, the Art Students League, Pratt Institute, and the Skowhegan School. He became a visiting artist at the University of Washington in 1970 and was professor of art there from 1971 to 1986. He was graduate advisor there to lithographer and abstract painter James Claussen.
Shortly after moving to Washington state, Lawrence did a series of five paintings on the westward journey of African-American pioneer George Washington Bush. These paintings are now in the collection of the State of Washington History Museum.
He undertook several major commissions in this part of his career. In 1980, he completed Exploration, a 40-foot-long mural made of porcelain on steel, comprising a dozen panels devoted to academic endeavor. It was installed in Howard University's Blackburn Center. The Washington Post described it as "enormously sophisticated yet wholly unpretentious " and said:
The colors are competely flat, but because the porcelain is layered, and because Lawrence here and there paints in strong black shawdows, his mural has the look of a rich relief. It is full of visual rhymes. The small scene of John Henry, the steel drivin' man, in the final panel is echoed by an image of a sculptor in the art scene: He is hammering another spike, for quite different reasons, into a block of stone. This is not art that one tires of, for it is not the sort of work one can read at once.
Lawrence produced another series in 1983, eight screen prints called the Hiroshima Series. Commissioned to provide full-page illustrations for a new edition of a work of his choice, Lawrence chose John Hershey's Hiroshima (1946). He depicted in abstract visual language several survivors at the moment of the bombing in the midst of physical and emotional destruction.
Lawrence's painting Theater was commissioned by the University of Washington in 1985 and installed in the main lobby of the Meany Hall for the Performing Arts.
The Whitney Museum of American Art produced an exhibition of Lawrence's entire career in 1974, as did the Seattle Art Museum in 1986.
In 1999, he and his wife established the Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation for the creation, presentation and study of American art, with a particular emphasis on work by African-American artists. It represents their estates and maintains a searchable archive of nearly a thousand images of their work.
Lawrence continued to paint until a few weeks before his death from lung cancer on June 9, 2000, at the age of 82.
Lawrence's wife, Gwendolyn Knight, survived him and died in 2005 at the age of 91.
The eighteen institutions that awarded Lawrence honorary degrees include Harvard University, Yale University, Howard University, Amherst College, and New York University.
The New York Times described him as "one of America's leading modern figurative painters" and "among the most impassioned visual chroniclers of the African-American experience." Shortly before his death he stated: "...for me, a painting should have three things: universality, clarity and strength. Clarity and strength so that it may be aesthetically good. Universality so that it may be understood by all men."
A retrospective exhibition of Lawrence's work, planned before his death, opened at the Phillips Collection in May 2001 and travelled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Detroit Institute of Fine Arts, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The exhibit was meant to coincide with the publication of Jacob Lawrence: Paintings, Drawings, and Murals (1935-1999), A Catalogue Raisonne. His last commissioned public work, the mosaic mural New York in Transit made of Murano glass was installed in October 2001 in the Times Square subway station in New York City.
In 2005, Dixie Café, a 1948 brush-and-ink drawing by Lawrence, was selected to suggest The Civil Rights Act of 1964 in a U.S. postage stamp panel commemorating milestones of the Civil Rights Movement. The stamp sheet was called To Form A More Perfect Union.
In May 2007, the White House Historical Association purchased Lawrence's The Builders (1947) at auction for $2.5 million. The painting has hung in the White House Green Room since 2009.
The Seattle Art Museum offers the Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Fellowship, a $10,000 award to "individuals whose original work reflects the Lawrences' concern with artistic excellence, education, mentorship and scholarship within the cultural contexts and value systems that informed their work and the work of other artists of color." The Jacob Lawrence Gallery at the University of Washington School of Art + Art History + Design offers an annual Jacob Lawrence Legacy Residency.
His work is in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Phillips Collection, the Brooklyn Museum, the National Gallery of Art and Reynolda House Museum of American Art, the Art Institute Chicago, the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Minnesota Museum of American Art, the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Princeton University Art Museum, the Musei Vaticani, the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Portland Art Museum, the Hudson River Museum, and The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Jacob Armstead Lawrence (September 7, 1917 – June 9, 2000) was an American painter known for his portrayal of African-American historical subjects and contemporary life. Lawrence referred to his style as \"dynamic cubism,\" an art form popularized in Europe which drew great inspiration from West African and Meso-American art. For his compositions, Lawrence found inspiration in everyday life in Harlem. He brought the African-American experience to life using blacks and browns juxtaposed with vivid colors. He also taught and spent 16 years as a professor at the University of Washington.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Lawrence is among the best known twentieth-century African-American painters, known for his modernist illustrations of everyday life as well as narratives of African-American history and historical figures. At the age of 23 he gained national recognition with his 60-panel The Migration Series, which depicted the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North. The series was purchased jointly by the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Lawrence's works are in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Reynolda House Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Northwest Art. His 1947 painting The Builders hangs in the White House.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Jacob Lawrence was born September 7, 1917, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where his parents had migrated from the rural south. They divorced in 1924. His mother put him and his two younger siblings into foster care in Philadelphia. When he was 13, he and his siblings moved to New York City, where he reconnected with his mother in Harlem. Lawrence was introduced to art shortly after that when their mother enrolled him in after-school classes at an arts and crafts settlement house in Harlem, called Utopia Children's Center, in an effort to keep him busy. The young Lawrence often drew patterns with crayons. In the beginning, he copied the patterns of his mother's carpets.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "After dropping out of school at 16, Lawrence worked in a laundromat and a printing plant. He continued with art, attending classes at the Harlem Art Workshop, taught by the noted African-American artist Charles Alston. Alston urged him to attend the Harlem Community Art Center, led by the sculptor Augusta Savage. Savage secured a scholarship to the American Artists School for Lawrence and a paid position with the Works Progress Administration, established during the Great Depression by the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Lawrence continued his studies as well, working with Alston and Henry Bannarn, another Harlem Renaissance artist, in the Alston-Bannarn workshop. He also studied at Harlem Art Workshop in New York in 1937. Harlem provided crucial training for the majority of Black artists in the United States. Lawrence was one of the first artists trained in and by the African-American community in Harlem. Throughout his lengthy artistic career, Lawrence concentrated on exploring the history and struggles of African Americans.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The \"hard, bright, brittle\" aspects of Harlem during the Great Depression inspired Lawrence as much as the colors, shapes, and patterns inside the homes of its residents. \"Even in my mother's home,\" Lawrence told historian Paul Karlstrom, \"people of my mother's generation would decorate their homes in all sorts of color... so you'd think in terms of Matisse.\" He used water-based media throughout his career. Lawrence started to gain some notice for his dramatic and lively portrayals of both contemporary scenes of African-American urban life as well as historical events, all of which he depicted in crisp shapes, bright, clear colors, dynamic patterns, and through revealing posture and gestures.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "At the very start of his career he developed the approach that made his reputation and remained his touchstone: creating series of paintings that told a story or, less often, depicted many aspects of a subject. His first were biographical accounts of key figures of the African diaspora. He was just 21 years old when his series of 41 paintings of the Haitian general Toussaint L’Ouverture, who led the revolution of the slaves that eventually gained independence, was shown in an exhibit of African-American artists at the Baltimore Museum of Art. This was followed by a series of paintings of the lives of Harriet Tubman (1938–39) and Frederick Douglass (1939–40).",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "His teacher Charles Alston assesses Lawrence's work in an essay for an exhibition at the Harlem YMCA 1938:",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Having thus far miraculously escaped the imprint of academic ideas and current vogues in art,... he has followed a course of development dictated by his own inner motivations... Working in the very limited medium of flat tempera he achieved a richness and brilliance of color harmonies both remarkable and exciting... Lawrence symbolizes more than anyone I know, the vitality, the seriousness and promise of a new and socially conscious generation of Negro artists.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "On July 24, 1941, Lawrence married the painter Gwendolyn Knight, also a student of Savage. She helped prepare the gesso panels for his paintings and contributed to the captions for the paintings in his multi-painting works.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Lawrence completed the 60-panel set of narrative paintings entitled Migration of the Negro or And the Migrants Kept Coming, now called the Migration Series, in 1940–41. The series portrayed the Great Migration, when hundreds of thousands of African Americans moved from the rural South to the urban North after World War I. Because he was working in tempera, which dries rapidly, he planned all the paintings in advance and then applied a single color wherever he was using it across all the scenes to maintain tonal consistency. Only then did he proceed to the next color. The series was exhibited at the Downtown Gallery in Greenwich Village, which made him the first African-American artist represented by a New York gallery. This brought him national recognition. Selections from this series were featured in a 1941 issue of Fortune. The entire series was purchased jointly and divided by the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., which holds the odd-numbered paintings, and New York's Museum of Modern Art, which holds the even-numbered. His early work involved general depictions of everyday life in Harlem and also a major series dedicated to African-American history (1940–1941).",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Another biographical series of twenty-two panels devoted to the abolitionist John Brown followed in 1941–42. When these pairings became too fragile to display, Lawrence, working on commission, recreated the paintings as a portfolio of silkscreen prints in 1977.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In 1943, Howard Devree, writing in The New York Times, thought Lawrence in his next series of thirty images had \"even more successfully concentrated his attention on the many-sided life of his people in Harlem\". He called the set \"an amazing social document\" and wrote:",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Lawrence's color is fittingly vivid for his interpretations. A strong semi-abstract approach aids him in arriving at his basic or archetypal statements. Confronting this work one feels as if vouchsafed an extraordinary elemental experience. Lawrence has grown in his use of rhythm as well as in sheer design and fluency.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In October 1943, during the Second World War, Lawrence was drafted into the United States Coast Guard and served as a public affairs specialist with the first racially integrated crew on the USCGC Sea Cloud, under Carlton Skinner. He continued to paint and sketch while in the Coast Guard, documenting the experience of war around the world. He produced 48 paintings during this time, all of which have been lost. He achieved the rank of petty officer third class.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In October and November 1944, MOMA exhibited all 60 migration panels plus 8 of the paintings Lawrence created aboard the Sea Cloud. He posed, still in his uniform, in front of a sign that read: \"Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series and Works Created in the US Coast Guard\". The Coast Guard sent the eight paintings to exhibits around the United States. In the disorder and personnel changes that came with demobilization at the end of the war they went missing.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In 1945, he was awarded a fellowship in the fine arts by the Guggenheim Foundation. In 1946, Josef Albers recruited Lawrence to join the faculty of the summer art program at Black Mountain College.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Returning to New York, Lawrence continued to paint but grew depressed; in 1949, he checked himself into Hillside Hospital in Queens, where he remained for eleven months. Painting there, he produced his Hospital Series, works that were uncharacteristic of him in their focus of his subjects' emotional states as an inpatient.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Between 1954 and 1956 Lawrence produced a 30-panel series called \"Struggle: From the History of the American People\" that depicted historical scenes from 1775 to 1817. The series, originally planned to include sixty panels, includes references to current events like the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, and they sometimes explore relatively obscure or neglected aspects of American history, like a woman, Margaret Cochran Corbin, in combat or the wall built by unseen enslaved Blacks that protected the American forces at the Battle of New Orleans. Rather than traditional titles, Lawrence labeled each panel with a quote, either to add an individual voice to his work or inject weighted vocabulary. Patrick Henry's speech, famous for the phrase \"Give me liberty or give me death\", he captioned with a different passage: \"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery.\" A panel showing Blacks fighting against the British is captioned with the words of a man who sued for emancipation from slavery in 1773: \"We have no property! We have no wives! No children! We have no city! No country!\" Three panels (Panels 14, 20 and 29) are lost, and three others were only located in 2017, 2020, and 2021. The fraught politics of the mid-1950s prevented the series from finding a museum purchaser, and the panels had been sold to a private collector who re-sold them as individual works.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The Brooklyn Museum of Art mounted a retrospective exhibition of his work in 1960. In 1969, he was among 200 Black artists in a premier show sponsored by the Philadelphia School District and the Pennsylvania Civic Center Museum. The show featured some of the top names in the country, including Ellen Powell Tiberino, Horace Pippin, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Barbara Bullock, Jacob Lawrence, Benny Andrews, Roland Ayers, Romare Bearden, Avel de Knight, Barkley Hendricks, Paul Keene, Raymond Saunders, Louis B. Sloan, Ed Wilson, Henry Ossawa Tanner and Joshua Johnson.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Lawrence illustrated several works for children. Harriet and the Promised Land appeared in 1968 and used the series of paintings that told the story of Harriet Tubman. It was listed as one of the year's best illustrated books by The New York Times and praised by the Boston Globe: \"The author's artistic talents, sensitivity and insight into the black experience have resulted in a book that actually creates, within the reader, a spiritual experience.\" Two similar volumes based on his John Brown and Great Migration series followed. Lawrence created illustrations for a selection of 18 of Aesop's Fables for Windmill Press in 1970, and the University of Washington Press published the full set of 23 tales in 1998.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Lawrence taught at several schools after his first stint teaching at Black Mountain College, including the New School for Social Research, the Art Students League, Pratt Institute, and the Skowhegan School. He became a visiting artist at the University of Washington in 1970 and was professor of art there from 1971 to 1986. He was graduate advisor there to lithographer and abstract painter James Claussen.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Shortly after moving to Washington state, Lawrence did a series of five paintings on the westward journey of African-American pioneer George Washington Bush. These paintings are now in the collection of the State of Washington History Museum.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "He undertook several major commissions in this part of his career. In 1980, he completed Exploration, a 40-foot-long mural made of porcelain on steel, comprising a dozen panels devoted to academic endeavor. It was installed in Howard University's Blackburn Center. The Washington Post described it as \"enormously sophisticated yet wholly unpretentious \" and said:",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The colors are competely flat, but because the porcelain is layered, and because Lawrence here and there paints in strong black shawdows, his mural has the look of a rich relief. It is full of visual rhymes. The small scene of John Henry, the steel drivin' man, in the final panel is echoed by an image of a sculptor in the art scene: He is hammering another spike, for quite different reasons, into a block of stone. This is not art that one tires of, for it is not the sort of work one can read at once.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Lawrence produced another series in 1983, eight screen prints called the Hiroshima Series. Commissioned to provide full-page illustrations for a new edition of a work of his choice, Lawrence chose John Hershey's Hiroshima (1946). He depicted in abstract visual language several survivors at the moment of the bombing in the midst of physical and emotional destruction.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Lawrence's painting Theater was commissioned by the University of Washington in 1985 and installed in the main lobby of the Meany Hall for the Performing Arts.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The Whitney Museum of American Art produced an exhibition of Lawrence's entire career in 1974, as did the Seattle Art Museum in 1986.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In 1999, he and his wife established the Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation for the creation, presentation and study of American art, with a particular emphasis on work by African-American artists. It represents their estates and maintains a searchable archive of nearly a thousand images of their work.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Lawrence continued to paint until a few weeks before his death from lung cancer on June 9, 2000, at the age of 82.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Lawrence's wife, Gwendolyn Knight, survived him and died in 2005 at the age of 91.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The eighteen institutions that awarded Lawrence honorary degrees include Harvard University, Yale University, Howard University, Amherst College, and New York University.",
"title": "Awards and honors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The New York Times described him as \"one of America's leading modern figurative painters\" and \"among the most impassioned visual chroniclers of the African-American experience.\" Shortly before his death he stated: \"...for me, a painting should have three things: universality, clarity and strength. Clarity and strength so that it may be aesthetically good. Universality so that it may be understood by all men.\"",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "A retrospective exhibition of Lawrence's work, planned before his death, opened at the Phillips Collection in May 2001 and travelled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Detroit Institute of Fine Arts, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The exhibit was meant to coincide with the publication of Jacob Lawrence: Paintings, Drawings, and Murals (1935-1999), A Catalogue Raisonne. His last commissioned public work, the mosaic mural New York in Transit made of Murano glass was installed in October 2001 in the Times Square subway station in New York City.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "In 2005, Dixie Café, a 1948 brush-and-ink drawing by Lawrence, was selected to suggest The Civil Rights Act of 1964 in a U.S. postage stamp panel commemorating milestones of the Civil Rights Movement. The stamp sheet was called To Form A More Perfect Union.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In May 2007, the White House Historical Association purchased Lawrence's The Builders (1947) at auction for $2.5 million. The painting has hung in the White House Green Room since 2009.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The Seattle Art Museum offers the Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Fellowship, a $10,000 award to \"individuals whose original work reflects the Lawrences' concern with artistic excellence, education, mentorship and scholarship within the cultural contexts and value systems that informed their work and the work of other artists of color.\" The Jacob Lawrence Gallery at the University of Washington School of Art + Art History + Design offers an annual Jacob Lawrence Legacy Residency.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "His work is in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Phillips Collection, the Brooklyn Museum, the National Gallery of Art and Reynolda House Museum of American Art, the Art Institute Chicago, the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Minnesota Museum of American Art, the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Princeton University Art Museum, the Musei Vaticani, the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Portland Art Museum, the Hudson River Museum, and The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.",
"title": "Legacy"
}
]
| Jacob Armstead Lawrence was an American painter known for his portrayal of African-American historical subjects and contemporary life. Lawrence referred to his style as "dynamic cubism," an art form popularized in Europe which drew great inspiration from West African and Meso-American art. For his compositions, Lawrence found inspiration in everyday life in Harlem. He brought the African-American experience to life using blacks and browns juxtaposed with vivid colors. He also taught and spent 16 years as a professor at the University of Washington. Lawrence is among the best known twentieth-century African-American painters, known for his modernist illustrations of everyday life as well as narratives of African-American history and historical figures. At the age of 23 he gained national recognition with his 60-panel The Migration Series, which depicted the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North. The series was purchased jointly by the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Lawrence's works are in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Reynolda House Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Northwest Art. His 1947 painting The Builders hangs in the White House. | 2001-10-27T17:42:04Z | 2023-12-27T21:23:31Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Lawrence |
16,273 | James Stewart | James Maitland "Jimmy" Stewart (May 20, 1908 – July 2, 1997) was an American actor and military officer. Known for his distinctive drawl and everyman screen persona, Stewart's film career spanned 80 films from 1935 to 1991. With the strong morality which he portrayed both on and off the screen, he epitomized the "American ideal" in the mid-twentieth century. In 1999, the American Film Institute (AFI) ranked him third on its list of the greatest American male actors. He received numerous honors including the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1980, the Kennedy Center Honor in 1983, as well as the Academy Honorary Award and Presidential Medal of Freedom, both in 1985.
Born and raised in Indiana, Pennsylvania, Stewart started acting while at Princeton University. After graduating in 1932, he began a career as a stage actor, appearing on Broadway and in summer stock productions. He landed his first supporting role in The Murder Man (1935) and had his breakthrough in Frank Capra's ensemble comedy You Can't Take It with You (1938). The following year, Stewart garnered his first of five Academy Award nominations for his portrayal of an idealized senator in Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). The following year he received the Academy Award for Best Actor, the only competitive Oscar of his career, for his performance in the George Cukor romantic comedy The Philadelphia Story (1940). His acting career was paused after he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II, deputy commanding the 2nd Bombardment Wing and commanding the 703d Bombardment Squadron. He later transferred to the Air Force Reserve, and held various command positions until his retirement in 1968 as a brigadier general.
Stewart's first postwar role was as George Bailey in Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946). Although the film was not a major success upon release, he earned an Oscar nomination, and the film has become a Christmas classic, as well as one of his best-known roles. As one of the most popular film stars of the '50s, Stewart played darker, more morally ambiguous characters in movies directed by Anthony Mann, including Winchester '73 (1950), The Glenn Miller Story (1954), and The Naked Spur (1953), and by Alfred Hitchcock in Rope (1948), Rear Window (1954), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), and Vertigo (1958). During this time he received Academy Award nominations for his roles in the comedy Harvey (1950) and the courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder (1959). Stewart also starred in The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), The Spirit of St. Louis (1957), The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) as well as the Western films How the West Was Won (1962), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), and Cheyenne Autumn (1964). He appeared in many popular family comedies during the 1960s.
Stewart remained unmarried until his 40s and was dubbed "The Great American Bachelor" by the press. In 1949, he married former model Gloria Hatrick McLean. They had twin daughters, and he adopted her two sons from her previous marriage. The marriage lasted until McLean's death in 1994, and Stewart died of a pulmonary embolism three years later.
James Maitland Stewart was born on May 20, 1908, in Indiana, Pennsylvania, the eldest child and only son born to Elizabeth Ruth (née Jackson; 1875–1953) and Alexander Maitland Stewart (1872–1962). Stewart had two younger sisters, Mary (1912–1977) and Virginia (1914–1972). He was of Scottish and Scotch-Irish ancestry. The Stewart family had lived in Pennsylvania for many generations. Stewart's father ran the family business, the J. M. Stewart and Company Hardware Store, which he hoped Stewart would take over as an adult after attending Princeton University, as was the family tradition. Raised a Presbyterian by his deeply religious father, Stewart was a devout churchgoer for much of his life.
Stewart's mother was a pianist, and music was an important part of family life. When a customer at the store was unable to pay his bill, Stewart's father accepted an old accordion as payment. Stewart learned to play the instrument with the help of a local barber. His accordion became a fixture offstage during his acting career. A shy child, Stewart spent much of his time after school in the basement working on model airplanes, mechanical drawings, and chemistry—all with a dream of going into aviation. He attended the Wilson Model School for primary school and junior high school. He was not a gifted student and received average to low grades. According to his teachers, this was not from a lack of intelligence, but due to being creative and having a tendency to daydream.
Stewart began attending Mercersburg Academy prep school in the fall of 1923, because his father did not believe he would be accepted into Princeton (his father was a member of the class of 1898) if he attended public high school. At Mercersburg, Stewart participated in a variety of extracurricular activities. He was a member of the track team (competing as a high jumper under coach Jimmy Curran), the art editor of the school yearbook, a member of the glee club, and a member of the John Marshall Literary Society. To his disappointment, he was relegated to the third-tier football team due to his slender physique. Stewart also made his first onstage appearance at Mercersburg, as Buquet in the play The Wolves in 1928. During summer breaks, he returned to Indiana, working first as a brick loader and then as a magician's assistant. Due to scarlet fever that turned into a kidney infection, he had to take time out from school in 1927, which delayed his graduation until 1928. He remained passionate about aviation, with his interest enhanced by Charles Lindbergh's first solo transatlantic flight, but abandoned visions of becoming a pilot when his father steered him towards Princeton.
Stewart enrolled at Princeton in 1928 as a member of the class of 1932, majoring in architecture and becoming a member of the Princeton Charter Club. He excelled academically but also became attracted to the school's drama and music clubs, including the Princeton Triangle Club. Upon his graduation in 1932, he was awarded a scholarship for graduate studies in architecture for his thesis on an airport terminal design, but chose instead to join University Players, an intercollegiate summer stock company performing in West Falmouth, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod.
Stewart performed in bit parts in the University Players' productions in Cape Cod during the summer of 1932. The company's directors included Joshua Logan, Bretaigne Windust, and Charles Leatherbee, and amongst its other actors were married couple Henry Fonda and Margaret Sullavan, who became Stewart's close friends. At the end of the season, Stewart moved to New York with his Players friends Logan, Myron McCormick, and newly single Henry Fonda. Along with McCormick, Stewart debuted on Broadway in the brief run of Carry Nation and a few weeks later – again with McCormick – appeared as a chauffeur in the comedy Goodbye Again, in which he had a walk-on line. The New Yorker commented, "Mr. James Stewart's chauffeur... comes on for three minutes and walks off to a round of spontaneous applause." Following the seven-month run of Goodbye Again, Stewart took a stage manager position in Boston, but was fired after frequently missing his cues. Returning to New York, he then landed a small part in Spring in Autumn and a role in All Good Americans, where he was required to throw a banjo out of the window. Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times wrote, "Throwing a $250 banjo out of the window at the concierge is constructive abuse and should be virtuously applauded." Both plays folded after only short runs, and Stewart began to think about going back to his studies.
Stewart was convinced to continue acting when he was cast in the lead role of Yellow Jack, playing a soldier who becomes the subject of a yellow fever experiment. It premiered at the Martin Beck Theater in March 1934. Stewart received unanimous praise from the critics, but the play proved unpopular with audiences and folded by June. During the summer, Stewart made his film debut with an unbilled appearance in the Shemp Howard comedy short Art Trouble (1934), filmed in Brooklyn, and acted in summer stock productions of We Die Exquisitely and All Paris Knows at the Red Barn Theater on Long Island. In the fall, he again received excellent reviews for his role in Divided by Three at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, which he followed with the modestly successful Page Miss Glory and the critical failure A Journey By Night in spring 1935.
Soon after A Journey By Night ended, Stewart signed a seven-year contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), orchestrated by talent scout Bill Grady, who had been tracking Stewart's career since seeing him perform in Princeton. His first Hollywood role was a minor appearance in the Spencer Tracy vehicle The Murder Man (1935). His performance was largely ignored by critics, although the New York Herald Tribune, remembering him in Yellow Jack, called him "wasted in a bit that he handles with characteristically engaging skill". As MGM did not see leading-man material in Stewart, described by biographer Michael D. Rinella as a "lanky young bumpkin with a hesitant manner of speech" during this time, his agent Leland Hayward decided that the best path for him would be through loan-outs to other studios.
Stewart had only a small role in his second MGM film, the hit musical Rose Marie (1936), but it led to his casting in seven other films within one year, from Next Time We Love to After the Thin Man. He also received crucial help from his University Players friend Margaret Sullavan, who campaigned for him to be her leading man in the Universal romantic comedy Next Time We Love (1936), filmed right after Rose Marie. Sullavan rehearsed extensively with him, boosting his confidence and helping him incorporate his mannerisms and boyishness into his screen persona. Next Time We Love was a box-office success and received mostly positive reviews, leading Stewart to be noticed by critics and MGM executives. Time stated that "the chief significance of [the film] in the progress of the cinema industry is likely to reside in the presence in its cast of James Stewart", and The New York Times called him "a welcome addition to the roster of Hollywood's leading men".
Stewart followed Next Time We Love with supporting roles in two commercially successful romantic comedies, Wife vs. Secretary (1936) with Clark Gable and Myrna Loy and Small Town Girl (1936). In both, he played the betrayed boyfriend of the leading lady, portrayed by Jean Harlow and Janet Gaynor, respectively. Both films garnered him some good reviews. After an appearance in the short subject Important News (1936), Stewart had his first top-billed role in the low-budget "B" movie Speed (1936), in which he played a mechanic and speed driver competing in the Indianapolis 500. The film was a critical and commercial failure, although Frank Nugent of The New York Times stated that "Mr. Stewart [and the rest of the cast] perform as pleasantly as possible."
Stewart's last three film releases of 1936 were all box-office successes. He had only a bit part in The Gorgeous Hussy, but a starring role in the musical Born to Dance with Eleanor Powell. His performance in the latter was not well-received: The New York Times stated that his "singing and dancing will (fortunately) never win him a song-and-dance-man classification", and Variety called "his singing and dancing [...] rather painful on their own", although it otherwise found Stewart aptly cast in an "assignment [that] calls for a shy youth". Stewart's last film to be released in 1936, After the Thin Man, features a shattering emotional climax rendered by Stewart. Kate Cameron of the New York Daily News wrote that he "has one grand scene in which he demonstrates most effectively that he is something more than a musical comedy juvenile".
For his next film, the romantic drama Seventh Heaven (1937), Stewart was loaned to 20th Century-Fox to play a Parisian sewer worker in a remake of Frank Borzage's silent classic released a decade earlier. He and co-star Simone Simon were miscast, and the film was a critical and commercial failure. William Boehnel of the New York World-Telegram called Stewart's performance emotionless, and Eileen Creelman of The New York Sun wrote that he made little attempt to look or sound French. Stewart's next film, The Last Gangster (1937) starring Edward G. Robinson, was also a failure, but it was followed by a critically acclaimed performance in Navy Blue and Gold (1937) as a football player at the United States Naval Academy. The film was a box-office success and earned Stewart the best reviews of his career up to that point. The New York Times wrote "the ending leaves us with the conviction that James Stewart is a sincere and likable triple-threat man in the [MGM] backfield" and Variety called his performance "fine".
Despite good reviews, Stewart was still a minor star, and MGM remained hesitant to cast him in leading roles, preferring to loan him out to other studios. After a well-received supporting part in Of Human Hearts (1938), he was loaned to RKO to act opposite Ginger Rogers in the romantic comedy Vivacious Lady (1938). The production was shut down for months in 1937 as Stewart recovered from an undisclosed illness, during which he was hospitalized. RKO initially wanted to replace Stewart, but eventually the project was canceled. However, Rogers' success in a stage musical caused the film to be picked up again. Stewart was recast in Vivacious Lady at Rogers' insistence and due to his performance in Of Human Hearts. It was a critical and commercial success, and showed Stewart's talent for performing in romantic comedies; The New York Herald called him "one of the most knowing and engaging young actors appearing on the screen at present".
Stewart's third film release of 1938, the First World War drama The Shopworn Angel, saw him collaborate again with Margaret Sullavan. In his performance, Stewart drew upon his own feelings of unrequited love towards Sullavan, who was married to his agent, Leland Hayward. Although the film was otherwise well-received, critics were mixed about Stewart. Bland Johaneson of the New York Daily Mirror compared him to Stan Laurel in this melodramatic film, and Variety called his performance unfocused. Irene Thier of The New York Post wrote that his role was "just another proof that this young man is one of the finest actors of the screen's young roster".
Stewart became a major star when he was loaned out to Columbia Pictures to play the lead role in Frank Capra's You Can't Take It with You (1938) opposite Jean Arthur. Stewart played the son of a banker who falls in love with a woman from a poor and eccentric family. Capra had recently completed several well-received films and was looking for a new type of leading man. He had been impressed by Stewart's role in Navy Blue and Gold (1937). According to Capra, Stewart was one of the best actors ever to hit the screen, understood character archetypes intuitively, and required little directing. You Can't Take It With You became the fifth highest-grossing film of the year and won the Academy Award for Best Picture. The film was also critically successful, but while Variety wrote that the performances of Stewart and Arthur garnered "much of the laughs", most of the critical acclaim went to Lionel Barrymore and Edward Arnold.
In contrast to the success of You Can't Take It With You, Stewart's first three film releases of 1939 were all commercial disappointments. In the melodrama Made for Each Other (1939), he shared the screen with Carole Lombard. Stewart blamed its directing and screenwriting for its poor box-office performance. Regardless, the film received favorable reviews, with Newsweek writing that Stewart and Lombard were "perfectly cast in the leading roles". The other two films, The Ice Follies of 1939 and It's a Wonderful World, were critical failures.
In Stewart's fourth 1939 film, he worked with Capra and Arthur again in the political comedy-drama Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Stewart played an idealist thrown into the political arena. It garnered critical praise and became the third-highest-grossing film of the year. The Nation stated "[Stewart] takes first place among Hollywood actors...Now he is mature and gives a difficult part, with many nuances, moments of tragic-comic impact." Later, critic Andrew Sarris qualified Stewart's performance as "lean, gangling, idealistic to the point of being neurotic, thoughtful to the point of being tongue-tied", describing him as "particularly gifted in expressing the emotional ambivalence of the action hero". Stewart won the New York Film Critics Circle award and received his first nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor.
Stewart's last screen appearance of 1939 came in the Western Destry Rides Again, in which he portrayed a pacifist lawman alongside Marlene Dietrich, a saloon girl who falls in love with him. It was critically and commercially successful. TIME magazine wrote, "James Stewart, who had just turned in the top performance of his cinematurity as Jefferson Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, turns in as good a performance or better as Thomas Jefferson Destry." Between films, Stewart had begun a radio career and had become a distinctive voice on the Lux Radio Theater, The Screen Guild Theater, and other shows. So well-known had his slow drawl become that comedians began impersonating him.
Stewart and Sullavan reunited for two films in 1940. The Ernst Lubitsch romantic comedy The Shop Around the Corner starred them as co-workers who cannot stand each other but unknowingly become romantic pen-pals. It received good reviews and was a box-office success in Europe, but failed to find an audience in the US, where less-gentle screwball comedies were more popular. Director Lubitsch assessed it to be the best film of his career, and it has been regarded highly by later critics, such as Pauline Kael and Richard Schickel.
The drama The Mortal Storm, directed by Frank Borzage, featured Sullavan and Stewart as lovers caught in turmoil upon Hitler's rise to power. It was one of the first blatantly anti-Nazi films to be produced in Hollywood, but according to film scholar Ben Urwand, "ultimately made very little impact" as it did not show the persecution experienced by Jews or name that ethnic group. Despite being well received by critics, it failed at the box office. Ten days after filming The Mortal Storm, Stewart began filming No Time for Comedy (1940) with Rosalind Russell. Critics complimented Stewart's performance; Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called Stewart "the best thing in the show", yet the film was again not a box-office success.
Stewart's final film to be released in 1940 was George Cukor's romantic comedy The Philadelphia Story, in which he played an intrusive, fast-talking reporter sent to cover the wedding of a socialite (Katharine Hepburn) with the help of her ex-husband (Cary Grant). The film became one of the largest box-office successes of the year and received widespread critical acclaim. The New York Herald Tribune stated that "Stewart...contributes most of the comedy to the show...In addition, he contributes some of the most irresistible romantic moments." His performance earned him his only Academy Award in a competitive category for Best Actor, beating out Henry Fonda, for whom he had voted and with whom he had once roomed, both almost broke, in the early 1930s in New York. Stewart himself assessed his performance in Mr. Smith to be superior and believed the Academy was recompensing for not giving him the award the year prior. Moreover, Stewart's character was a supporting role, not the male lead. He gave the Oscar to his father, who displayed it at his hardware store alongside other family awards and military medals.
Stewart next appeared in two comedies—Come Live with Me (1941), which paired him with Hedy Lamarr, and Pot o' Gold (1941), featuring Paulette Goddard—that were both box-office failures. Stewart considered the latter to be the worst film of his career. His last film before military service was the musical Ziegfeld Girl (1941), which co-starred Judy Garland, Hedy Lamarr, and Lana Turner. It was a critical failure, but also one of the best box-office performers of the year.
Stewart became the first major American movie star to enlist in the United States Army to fight in World War II. His family had deep military roots: both of his grandfathers had fought in the Civil War, and his father had served during both the Spanish–American War and World War I. After first being rejected for low weight in November 1940, he enlisted in February 1941. As an experienced pilot, he reported for induction as a private in the Air Corps on March 22, 1941. Soon to be 33 years old, he was over the age limit for Aviation Cadet training—the normal path of commissioning for pilots, navigators and bombardiers—and therefore applied for an Air Corps commission as both a college graduate and a licensed commercial pilot. Stewart received his commission as a second lieutenant on January 1, 1942.
After enlisting, Stewart made no new commercial films, although he remained under contract to MGM. His public appearances were limited to engagements for the Army Air Forces. The Air Corps scheduled him on network radio with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, and on the radio program We Hold These Truths, a celebration of the United States Bill of Rights, which was broadcast a week after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Stewart also appeared in a First Motion Picture Unit short film, Winning Your Wings, to help recruit airmen. Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1942, it appeared in movie theaters nationwide beginning in late May 1942 and resulted in 150,000 new recruits.
Stewart was concerned that his celebrity status would relegate him to duties behind the lines. After spending over a year training pilots at Kirtland Army Airfield in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he appealed to his commander and in November 1943 was sent to England as part of the 703d Bomb Squadron to fly B-24 Liberators. He was based initially at RAF Tibenham, before moving to RAF Old Buckenham.
Stewart was promoted to major following a mission to Ludwigshafen, Germany, on January 7, 1944. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for actions as deputy commander of the 2nd Bombardment Wing, the French Croix de Guerre with palm, and the Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters. Stewart was promoted to full colonel on March 29, 1945, becoming one of the few Americans to ever rise from private to colonel in only four years. At the beginning of June 1945, Stewart was the presiding officer of the court martial of a pilot and navigator who accidentally bombed Zürich, Switzerland.
Stewart returned to the United States in early fall 1945. He continued to play a role in reserve of the Army Air Forces after the war and was also one of the 12 founders of the Air Force Association in October 1945. Stewart would eventually transfer to the reserves of the United States Air Force after the Army Air Forces split from the Army in 1947. During active-duty periods, he served with the Strategic Air Command and completed transition training as a pilot on the B-47 and B-52.
Stewart was first nominated for promotion to brigadier general in February 1957; however, his promotion was initially opposed by Senator Margaret Chase Smith. At the time of the nomination, the Washington Daily News noted: "He trains actively with the Reserve every year. He's had 18 hours as first pilot of a B-52." On July 23, 1959, Stewart was promoted to brigadier general, becoming the highest-ranking actor in American military history. During the Vietnam War, he flew as a non-duty observer in a B-52 on an Arc Light bombing mission in February 1966. He served for 27 years, officially retiring from the Air Force on May 31, 1968, when he reached the mandatory retirement age of 60. Upon his retirement, he was awarded the United States Air Force Distinguished Service Medal. Stewart rarely spoke about his wartime service but did appear in an episode of the British television documentary series The World at War (1974), commenting on the disastrous 1943 mission against Schweinfurt, Germany.
After his experiences in the war, Stewart considered returning to Pennsylvania to run the family store. His former agent, Leland Hayward, had also left the talent business in 1944 after selling his roster of stars, including Stewart, to Music Corporation of America (MCA). Stewart decided not to renew his MGM contract and instead signed a deal with MCA. He later stated that he was given a new beginning by Frank Capra, who asked him to star in It's a Wonderful Life (1946), the first postwar film for both of them. Stewart played George Bailey, an upstanding small-town man who becomes increasingly frustrated by his ordinary existence and financial troubles. Driven to suicide on Christmas Eve, he is led to reassess his life by Clarence Odbody, an "angel, second class", played by Henry Travers. During filming, Stewart experienced doubts about his abilities and continued to consider retiring from acting.
Although It's a Wonderful Life was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Stewart's third Best Actor nomination, it received mixed reviews and was only a moderate success at the box office, failing to cover its production costs. Several critics found the movie too sentimental, although Bosley Crowther wrote that Stewart did a "warmly appealing job, indicating that he has grown in spiritual stature as well as in talent during the years he was in the war", and President Harry S. Truman concluded that "If [my wife] and I had a son we'd want him to be just like Jimmy Stewart [in this film]." In the decades since its release, It's a Wonderful Life has grown to define Stewart's film persona and is widely considered a Christmas classic, and according to the American Film Institute, is one of the 100 best American movies ever made. Andrew Sarris stated that Stewart's performance was underappreciated by critics of the time, who could not see "the force and fury" of it, and considered his proposal scene with Donna Reed, "one of the most sublimely histrionic expressions of passion". Stewart later named the film his personal favorite out of his filmography.
In the aftermath of It's A Wonderful Life, Capra's production company went into bankruptcy, while Stewart continued to have doubts about his acting abilities. His generation of actors was fading, and a new wave of actors, including Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and James Dean, would soon remake Hollywood. Stewart returned to making radio dramas in 1946; he continued this work between films until the mid-1950s. He also made a comeback on Broadway to star in Mary Coyle Chase's Harvey in July 1947, replacing the original star Frank Fay for the duration of his vacation. The play had opened to nearly universal praise in 1944 and told the story of Elwood P. Dowd, a wealthy eccentric, whose best friend is an invisible man-sized rabbit and whose relatives are trying to get him committed to a mental asylum. Stewart gained a following in the unconventional play, and although Fay returned to the role in August, they decided that Stewart would take his place again the next summer. Stewart's only film to be released in 1947 was the William A. Wellman comedy Magic Town, one of the first films about the new science of public opinion polling. It was poorly received both commercially and critically.
Stewart appeared in four new film releases in 1948. Call Northside 777 was a critically acclaimed film noir, while the musical comedy On Our Merry Way, in which Stewart and Henry Fonda played jazz musicians in an ensemble cast, was a critical and commercial failure. The comedy You Gotta Stay Happy, which paired Stewart with Joan Fontaine, was the most successful of his post-war films up to that point. Rope, in which Stewart played the idolized teacher of two young men who commit murder to show their supposed superiority, began his collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock. Shot in long "real-time" takes, Stewart felt pressure to be flawless in his performance; the added stress led to him sleeping very little and drinking more heavily. Rope received mixed reviews, and Andrew Sarris and Scott Eyman have later called him miscast in the role of a Nietzsche-loving philosophy professor. The film's screenwriter Arthur Laurents also stated that "the casting of [Stewart] was absolutely destructive. He's not sexual as an actor."
Stewart found success again with The Stratton Story (1949), playing baseball champion Monty Stratton opposite June Allyson. It became the sixth highest-grossing film of 1949 and was well received by the critics. The New York Times noted, "The Stratton Story was the best thing that has yet happened to Mr. Stewart in his post-war film career...he gives such a winning performance that it is almost impossible to imagine any one else playing the role." Stewart's other 1949 release saw him reunited with Spencer Tracy in the World War II film Malaya (1949). It was a commercial failure and received mixed reviews.
In the 1950s, Stewart experienced a career renewal as the star of Westerns and collaborated on several films with director Anthony Mann. The first of these was the Universal production Winchester '73 (1950), which Stewart agreed to do in exchange for being cast in a screen adaptation of Harvey. It also marked a turning point in Hollywood, as Stewart's agent, Lew Wasserman, brokered an innovative deal with Universal, in which Stewart would receive no fee in exchange for a percentage of the profits. Stewart was also granted authority to collaborate with the studio on casting and hiring decisions. Stewart ended up earning about $600,000 for Winchester '73, significantly more than his usual fee, and other stars quickly capitalized on this new way of doing business, which further undermined the decaying studio system.
Stewart chose Mann to direct, and the film gave him the idea of redefining his screen persona through the Western genre. In the film, Stewart is a tough, vengeful sharpshooter, the winner of a prized rifle that is stolen and passes through many hands, until the showdown between him and his brother. Winchester '73 became a box-office success upon its summer release and earned Stewart rave reviews. He also starred in another successful Western that summer, Broken Arrow (1950), which featured him as an ex-soldier and Native American agent making peace with the Apache.
Stewart's third film release of 1950 was the comedy The Jackpot; it received critical acclaim and was commercially successful, but was a minor film in his repertoire and has largely been forgotten by contemporary critics and fans. In December 1950, the screen adaptation of Harvey was released, directed by Henry Koster and with Stewart reprising his stage role. With critics comparing his performance with Fay's, Stewart's performance as well as the film itself received mixed reviews. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote that "so darling is the acting of James Stewart [...] and all the rest that a virtually brand-new experience is still in store for even those who saw the play", while Variety called him "perfect" in the role. John McCarten of the New Yorker stated that although he "doesn't bring his part to the battered authority of Frank Fay...he nevertheless succeeds in making plausible the notion that Harvey, the rabbit, would accept him as a pal." Stewart later stated that he was dissatisfied with his performance, stating, "I played him a little too dreamily, a little too cute-cute." Despite the film's poor box office performance, Stewart received his fourth Academy Award nomination as well as his first Golden Globe nomination. Similar to It's a Wonderful Life, Harvey achieved popularity later, after frequent television showings.
Stewart appeared in only one film released in 1951, playing a scientist in Koster's British production No Highway in the Sky, which was one of the first airplane disaster films ever made. Filmed in England, it became a box office success in the United Kingdom, but failed to attract audiences in the United States. Stewart took a small supporting role as a troubled clown in Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), which went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Critics were curious why Stewart had taken such a small, out-of-character role; he responded that he was inspired by Lon Chaney's ability to disguise himself while letting his character emerge. In the same year, Stewart starred in a critically and commercially failed biopic, Carbine Williams (1952), and continued his collaboration with Mann in Bend of the River (1952), which was a commercial and critical success.
Stewart followed Bend of the River with four more collaborations with Mann in the next two years. The Naked Spur (1953) and The Far Country (1954) were successful with audiences and developed Stewart's screen persona into a more mature, ambiguous, and edgier presence. The films featured him as troubled cowboys seeking redemption while facing corrupt cattlemen, ranchers, and outlaws; a man who knows violence first-hand and struggles to control it. The Stewart–Mann collaborations laid the foundation for many of the Westerns of the 1950s and remain popular today for their grittier, more realistic depiction of the classic movie genre. In addition, Stewart starred in the Western radio show The Six Shooter for its one-season run from 1953 to 1954. He and Mann also collaborated on films outside the Western genre such as Thunder Bay (1953) and The Glenn Miller Story (1954), the latter a critically acclaimed biopic in which he starred opposite June Allyson. It earned Stewart a BAFTA nomination and continued his portrayals of 'American heroes'.
Stewart's second collaboration with Hitchcock, the thriller Rear Window, became the eighth highest-grossing film of 1954. Hitchcock and Stewart also formed a corporation, Patron Inc., to produce the film. Stewart portrayed a photographer, loosely based on Robert Capa, who projects his fantasies and fears onto the people he observes out his apartment window while on hiatus due to a broken leg and comes to believe that he has witnessed a murder. Limited by his wheelchair, Stewart had to react to what his character sees with mostly facial responses. Like Mann, Hitchcock uncovered new depths to Stewart's acting, showing a protagonist confronting his fears and repressed desires. Although most of the initial acclaim for Rear Window was directed towards Hitchcock, critic Vincent Canby later described Stewart's performance in it as "grand" and stated that "[his] longtime star status in Hollywood has always obscured recognition of his talent." 1954 was a landmark year in Stewart's career in terms of audience success, and he topped Look magazine's list of the most-popular movie stars, displacing rival Western star John Wayne.
Stewart continued his successful box-office run with two collaborations with Mann in 1955. Strategic Air Command paired him again with June Allyson in a Cold War propaganda film geared to show audiences that extensive military spending was necessary. Stewart took a central role in its development, using his experiences from the air force. Despite criticism for the dry, mechanistic storyline, it became the sixth highest-grossing film of 1955. Stewart's final collaboration with Mann in the Western genre, The Man from Laramie, one of the first Westerns to be shot in CinemaScope, was well received by the critics and audiences alike. Following his work with Mann, Stewart starred opposite Doris Day in Hitchcock's remake of his earlier film The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). The film was another success. Even though critics preferred the first version, Hitchcock himself considered his remake superior.
Stewart's next film, Billy Wilder's The Spirit of St. Louis (1957), saw him star as his young adulthood hero, Charles Lindbergh. It was a big-budget production with elaborate special effects for the flying sequences, but received only mixed reviews and did not earn back its production costs. Stewart ended the year with a starring role in the Western Night Passage (1957), which had originally been slated as his ninth collaboration with Mann. During the pre-production, a rift developed between Mann and writer Borden Chase over the script, which Mann considered weak. Mann decided to leave the film and never collaborated with Stewart again. James Neilson replaced Mann, and the film opened in 1957 to become a box-office flop. Soured by this failure, Stewart avoided the genre and would not make another Western for four years.
Stewart's collaboration with Hitchcock ended the following year with Vertigo (1958), in which he starred as an acrophobic former policeman who becomes obsessed with a woman (Kim Novak) he is shadowing. Although Vertigo has later become considered one of Hitchcock's key works and was ranked the greatest film ever made by the Sight & Sound critics' poll in 2012, it was met with unenthusiastic reviews and poor box-office receipts upon its release. Regardless, several critics complimented Stewart for his performance, with Bosley Crowther noting, "Mr. Stewart, as usual, manages to act awfully tense in a casual way."
Hitchcock blamed the film's failure on Stewart being too old to convincingly be Novak's love interest: he was fifty years old at the time and had begun wearing a silver hairpiece in his movies. Consequently, Hitchcock cast Cary Grant in his next film, North by Northwest (1959), a role Stewart wanted; Grant was four years older than Stewart but photographed much younger. Stewart's second 1958 film release, the romantic comedy Bell, Book and Candle (1958), also paired him with Kim Novak, with Stewart later echoing Hitchcock in saying that he was miscast as 25-year-old Novak's romantic partner. The film and Stewart's performance received poor reviews and resulted in a box office failure. However, according to film scholar David Bingham, by the early 1950s, "Stewart's personality was so credible and well-established", that his choice of role no longer affected his popularity.
Stewart ended the decade with Otto Preminger's realistic courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder (1959) and the crime film The FBI Story (1959). The former was a box office success despite its explicit dealing with subjects such as rape, and garnered good reviews. Stewart received critical acclaim for his role as a small-town lawyer involved in a difficult murder case; Bosley Crowther called it "one of the finest performances of his career". Stewart won his first BAFTA, a Volpi Cup, a New York Film Critics Circle Award, and a Producers Guild of America Award, as well as earned his fifth and final Academy Award nomination for his performance. The latter film, in which Stewart portrayed a Depression-era FBI agent, was less well received by critics and was commercially unsuccessful. Despite the commercial failure of The FBI Story, the film marked the close of the most commercially successful decade of Stewart's career. According to Quigley's annual poll, Stewart was one of the top money-making stars for ten years, appearing in the top ten in 1950, 1952–1959, and 1965. He topped the list in 1955.
Stewart opened the new decade by starring in the war film The Mountain Road (1960). To his surprise, it was a box office failure, despite his claims that it was one of the best scripts he'd ever read. He began a new director collaboration with John Ford, making his debut in his films in the Western Two Rode Together (1961), which had thematic echoes of Ford's The Searchers. The same year, he also narrated the film X-15 for the USAF. Stewart was considered for the role of Atticus Finch in the 1962 film adaptation of Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird, but he turned it down, concerned that the story was too controversial.
Stewart and Ford's next collaboration was The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). A classic psychological Western, the picture was shot in black-and-white film noir style at Ford's insistence, with Stewart as an East Coast attorney who goes against his non-violent principles when he is forced to confront a psychopathic outlaw (Lee Marvin) in a small frontier town. The complex film initially garnered mixed reviews but became a critical favorite over the ensuing decades. Stewart was billed above John Wayne in posters and the trailers, but Wayne received top billing in the film itself. Stewart, Wayne, and Ford also collaborated for a television play that same year, Flashing Spikes (1962), for ABC's anthology series Alcoa Premiere, albeit featuring Wayne billed with a television pseudonym, "Michael Morris", (also used for Wayne's brief appearance in the John Ford-directed episode of the television series Wagon Train titled "The Colter Craven Story") for his lengthy cameo. Next, Stewart appeared as part of an all-star cast—including Henry Fonda and John Wayne—in How the West Was Won, a Western epic released in the United States in early 1963. The film went on to win three Academy Awards and reap massive box-office figures.
In 1962, Stewart signed a multi-movie deal with 20th Century Fox. The first two of these films reunited him with director Henry Koster in the family-friendly comedies Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation (1962) with Maureen O'Hara and Take Her, She's Mine (1963), which were both box-office successes. The former received moderately positive reviews and won Stewart the Silver Bear for Best Actor at the Berlin International Film Festival; the latter was panned by the critics. Stewart then appeared in John Ford's final Western, Cheyenne Autumn (1964), playing a white-suited Wyatt Earp in a long semi-comedic sequence in the middle of the movie. The film failed domestically and was quickly forgotten.
In 1965, Stewart was given his first honorary award for his career, the Cecil B. DeMille Award. He appeared in three films that year. The Fox family-comedy Dear Brigitte (1965), which featured French actress Brigitte Bardot as the object of Stewart's son's infatuation, was a box-office failure. The Civil War film Shenandoah (1965) was a commercial success with strong anti-war and humanitarian themes. The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) continued Stewart's series of aviation-themed films; it was well-received critically, but a box-office failure.
For the next few years, Stewart acted in a series of Westerns: The Rare Breed (1966) with Maureen O'Hara, Firecreek (1968) with Henry Fonda, Bandolero! (1968) with Dean Martin, and The Cheyenne Social Club (1970) with Henry Fonda again. In 1968, he received the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award. Stewart returned on Broadway to reprise his role as Elwood P. Dowd in Harvey at the ANTA Theatre in February 1970; the revival ran until May. He won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Performance for it.
In 1971, Stewart starred in the NBC sitcom The Jimmy Stewart Show. He played a small-town college professor whose adult son moves back home with his family. Stewart disliked the amount of work needed to film the show each week and was relieved when it was canceled after only one season due to bad reviews and lack of audiences. His only film release for 1971, the comedy-drama Fools' Parade, was more positively received. Robert Greenspun of The New York Times stated that "the movie belongs to Stewart, who has never been more wonderful". For his contributions to Western films, Stewart was inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City in 1972.
Stewart returned to television in Harvey for NBC's Hallmark Hall of Fame series in 1972 and then starred in the CBS mystery series Hawkins in 1973. Playing a small-town lawyer investigating mysterious cases—similar to his character in Anatomy of a Murder—Stewart won a Golden Globe for his performance. Nevertheless, Hawkins failed to gain a wide audience, possibly because it rotated with Shaft, which had a starkly conflicting demographic, and was canceled after one season. Stewart also periodically appeared on Johnny Carson's The Tonight Show, sharing poems he had written at different times in his life. His poems were later compiled into a short collection, Jimmy Stewart and His Poems (1989).
After performing again in Harvey at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London in 1975, Stewart returned to films with a major supporting role in John Wayne's final film, The Shootist (1976), playing a doctor giving Wayne's gunfighter a terminal cancer diagnosis. By this time, Stewart had a hearing impairment, which affected his ability to hear his cues and led to him repeatedly flubbing his lines; his vanity would not allow him to admit this or to wear a hearing aid. Stewart was offered the role of Howard Beale in Network (1976) but refused it due to its explicit language. Instead, he appeared in supporting roles in the disaster film Airport '77 (1977) with Jack Lemmon, the remake of The Big Sleep (1978) with Robert Mitchum as Philip Marlowe, and the family film The Magic of Lassie (1978). Despite mixed reviews, Airport '77 was a box-office success, but the two other films were commercial and critical failures. Harry Haun of New York Daily News wrote in his review of The Big Sleep that it was "really sad to see James Stewart struggle so earnestly with material that just isn't there". Stewart made a memorable cameo appearance on the final episode of The Carol Burnett Show in March 1978, surprising Burnett, a lifelong Stewart fan.
Stewart's final live-action feature film was the critically panned Japanese film The Green Horizon (1980), directed by Susumu Hani. Stewart took the role because the film promoted wildlife conservation and allowed his family to travel with him to Kenya. In the 1980s, Stewart semi-retired from acting. He was offered the role of Norman Thayer in On Golden Pond (1981) but turned it down because he disliked the film's father-daughter relationship; the role went instead to his friend, Henry Fonda. Stewart filmed two television movies in the 1980s: Mr. Krueger's Christmas (1980), produced by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which allowed him to fulfill a lifelong dream to conduct the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and Right of Way (1983), an HBO drama that co-starred Bette Davis. He also made an appearance in the historical miniseries North and South in 1986 and did voiceover work for commercials for Campbell's Soups in the 1980s and 1990s. Stewart's last film performance was voicing the character of Sheriff Wylie Burp in the animated movie An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (1991).
Stewart remained in the public eye due to his frequent visits to the White House during the Reagan administration. The re-release of Hitchcock films gained him renewed recognition, with Rear Window and Vertigo praised by film critics. Stewart also received several honorary film industry awards at the end of his career: an American Film Institute Award in 1980, a Silver Bear in 1982, Kennedy Center Honors in 1983, an Academy Honorary Award in 1985, and National Board of Review and Film Society of Lincoln Center's Chaplin Award in 1990. The honorary Oscar was presented by former co-star Cary Grant "for his 50 years of memorable performances, for his high ideals both on and off the screen, with respect and affection of his colleagues". In addition, Stewart received the highest civilian award in the US, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, "for his contributions in the fields of the arts, entertainment and public service", in 1985.
In December 2023, meditation app Calm announced that Stewart would be the latest narrator for its Sleep Story series, with an AI-generated voice of the actor reading an original story “It’s a Wonderful Sleep Story”. The project uses AI voice-cloning technology from Respeecher, and was conducted with the consent of Stewart’s family and his estate.
As a friend, mentor, and focus of his early romantic feelings, Margaret Sullavan had a unique influence on Stewart's life.
They met while they were both performing for the University Players; he was smitten, and invited her on a date. Unfortunately for Stewart, she regarded him as a close friend and co-worker, so they never began a romantic relationship. Though Sullavan was always aware of his feelings, Stewart never directly revealed them to her. Sullavan loved Stewart, but not romantically. Rather, she felt protective and maternal towards him.
The director of The Shopworn Angel, H. C. Potter, suggested they might have married had Stewart been more forthcoming with his feelings. Instead, Sullavan became his acting mentor in Hollywood. According to director Edward H. Griffith, she "made [him] a star" by co-starring with him in four films: Next Time You Love (1936), The Shopworn Angel (1938), The Shop Around the Corner (1940) and The Mortal Storm (1940).
Stewart did not marry until his forties, which attracted a significant amount of contemporary media attention; gossip columnist Hedda Hopper called him the "Great American Bachelor". Regardless, he had several romantic relationships prior to marriage. After being introduced by Henry Fonda, Stewart and Ginger Rogers enjoyed a relationship in 1935, while Fonda was dating Rogers' good friend Lucille Ball.
During production of The Shopworn Angel (1938), Stewart dated actress Norma Shearer for six weeks. Afterward, he dated Loretta Young, but she wanted to settle down and Stewart did not.
While filming Destry Rides Again (1939), Stewart had an affair with his co-star Marlene Dietrich, who was married at the time. Dietrich allegedly became pregnant, but it was quickly terminated. Stewart ended their relationship after the filming was completed. Hurt by Stewart's rejection, she barely mentioned him in her memoir and waved him off as a one-time affair.
He dated Olivia de Havilland in the late 1930s and early 1940s and even proposed marriage to her, but she rejected the proposal, as she believed he was not ready to settle down. She ended the relationship shortly before he began his military service, as she had fallen in love with director John Huston.
A licensed civilian pilot, Stewart enlisted in the Army Air Forces early in 1941. After seeing action in Europe during World War II, he attained the rank of colonel and received several awards for his service. He was made brigadier general in the Air Force Reserve in 1959. He retired from the service in 1968, at which time he was awarded the Air Force Distinguished Service Medal. President Reagan recounted at a White House briefing that he was corrected by Stewart himself after Reagan incorrectly announced he was a major general at a campaign event.
In 1942, while serving in the military, Stewart met singer Dinah Shore at the Hollywood Canteen, a club mainly for servicemen. They began a romantic relationship and were nearly married in Las Vegas in 1943, but Stewart called off the marriage before they arrived, citing cold feet. After the war, Stewart began a relationship with Myrna Dell while he was filming The Stratton Story (1949). Although gossip columnists made claims that they were planning to marry, Dell said this was not true.
Stewart's first interaction with his future wife, Gloria Hatrick McLean, was at Keenan Wynn's Christmas party in 1947. He had crashed the party and became inebriated, leaving a poor impression of himself with Hatrick. A year later, Gary Cooper and his wife, Veronica, invited Hatrick and Stewart to a dinner party, and the two began dating. A former model, Hatrick was divorced with two children. Stewart and Hatrick were married at Brentwood Presbyterian Church on August 9, 1949, and remained married until her death from lung cancer in 1994.
The couple purchased a home in Beverly Hills in 1951, where they resided for the rest of their lives. They also owned the Winecup Gamble Ranch in Nevada from 1953 to 1957. Stewart adopted Gloria's two sons, Ronald (1944–1969) and Michael (born 1946), and with Gloria he had twin daughters, Judy and Kelly, on May 7, 1951. Ronald was killed in action in Vietnam on June 8, 1969, at the age of 24, while serving as a lieutenant in the Marine Corps.
Stewart was guarded about his personal life and, according to biographer Scott Eyman, tended in interviews to avoid the emotional connection he was known for in his films, preferring to keep his thoughts and feelings to himself. He was known as a loner who did not have intimate relationships with many people. Director John Ford said of Stewart, "You don't get to know Jimmy Stewart; Jimmy Stewart gets to know you."
Stewart's 50-year friendship with Henry Fonda began in Manhattan when Fonda invited Stewart to be his third roommate (in addition to Joshua Logan and Myron McCormick) in order to make the rent. When Stewart moved to Hollywood in 1935, he again shared an apartment with Fonda, and the two gained reputations as playboys. Over their careers, they starred in four films together: On Our Merry Way (1948), How the West Was Won (1962), Firecreek (1968), and The Cheyenne Social Club (1970). Both Stewart's and Fonda's children later noted that their favorite activity when not working seemed to be quietly sharing time together while building and painting model airplanes, a hobby they had taken up in New York years earlier. Besides building model airplanes, Stewart and Fonda liked to build and fly kites, play golf, and reminisce about the "old days". After Fonda's death in 1982, Stewart's only public comment was "I've just lost my best friend." Their friendship was chronicled in Scott Eyman's biography, Hank and Jim (2017).
Aside from Fonda, Stewart's close friends included his former agent, Leland Hayward; director John Ford; photographer John Swope, Stewart's former roommate; and Billy Grady, the talent scout who discovered Stewart and also served as the best man at his wedding. Gary Cooper was another close friend of Stewart's. On April 17, 1961, Cooper was too ill (with cancer) to attend the 33rd Academy Awards ceremony, so Stewart accepted the honorary Oscar on his behalf.
In addition to his film career, Stewart had diversified investments, including real estate, oil wells, the charter-plane company Southwest Airways, and membership on major corporate boards; he became a multimillionaire. Already prior to his enlistment in the Air Corps, he had been an avid pilot, with a private pilot certificate and a commercial pilot license, as well as over 400 hours of flying time. A highly-proficient pilot, he entered a cross-country race with Leland Hayward in 1937 and was one of the early investors in Thunderbird Field, a pilot-training school built and operated by Southwest Airways in Glendale, Arizona.
Stewart was also active in philanthropy over the years. He served as the national vice-chairman of entertainment for the American Red Cross's fund-raising campaign for wounded soldiers in Vietnam, as well as contributed donations for improvements and restorations to Indiana, his hometown in Pennsylvania. His signature charity event, "The Jimmy Stewart Relay Marathon Race", held annually since 1982, has raised millions of dollars for the Child and Family Development Center at St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica, California.
Stewart was a lifelong supporter of scouting, having been a Second Class Scout as a youth and being awarded the Silver Buffalo Award for service to youth in 1958. He was also an adult Scout leader, and in the 1970s and 1980s, he made advertisements for the Boy Scouts of America, which led to his being incorrectly identified as an Eagle Scout. An award for Boy Scouts, "The James M. Stewart Good Citizenship Award" has been presented since 2003. Stewart was also a Life Member of the Sons of the Revolution in California.
Stewart was a staunch conservative Republican throughout his life. A political argument in 1947 reportedly led to a fistfight with friend Henry Fonda (a liberal Democrat), according to some accounts, but the two maintained their friendship by never discussing politics again. The fistfight may be apocryphal, as Jhan Robbins quotes Stewart as saying, "Our views never interfered with our feelings for each other. We just didn't talk about certain things. I can't remember ever having an argument with him—ever!"
In 1964, Stewart campaigned for the conservative presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and, according to biographer Marc Eliot, erred on the obsessive prior to the election. Stewart was a hawk on the Vietnam War and maintained that his son, Ronald, did not die in vain. Following the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, Stewart, Charlton Heston, Kirk Douglas, and Gregory Peck issued a statement calling for support of President Lyndon B. Johnson's Gun Control Act of 1968.
Stewart actively supported Ronald Reagan's bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976. He attended Reagan's campaign rallies, in one speech assuring that he was more conservative than ever, regardless of the death of his son in the Vietnam War. In the last years of his life, he supported the re-election of Jesse Helms to the Senate in 1990 and also donated to the campaign of Bob Dole for the 1996 presidential election.
In 1988, Stewart made a plea in Congressional hearings, along with Burt Lancaster, Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, film director Martin Scorsese, and many others, against Ted Turner's decision to 'colorize' classic black-and-white films, including It's a Wonderful Life. Stewart stated, "the coloring of black-and-white films is wrong. It's morally and artistically wrong and these profiteers should leave our film industry alone."
In 1989, Stewart founded the American Spirit Foundation to apply entertainment-industry resources to developing innovative approaches to public education and to assist the emerging democracy movements in the former Iron Curtain countries.
Stewart's wife Gloria died of lung cancer on February 16, 1994, aged 75. According to biographer Donald Dewey, her death left Stewart depressed and "lost at sea". Stewart became even more reclusive, spending most of his time in his bedroom, exiting only to eat and visit with his children. He shut out most people from his life, not only media and fans, but also his co-stars and friends. His friends Leonard Gershe and Gregory Peck said Stewart was not depressed or unhappy, but finally allowed to rest and be alone.
Stewart was hospitalized after falling in December 1995. In December 1996, he was due to have the battery in his pacemaker changed but opted not to have that done. In February 1997, he was hospitalized for an irregular heartbeat. On June 25, a thrombosis formed in his right leg, leading to a pulmonary embolism one week later. Stewart died of a heart attack caused by the embolism at the age of 89, surrounded by his children at his home in Beverly Hills, on July 2, 1997; his final words to his family were, "I'm going to be with Gloria now." President Bill Clinton commented that America had lost a "national treasure ... a great actor, a gentleman and a patriot". He was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. More than 3,000 mourners attended his memorial service, including June Allyson, Carol Burnett, Bob Hope, Lew Wasserman, Nancy Reagan, Esther Williams, and Robert Stack. The service included full military honors and three volleys of musketry.
He had the ability to talk naturally. He knew that in conversations people do often interrupt one another and it's not always so easy to get a thought out. It took a little time for the sound men to get used to him, but he had an enormous impact. And then, some years later, Marlon came out and did the same thing all over again—but what people forget is that Jimmy did it first.
—Cary Grant on Stewart's acting technique.
According to biographer Scott Eyman, Stewart was an instinctive actor. He was natural and at ease in front of the camera, despite his shy off-screen personality. In line with his natural and conversational acting style, Stewart's co-stars found him easy to work with, as he was willing to improvise around any situation that arose while filming. Later in his career, Stewart began to resent his reputation of having a "natural" acting technique. He asserted that there was not anything natural about standing on a sound stage in front of lights and cameras while acting out a scene.
Stewart had established early in his career that he was proficient at communicating personality and character nuances through his performances alone. He used an "inside-out" acting technique, preferring to represent the character without accents, makeup, and props. Additionally, he tended to act with his body, not only with his voice and face; for example, in Harvey, Stewart portrays the main character's age and loneliness by slightly hunching down. He was also known for his pauses that had the ability to hold the audience's attention. Film critic Geoffrey O'Brien related that Stewart's "stammering pauses" created anxious space for the audience, leaving them in anticipation for the scene which Stewart took his time leading up to.
Stewart himself claimed to dislike his earlier film performances, saying he was "all hands and feet", adding that he "didn't seem to know what to do with either". He mentioned that even though he did not always like his performances, he would not get discouraged. He said, "But I always tried, and if the script wasn't too good, well, then, I just tried a little bit harder. I hope, though, not so hard that it shows." Former co-star Kim Novak stated of his acting style that for emotional scenes, he would access emotions deep inside of him and would take time to wind down after the scene ended. He could not turn it off immediately after the director yelled cut.
Stewart was particularly adept at performing vulnerable scenes with women. Jack Lemmon suggested that Stewart's talent for performing with women was that he was able to allow the audience to see the respect and gentility he felt toward the women through his eyes. He showed that his characters needed them as much as their characters needed him. In connection to Stewart's screen persona with women, Peter Bradshaw said The Philadelphia Story is "a film every school pupil should see" due to Stewart's character's clear explanation of sexual consent after being accused of taking advantage of the main female character.
Stewart's screen persona was that of an "everyman", an ordinary man placed in extraordinary circumstances. Audiences could identify with him, in contrast to other Hollywood leading men of the time, such as Cary Grant, who represented what the audience wanted to become. Stewart's screen persona has been compared to those of Gary Cooper and Tom Hanks. Eyman suggested that Stewart could portray several different characters: "the brother, the sweetheart, [and] the nice guy next door with a bias toward doing the right thing: always decent but never a pushover". In Stewart's early career, Louella Parsons described his "boyish appeal" and "ability to win audience sympathy" as the reasons for his success as an actor; Stewart's performances appealed to both young and old audiences. According to film scholar Dennis Bingham, Stewart's essential persona was "a small-town friendly neighbor, with a gentle face and voice and a slim body that is at once graceful and awkward". Unlike many actors who developed their on-screen persona over time, Stewart's on-screen persona was recognizable as early as Art Trouble (1934), his uncredited debut film role, where Stewart was relaxed and comfortable on screen. He portrayed this persona most strongly in the 1940s, but maintained a classic everyman persona throughout his career.
Film scholar Dennis Bingham wrote that Stewart was "both a 'personality' star and a chameleon" who evoked both masculine and feminine qualities. Consequently, it was difficult for filmmakers to sell Stewart as the stereotypical leading man, and thus he "became a star in films that capitalized on his sexual ambivalence". Stewart's asexual persona as a leading man was unusual for the time period for an actor who was not mainly a comedian. However, during his career "Stewart [encompassed] the furthest extremes of American masculinity, from Reaganite militarist patriotism to Hitchcockian perversity".
According to Roger Ebert, Stewart's pre-World War II characters were usually likable, but in postwar years directors chose to cast Stewart in darker roles, such as Jeffries in Rear Window. Ebert put this into contemporary perspective by asking, "What would it feel like to see [Tom Hanks] in a bizarre and twisted light?", explaining that it is jarring to see a beloved everyman persona such as Stewart in dark roles. Furthermore, Jonathan Rosenbaum explained that since audiences were more interested in Stewart's "star persona" and "aura" than his characters, "this makes it more striking when Anthony Mann and Alfred Hitchcock periodically explore the neurotic and obsessive aspects of Stewart's persona to play against his all-American innocence and earnestness."
Film scholar John Belton argued that rather than playing characters in his films, Stewart often played his own screen persona. He had difficulty playing famous historical personages because his persona could not accommodate the historical character. Belton explained that "James Stewart is more James Stewart than Glenn Miller in The Glenn Miller Story (1954) or Charles Lindbergh in The Spirit of St. Louis (1957)." Moreover, Jonathan Rosenbaum continued that Stewart's "pre-existing life-size persona" in Winchester '73 "helped to shape and determine the impact of [his character] in [this film]". On the other hand, Stewart has been described as a character actor who went through several distinct career phases. According to film scholar Amy Lawrence, the main elements of Stewart's persona, "a propensity for physical and spiritual suffering, lingering fears of inadequacy", were established by Frank Capra in the 1930s and were enhanced through his later work with Hitchcock and Mann. John Belton explained that "James Stewart evolves from the naive, small-town, populist hero of Frank Capra's 1930s comedies to the bitter, anxiety-ridden, vengeance-obsessed cowboy in Anthony Mann's 1950s Westerns and the disturbed voyeur and sexual fetishist in Alfred Hitchcock's 1950s suspense thrillers." During his postwar career, Stewart usually avoided appearing in comedies, Harvey and Take Her, She's Mine being exceptions. He played many different types of characters, including manipulative, cynical, obsessive, or crazy characters. Stewart found that acting allowed him to express the fear and anxiety that he could not express during the war; his post-war performances were received well by audiences because they could still see the innocent, pre-war Stewart underneath his dark roles. According to Andrew Sarris, Stewart was "the most complete actor-personality in the American cinema".
Selected credits:
(1st film role; a short - uncredited)
Stewart is remembered for portraying idealist "everyman" characters in his films. His heroism on screen and devotion to his family made him relatable and representative of the American ideal, leading Stewart to be considered one of the best-loved figures in twentieth-century American popular culture. According to film scholar Dennis Bingham, "his ability to 'play'—even symbolize—honesty and 'American ideals' made him an icon into whose mold later male stars tried to pour themselves". Similarly, film scholar James Naremore has called Stewart "the most successful actor of the 'common man' in the history of movies" and "the most intensely-emotional leading man to emerge from the studio system", who could cry on screen without losing his masculinity. David Thomson has explained Stewart's appeal by stating that "we wanted to be him, and we wanted to be liked by him", while Roger Ebert has stated that "whether he played everyman, or everyman's hidden psyche, Stewart was an innately likable man whose face, loping gait and distinctive drawl became famous all over the world". Among Stewart's most recognizable qualities was his manner of speaking with a hesitant drawl. According to film scholar Tim Palmer, "Stewart's legacy rests on his roles as the nervous idealist standing trial for, and gaining stature from, the sincerity of his beliefs, while his emotive convictions are put to the test." Film critic David Ansen wrote about Stewart's appeal as a person in addition to his appeal as an actor. Ansen retold a story in which Jack Warner, upon being told about Ronald Reagan's presidential ambitions, said, "No. Jimmy Stewart for president, Ronald Reagan for best friend." Ansen further explained that Stewart was the ultimate trustworthy movie star.
In contrast to his popularly remembered "all-American" screen persona, film critics and scholars have tended to emphasize that his performances also showed a "dark side". According to film scholar Murray Pomerance, "the other Jimmy Stewart ... was a different type altogether, a repressed and neurotic man buried beneath an apparently calm facade, but ready at any moment to explode with vengeful anxiety and anger, or else with deeply twisted and constrained passions that could never match up with cheery personality of the alter ego." Bingham has described him as having "two coequal personas; the earnest idealist, the nostalgic figure of the homespun boy next door; and the risk-taking actor who probably performed in films for more canonical auteurs than any other American star". According to him, it is this complexity and his ambiguous masculinity and sexuality with which he approached his roles that characterized his persona. Naremore has stated that there was a "troubled, cranky, slightly-repressed feeling in [Stewart's] behavior", and Thomson has written that it was his dark side that produced "great cinema".
Stewart was one of the most sought-after actors in 1950s Hollywood, proving that independent actors could be successful in the film industry, which led more actors in Hollywood to forego studio contracts. According to Bingham, Stewart marked "the transition between the studio period...and the era of free-lance actors, independent production, and powerful talent agents that made possible the "new kind of star" of the late 1960s". Although Stewart was not the first big-name freelance actor, his "mythic sweetness and idealism [which] were combined with eccentric physical equipment and capacity as an actor to enact emotion, anxiety, and pain" enabled him to succeed in both the studio system, which emphasized the star as a real person, and the skeptical post-studio era.
A number of Stewart's films have become classics of American cinema, with twelve of his films having been inducted into the United States National Film Registry as of 2019, and five—Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), The Philadelphia Story (1940), It's a Wonderful Life (1946), Rear Window (1954), and Vertigo (1958)—being featured on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 greatest American films of all time. Stewart and Robert DeNiro share the title for the most films represented on the AFI list. Stewart is also the most represented leading actor on the "100 Greatest Movies of All Time" list presented by Entertainment Weekly. Two of his characters—Jefferson Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life (1946)—made AFI's list of the one hundred greatest heroes and villains, and Harvey (1950) and The Philadelphia Story (1940) were included in their list of Greatest American Comedies. In 1999, the American Film Institute (AFI) ranked Stewart third on its list of the greatest American male actors.
In 1960, Stewart was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1700 Vine Street for his contributions to the film industry. In 1974, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. His Golden Plate was presented by Awards Council member Helen Hayes. In 1997, Princeton University, Stewart's alma mater, honored him with the dedication of the James M. Stewart Theater along with a retrospective of his films. Stewart has also been honored with his own postal stamp as part of the "Legends of Hollywood" stamp series. In 1999, a bust of Stewart was unveiled at the Eighth Air Force Heritage Museum in Georgia. The L. Tom Perry Special Collections Library at Brigham Young University houses his personal papers and movie memorabilia including letters, scrapbooks, recordings of early radio programs, and two of his accordions. Stewart donated his papers and memorabilia to the library after becoming friends with the curator of its arts and communications collections, James D'Arc.
Stewart has several memorials in his childhood hometown, Indiana, Pennsylvania. On May 20, 1995, his 87th birthday, The Jimmy Stewart Museum was established. The museum is located near his birthplace, his childhood home, and the former location of his father's hardware store. The museum has six galleries that include photos, memorabilia, personal mementos, movie posters, props, scripts, costumes and much more. Stewart had contributed significant donations to his hometown, and had done it quietly as he didn't want the publicity. A large statue of Stewart stands on the lawn of the Indiana County Courthouse, and a plaque marks his birthplace. In 1983, Jimmy Stewart came back to Indiana to celebrate his 75th birthday and unveiled the statue along with getting a phone call from then President Ronald Reagan to congratulate him on his birthday. 2011, the United States Post Office located at 47 South 7th Street in Indiana, Pennsylvania, was designated the "James M. 'Jimmy' Stewart Post Office Building". Additionally, the Indiana County–Jimmy Stewart Airport was named in his honor. His personal Cessna-310 airplane is refurbished and on display outside the airport that bears his name. His childhood home is still standing and over looks his beloved hometown. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "James Maitland \"Jimmy\" Stewart (May 20, 1908 – July 2, 1997) was an American actor and military officer. Known for his distinctive drawl and everyman screen persona, Stewart's film career spanned 80 films from 1935 to 1991. With the strong morality which he portrayed both on and off the screen, he epitomized the \"American ideal\" in the mid-twentieth century. In 1999, the American Film Institute (AFI) ranked him third on its list of the greatest American male actors. He received numerous honors including the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1980, the Kennedy Center Honor in 1983, as well as the Academy Honorary Award and Presidential Medal of Freedom, both in 1985.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Born and raised in Indiana, Pennsylvania, Stewart started acting while at Princeton University. After graduating in 1932, he began a career as a stage actor, appearing on Broadway and in summer stock productions. He landed his first supporting role in The Murder Man (1935) and had his breakthrough in Frank Capra's ensemble comedy You Can't Take It with You (1938). The following year, Stewart garnered his first of five Academy Award nominations for his portrayal of an idealized senator in Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). The following year he received the Academy Award for Best Actor, the only competitive Oscar of his career, for his performance in the George Cukor romantic comedy The Philadelphia Story (1940). His acting career was paused after he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II, deputy commanding the 2nd Bombardment Wing and commanding the 703d Bombardment Squadron. He later transferred to the Air Force Reserve, and held various command positions until his retirement in 1968 as a brigadier general.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Stewart's first postwar role was as George Bailey in Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946). Although the film was not a major success upon release, he earned an Oscar nomination, and the film has become a Christmas classic, as well as one of his best-known roles. As one of the most popular film stars of the '50s, Stewart played darker, more morally ambiguous characters in movies directed by Anthony Mann, including Winchester '73 (1950), The Glenn Miller Story (1954), and The Naked Spur (1953), and by Alfred Hitchcock in Rope (1948), Rear Window (1954), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), and Vertigo (1958). During this time he received Academy Award nominations for his roles in the comedy Harvey (1950) and the courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder (1959). Stewart also starred in The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), The Spirit of St. Louis (1957), The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) as well as the Western films How the West Was Won (1962), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), and Cheyenne Autumn (1964). He appeared in many popular family comedies during the 1960s.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Stewart remained unmarried until his 40s and was dubbed \"The Great American Bachelor\" by the press. In 1949, he married former model Gloria Hatrick McLean. They had twin daughters, and he adopted her two sons from her previous marriage. The marriage lasted until McLean's death in 1994, and Stewart died of a pulmonary embolism three years later.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "James Maitland Stewart was born on May 20, 1908, in Indiana, Pennsylvania, the eldest child and only son born to Elizabeth Ruth (née Jackson; 1875–1953) and Alexander Maitland Stewart (1872–1962). Stewart had two younger sisters, Mary (1912–1977) and Virginia (1914–1972). He was of Scottish and Scotch-Irish ancestry. The Stewart family had lived in Pennsylvania for many generations. Stewart's father ran the family business, the J. M. Stewart and Company Hardware Store, which he hoped Stewart would take over as an adult after attending Princeton University, as was the family tradition. Raised a Presbyterian by his deeply religious father, Stewart was a devout churchgoer for much of his life.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Stewart's mother was a pianist, and music was an important part of family life. When a customer at the store was unable to pay his bill, Stewart's father accepted an old accordion as payment. Stewart learned to play the instrument with the help of a local barber. His accordion became a fixture offstage during his acting career. A shy child, Stewart spent much of his time after school in the basement working on model airplanes, mechanical drawings, and chemistry—all with a dream of going into aviation. He attended the Wilson Model School for primary school and junior high school. He was not a gifted student and received average to low grades. According to his teachers, this was not from a lack of intelligence, but due to being creative and having a tendency to daydream.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Stewart began attending Mercersburg Academy prep school in the fall of 1923, because his father did not believe he would be accepted into Princeton (his father was a member of the class of 1898) if he attended public high school. At Mercersburg, Stewart participated in a variety of extracurricular activities. He was a member of the track team (competing as a high jumper under coach Jimmy Curran), the art editor of the school yearbook, a member of the glee club, and a member of the John Marshall Literary Society. To his disappointment, he was relegated to the third-tier football team due to his slender physique. Stewart also made his first onstage appearance at Mercersburg, as Buquet in the play The Wolves in 1928. During summer breaks, he returned to Indiana, working first as a brick loader and then as a magician's assistant. Due to scarlet fever that turned into a kidney infection, he had to take time out from school in 1927, which delayed his graduation until 1928. He remained passionate about aviation, with his interest enhanced by Charles Lindbergh's first solo transatlantic flight, but abandoned visions of becoming a pilot when his father steered him towards Princeton.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Stewart enrolled at Princeton in 1928 as a member of the class of 1932, majoring in architecture and becoming a member of the Princeton Charter Club. He excelled academically but also became attracted to the school's drama and music clubs, including the Princeton Triangle Club. Upon his graduation in 1932, he was awarded a scholarship for graduate studies in architecture for his thesis on an airport terminal design, but chose instead to join University Players, an intercollegiate summer stock company performing in West Falmouth, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Stewart performed in bit parts in the University Players' productions in Cape Cod during the summer of 1932. The company's directors included Joshua Logan, Bretaigne Windust, and Charles Leatherbee, and amongst its other actors were married couple Henry Fonda and Margaret Sullavan, who became Stewart's close friends. At the end of the season, Stewart moved to New York with his Players friends Logan, Myron McCormick, and newly single Henry Fonda. Along with McCormick, Stewart debuted on Broadway in the brief run of Carry Nation and a few weeks later – again with McCormick – appeared as a chauffeur in the comedy Goodbye Again, in which he had a walk-on line. The New Yorker commented, \"Mr. James Stewart's chauffeur... comes on for three minutes and walks off to a round of spontaneous applause.\" Following the seven-month run of Goodbye Again, Stewart took a stage manager position in Boston, but was fired after frequently missing his cues. Returning to New York, he then landed a small part in Spring in Autumn and a role in All Good Americans, where he was required to throw a banjo out of the window. Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times wrote, \"Throwing a $250 banjo out of the window at the concierge is constructive abuse and should be virtuously applauded.\" Both plays folded after only short runs, and Stewart began to think about going back to his studies.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Stewart was convinced to continue acting when he was cast in the lead role of Yellow Jack, playing a soldier who becomes the subject of a yellow fever experiment. It premiered at the Martin Beck Theater in March 1934. Stewart received unanimous praise from the critics, but the play proved unpopular with audiences and folded by June. During the summer, Stewart made his film debut with an unbilled appearance in the Shemp Howard comedy short Art Trouble (1934), filmed in Brooklyn, and acted in summer stock productions of We Die Exquisitely and All Paris Knows at the Red Barn Theater on Long Island. In the fall, he again received excellent reviews for his role in Divided by Three at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, which he followed with the modestly successful Page Miss Glory and the critical failure A Journey By Night in spring 1935.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Soon after A Journey By Night ended, Stewart signed a seven-year contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), orchestrated by talent scout Bill Grady, who had been tracking Stewart's career since seeing him perform in Princeton. His first Hollywood role was a minor appearance in the Spencer Tracy vehicle The Murder Man (1935). His performance was largely ignored by critics, although the New York Herald Tribune, remembering him in Yellow Jack, called him \"wasted in a bit that he handles with characteristically engaging skill\". As MGM did not see leading-man material in Stewart, described by biographer Michael D. Rinella as a \"lanky young bumpkin with a hesitant manner of speech\" during this time, his agent Leland Hayward decided that the best path for him would be through loan-outs to other studios.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Stewart had only a small role in his second MGM film, the hit musical Rose Marie (1936), but it led to his casting in seven other films within one year, from Next Time We Love to After the Thin Man. He also received crucial help from his University Players friend Margaret Sullavan, who campaigned for him to be her leading man in the Universal romantic comedy Next Time We Love (1936), filmed right after Rose Marie. Sullavan rehearsed extensively with him, boosting his confidence and helping him incorporate his mannerisms and boyishness into his screen persona. Next Time We Love was a box-office success and received mostly positive reviews, leading Stewart to be noticed by critics and MGM executives. Time stated that \"the chief significance of [the film] in the progress of the cinema industry is likely to reside in the presence in its cast of James Stewart\", and The New York Times called him \"a welcome addition to the roster of Hollywood's leading men\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Stewart followed Next Time We Love with supporting roles in two commercially successful romantic comedies, Wife vs. Secretary (1936) with Clark Gable and Myrna Loy and Small Town Girl (1936). In both, he played the betrayed boyfriend of the leading lady, portrayed by Jean Harlow and Janet Gaynor, respectively. Both films garnered him some good reviews. After an appearance in the short subject Important News (1936), Stewart had his first top-billed role in the low-budget \"B\" movie Speed (1936), in which he played a mechanic and speed driver competing in the Indianapolis 500. The film was a critical and commercial failure, although Frank Nugent of The New York Times stated that \"Mr. Stewart [and the rest of the cast] perform as pleasantly as possible.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Stewart's last three film releases of 1936 were all box-office successes. He had only a bit part in The Gorgeous Hussy, but a starring role in the musical Born to Dance with Eleanor Powell. His performance in the latter was not well-received: The New York Times stated that his \"singing and dancing will (fortunately) never win him a song-and-dance-man classification\", and Variety called \"his singing and dancing [...] rather painful on their own\", although it otherwise found Stewart aptly cast in an \"assignment [that] calls for a shy youth\". Stewart's last film to be released in 1936, After the Thin Man, features a shattering emotional climax rendered by Stewart. Kate Cameron of the New York Daily News wrote that he \"has one grand scene in which he demonstrates most effectively that he is something more than a musical comedy juvenile\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "For his next film, the romantic drama Seventh Heaven (1937), Stewart was loaned to 20th Century-Fox to play a Parisian sewer worker in a remake of Frank Borzage's silent classic released a decade earlier. He and co-star Simone Simon were miscast, and the film was a critical and commercial failure. William Boehnel of the New York World-Telegram called Stewart's performance emotionless, and Eileen Creelman of The New York Sun wrote that he made little attempt to look or sound French. Stewart's next film, The Last Gangster (1937) starring Edward G. Robinson, was also a failure, but it was followed by a critically acclaimed performance in Navy Blue and Gold (1937) as a football player at the United States Naval Academy. The film was a box-office success and earned Stewart the best reviews of his career up to that point. The New York Times wrote \"the ending leaves us with the conviction that James Stewart is a sincere and likable triple-threat man in the [MGM] backfield\" and Variety called his performance \"fine\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Despite good reviews, Stewart was still a minor star, and MGM remained hesitant to cast him in leading roles, preferring to loan him out to other studios. After a well-received supporting part in Of Human Hearts (1938), he was loaned to RKO to act opposite Ginger Rogers in the romantic comedy Vivacious Lady (1938). The production was shut down for months in 1937 as Stewart recovered from an undisclosed illness, during which he was hospitalized. RKO initially wanted to replace Stewart, but eventually the project was canceled. However, Rogers' success in a stage musical caused the film to be picked up again. Stewart was recast in Vivacious Lady at Rogers' insistence and due to his performance in Of Human Hearts. It was a critical and commercial success, and showed Stewart's talent for performing in romantic comedies; The New York Herald called him \"one of the most knowing and engaging young actors appearing on the screen at present\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Stewart's third film release of 1938, the First World War drama The Shopworn Angel, saw him collaborate again with Margaret Sullavan. In his performance, Stewart drew upon his own feelings of unrequited love towards Sullavan, who was married to his agent, Leland Hayward. Although the film was otherwise well-received, critics were mixed about Stewart. Bland Johaneson of the New York Daily Mirror compared him to Stan Laurel in this melodramatic film, and Variety called his performance unfocused. Irene Thier of The New York Post wrote that his role was \"just another proof that this young man is one of the finest actors of the screen's young roster\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Stewart became a major star when he was loaned out to Columbia Pictures to play the lead role in Frank Capra's You Can't Take It with You (1938) opposite Jean Arthur. Stewart played the son of a banker who falls in love with a woman from a poor and eccentric family. Capra had recently completed several well-received films and was looking for a new type of leading man. He had been impressed by Stewart's role in Navy Blue and Gold (1937). According to Capra, Stewart was one of the best actors ever to hit the screen, understood character archetypes intuitively, and required little directing. You Can't Take It With You became the fifth highest-grossing film of the year and won the Academy Award for Best Picture. The film was also critically successful, but while Variety wrote that the performances of Stewart and Arthur garnered \"much of the laughs\", most of the critical acclaim went to Lionel Barrymore and Edward Arnold.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In contrast to the success of You Can't Take It With You, Stewart's first three film releases of 1939 were all commercial disappointments. In the melodrama Made for Each Other (1939), he shared the screen with Carole Lombard. Stewart blamed its directing and screenwriting for its poor box-office performance. Regardless, the film received favorable reviews, with Newsweek writing that Stewart and Lombard were \"perfectly cast in the leading roles\". The other two films, The Ice Follies of 1939 and It's a Wonderful World, were critical failures.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In Stewart's fourth 1939 film, he worked with Capra and Arthur again in the political comedy-drama Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Stewart played an idealist thrown into the political arena. It garnered critical praise and became the third-highest-grossing film of the year. The Nation stated \"[Stewart] takes first place among Hollywood actors...Now he is mature and gives a difficult part, with many nuances, moments of tragic-comic impact.\" Later, critic Andrew Sarris qualified Stewart's performance as \"lean, gangling, idealistic to the point of being neurotic, thoughtful to the point of being tongue-tied\", describing him as \"particularly gifted in expressing the emotional ambivalence of the action hero\". Stewart won the New York Film Critics Circle award and received his first nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Stewart's last screen appearance of 1939 came in the Western Destry Rides Again, in which he portrayed a pacifist lawman alongside Marlene Dietrich, a saloon girl who falls in love with him. It was critically and commercially successful. TIME magazine wrote, \"James Stewart, who had just turned in the top performance of his cinematurity as Jefferson Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, turns in as good a performance or better as Thomas Jefferson Destry.\" Between films, Stewart had begun a radio career and had become a distinctive voice on the Lux Radio Theater, The Screen Guild Theater, and other shows. So well-known had his slow drawl become that comedians began impersonating him.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Stewart and Sullavan reunited for two films in 1940. The Ernst Lubitsch romantic comedy The Shop Around the Corner starred them as co-workers who cannot stand each other but unknowingly become romantic pen-pals. It received good reviews and was a box-office success in Europe, but failed to find an audience in the US, where less-gentle screwball comedies were more popular. Director Lubitsch assessed it to be the best film of his career, and it has been regarded highly by later critics, such as Pauline Kael and Richard Schickel.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The drama The Mortal Storm, directed by Frank Borzage, featured Sullavan and Stewart as lovers caught in turmoil upon Hitler's rise to power. It was one of the first blatantly anti-Nazi films to be produced in Hollywood, but according to film scholar Ben Urwand, \"ultimately made very little impact\" as it did not show the persecution experienced by Jews or name that ethnic group. Despite being well received by critics, it failed at the box office. Ten days after filming The Mortal Storm, Stewart began filming No Time for Comedy (1940) with Rosalind Russell. Critics complimented Stewart's performance; Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called Stewart \"the best thing in the show\", yet the film was again not a box-office success.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Stewart's final film to be released in 1940 was George Cukor's romantic comedy The Philadelphia Story, in which he played an intrusive, fast-talking reporter sent to cover the wedding of a socialite (Katharine Hepburn) with the help of her ex-husband (Cary Grant). The film became one of the largest box-office successes of the year and received widespread critical acclaim. The New York Herald Tribune stated that \"Stewart...contributes most of the comedy to the show...In addition, he contributes some of the most irresistible romantic moments.\" His performance earned him his only Academy Award in a competitive category for Best Actor, beating out Henry Fonda, for whom he had voted and with whom he had once roomed, both almost broke, in the early 1930s in New York. Stewart himself assessed his performance in Mr. Smith to be superior and believed the Academy was recompensing for not giving him the award the year prior. Moreover, Stewart's character was a supporting role, not the male lead. He gave the Oscar to his father, who displayed it at his hardware store alongside other family awards and military medals.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Stewart next appeared in two comedies—Come Live with Me (1941), which paired him with Hedy Lamarr, and Pot o' Gold (1941), featuring Paulette Goddard—that were both box-office failures. Stewart considered the latter to be the worst film of his career. His last film before military service was the musical Ziegfeld Girl (1941), which co-starred Judy Garland, Hedy Lamarr, and Lana Turner. It was a critical failure, but also one of the best box-office performers of the year.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Stewart became the first major American movie star to enlist in the United States Army to fight in World War II. His family had deep military roots: both of his grandfathers had fought in the Civil War, and his father had served during both the Spanish–American War and World War I. After first being rejected for low weight in November 1940, he enlisted in February 1941. As an experienced pilot, he reported for induction as a private in the Air Corps on March 22, 1941. Soon to be 33 years old, he was over the age limit for Aviation Cadet training—the normal path of commissioning for pilots, navigators and bombardiers—and therefore applied for an Air Corps commission as both a college graduate and a licensed commercial pilot. Stewart received his commission as a second lieutenant on January 1, 1942.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "After enlisting, Stewart made no new commercial films, although he remained under contract to MGM. His public appearances were limited to engagements for the Army Air Forces. The Air Corps scheduled him on network radio with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, and on the radio program We Hold These Truths, a celebration of the United States Bill of Rights, which was broadcast a week after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Stewart also appeared in a First Motion Picture Unit short film, Winning Your Wings, to help recruit airmen. Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1942, it appeared in movie theaters nationwide beginning in late May 1942 and resulted in 150,000 new recruits.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Stewart was concerned that his celebrity status would relegate him to duties behind the lines. After spending over a year training pilots at Kirtland Army Airfield in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he appealed to his commander and in November 1943 was sent to England as part of the 703d Bomb Squadron to fly B-24 Liberators. He was based initially at RAF Tibenham, before moving to RAF Old Buckenham.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Stewart was promoted to major following a mission to Ludwigshafen, Germany, on January 7, 1944. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for actions as deputy commander of the 2nd Bombardment Wing, the French Croix de Guerre with palm, and the Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters. Stewart was promoted to full colonel on March 29, 1945, becoming one of the few Americans to ever rise from private to colonel in only four years. At the beginning of June 1945, Stewart was the presiding officer of the court martial of a pilot and navigator who accidentally bombed Zürich, Switzerland.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Stewart returned to the United States in early fall 1945. He continued to play a role in reserve of the Army Air Forces after the war and was also one of the 12 founders of the Air Force Association in October 1945. Stewart would eventually transfer to the reserves of the United States Air Force after the Army Air Forces split from the Army in 1947. During active-duty periods, he served with the Strategic Air Command and completed transition training as a pilot on the B-47 and B-52.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Stewart was first nominated for promotion to brigadier general in February 1957; however, his promotion was initially opposed by Senator Margaret Chase Smith. At the time of the nomination, the Washington Daily News noted: \"He trains actively with the Reserve every year. He's had 18 hours as first pilot of a B-52.\" On July 23, 1959, Stewart was promoted to brigadier general, becoming the highest-ranking actor in American military history. During the Vietnam War, he flew as a non-duty observer in a B-52 on an Arc Light bombing mission in February 1966. He served for 27 years, officially retiring from the Air Force on May 31, 1968, when he reached the mandatory retirement age of 60. Upon his retirement, he was awarded the United States Air Force Distinguished Service Medal. Stewart rarely spoke about his wartime service but did appear in an episode of the British television documentary series The World at War (1974), commenting on the disastrous 1943 mission against Schweinfurt, Germany.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "After his experiences in the war, Stewart considered returning to Pennsylvania to run the family store. His former agent, Leland Hayward, had also left the talent business in 1944 after selling his roster of stars, including Stewart, to Music Corporation of America (MCA). Stewart decided not to renew his MGM contract and instead signed a deal with MCA. He later stated that he was given a new beginning by Frank Capra, who asked him to star in It's a Wonderful Life (1946), the first postwar film for both of them. Stewart played George Bailey, an upstanding small-town man who becomes increasingly frustrated by his ordinary existence and financial troubles. Driven to suicide on Christmas Eve, he is led to reassess his life by Clarence Odbody, an \"angel, second class\", played by Henry Travers. During filming, Stewart experienced doubts about his abilities and continued to consider retiring from acting.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Although It's a Wonderful Life was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Stewart's third Best Actor nomination, it received mixed reviews and was only a moderate success at the box office, failing to cover its production costs. Several critics found the movie too sentimental, although Bosley Crowther wrote that Stewart did a \"warmly appealing job, indicating that he has grown in spiritual stature as well as in talent during the years he was in the war\", and President Harry S. Truman concluded that \"If [my wife] and I had a son we'd want him to be just like Jimmy Stewart [in this film].\" In the decades since its release, It's a Wonderful Life has grown to define Stewart's film persona and is widely considered a Christmas classic, and according to the American Film Institute, is one of the 100 best American movies ever made. Andrew Sarris stated that Stewart's performance was underappreciated by critics of the time, who could not see \"the force and fury\" of it, and considered his proposal scene with Donna Reed, \"one of the most sublimely histrionic expressions of passion\". Stewart later named the film his personal favorite out of his filmography.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "In the aftermath of It's A Wonderful Life, Capra's production company went into bankruptcy, while Stewart continued to have doubts about his acting abilities. His generation of actors was fading, and a new wave of actors, including Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and James Dean, would soon remake Hollywood. Stewart returned to making radio dramas in 1946; he continued this work between films until the mid-1950s. He also made a comeback on Broadway to star in Mary Coyle Chase's Harvey in July 1947, replacing the original star Frank Fay for the duration of his vacation. The play had opened to nearly universal praise in 1944 and told the story of Elwood P. Dowd, a wealthy eccentric, whose best friend is an invisible man-sized rabbit and whose relatives are trying to get him committed to a mental asylum. Stewart gained a following in the unconventional play, and although Fay returned to the role in August, they decided that Stewart would take his place again the next summer. Stewart's only film to be released in 1947 was the William A. Wellman comedy Magic Town, one of the first films about the new science of public opinion polling. It was poorly received both commercially and critically.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Stewart appeared in four new film releases in 1948. Call Northside 777 was a critically acclaimed film noir, while the musical comedy On Our Merry Way, in which Stewart and Henry Fonda played jazz musicians in an ensemble cast, was a critical and commercial failure. The comedy You Gotta Stay Happy, which paired Stewart with Joan Fontaine, was the most successful of his post-war films up to that point. Rope, in which Stewart played the idolized teacher of two young men who commit murder to show their supposed superiority, began his collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock. Shot in long \"real-time\" takes, Stewart felt pressure to be flawless in his performance; the added stress led to him sleeping very little and drinking more heavily. Rope received mixed reviews, and Andrew Sarris and Scott Eyman have later called him miscast in the role of a Nietzsche-loving philosophy professor. The film's screenwriter Arthur Laurents also stated that \"the casting of [Stewart] was absolutely destructive. He's not sexual as an actor.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Stewart found success again with The Stratton Story (1949), playing baseball champion Monty Stratton opposite June Allyson. It became the sixth highest-grossing film of 1949 and was well received by the critics. The New York Times noted, \"The Stratton Story was the best thing that has yet happened to Mr. Stewart in his post-war film career...he gives such a winning performance that it is almost impossible to imagine any one else playing the role.\" Stewart's other 1949 release saw him reunited with Spencer Tracy in the World War II film Malaya (1949). It was a commercial failure and received mixed reviews.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In the 1950s, Stewart experienced a career renewal as the star of Westerns and collaborated on several films with director Anthony Mann. The first of these was the Universal production Winchester '73 (1950), which Stewart agreed to do in exchange for being cast in a screen adaptation of Harvey. It also marked a turning point in Hollywood, as Stewart's agent, Lew Wasserman, brokered an innovative deal with Universal, in which Stewart would receive no fee in exchange for a percentage of the profits. Stewart was also granted authority to collaborate with the studio on casting and hiring decisions. Stewart ended up earning about $600,000 for Winchester '73, significantly more than his usual fee, and other stars quickly capitalized on this new way of doing business, which further undermined the decaying studio system.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Stewart chose Mann to direct, and the film gave him the idea of redefining his screen persona through the Western genre. In the film, Stewart is a tough, vengeful sharpshooter, the winner of a prized rifle that is stolen and passes through many hands, until the showdown between him and his brother. Winchester '73 became a box-office success upon its summer release and earned Stewart rave reviews. He also starred in another successful Western that summer, Broken Arrow (1950), which featured him as an ex-soldier and Native American agent making peace with the Apache.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Stewart's third film release of 1950 was the comedy The Jackpot; it received critical acclaim and was commercially successful, but was a minor film in his repertoire and has largely been forgotten by contemporary critics and fans. In December 1950, the screen adaptation of Harvey was released, directed by Henry Koster and with Stewart reprising his stage role. With critics comparing his performance with Fay's, Stewart's performance as well as the film itself received mixed reviews. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote that \"so darling is the acting of James Stewart [...] and all the rest that a virtually brand-new experience is still in store for even those who saw the play\", while Variety called him \"perfect\" in the role. John McCarten of the New Yorker stated that although he \"doesn't bring his part to the battered authority of Frank Fay...he nevertheless succeeds in making plausible the notion that Harvey, the rabbit, would accept him as a pal.\" Stewart later stated that he was dissatisfied with his performance, stating, \"I played him a little too dreamily, a little too cute-cute.\" Despite the film's poor box office performance, Stewart received his fourth Academy Award nomination as well as his first Golden Globe nomination. Similar to It's a Wonderful Life, Harvey achieved popularity later, after frequent television showings.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Stewart appeared in only one film released in 1951, playing a scientist in Koster's British production No Highway in the Sky, which was one of the first airplane disaster films ever made. Filmed in England, it became a box office success in the United Kingdom, but failed to attract audiences in the United States. Stewart took a small supporting role as a troubled clown in Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), which went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Critics were curious why Stewart had taken such a small, out-of-character role; he responded that he was inspired by Lon Chaney's ability to disguise himself while letting his character emerge. In the same year, Stewart starred in a critically and commercially failed biopic, Carbine Williams (1952), and continued his collaboration with Mann in Bend of the River (1952), which was a commercial and critical success.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Stewart followed Bend of the River with four more collaborations with Mann in the next two years. The Naked Spur (1953) and The Far Country (1954) were successful with audiences and developed Stewart's screen persona into a more mature, ambiguous, and edgier presence. The films featured him as troubled cowboys seeking redemption while facing corrupt cattlemen, ranchers, and outlaws; a man who knows violence first-hand and struggles to control it. The Stewart–Mann collaborations laid the foundation for many of the Westerns of the 1950s and remain popular today for their grittier, more realistic depiction of the classic movie genre. In addition, Stewart starred in the Western radio show The Six Shooter for its one-season run from 1953 to 1954. He and Mann also collaborated on films outside the Western genre such as Thunder Bay (1953) and The Glenn Miller Story (1954), the latter a critically acclaimed biopic in which he starred opposite June Allyson. It earned Stewart a BAFTA nomination and continued his portrayals of 'American heroes'.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Stewart's second collaboration with Hitchcock, the thriller Rear Window, became the eighth highest-grossing film of 1954. Hitchcock and Stewart also formed a corporation, Patron Inc., to produce the film. Stewart portrayed a photographer, loosely based on Robert Capa, who projects his fantasies and fears onto the people he observes out his apartment window while on hiatus due to a broken leg and comes to believe that he has witnessed a murder. Limited by his wheelchair, Stewart had to react to what his character sees with mostly facial responses. Like Mann, Hitchcock uncovered new depths to Stewart's acting, showing a protagonist confronting his fears and repressed desires. Although most of the initial acclaim for Rear Window was directed towards Hitchcock, critic Vincent Canby later described Stewart's performance in it as \"grand\" and stated that \"[his] longtime star status in Hollywood has always obscured recognition of his talent.\" 1954 was a landmark year in Stewart's career in terms of audience success, and he topped Look magazine's list of the most-popular movie stars, displacing rival Western star John Wayne.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Stewart continued his successful box-office run with two collaborations with Mann in 1955. Strategic Air Command paired him again with June Allyson in a Cold War propaganda film geared to show audiences that extensive military spending was necessary. Stewart took a central role in its development, using his experiences from the air force. Despite criticism for the dry, mechanistic storyline, it became the sixth highest-grossing film of 1955. Stewart's final collaboration with Mann in the Western genre, The Man from Laramie, one of the first Westerns to be shot in CinemaScope, was well received by the critics and audiences alike. Following his work with Mann, Stewart starred opposite Doris Day in Hitchcock's remake of his earlier film The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). The film was another success. Even though critics preferred the first version, Hitchcock himself considered his remake superior.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Stewart's next film, Billy Wilder's The Spirit of St. Louis (1957), saw him star as his young adulthood hero, Charles Lindbergh. It was a big-budget production with elaborate special effects for the flying sequences, but received only mixed reviews and did not earn back its production costs. Stewart ended the year with a starring role in the Western Night Passage (1957), which had originally been slated as his ninth collaboration with Mann. During the pre-production, a rift developed between Mann and writer Borden Chase over the script, which Mann considered weak. Mann decided to leave the film and never collaborated with Stewart again. James Neilson replaced Mann, and the film opened in 1957 to become a box-office flop. Soured by this failure, Stewart avoided the genre and would not make another Western for four years.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Stewart's collaboration with Hitchcock ended the following year with Vertigo (1958), in which he starred as an acrophobic former policeman who becomes obsessed with a woman (Kim Novak) he is shadowing. Although Vertigo has later become considered one of Hitchcock's key works and was ranked the greatest film ever made by the Sight & Sound critics' poll in 2012, it was met with unenthusiastic reviews and poor box-office receipts upon its release. Regardless, several critics complimented Stewart for his performance, with Bosley Crowther noting, \"Mr. Stewart, as usual, manages to act awfully tense in a casual way.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Hitchcock blamed the film's failure on Stewart being too old to convincingly be Novak's love interest: he was fifty years old at the time and had begun wearing a silver hairpiece in his movies. Consequently, Hitchcock cast Cary Grant in his next film, North by Northwest (1959), a role Stewart wanted; Grant was four years older than Stewart but photographed much younger. Stewart's second 1958 film release, the romantic comedy Bell, Book and Candle (1958), also paired him with Kim Novak, with Stewart later echoing Hitchcock in saying that he was miscast as 25-year-old Novak's romantic partner. The film and Stewart's performance received poor reviews and resulted in a box office failure. However, according to film scholar David Bingham, by the early 1950s, \"Stewart's personality was so credible and well-established\", that his choice of role no longer affected his popularity.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Stewart ended the decade with Otto Preminger's realistic courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder (1959) and the crime film The FBI Story (1959). The former was a box office success despite its explicit dealing with subjects such as rape, and garnered good reviews. Stewart received critical acclaim for his role as a small-town lawyer involved in a difficult murder case; Bosley Crowther called it \"one of the finest performances of his career\". Stewart won his first BAFTA, a Volpi Cup, a New York Film Critics Circle Award, and a Producers Guild of America Award, as well as earned his fifth and final Academy Award nomination for his performance. The latter film, in which Stewart portrayed a Depression-era FBI agent, was less well received by critics and was commercially unsuccessful. Despite the commercial failure of The FBI Story, the film marked the close of the most commercially successful decade of Stewart's career. According to Quigley's annual poll, Stewart was one of the top money-making stars for ten years, appearing in the top ten in 1950, 1952–1959, and 1965. He topped the list in 1955.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Stewart opened the new decade by starring in the war film The Mountain Road (1960). To his surprise, it was a box office failure, despite his claims that it was one of the best scripts he'd ever read. He began a new director collaboration with John Ford, making his debut in his films in the Western Two Rode Together (1961), which had thematic echoes of Ford's The Searchers. The same year, he also narrated the film X-15 for the USAF. Stewart was considered for the role of Atticus Finch in the 1962 film adaptation of Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird, but he turned it down, concerned that the story was too controversial.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Stewart and Ford's next collaboration was The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). A classic psychological Western, the picture was shot in black-and-white film noir style at Ford's insistence, with Stewart as an East Coast attorney who goes against his non-violent principles when he is forced to confront a psychopathic outlaw (Lee Marvin) in a small frontier town. The complex film initially garnered mixed reviews but became a critical favorite over the ensuing decades. Stewart was billed above John Wayne in posters and the trailers, but Wayne received top billing in the film itself. Stewart, Wayne, and Ford also collaborated for a television play that same year, Flashing Spikes (1962), for ABC's anthology series Alcoa Premiere, albeit featuring Wayne billed with a television pseudonym, \"Michael Morris\", (also used for Wayne's brief appearance in the John Ford-directed episode of the television series Wagon Train titled \"The Colter Craven Story\") for his lengthy cameo. Next, Stewart appeared as part of an all-star cast—including Henry Fonda and John Wayne—in How the West Was Won, a Western epic released in the United States in early 1963. The film went on to win three Academy Awards and reap massive box-office figures.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "In 1962, Stewart signed a multi-movie deal with 20th Century Fox. The first two of these films reunited him with director Henry Koster in the family-friendly comedies Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation (1962) with Maureen O'Hara and Take Her, She's Mine (1963), which were both box-office successes. The former received moderately positive reviews and won Stewart the Silver Bear for Best Actor at the Berlin International Film Festival; the latter was panned by the critics. Stewart then appeared in John Ford's final Western, Cheyenne Autumn (1964), playing a white-suited Wyatt Earp in a long semi-comedic sequence in the middle of the movie. The film failed domestically and was quickly forgotten.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "In 1965, Stewart was given his first honorary award for his career, the Cecil B. DeMille Award. He appeared in three films that year. The Fox family-comedy Dear Brigitte (1965), which featured French actress Brigitte Bardot as the object of Stewart's son's infatuation, was a box-office failure. The Civil War film Shenandoah (1965) was a commercial success with strong anti-war and humanitarian themes. The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) continued Stewart's series of aviation-themed films; it was well-received critically, but a box-office failure.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "For the next few years, Stewart acted in a series of Westerns: The Rare Breed (1966) with Maureen O'Hara, Firecreek (1968) with Henry Fonda, Bandolero! (1968) with Dean Martin, and The Cheyenne Social Club (1970) with Henry Fonda again. In 1968, he received the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award. Stewart returned on Broadway to reprise his role as Elwood P. Dowd in Harvey at the ANTA Theatre in February 1970; the revival ran until May. He won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Performance for it.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "In 1971, Stewart starred in the NBC sitcom The Jimmy Stewart Show. He played a small-town college professor whose adult son moves back home with his family. Stewart disliked the amount of work needed to film the show each week and was relieved when it was canceled after only one season due to bad reviews and lack of audiences. His only film release for 1971, the comedy-drama Fools' Parade, was more positively received. Robert Greenspun of The New York Times stated that \"the movie belongs to Stewart, who has never been more wonderful\". For his contributions to Western films, Stewart was inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City in 1972.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Stewart returned to television in Harvey for NBC's Hallmark Hall of Fame series in 1972 and then starred in the CBS mystery series Hawkins in 1973. Playing a small-town lawyer investigating mysterious cases—similar to his character in Anatomy of a Murder—Stewart won a Golden Globe for his performance. Nevertheless, Hawkins failed to gain a wide audience, possibly because it rotated with Shaft, which had a starkly conflicting demographic, and was canceled after one season. Stewart also periodically appeared on Johnny Carson's The Tonight Show, sharing poems he had written at different times in his life. His poems were later compiled into a short collection, Jimmy Stewart and His Poems (1989).",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "After performing again in Harvey at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London in 1975, Stewart returned to films with a major supporting role in John Wayne's final film, The Shootist (1976), playing a doctor giving Wayne's gunfighter a terminal cancer diagnosis. By this time, Stewart had a hearing impairment, which affected his ability to hear his cues and led to him repeatedly flubbing his lines; his vanity would not allow him to admit this or to wear a hearing aid. Stewart was offered the role of Howard Beale in Network (1976) but refused it due to its explicit language. Instead, he appeared in supporting roles in the disaster film Airport '77 (1977) with Jack Lemmon, the remake of The Big Sleep (1978) with Robert Mitchum as Philip Marlowe, and the family film The Magic of Lassie (1978). Despite mixed reviews, Airport '77 was a box-office success, but the two other films were commercial and critical failures. Harry Haun of New York Daily News wrote in his review of The Big Sleep that it was \"really sad to see James Stewart struggle so earnestly with material that just isn't there\". Stewart made a memorable cameo appearance on the final episode of The Carol Burnett Show in March 1978, surprising Burnett, a lifelong Stewart fan.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Stewart's final live-action feature film was the critically panned Japanese film The Green Horizon (1980), directed by Susumu Hani. Stewart took the role because the film promoted wildlife conservation and allowed his family to travel with him to Kenya. In the 1980s, Stewart semi-retired from acting. He was offered the role of Norman Thayer in On Golden Pond (1981) but turned it down because he disliked the film's father-daughter relationship; the role went instead to his friend, Henry Fonda. Stewart filmed two television movies in the 1980s: Mr. Krueger's Christmas (1980), produced by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which allowed him to fulfill a lifelong dream to conduct the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and Right of Way (1983), an HBO drama that co-starred Bette Davis. He also made an appearance in the historical miniseries North and South in 1986 and did voiceover work for commercials for Campbell's Soups in the 1980s and 1990s. Stewart's last film performance was voicing the character of Sheriff Wylie Burp in the animated movie An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (1991).",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Stewart remained in the public eye due to his frequent visits to the White House during the Reagan administration. The re-release of Hitchcock films gained him renewed recognition, with Rear Window and Vertigo praised by film critics. Stewart also received several honorary film industry awards at the end of his career: an American Film Institute Award in 1980, a Silver Bear in 1982, Kennedy Center Honors in 1983, an Academy Honorary Award in 1985, and National Board of Review and Film Society of Lincoln Center's Chaplin Award in 1990. The honorary Oscar was presented by former co-star Cary Grant \"for his 50 years of memorable performances, for his high ideals both on and off the screen, with respect and affection of his colleagues\". In addition, Stewart received the highest civilian award in the US, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, \"for his contributions in the fields of the arts, entertainment and public service\", in 1985.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "In December 2023, meditation app Calm announced that Stewart would be the latest narrator for its Sleep Story series, with an AI-generated voice of the actor reading an original story “It’s a Wonderful Sleep Story”. The project uses AI voice-cloning technology from Respeecher, and was conducted with the consent of Stewart’s family and his estate.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "As a friend, mentor, and focus of his early romantic feelings, Margaret Sullavan had a unique influence on Stewart's life.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "They met while they were both performing for the University Players; he was smitten, and invited her on a date. Unfortunately for Stewart, she regarded him as a close friend and co-worker, so they never began a romantic relationship. Though Sullavan was always aware of his feelings, Stewart never directly revealed them to her. Sullavan loved Stewart, but not romantically. Rather, she felt protective and maternal towards him.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "The director of The Shopworn Angel, H. C. Potter, suggested they might have married had Stewart been more forthcoming with his feelings. Instead, Sullavan became his acting mentor in Hollywood. According to director Edward H. Griffith, she \"made [him] a star\" by co-starring with him in four films: Next Time You Love (1936), The Shopworn Angel (1938), The Shop Around the Corner (1940) and The Mortal Storm (1940).",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Stewart did not marry until his forties, which attracted a significant amount of contemporary media attention; gossip columnist Hedda Hopper called him the \"Great American Bachelor\". Regardless, he had several romantic relationships prior to marriage. After being introduced by Henry Fonda, Stewart and Ginger Rogers enjoyed a relationship in 1935, while Fonda was dating Rogers' good friend Lucille Ball.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "During production of The Shopworn Angel (1938), Stewart dated actress Norma Shearer for six weeks. Afterward, he dated Loretta Young, but she wanted to settle down and Stewart did not.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "While filming Destry Rides Again (1939), Stewart had an affair with his co-star Marlene Dietrich, who was married at the time. Dietrich allegedly became pregnant, but it was quickly terminated. Stewart ended their relationship after the filming was completed. Hurt by Stewart's rejection, she barely mentioned him in her memoir and waved him off as a one-time affair.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "He dated Olivia de Havilland in the late 1930s and early 1940s and even proposed marriage to her, but she rejected the proposal, as she believed he was not ready to settle down. She ended the relationship shortly before he began his military service, as she had fallen in love with director John Huston.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "A licensed civilian pilot, Stewart enlisted in the Army Air Forces early in 1941. After seeing action in Europe during World War II, he attained the rank of colonel and received several awards for his service. He was made brigadier general in the Air Force Reserve in 1959. He retired from the service in 1968, at which time he was awarded the Air Force Distinguished Service Medal. President Reagan recounted at a White House briefing that he was corrected by Stewart himself after Reagan incorrectly announced he was a major general at a campaign event.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "In 1942, while serving in the military, Stewart met singer Dinah Shore at the Hollywood Canteen, a club mainly for servicemen. They began a romantic relationship and were nearly married in Las Vegas in 1943, but Stewart called off the marriage before they arrived, citing cold feet. After the war, Stewart began a relationship with Myrna Dell while he was filming The Stratton Story (1949). Although gossip columnists made claims that they were planning to marry, Dell said this was not true.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Stewart's first interaction with his future wife, Gloria Hatrick McLean, was at Keenan Wynn's Christmas party in 1947. He had crashed the party and became inebriated, leaving a poor impression of himself with Hatrick. A year later, Gary Cooper and his wife, Veronica, invited Hatrick and Stewart to a dinner party, and the two began dating. A former model, Hatrick was divorced with two children. Stewart and Hatrick were married at Brentwood Presbyterian Church on August 9, 1949, and remained married until her death from lung cancer in 1994.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "The couple purchased a home in Beverly Hills in 1951, where they resided for the rest of their lives. They also owned the Winecup Gamble Ranch in Nevada from 1953 to 1957. Stewart adopted Gloria's two sons, Ronald (1944–1969) and Michael (born 1946), and with Gloria he had twin daughters, Judy and Kelly, on May 7, 1951. Ronald was killed in action in Vietnam on June 8, 1969, at the age of 24, while serving as a lieutenant in the Marine Corps.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Stewart was guarded about his personal life and, according to biographer Scott Eyman, tended in interviews to avoid the emotional connection he was known for in his films, preferring to keep his thoughts and feelings to himself. He was known as a loner who did not have intimate relationships with many people. Director John Ford said of Stewart, \"You don't get to know Jimmy Stewart; Jimmy Stewart gets to know you.\"",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Stewart's 50-year friendship with Henry Fonda began in Manhattan when Fonda invited Stewart to be his third roommate (in addition to Joshua Logan and Myron McCormick) in order to make the rent. When Stewart moved to Hollywood in 1935, he again shared an apartment with Fonda, and the two gained reputations as playboys. Over their careers, they starred in four films together: On Our Merry Way (1948), How the West Was Won (1962), Firecreek (1968), and The Cheyenne Social Club (1970). Both Stewart's and Fonda's children later noted that their favorite activity when not working seemed to be quietly sharing time together while building and painting model airplanes, a hobby they had taken up in New York years earlier. Besides building model airplanes, Stewart and Fonda liked to build and fly kites, play golf, and reminisce about the \"old days\". After Fonda's death in 1982, Stewart's only public comment was \"I've just lost my best friend.\" Their friendship was chronicled in Scott Eyman's biography, Hank and Jim (2017).",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Aside from Fonda, Stewart's close friends included his former agent, Leland Hayward; director John Ford; photographer John Swope, Stewart's former roommate; and Billy Grady, the talent scout who discovered Stewart and also served as the best man at his wedding. Gary Cooper was another close friend of Stewart's. On April 17, 1961, Cooper was too ill (with cancer) to attend the 33rd Academy Awards ceremony, so Stewart accepted the honorary Oscar on his behalf.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "In addition to his film career, Stewart had diversified investments, including real estate, oil wells, the charter-plane company Southwest Airways, and membership on major corporate boards; he became a multimillionaire. Already prior to his enlistment in the Air Corps, he had been an avid pilot, with a private pilot certificate and a commercial pilot license, as well as over 400 hours of flying time. A highly-proficient pilot, he entered a cross-country race with Leland Hayward in 1937 and was one of the early investors in Thunderbird Field, a pilot-training school built and operated by Southwest Airways in Glendale, Arizona.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Stewart was also active in philanthropy over the years. He served as the national vice-chairman of entertainment for the American Red Cross's fund-raising campaign for wounded soldiers in Vietnam, as well as contributed donations for improvements and restorations to Indiana, his hometown in Pennsylvania. His signature charity event, \"The Jimmy Stewart Relay Marathon Race\", held annually since 1982, has raised millions of dollars for the Child and Family Development Center at St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica, California.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Stewart was a lifelong supporter of scouting, having been a Second Class Scout as a youth and being awarded the Silver Buffalo Award for service to youth in 1958. He was also an adult Scout leader, and in the 1970s and 1980s, he made advertisements for the Boy Scouts of America, which led to his being incorrectly identified as an Eagle Scout. An award for Boy Scouts, \"The James M. Stewart Good Citizenship Award\" has been presented since 2003. Stewart was also a Life Member of the Sons of the Revolution in California.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Stewart was a staunch conservative Republican throughout his life. A political argument in 1947 reportedly led to a fistfight with friend Henry Fonda (a liberal Democrat), according to some accounts, but the two maintained their friendship by never discussing politics again. The fistfight may be apocryphal, as Jhan Robbins quotes Stewart as saying, \"Our views never interfered with our feelings for each other. We just didn't talk about certain things. I can't remember ever having an argument with him—ever!\"",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "In 1964, Stewart campaigned for the conservative presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and, according to biographer Marc Eliot, erred on the obsessive prior to the election. Stewart was a hawk on the Vietnam War and maintained that his son, Ronald, did not die in vain. Following the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, Stewart, Charlton Heston, Kirk Douglas, and Gregory Peck issued a statement calling for support of President Lyndon B. Johnson's Gun Control Act of 1968.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Stewart actively supported Ronald Reagan's bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976. He attended Reagan's campaign rallies, in one speech assuring that he was more conservative than ever, regardless of the death of his son in the Vietnam War. In the last years of his life, he supported the re-election of Jesse Helms to the Senate in 1990 and also donated to the campaign of Bob Dole for the 1996 presidential election.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "In 1988, Stewart made a plea in Congressional hearings, along with Burt Lancaster, Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, film director Martin Scorsese, and many others, against Ted Turner's decision to 'colorize' classic black-and-white films, including It's a Wonderful Life. Stewart stated, \"the coloring of black-and-white films is wrong. It's morally and artistically wrong and these profiteers should leave our film industry alone.\"",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "In 1989, Stewart founded the American Spirit Foundation to apply entertainment-industry resources to developing innovative approaches to public education and to assist the emerging democracy movements in the former Iron Curtain countries.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Stewart's wife Gloria died of lung cancer on February 16, 1994, aged 75. According to biographer Donald Dewey, her death left Stewart depressed and \"lost at sea\". Stewart became even more reclusive, spending most of his time in his bedroom, exiting only to eat and visit with his children. He shut out most people from his life, not only media and fans, but also his co-stars and friends. His friends Leonard Gershe and Gregory Peck said Stewart was not depressed or unhappy, but finally allowed to rest and be alone.",
"title": "Final years and death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Stewart was hospitalized after falling in December 1995. In December 1996, he was due to have the battery in his pacemaker changed but opted not to have that done. In February 1997, he was hospitalized for an irregular heartbeat. On June 25, a thrombosis formed in his right leg, leading to a pulmonary embolism one week later. Stewart died of a heart attack caused by the embolism at the age of 89, surrounded by his children at his home in Beverly Hills, on July 2, 1997; his final words to his family were, \"I'm going to be with Gloria now.\" President Bill Clinton commented that America had lost a \"national treasure ... a great actor, a gentleman and a patriot\". He was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. More than 3,000 mourners attended his memorial service, including June Allyson, Carol Burnett, Bob Hope, Lew Wasserman, Nancy Reagan, Esther Williams, and Robert Stack. The service included full military honors and three volleys of musketry.",
"title": "Final years and death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "He had the ability to talk naturally. He knew that in conversations people do often interrupt one another and it's not always so easy to get a thought out. It took a little time for the sound men to get used to him, but he had an enormous impact. And then, some years later, Marlon came out and did the same thing all over again—but what people forget is that Jimmy did it first.",
"title": "Acting style and screen persona"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "—Cary Grant on Stewart's acting technique.",
"title": "Acting style and screen persona"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "According to biographer Scott Eyman, Stewart was an instinctive actor. He was natural and at ease in front of the camera, despite his shy off-screen personality. In line with his natural and conversational acting style, Stewart's co-stars found him easy to work with, as he was willing to improvise around any situation that arose while filming. Later in his career, Stewart began to resent his reputation of having a \"natural\" acting technique. He asserted that there was not anything natural about standing on a sound stage in front of lights and cameras while acting out a scene.",
"title": "Acting style and screen persona"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "Stewart had established early in his career that he was proficient at communicating personality and character nuances through his performances alone. He used an \"inside-out\" acting technique, preferring to represent the character without accents, makeup, and props. Additionally, he tended to act with his body, not only with his voice and face; for example, in Harvey, Stewart portrays the main character's age and loneliness by slightly hunching down. He was also known for his pauses that had the ability to hold the audience's attention. Film critic Geoffrey O'Brien related that Stewart's \"stammering pauses\" created anxious space for the audience, leaving them in anticipation for the scene which Stewart took his time leading up to.",
"title": "Acting style and screen persona"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "Stewart himself claimed to dislike his earlier film performances, saying he was \"all hands and feet\", adding that he \"didn't seem to know what to do with either\". He mentioned that even though he did not always like his performances, he would not get discouraged. He said, \"But I always tried, and if the script wasn't too good, well, then, I just tried a little bit harder. I hope, though, not so hard that it shows.\" Former co-star Kim Novak stated of his acting style that for emotional scenes, he would access emotions deep inside of him and would take time to wind down after the scene ended. He could not turn it off immediately after the director yelled cut.",
"title": "Acting style and screen persona"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "Stewart was particularly adept at performing vulnerable scenes with women. Jack Lemmon suggested that Stewart's talent for performing with women was that he was able to allow the audience to see the respect and gentility he felt toward the women through his eyes. He showed that his characters needed them as much as their characters needed him. In connection to Stewart's screen persona with women, Peter Bradshaw said The Philadelphia Story is \"a film every school pupil should see\" due to Stewart's character's clear explanation of sexual consent after being accused of taking advantage of the main female character.",
"title": "Acting style and screen persona"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Stewart's screen persona was that of an \"everyman\", an ordinary man placed in extraordinary circumstances. Audiences could identify with him, in contrast to other Hollywood leading men of the time, such as Cary Grant, who represented what the audience wanted to become. Stewart's screen persona has been compared to those of Gary Cooper and Tom Hanks. Eyman suggested that Stewart could portray several different characters: \"the brother, the sweetheart, [and] the nice guy next door with a bias toward doing the right thing: always decent but never a pushover\". In Stewart's early career, Louella Parsons described his \"boyish appeal\" and \"ability to win audience sympathy\" as the reasons for his success as an actor; Stewart's performances appealed to both young and old audiences. According to film scholar Dennis Bingham, Stewart's essential persona was \"a small-town friendly neighbor, with a gentle face and voice and a slim body that is at once graceful and awkward\". Unlike many actors who developed their on-screen persona over time, Stewart's on-screen persona was recognizable as early as Art Trouble (1934), his uncredited debut film role, where Stewart was relaxed and comfortable on screen. He portrayed this persona most strongly in the 1940s, but maintained a classic everyman persona throughout his career.",
"title": "Acting style and screen persona"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Film scholar Dennis Bingham wrote that Stewart was \"both a 'personality' star and a chameleon\" who evoked both masculine and feminine qualities. Consequently, it was difficult for filmmakers to sell Stewart as the stereotypical leading man, and thus he \"became a star in films that capitalized on his sexual ambivalence\". Stewart's asexual persona as a leading man was unusual for the time period for an actor who was not mainly a comedian. However, during his career \"Stewart [encompassed] the furthest extremes of American masculinity, from Reaganite militarist patriotism to Hitchcockian perversity\".",
"title": "Acting style and screen persona"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "According to Roger Ebert, Stewart's pre-World War II characters were usually likable, but in postwar years directors chose to cast Stewart in darker roles, such as Jeffries in Rear Window. Ebert put this into contemporary perspective by asking, \"What would it feel like to see [Tom Hanks] in a bizarre and twisted light?\", explaining that it is jarring to see a beloved everyman persona such as Stewart in dark roles. Furthermore, Jonathan Rosenbaum explained that since audiences were more interested in Stewart's \"star persona\" and \"aura\" than his characters, \"this makes it more striking when Anthony Mann and Alfred Hitchcock periodically explore the neurotic and obsessive aspects of Stewart's persona to play against his all-American innocence and earnestness.\"",
"title": "Acting style and screen persona"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "Film scholar John Belton argued that rather than playing characters in his films, Stewart often played his own screen persona. He had difficulty playing famous historical personages because his persona could not accommodate the historical character. Belton explained that \"James Stewart is more James Stewart than Glenn Miller in The Glenn Miller Story (1954) or Charles Lindbergh in The Spirit of St. Louis (1957).\" Moreover, Jonathan Rosenbaum continued that Stewart's \"pre-existing life-size persona\" in Winchester '73 \"helped to shape and determine the impact of [his character] in [this film]\". On the other hand, Stewart has been described as a character actor who went through several distinct career phases. According to film scholar Amy Lawrence, the main elements of Stewart's persona, \"a propensity for physical and spiritual suffering, lingering fears of inadequacy\", were established by Frank Capra in the 1930s and were enhanced through his later work with Hitchcock and Mann. John Belton explained that \"James Stewart evolves from the naive, small-town, populist hero of Frank Capra's 1930s comedies to the bitter, anxiety-ridden, vengeance-obsessed cowboy in Anthony Mann's 1950s Westerns and the disturbed voyeur and sexual fetishist in Alfred Hitchcock's 1950s suspense thrillers.\" During his postwar career, Stewart usually avoided appearing in comedies, Harvey and Take Her, She's Mine being exceptions. He played many different types of characters, including manipulative, cynical, obsessive, or crazy characters. Stewart found that acting allowed him to express the fear and anxiety that he could not express during the war; his post-war performances were received well by audiences because they could still see the innocent, pre-war Stewart underneath his dark roles. According to Andrew Sarris, Stewart was \"the most complete actor-personality in the American cinema\".",
"title": "Acting style and screen persona"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Selected credits:",
"title": "Work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "(1st film role; a short - uncredited)",
"title": "Work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "Stewart is remembered for portraying idealist \"everyman\" characters in his films. His heroism on screen and devotion to his family made him relatable and representative of the American ideal, leading Stewart to be considered one of the best-loved figures in twentieth-century American popular culture. According to film scholar Dennis Bingham, \"his ability to 'play'—even symbolize—honesty and 'American ideals' made him an icon into whose mold later male stars tried to pour themselves\". Similarly, film scholar James Naremore has called Stewart \"the most successful actor of the 'common man' in the history of movies\" and \"the most intensely-emotional leading man to emerge from the studio system\", who could cry on screen without losing his masculinity. David Thomson has explained Stewart's appeal by stating that \"we wanted to be him, and we wanted to be liked by him\", while Roger Ebert has stated that \"whether he played everyman, or everyman's hidden psyche, Stewart was an innately likable man whose face, loping gait and distinctive drawl became famous all over the world\". Among Stewart's most recognizable qualities was his manner of speaking with a hesitant drawl. According to film scholar Tim Palmer, \"Stewart's legacy rests on his roles as the nervous idealist standing trial for, and gaining stature from, the sincerity of his beliefs, while his emotive convictions are put to the test.\" Film critic David Ansen wrote about Stewart's appeal as a person in addition to his appeal as an actor. Ansen retold a story in which Jack Warner, upon being told about Ronald Reagan's presidential ambitions, said, \"No. Jimmy Stewart for president, Ronald Reagan for best friend.\" Ansen further explained that Stewart was the ultimate trustworthy movie star.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "In contrast to his popularly remembered \"all-American\" screen persona, film critics and scholars have tended to emphasize that his performances also showed a \"dark side\". According to film scholar Murray Pomerance, \"the other Jimmy Stewart ... was a different type altogether, a repressed and neurotic man buried beneath an apparently calm facade, but ready at any moment to explode with vengeful anxiety and anger, or else with deeply twisted and constrained passions that could never match up with cheery personality of the alter ego.\" Bingham has described him as having \"two coequal personas; the earnest idealist, the nostalgic figure of the homespun boy next door; and the risk-taking actor who probably performed in films for more canonical auteurs than any other American star\". According to him, it is this complexity and his ambiguous masculinity and sexuality with which he approached his roles that characterized his persona. Naremore has stated that there was a \"troubled, cranky, slightly-repressed feeling in [Stewart's] behavior\", and Thomson has written that it was his dark side that produced \"great cinema\".",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "Stewart was one of the most sought-after actors in 1950s Hollywood, proving that independent actors could be successful in the film industry, which led more actors in Hollywood to forego studio contracts. According to Bingham, Stewart marked \"the transition between the studio period...and the era of free-lance actors, independent production, and powerful talent agents that made possible the \"new kind of star\" of the late 1960s\". Although Stewart was not the first big-name freelance actor, his \"mythic sweetness and idealism [which] were combined with eccentric physical equipment and capacity as an actor to enact emotion, anxiety, and pain\" enabled him to succeed in both the studio system, which emphasized the star as a real person, and the skeptical post-studio era.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "A number of Stewart's films have become classics of American cinema, with twelve of his films having been inducted into the United States National Film Registry as of 2019, and five—Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), The Philadelphia Story (1940), It's a Wonderful Life (1946), Rear Window (1954), and Vertigo (1958)—being featured on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 greatest American films of all time. Stewart and Robert DeNiro share the title for the most films represented on the AFI list. Stewart is also the most represented leading actor on the \"100 Greatest Movies of All Time\" list presented by Entertainment Weekly. Two of his characters—Jefferson Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life (1946)—made AFI's list of the one hundred greatest heroes and villains, and Harvey (1950) and The Philadelphia Story (1940) were included in their list of Greatest American Comedies. In 1999, the American Film Institute (AFI) ranked Stewart third on its list of the greatest American male actors.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "In 1960, Stewart was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1700 Vine Street for his contributions to the film industry. In 1974, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. His Golden Plate was presented by Awards Council member Helen Hayes. In 1997, Princeton University, Stewart's alma mater, honored him with the dedication of the James M. Stewart Theater along with a retrospective of his films. Stewart has also been honored with his own postal stamp as part of the \"Legends of Hollywood\" stamp series. In 1999, a bust of Stewart was unveiled at the Eighth Air Force Heritage Museum in Georgia. The L. Tom Perry Special Collections Library at Brigham Young University houses his personal papers and movie memorabilia including letters, scrapbooks, recordings of early radio programs, and two of his accordions. Stewart donated his papers and memorabilia to the library after becoming friends with the curator of its arts and communications collections, James D'Arc.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "Stewart has several memorials in his childhood hometown, Indiana, Pennsylvania. On May 20, 1995, his 87th birthday, The Jimmy Stewart Museum was established. The museum is located near his birthplace, his childhood home, and the former location of his father's hardware store. The museum has six galleries that include photos, memorabilia, personal mementos, movie posters, props, scripts, costumes and much more. Stewart had contributed significant donations to his hometown, and had done it quietly as he didn't want the publicity. A large statue of Stewart stands on the lawn of the Indiana County Courthouse, and a plaque marks his birthplace. In 1983, Jimmy Stewart came back to Indiana to celebrate his 75th birthday and unveiled the statue along with getting a phone call from then President Ronald Reagan to congratulate him on his birthday. 2011, the United States Post Office located at 47 South 7th Street in Indiana, Pennsylvania, was designated the \"James M. 'Jimmy' Stewart Post Office Building\". Additionally, the Indiana County–Jimmy Stewart Airport was named in his honor. His personal Cessna-310 airplane is refurbished and on display outside the airport that bears his name. His childhood home is still standing and over looks his beloved hometown.",
"title": "Legacy"
}
]
| James Maitland "Jimmy" Stewart was an American actor and military officer. Known for his distinctive drawl and everyman screen persona, Stewart's film career spanned 80 films from 1935 to 1991. With the strong morality which he portrayed both on and off the screen, he epitomized the "American ideal" in the mid-twentieth century. In 1999, the American Film Institute (AFI) ranked him third on its list of the greatest American male actors. He received numerous honors including the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1980, the Kennedy Center Honor in 1983, as well as the Academy Honorary Award and Presidential Medal of Freedom, both in 1985. Born and raised in Indiana, Pennsylvania, Stewart started acting while at Princeton University. After graduating in 1932, he began a career as a stage actor, appearing on Broadway and in summer stock productions. He landed his first supporting role in The Murder Man (1935) and had his breakthrough in Frank Capra's ensemble comedy You Can't Take It with You (1938). The following year, Stewart garnered his first of five Academy Award nominations for his portrayal of an idealized senator in Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). The following year he received the Academy Award for Best Actor, the only competitive Oscar of his career, for his performance in the George Cukor romantic comedy The Philadelphia Story (1940). His acting career was paused after he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II, deputy commanding the 2nd Bombardment Wing and commanding the 703d Bombardment Squadron. He later transferred to the Air Force Reserve, and held various command positions until his retirement in 1968 as a brigadier general. Stewart's first postwar role was as George Bailey in Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946). Although the film was not a major success upon release, he earned an Oscar nomination, and the film has become a Christmas classic, as well as one of his best-known roles. As one of the most popular film stars of the '50s, Stewart played darker, more morally ambiguous characters in movies directed by Anthony Mann, including Winchester '73 (1950), The Glenn Miller Story (1954), and The Naked Spur (1953), and by Alfred Hitchcock in Rope (1948), Rear Window (1954), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), and Vertigo (1958). During this time he received Academy Award nominations for his roles in the comedy Harvey (1950) and the courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder (1959). Stewart also starred in The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), The Spirit of St. Louis (1957), The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) as well as the Western films How the West Was Won (1962), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), and Cheyenne Autumn (1964). He appeared in many popular family comedies during the 1960s. Stewart remained unmarried until his 40s and was dubbed "The Great American Bachelor" by the press. In 1949, he married former model Gloria Hatrick McLean. They had twin daughters, and he adopted her two sons from her previous marriage. The marriage lasted until McLean's death in 1994, and Stewart died of a pulmonary embolism three years later. | 2001-11-02T16:07:20Z | 2023-12-29T07:47:04Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Stewart |
16,274 | Jalalabad | Jalalabad (/dʒəˈlæləˌbæd/; جلال آباد [d͡ʒä.lɑː.lɑː.bɑːd̪]) is the fifth-largest city of Afghanistan. It has a population of about 356,274, and serves as the capital of Nangarhar Province in the eastern part of the country, about 130 kilometres (80 mi) from the capital Kabul. Jalalabad is located at the junction of the Kabul River and the Kunar River in a plateau to the south of the Hindu Kush mountains. It is linked by the Kabul-Jalalabad Road to the west and Peshawar in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, to the east through Torkham and the Khyber Pass.
Jalalabad is a leading center of social and trade activity because of its proximity with the Torkham border checkpoint and border crossing, 65 km (40 mi) away. Major industries include papermaking, as well as agricultural products including oranges, lemon, rice, and sugarcane, helped by its warm climate. It hosts Afghanistan's second largest educational institute, Nangarhar University. For centuries the city has been favored by Afghan kings and it has a cultural significance in Afghan poetry. During Timur Shah's reign of the Durrani Empire, Jalalabad served as the Afghan winter capital.
Known at the time by names such as Nagarhara and Adinapur, Jalalabad was a major center of Greco-Buddhist culture during the late 1st millennium BCE, focused on sites such as Ahin Posh.
The first surviving references to the city are in early 1st millennium CE accounts by visiting Chinese Buddhist monks. In or about 400 CE, Faxian visited "Nagarhara" and worshiped at sacred Buddhist sites, such as the "Cave of the Buddha's Shadow” (佛影窟). In 630 CE, Xuan Zang, visited "Adinapur" and other locations nearby.
The Buddhist era began to end after the region was conquered by Muslim forces during the late 1st Millennium. However, conversions to Islam evidently did not occur quickly. In Hudud-al-Alam, written in 982 CE, there is reference to a village near Jalalabad where the local king had Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu wives.
The region became part of the Ghaznavid Empire in the 10th century. Sabuktigin annexed the land all the way west of the Neelum River in Kashmir. "The Afghans and Khiljies who resided among the mountains having taken the oath of allegiance to Sabuktigin, many of them were enlisted in his army, after which he returned in triumph to Ghazni." The Ghurids succeeded the Ghaznavids and expanded the Islamic empire further into Hindustan. The region around Jalalabad later became part of the Khalji territory, followed by that of the Timurids.
It is said that the original name of Jalalabad was Adinapur. Jalalabad was named in honour of Mughal ruler Jalal-uddin in the last decade of the sixteenth century, the grandson of Babur. The modern city gained prominence during the reign of Babur, founder of the Mughal Empire. Babur had chosen the site for this city which was built by his grandson Jalal-uddin Mohammad Akbar in 1560.
It remained part of the Mughal Empire until around 1738 when Nader Shah and his Afsharid forces defeated the Mughals. Nader Shah's forces were accompanied by the young Ahmad Shah Durrani and his 4,000-strong Afghan army from southern Afghanistan. In 1747, he founded the Durrani Empire (Afghan Empire) after re-conquering the area. The Afghan army has long used the city while going back and forth during their military campaigns into the Indian-subcontinent.
In 1834, Dost Mohammad Khan subjugated Jalalabad in his campaign to Jalalabad.
The British-Indian forces invaded Jalalabad in 1838, during the First Anglo-Afghan War. In the 1842 Battle of Jellalabad, Akbar Khan besieged the British troops on their way to Jalalabad. In 1878, during the Second Anglo-Afghan War, the British again invaded and set up camps in Jalalabad but withdrew two years later.
Jalalabad is considered one of the most important cities of the Pashtun culture. Seraj-ul-Emarat, the residence of Amir Habibullah and King Amanullah was destroyed in 1929 when Habibullah Kalakani rose to power; the other sanctuaries however, retain vestiges of the past. The mausoleum of both rulers is enclosed by a garden facing Seraj-ul-Emart. The Sulemankhils, a Pashtun family famous for their scientific research, is from Jalalabad. Other celebrated Pashtun families originate from the villages near Jalalabad too.
In the 1960s and 1970s, construction started on a new planned city called Reg-e Shamshad Khan.
From 1978 to early 1990s, the city served as a strategic location for the Soviet-backed Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. In March 1989, two Mujahideen rebel factions backed by Pakistan and the U.S. assaulted the city during the Battle of Jalalabad. However government forces managed to drive them out within two months, which was a major setback to the resistance fighters and the ISI. The city was heavily bombarded and hundreds of civilians were killed. Many buildings, such as schools, hospitals and public buildings were destroyed during the 2-month battle.
After the resignation of President Najibullah, Jalalabad quickly fell to mujahideen rebels of Yunus Khalis on April 19, 1992. On September 12, 1996, the Taliban took control of the city until they were toppled by the US-backed Afghan forces in late 2001. Al-Qaeda had been building terrorist training camps in Jalalabad. The city returned to Afghan government control under Hamid Karzai.
The economy of Jalalabad gradually increased in the last decade. Many of the city's population began joining the Afghan National Security Forces. Construction has also increased. The Jalalabad Airport has long served as a military base for the NATO forces. In 2011, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul announced that it plans to establish a consulate in Jalalabad. In March 2007, US marines murdered 19 unarmed civilians and wounded 50 near Jalalabad, in an incident compared by the New York Times to the Haditha massacre. None of those responsible received any serious punishment. Many suicide attacks by jihadist insurgents have taken place, including in August 2013, April 2015, January 2018, July 2018, September 2018, October 2019 and August 2020. The groups responsible for the attacks include the Taliban, Haqqani Network, al-Qaeda, and ISIS (Daesh).
On August 15, 2021, the Taliban again took control of the city. Its capture cut off the last highway from Kabul to the outside world, and the city fell later the same day. Three days later on August 18, protestors took down the Afghan Taliban flag and replaced it with a tricolor flag of the previous Afghan government.
The city population is estimated to be 280,685 in year 2021. It has six districts and a total land area of 12,796 hectares (31,620 acres). The total number of dwellings in this city is 39,586.
Nearly all residents of Jalalabad are Muslim, followers of Sunni Islam. Jalalabad is also a center of the country's Sikhs, although the community has dwindled in the city (and nationwide) since the wars began. Similarly it is also has a Hindu minority.
Jalalabad is the regional hub in eastern Afghanistan, close to the border with Pakistan. Agriculture is the predominant land use at 44%, higher density of dwellings is found in Districts 1–5 and vacant plots are largely clustered in District 6. Districts 1–6 all have a grid network of roads.
Jalalabad's climate is hot desert (Köppen: BWh), and it is one of the hottest localities in Afghanistan. The city's climate has close resemblance to that of Arizona in the United States. It receives six to eight inches (152 to 203 mm) of rainfall per annum which are limited to winter and the months of spring. Frosts are not common, and during the summer, the temperature can reach a maximum of 120 °F (49 °C).
The north and southwestern parts of the city which has lower elevation are welcoming places to winds from the north and west cooling the parts in summer months. Jalalabad has the highest relative humidity in summer compared to other Afghan cities. However the moderate temperatures of winter has led to various people down the history establishing their settlements in the city. Because of its warm temperature relative to most of Afghanistan, Jalalabad (alongside Peshawar) was often the "winter capital" of various Afghan rulers of the past centuries, while rich people would relocate to villas in Jalalabad to avoid the freezing temperatures in Kabul.
Jalalabad is home to a large number of fruits. Various types of citrus fruits like orange, tangerine, grapefruit, lemon, lime grow in gardens as well as in orchards. The orange trees yield a crop only once in three years. The narindj variety of orange is the most common one which has yellow skin and its taste is a combination of orange and grapefruit. The grapefruits grown here have a diameter of eight or nine inches. Per year 1800 tonnes of pomegranates, 334 tonnes of grapes, and 7750 tonnes of mulberries are produced in Jalalabad. The fruits are either sold in local markets or transported to Kabul markets from where they are exported. The second most common crop is local vatani variety of sugarcane. It contains 15% sugar by weight. Jalalabad also has the largest date farm in Afghanistan.
The Jalalabad Airport (also known as Nangarhar Airport) is located roughly 3 miles (4.8 km) southeast from the city's center. It is a domestic airport for civilian use. It serves the population of Nangarhar and neighboring provinces.
There are proposals for the establishment of Afghanistan's rail network linking Jalalabad with Pakistan Railways, allowing for increased trade of goods, people and commerce between the two countries.
Jalalabad is connected by main roads with the Afghan capital of Kabul, the city of Peshawar in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, and several nearby Afghan cities and towns. All trade between Afghanistan and Pakistan passes through this city. The highway between Jalalabad and Kabul was resurfaced in 2006, reducing the transit time between these two important cities. This highway is considered to be one of the most dangerous in the world because of the large number of accidents. An improvement in the road networks between Jalalabad and Peshawar has also been proposed, with the intention of widening the existing road and improving security to attract more tourists and allow for safer passage of goods between to the two countries.
The Ghazi Amanullah International Cricket Stadium is next to the Ghazi Amanullah Khan Town, which is about 15 miles (24 km) of driving distance southeast of Jalalabad. The people of Jalalabad go there not only for sports purposes but also for enjoyment and relaxation. This is especially during holidays or when they receive visiting family or friends from another place. It is also a popular hangout for those with cars.
The province is represented in domestic cricket competitions by the Nangarhar province cricket team. National team member Hamid Hasan was born in the province and he currently represents Afghanistan in international cricket. The Ghazi Amanullah International Cricket Stadium is the first international standard cricket stadium in Afghanistan. It is located in the Ghazi Amanullah Town, a modern suburb on the southeastern fringe of Jalalabad in Nangarhar Province. Construction on the stadium began in March 2010 when the foundation stone was laid by Minister of Finance and president of the Afghanistan Cricket Board, Omar Zakhilwal. The project, which was developed on 30 acres of land donated by the developer constructing the Ghazi Amanullah Town, cost up the first phase of construction $1.8 million. The first phase, which took one year to complete, included the completion of the stadium itself. The remainder of the phases will see the construction of a pavilion, accommodation for players and administrative buildings. The stadium, which has a capacity of 14,000, was completed before the national team and under-19 team left for Canada and the Under-19 Cricket World Cup Qualifier in Ireland respectively. The two sides inaugurated the stadium in a Twenty20 match. It is hoped that the stadium will be able to attract international teams to play Afghanistan, who currently have One Day International status until at least 2013. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Jalalabad (/dʒəˈlæləˌbæd/; جلال آباد [d͡ʒä.lɑː.lɑː.bɑːd̪]) is the fifth-largest city of Afghanistan. It has a population of about 356,274, and serves as the capital of Nangarhar Province in the eastern part of the country, about 130 kilometres (80 mi) from the capital Kabul. Jalalabad is located at the junction of the Kabul River and the Kunar River in a plateau to the south of the Hindu Kush mountains. It is linked by the Kabul-Jalalabad Road to the west and Peshawar in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, to the east through Torkham and the Khyber Pass.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Jalalabad is a leading center of social and trade activity because of its proximity with the Torkham border checkpoint and border crossing, 65 km (40 mi) away. Major industries include papermaking, as well as agricultural products including oranges, lemon, rice, and sugarcane, helped by its warm climate. It hosts Afghanistan's second largest educational institute, Nangarhar University. For centuries the city has been favored by Afghan kings and it has a cultural significance in Afghan poetry. During Timur Shah's reign of the Durrani Empire, Jalalabad served as the Afghan winter capital.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Known at the time by names such as Nagarhara and Adinapur, Jalalabad was a major center of Greco-Buddhist culture during the late 1st millennium BCE, focused on sites such as Ahin Posh.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The first surviving references to the city are in early 1st millennium CE accounts by visiting Chinese Buddhist monks. In or about 400 CE, Faxian visited \"Nagarhara\" and worshiped at sacred Buddhist sites, such as the \"Cave of the Buddha's Shadow” (佛影窟). In 630 CE, Xuan Zang, visited \"Adinapur\" and other locations nearby.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The Buddhist era began to end after the region was conquered by Muslim forces during the late 1st Millennium. However, conversions to Islam evidently did not occur quickly. In Hudud-al-Alam, written in 982 CE, there is reference to a village near Jalalabad where the local king had Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu wives.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The region became part of the Ghaznavid Empire in the 10th century. Sabuktigin annexed the land all the way west of the Neelum River in Kashmir. \"The Afghans and Khiljies who resided among the mountains having taken the oath of allegiance to Sabuktigin, many of them were enlisted in his army, after which he returned in triumph to Ghazni.\" The Ghurids succeeded the Ghaznavids and expanded the Islamic empire further into Hindustan. The region around Jalalabad later became part of the Khalji territory, followed by that of the Timurids.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "It is said that the original name of Jalalabad was Adinapur. Jalalabad was named in honour of Mughal ruler Jalal-uddin in the last decade of the sixteenth century, the grandson of Babur. The modern city gained prominence during the reign of Babur, founder of the Mughal Empire. Babur had chosen the site for this city which was built by his grandson Jalal-uddin Mohammad Akbar in 1560.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "It remained part of the Mughal Empire until around 1738 when Nader Shah and his Afsharid forces defeated the Mughals. Nader Shah's forces were accompanied by the young Ahmad Shah Durrani and his 4,000-strong Afghan army from southern Afghanistan. In 1747, he founded the Durrani Empire (Afghan Empire) after re-conquering the area. The Afghan army has long used the city while going back and forth during their military campaigns into the Indian-subcontinent.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In 1834, Dost Mohammad Khan subjugated Jalalabad in his campaign to Jalalabad.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The British-Indian forces invaded Jalalabad in 1838, during the First Anglo-Afghan War. In the 1842 Battle of Jellalabad, Akbar Khan besieged the British troops on their way to Jalalabad. In 1878, during the Second Anglo-Afghan War, the British again invaded and set up camps in Jalalabad but withdrew two years later.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Jalalabad is considered one of the most important cities of the Pashtun culture. Seraj-ul-Emarat, the residence of Amir Habibullah and King Amanullah was destroyed in 1929 when Habibullah Kalakani rose to power; the other sanctuaries however, retain vestiges of the past. The mausoleum of both rulers is enclosed by a garden facing Seraj-ul-Emart. The Sulemankhils, a Pashtun family famous for their scientific research, is from Jalalabad. Other celebrated Pashtun families originate from the villages near Jalalabad too.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In the 1960s and 1970s, construction started on a new planned city called Reg-e Shamshad Khan.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "From 1978 to early 1990s, the city served as a strategic location for the Soviet-backed Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. In March 1989, two Mujahideen rebel factions backed by Pakistan and the U.S. assaulted the city during the Battle of Jalalabad. However government forces managed to drive them out within two months, which was a major setback to the resistance fighters and the ISI. The city was heavily bombarded and hundreds of civilians were killed. Many buildings, such as schools, hospitals and public buildings were destroyed during the 2-month battle.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "After the resignation of President Najibullah, Jalalabad quickly fell to mujahideen rebels of Yunus Khalis on April 19, 1992. On September 12, 1996, the Taliban took control of the city until they were toppled by the US-backed Afghan forces in late 2001. Al-Qaeda had been building terrorist training camps in Jalalabad. The city returned to Afghan government control under Hamid Karzai.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The economy of Jalalabad gradually increased in the last decade. Many of the city's population began joining the Afghan National Security Forces. Construction has also increased. The Jalalabad Airport has long served as a military base for the NATO forces. In 2011, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul announced that it plans to establish a consulate in Jalalabad. In March 2007, US marines murdered 19 unarmed civilians and wounded 50 near Jalalabad, in an incident compared by the New York Times to the Haditha massacre. None of those responsible received any serious punishment. Many suicide attacks by jihadist insurgents have taken place, including in August 2013, April 2015, January 2018, July 2018, September 2018, October 2019 and August 2020. The groups responsible for the attacks include the Taliban, Haqqani Network, al-Qaeda, and ISIS (Daesh).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "On August 15, 2021, the Taliban again took control of the city. Its capture cut off the last highway from Kabul to the outside world, and the city fell later the same day. Three days later on August 18, protestors took down the Afghan Taliban flag and replaced it with a tricolor flag of the previous Afghan government.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The city population is estimated to be 280,685 in year 2021. It has six districts and a total land area of 12,796 hectares (31,620 acres). The total number of dwellings in this city is 39,586.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Nearly all residents of Jalalabad are Muslim, followers of Sunni Islam. Jalalabad is also a center of the country's Sikhs, although the community has dwindled in the city (and nationwide) since the wars began. Similarly it is also has a Hindu minority.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Jalalabad is the regional hub in eastern Afghanistan, close to the border with Pakistan. Agriculture is the predominant land use at 44%, higher density of dwellings is found in Districts 1–5 and vacant plots are largely clustered in District 6. Districts 1–6 all have a grid network of roads.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Jalalabad's climate is hot desert (Köppen: BWh), and it is one of the hottest localities in Afghanistan. The city's climate has close resemblance to that of Arizona in the United States. It receives six to eight inches (152 to 203 mm) of rainfall per annum which are limited to winter and the months of spring. Frosts are not common, and during the summer, the temperature can reach a maximum of 120 °F (49 °C).",
"title": "Climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The north and southwestern parts of the city which has lower elevation are welcoming places to winds from the north and west cooling the parts in summer months. Jalalabad has the highest relative humidity in summer compared to other Afghan cities. However the moderate temperatures of winter has led to various people down the history establishing their settlements in the city. Because of its warm temperature relative to most of Afghanistan, Jalalabad (alongside Peshawar) was often the \"winter capital\" of various Afghan rulers of the past centuries, while rich people would relocate to villas in Jalalabad to avoid the freezing temperatures in Kabul.",
"title": "Climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Jalalabad is home to a large number of fruits. Various types of citrus fruits like orange, tangerine, grapefruit, lemon, lime grow in gardens as well as in orchards. The orange trees yield a crop only once in three years. The narindj variety of orange is the most common one which has yellow skin and its taste is a combination of orange and grapefruit. The grapefruits grown here have a diameter of eight or nine inches. Per year 1800 tonnes of pomegranates, 334 tonnes of grapes, and 7750 tonnes of mulberries are produced in Jalalabad. The fruits are either sold in local markets or transported to Kabul markets from where they are exported. The second most common crop is local vatani variety of sugarcane. It contains 15% sugar by weight. Jalalabad also has the largest date farm in Afghanistan.",
"title": "Flora and fauna"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The Jalalabad Airport (also known as Nangarhar Airport) is located roughly 3 miles (4.8 km) southeast from the city's center. It is a domestic airport for civilian use. It serves the population of Nangarhar and neighboring provinces.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "There are proposals for the establishment of Afghanistan's rail network linking Jalalabad with Pakistan Railways, allowing for increased trade of goods, people and commerce between the two countries.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Jalalabad is connected by main roads with the Afghan capital of Kabul, the city of Peshawar in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, and several nearby Afghan cities and towns. All trade between Afghanistan and Pakistan passes through this city. The highway between Jalalabad and Kabul was resurfaced in 2006, reducing the transit time between these two important cities. This highway is considered to be one of the most dangerous in the world because of the large number of accidents. An improvement in the road networks between Jalalabad and Peshawar has also been proposed, with the intention of widening the existing road and improving security to attract more tourists and allow for safer passage of goods between to the two countries.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The Ghazi Amanullah International Cricket Stadium is next to the Ghazi Amanullah Khan Town, which is about 15 miles (24 km) of driving distance southeast of Jalalabad. The people of Jalalabad go there not only for sports purposes but also for enjoyment and relaxation. This is especially during holidays or when they receive visiting family or friends from another place. It is also a popular hangout for those with cars.",
"title": "General places of interest"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The province is represented in domestic cricket competitions by the Nangarhar province cricket team. National team member Hamid Hasan was born in the province and he currently represents Afghanistan in international cricket. The Ghazi Amanullah International Cricket Stadium is the first international standard cricket stadium in Afghanistan. It is located in the Ghazi Amanullah Town, a modern suburb on the southeastern fringe of Jalalabad in Nangarhar Province. Construction on the stadium began in March 2010 when the foundation stone was laid by Minister of Finance and president of the Afghanistan Cricket Board, Omar Zakhilwal. The project, which was developed on 30 acres of land donated by the developer constructing the Ghazi Amanullah Town, cost up the first phase of construction $1.8 million. The first phase, which took one year to complete, included the completion of the stadium itself. The remainder of the phases will see the construction of a pavilion, accommodation for players and administrative buildings. The stadium, which has a capacity of 14,000, was completed before the national team and under-19 team left for Canada and the Under-19 Cricket World Cup Qualifier in Ireland respectively. The two sides inaugurated the stadium in a Twenty20 match. It is hoped that the stadium will be able to attract international teams to play Afghanistan, who currently have One Day International status until at least 2013.",
"title": "Sports"
}
]
| Jalalabad is the fifth-largest city of Afghanistan. It has a population of about 356,274, and serves as the capital of Nangarhar Province in the eastern part of the country, about 130 kilometres (80 mi) from the capital Kabul. Jalalabad is located at the junction of the Kabul River and the Kunar River in a plateau to the south of the Hindu Kush mountains. It is linked by the Kabul-Jalalabad Road to the west and Peshawar in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, to the east through Torkham and the Khyber Pass. Jalalabad is a leading center of social and trade activity because of its proximity with the Torkham border checkpoint and border crossing, 65 km (40 mi) away. Major industries include papermaking, as well as agricultural products including oranges, lemon, rice, and sugarcane, helped by its warm climate. It hosts Afghanistan's second largest educational institute, Nangarhar University. For centuries the city has been favored by Afghan kings and it has a cultural significance in Afghan poetry. During Timur Shah's reign of the Durrani Empire, Jalalabad served as the Afghan winter capital. | 2001-10-28T16:10:55Z | 2023-12-18T23:20:32Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jalalabad |
16,275 | Jakarta | Jakarta (/dʒəˈkɑːrtə/; Indonesian pronunciation: [dʒaˈkarta] , Betawi: Jakarté), officially the Special Capital Region of Jakarta (Indonesian: Daerah Khusus Ibukota Jakarta) and formerly Batavia, is the capital and largest metropolis of Indonesia. Lying on the northwest coast of Java, the world's most populous island, Jakarta is the largest metropole in Southeast Asia, and serves as the diplomatic capital of ASEAN. Jakarta is bordered by two provinces: West Java to the south and east; and, since 2000, Banten to the west. Its coastline faces the Java Sea to the north, and it shares a maritime border with Lampung to the west.
Jakarta is the economic, cultural, and political centre of Indonesia. It possesses a province-level status and has a population of 10,679,951 as of mid-2022. Although Jakarta extends over only 661.23 km (255.30 sq mi) and thus has the smallest area of any Indonesian province, its metropolitan area covers 9,957.08 km (3,844.45 sq mi), which includes the satellite cities of Bogor, Depok, Tangerang, South Tangerang, and Bekasi, and has an estimated population of 35 million as of 2022, making it the largest urban area in Indonesia and the second-largest in the world (after Tokyo). Jakarta ranks first among the Indonesian provinces in the human development index. Jakarta's business and employment opportunities, along with its ability to offer a potentially higher standard of living compared to other parts of the country, have attracted migrants from across the Indonesian archipelago, making it a melting pot of numerous cultures.
Jakarta is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in Southeast Asia. Established in the fourth century as Sunda Kelapa, the city became an important trading port for the Sunda Kingdom. At one time, it was the de facto capital of the Dutch East Indies, when it was known as Batavia. Jakarta was officially a city within West Java until 1960 when its official status was changed to a province with special capital region distinction. As a province, its government consists of five administrative cities and one administrative regency. Jakarta is an alpha world city and is the seat of the ASEAN secretariat. Financial institutions such as the Bank of Indonesia, Indonesia Stock Exchange, and corporate headquarters of numerous Indonesian companies and multinational corporations are located in the city. In 2021, the city's GRP PPP was estimated at US$602.946 billion.
Jakarta's main challenges include rapid urban growth, ecological breakdown, gridlocked traffic, congestion, and flooding due to subsidence (sea level rise is relative, not absolute). Jakarta is sinking up to 17 cm (6.7 inches) annually, which has made the city more prone to flooding and one of the fastest-sinking capitals in the world. In response to these challenges, in August 2019, President Joko Widodo announced his agreement with an official study that the capital of Indonesia would be moved from Jakarta to the planned city of Nusantara, in the province of East Kalimantan on the island of Borneo. The Parliament approved the move on 18 January 2022.
Jakarta has been home to multiple settlements. Below is the list of names used during its existence:
Sunda Kelapa (397–1527) Jayakarta (1527–1619) Batavia (1619–1942) Djakarta (1942–1972) Jakarta (1972–present)
The name 'Jakarta' is derived from the word Jayakarta (Devanagari: जयकर्त) which is ultimately derived from the Sanskrit जय jaya (victorious), and कृत krta (accomplished, acquired), thus Jayakarta translates as 'victorious deed', 'complete act' or 'complete victory'. It was named for the Muslim troops of Fatahillah which successfully defeated and drove the Portuguese away from the city in 1527. Before it was called Jayakarta, the city was known as 'Sunda Kelapa'. Tomé Pires, a Portuguese apothecary, wrote the name of the city in his magnum opus as Jacatra or Jacarta during his journey to the East Indies.
In the 17th century, the city was known as Koningin van het Oosten (Queen of the Orient), a name that was given for the urban beauty of downtown Batavia's canals, mansions and ordered city layout. After expanding to the south in the 19th century, this nickname came to be more associated with the suburbs (e.g. Menteng and the area around Merdeka Square), with their wide lanes, green spaces and villas. During the Japanese occupation, the city was renamed as Jakaruta Tokubetsu-shi (ジャカルタ特別市, Jakarta Special City).
The north coast area of western Java including Jakarta was the location of prehistoric Buni culture that flourished from 400 BC to 100 AD. The area in and around modern Jakarta was part of the 4th-century Sundanese kingdom of Tarumanagara, one of the oldest Hindu kingdoms in Indonesia. The area of North Jakarta around Tugu became a populated settlement in the early 5th century. The Tugu inscription (probably written around 417 AD) discovered in Batutumbuh hamlet, Tugu village, Koja, North Jakarta, mentions that King Purnawarman of Tarumanagara undertook hydraulic projects; the irrigation and water drainage project of the Chandrabhaga river and the Gomati river near his capital. Following the decline of Tarumanagara, its territories, including the Jakarta area, became part of the Hindu Kingdom of Sunda. From the 7th to the early 13th century, the port of Sunda was under the Srivijaya maritime empire. According to the Chinese source, Chu-fan-chi, written circa 1225, Chou Ju-kua reported in the early 13th century that Srivijaya still ruled Sumatra, the Malay peninsula and western Java (Sunda). The source says the port of Sunda is strategic and thriving, mentioning pepper from Sunda as among the best in quality. The people worked in agriculture, and their houses were built on wooden piles. The harbour area became known as Sunda Kelapa, (Sundanese: ᮞᮥᮔ᮪ᮓ ᮊᮨᮜᮕ) and by the 14th century, it was an important trading port for the Sunda Kingdom.
The first European fleet, four Portuguese ships from Malacca, arrived in 1513 while looking for a route to obtain spices. The Sunda Kingdom made an alliance treaty with the Portuguese by allowing them to build a port in 1522 to defend against the rising power of Demak Sultanate from central Java. In 1527, Fatahillah, a Pasai-born military commander of Demak attacked and conquered Sunda Kelapa, driving out the Portuguese. Sunda Kelapa was renamed Jayakarta, and became a fiefdom of the Banten Sultanate, which became a major Southeast Asian trading centre.
Through the relationship with Prince Jayawikarta of the Banten Sultanate, Dutch ships arrived in 1596. In 1602, the British East India Company's first voyage, commanded by Sir James Lancaster, arrived in Aceh and sailed on to Banten where they were allowed to build a trading post. This site became the centre of British trade in the Indonesian archipelago until 1682. Jayawikarta is thought to have made trading connections with the British merchants, rivals of the Dutch, by allowing them to build houses directly across from the Dutch buildings in 1615.
When relations between Prince Jayawikarta and the Dutch deteriorated, his soldiers attacked the Dutch fortress. His army and the British, however, were defeated by the Dutch, in part owing to the timely arrival of Jan Pieterszoon Coen. The Dutch burned the British fort and forced them to retreat on their ships. The victory consolidated Dutch power, and they renamed the city Batavia in 1619.
Commercial opportunities in the city attracted native and especially Chinese and Arab immigrants. This sudden population increase created burdens on the city. Tensions grew as the colonial government tried to restrict Chinese migration through deportations. Following a revolt, 5,000 Chinese were massacred by the Dutch and natives on 9 October 1740, and the following year, Chinese inhabitants were moved to Glodok outside the city walls. At the beginning of the 19th century, around 400 Arabs and Moors lived in Batavia, a number that changed little during the following decades. Among the commodities traded were fabrics, mainly imported cotton, batik and clothing worn by Arab communities.
The city began to expand further south as epidemics in 1835 and 1870 forced residents to move away from the port. The Koningsplein, now Merdeka Square was completed in 1818, the housing park of Menteng was started in 1913, and Kebayoran Baru was the last Dutch-built residential area. By 1930, Batavia had more than 500,000 inhabitants, including 37,067 Europeans. The city was expanded in 1935 through the annexation of the town of Meester Cornelis, modern Jatinegara.
On 5 March 1942, the Japanese captured Batavia from Dutch control, and the city was named Jakarta (Jakarta Special City (ジャカルタ特別市, Jakaruta tokubetsu-shi), under the special status that was assigned to the city). After the war, the Dutch name Batavia was internationally recognised until full Indonesian independence on 27 December 1949. The city, now renamed Jakarta, was officially proclaimed the national capital of Indonesia.
After World War II ended, Indonesian nationalists declared independence on 17 August 1945, and the government of Jakarta City was changed into the Jakarta National Administration in the following month. During the Indonesian National Revolution, Indonesian Republicans withdrew from Allied-occupied Jakarta and established their capital in Yogyakarta.
After securing full independence, Jakarta again became the national capital in 1950. With Jakarta selected to host the 1962 Asian Games, Sukarno, envisaging Jakarta as a great international city, instigated large government-funded projects with openly nationalistic and modernist architecture. Projects included a cloverleaf interchange, a major boulevard (Jalan MH Thamrin-Sudirman), monuments such as The National Monument, Hotel Indonesia, a shopping centre, and a new building intended to be the headquarters of CONEFO. In October 1965, Jakarta was the site of an abortive coup attempt in which six top generals were killed, precipitating a violent anti-communist purge which killed at least 500,000 people, including some ethnic Chinese. The event marked the beginning of Suharto's New Order. The first government was led by a mayor until the end of 1960 when the office was changed to that of a governor. The last mayor of Jakarta was Soediro until he was replaced by Soemarno Sosroatmodjo as governor.
In 1966, Jakarta was declared a 'special capital region' (Daerah Khusus Ibukota), with a status equivalent to that of a province. Based on law No. 5 of 1974 relating to regional governments, the Jakarta Special Capital Region was confirmed as the capital of Indonesia and one of the country's then 26 provinces. Lieutenant General Ali Sadikin served as governor from 1966 to 1977; he rehabilitated roads and bridges, encouraged the arts, built hospitals and a large number of schools. He cleared out slum dwellers for new development projects — some for the benefit of the Suharto family,— and attempted to eliminate rickshaws and ban street vendors. He began control of migration to the city to stem overcrowding and poverty. Foreign investment contributed to a real estate boom that transformed the face of Jakarta. The boom ended with the 1997 Asian financial crisis, putting Jakarta at the centre of violence, protest, and political manoeuvring.
After three decades in power, support for President Suharto began to wane. Tensions peaked when four students were shot dead at Trisakti University by security forces. Four days of riots and violence in 1998 ensued that killed an estimated 1,200, and destroyed or damaged 6,000 buildings, forcing Suharto to resign. Much of the rioting targeted Chinese Indonesians. In the post-Suharto era, Jakarta has remained the focal point of democratic change in Indonesia. Jemaah Islamiah-connected bombings occurred almost annually in the city between 2000 and 2005, with another in 2009. In August 2007, Jakarta held its first-ever election to choose a governor as part of a nationwide decentralisation program that allows direct local elections in several areas. Previously, governors were elected by the city's legislative body.
During the Jokowi presidency, the Government adopted a plan to move Indonesia's capital to East Kalimantan.
Between 2016 and 2017, a series of terrorist attacks rocked Jakarta with scenes of multiple suicide bombings and gunfire. In suspicion to its links, the Islamic State, the perpetrator led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi claimed responsibility for the attacks.
Jakarta covers 661.23 km (255.30 sq mi), the smallest among any Indonesian provinces. However, its metropolitan area covers 6,392 km (2,468 sq mi), which extends into the two bordering provinces of West Java and Banten. The Greater Jakarta area includes three bordering regencies (Bekasi Regency, Tangerang Regency and Bogor Regency) and five adjacent cities (Bogor, Depok, Bekasi, Tangerang and South Tangerang).
Jakarta is situated on the northwest coast of Java, at the mouth of the Ciliwung River on Jakarta Bay, an inlet of the Java Sea. It is strategically located near the Sunda Strait. The northern part of Jakarta is plain land, some areas of which are below sea level, and subject to frequent flooding. The southern parts of the city are hilly. It is one of only two Asian capital cities located in the southern hemisphere (along with East Timor's Dili). Officially, the area of the Jakarta Special District is 661.23 km (255 sq mi) of land area and 6,977 km (2,694 sq mi) of sea area. The Thousand Islands, which are administratively a part of Jakarta, are located in Jakarta Bay, north of the city.
Jakarta lies in a low and flat alluvial plain, ranging from −2 to 91 m (−7 to 299 ft) with an average elevation of 8 m (26 ft) above sea level with historically extensive swampy areas. Some parts of the city have been constructed on reclaimed tidal flats that occur around the area. Thirteen rivers flow through Jakarta. They are Ciliwung River, Kalibaru, Pesanggrahan, Cipinang, Angke River, Maja, Mookervart, Krukut, Buaran, West Tarum, Cakung, Petukangan, Sunter River and Grogol River. They flow from the Puncak highlands to the south of the city, then across the city northwards towards the Java Sea. The Ciliwung River divides the city into the western and eastern districts.
These rivers, combined with the wet season rains and insufficient drainage due to clogging, make Jakarta prone to flooding.
Moreover, Jakarta is sinking about 5 to 10 cm (2.0 to 3.9 in) each year, and up to 20 cm (7.9 in) in the northern coastal areas. After a feasibility study, a ring dyke known as Giant Sea Wall Jakarta is under construction around Jakarta Bay to help cope with the threat from the sea. The dyke will be equipped with a pumping system and retention areas to defend against seawater and function as a toll road. The project is expected to be completed by 2025. In January 2014, the central government agreed to build two dams in Ciawi, Bogor and a 1.2 km (0.75 mi) tunnel from Ciliwung River to Cisadane River to ease flooding in the city. Nowadays, a 1.2 km (0.75 mi), with capacity 60 m (2,100 cu ft) per second, underground water tunnel between Ciliwung River and the East Flood Canal is being worked on to ease the Ciliwung River overflows. In 2023, the New York Times reported that in some places Jakarta is sinking up to 12 inches (30 cm) annually.
Environmental advocates point out that subsidence is driven by the extraction of groundwater, much of it illegal. Furthermore, the government's lack of strict regulation amplifies the issue as many recently built high-rise buildings, corporations, and factories around Jakarta opt for illegally extracting groundwater. In fact, in a recent inspection of 80 buildings in Jalan Thamrin, a busy road lined with skyscrapers and shopping malls, 56 buildings had a groundwater pump, and 33 were pumping groundwater illegally. This could be halted by stopping extraction (as the city of Tokyo has done), increasing efficiency, and finding other sources for water use. Moreover, increasing regulation through higher taxes or limiting groundwater pumping has proven to help cities like Shanghai, Tokyo, and San Jose relieve their subsidence issue. The rivers of Jakarta are highly polluted and currently unsuitable for drinking water.
Jakarta has architecturally significant buildings spanning distinct historical and cultural periods. Architectural styles reflect Malay, Sundanese, Javanese, Arabic, Chinese and Dutch influences. External influences inform the architecture of the Betawi house. The houses were built of nangka wood (Artocarpus integrifolia) and comprised three rooms. The shape of the roof is reminiscent of the traditional Javanese joglo. Additionally, the number of registered cultural heritage buildings has increased.
Colonial buildings and structures include those that were constructed during the colonial period. The dominant colonial styles can be divided into three periods: the Dutch Golden Age (17th to late 18th century), the transitional style period (late 18th century – 19th century), and Dutch modernism (20th century). Colonial architecture is apparent in houses and villas, churches, civic buildings and offices, mostly concentrated in the Jakarta Old Town and Central Jakarta. Architects such as J.C. Schultze and Eduard Cuypers designed some of the significant buildings. Schultze's works include Jakarta Art Building, the Indonesia Supreme Court Building and Ministry of Finance Building, while Cuypers designed Bank Indonesia Museum and Mandiri Museum. In the early 20th century, most buildings were built in Neo-Renaissance style. By the 1920s, the architectural taste had begun to shift in favour of rationalism and modernism, particularly art deco architecture. The elite suburb Menteng, developed during the 1910s, was the city's first attempt at creating an ideal and healthy housing for the middle class. The original houses had a longitudinal organisation, with overhanging eaves, large windows and open ventilation, all practical features for a tropical climate. These houses were developed by N.V. de Bouwploeg, and established by P.A.J. Moojen.
After independence, the process of nation-building in Indonesia and demolishing the memory of colonialism was as important as the symbolic building of arterial roads, monuments, and government buildings. The National Monument in Jakarta, designed by Sukarno, is Indonesia's beacon of nationalism. In the early 1960s, Jakarta provided highways and super-scale cultural monuments as well as Senayan Sports Stadium. The parliament building features a hyperbolic roof reminiscent of German rationalist and Corbusian design concepts. Built-in 1996, Wisma 46 soars to a height of 262 m (860 ft) and its nib-shaped top celebrates technology and symbolises stereoscopy.
The urban construction boom continued during the 21st century. The Golden Triangle of Jakarta is one of the fastest evolving CBD's in the Asia-Pacific region. According to CTBUH and Emporis, there are 88 skyscrapers that reach or exceed 150 m (490 ft), which puts the city in the top 10 of world rankings. It has more buildings taller than 150 metres than any other Southeast Asian or Southern Hemisphere cities.
Most landmarks, monuments and statues in Jakarta were begun in the 1960s during the Sukarno era, then completed in the Suharto era, while some date from the colonial period. Although many of the projects were completed after his presidency, Sukarno, who was an architect, is credited for planning Jakarta's monuments and landmarks, as he desired the city to be the beacon of a powerful new nation. Among the monumental projects that were built, initiated, and planned during his administration are the National Monument, Istiqlal mosque, the Legislature Building, and the Gelora Bung Karno stadium. Sukarno also built many nationalistic monuments and statues in the capital city.
The most famous landmark, which became the symbol of the city, is the 132 m-tall (433 ft) obelisk of the National Monument (Monumen Nasional or Monas) in the centre of Merdeka Square. On its southwest corner stands a Mahabharata-themed Arjuna Wijaya chariot statue and fountain. Further south through Jalan M.H. Thamrin, one of the main avenues, the Selamat Datang monument stands on the fountain in the centre of the Hotel Indonesia roundabout. Other landmarks include the Istiqlal Mosque, Jakarta Cathedral and the Immanuel Church. The former Batavia Stadhuis, Sunda Kelapa port in Jakarta Old Town is another landmark. The Autograph Tower in Central Jakarta, at 382.9 metres is the tallest building in Indonesia. The most recent landmark built is the Jakarta International Stadium.
Some of the statues and monuments are nationalist, such as the West Irian Liberation Monument, the Tugu Tani, the Youth statue and the Dirgantara Monument. Some statues commemorate Indonesian national heroes, such as the Diponegoro and Kartini statues in Merdeka Square. The Sudirman and Thamrin statues are located on the streets bearing their names. There is also a statue of Sukarno and Hatta at the Proclamation Monument as well as at the entrance to Soekarno–Hatta International Airport.
In June 2011, Jakarta had only 10.5% green open spaces (Ruang Terbuka Hijau), although this grew to 13.94%. Public parks are included in public green open spaces. There are about 300 integrated child-friendly public spaces (RPTRA) in the city in 2019. As of 2014, 183 water reservoirs and lakes supported the greater Jakarta area.
Jakarta has a tropical monsoon climate (Am) according to the Köppen climate classification system. The wet season in Jakarta covers eight months: October to May. The remaining four months (June to September) constitute the city's drier season, having an average monthly rainfall of less than 100 mm (3.9 in). August qualifies as the genuine dry season month, as it has less than 60 mm (2.4 in) of rainfall. Across the western part of Java, the wet season peaks in January and February with an average monthly rainfall of 297.7 mm (11.72 in), and its dry season's low point is in August with a monthly average of 43.2 mm (1.70 in).
Jakarta attracts people from across Indonesia, often in search of employment. The 1961 census showed that 51% of the city's population was born in Jakarta. Inward immigration tended to negate the effect of family planning programs. Ministry of Home Affairs (Kemendagri) tabulates its own data, which has improved since ID card requirements in last decade, lists Jakarta's population at 11,261,595 in yearend 2021.
Between 1961 and 1980, the population of Jakarta doubled, and during the period 1980–1990, the city's population grew annually by 3.7%. The 2010 census counted some 9.58 million people, well above government estimates. The population rose from 4.5 million in 1970 to 9.5 million in 2010, counting only legal residents, while the population of Greater Jakarta rose from 8.2 million in 1970 to 28.5 million in 2010. As of 2014, the population of Jakarta stood at 10 million, with a population density of 15,174 people/km. In 2014, the population of Greater Jakarta was 30 million, accounting for 11% of Indonesia's overall population. It is predicted to reach 35.6 million people by 2030 to become the world's biggest megacity. The gender ratio was 102.8 (males per 100 females) in 2010, and 101.3 in 2014.
Ethnic groups in Jakarta
Jakarta is pluralistic and religiously diverse, without a majority ethnic group. As of 2010, 36.17% of the city's population were Javanese, 28.29% Betawi (locally established mixed race, cemented by diverse creole), 14.61% Sundanese, 6.62% Chinese, 3.42% Batak, 2.85% Minangkabau, 0.96% Malays, Indo and others 7.08%.
The 'Betawi' (Orang Betawi, or 'people of Batavia') are immigrant descendants of the old city who became widely recognised as an ethnic group by the mid-19th century. They mostly descend from an eclectic mix of Southeast Asians brought or attracted to meet labour needs. They are thus a creole ethnic group who came from much of Indonesia. Over generations, most have intermarried with one or more ethnicities, especially people of Chinese, Arab and European descent. Most Betawis lived in the fringe zones with few Betawi-majority zones of central Jakarta. It is thus a conundrum for some Javanese people, especially multi-generational Jakarta residents, to identify as either Javanese or Betawi since living in a Betawi-majority district and speaking more of that creole and adapting is a matter of preference for such families.
A significant Chinese community has lived in Jakarta for many centuries. They traditionally reside around old urban areas, such as Pinangsia, PIK, Pluit and Glodok (Jakarta's Chinatown) areas. They also can be found in the old Chinatowns of Senen and Jatinegara. As of 2001 they self-identified as being 5.5%, which was thought of as under-reported; this explains the 6.6% figure ten years later.
The Sumatran residents are diverse. According to the 2020 census, roughly 361,000 Batak; 300,960 Minangkabau and 101,370 Malays lived in the city. The number of Batak people has grown in ranking, from eighth in 1930 to fifth in 2000. Toba Batak is the largest subset in Jakarta. Working Minangkabau in the 1980s in high proportions were well-embedded merchants, artisans, doctors, teachers or journalists. Minang merchants are found in traditional markets, such as Tanah Abang and Senen.
Indonesian is the official and dominant language of Jakarta, while many elderly people speak Dutch or Chinese, depending on their upbringing. English is used for communication, especially in Central and South Jakarta. Each of the ethnic groups uses their mother tongue at home, such as Betawi, Javanese, and Sundanese. The Betawi language is distinct from those of the Sundanese or Javanese, forming itself as a language island in the surrounding area. It is mostly based on the East Malay dialect and enriched by loan words from Dutch, Portuguese, Sundanese, Javanese, Chinese, and Arabic. Over time, many Betawi words and phrases became integrated into Indonesian as Jakartan slang, and is used by most people regardless of their ethnic background.
The Chinese in Jakarta mainly speak Indonesian and English due to a strict language ban during Soeharto's New Order era; older people may be fluent in Hokkien dialect and Mandarin, meanwhile the youngsters are only fluent in Indonesian and English, some educated in Mandarin. With the recent urbanization of Chinese communities from several rural areas in Indonesia, other Chinese dialects have been brought into the Chinese community in Jakarta, such as Hakka, Teochew and Cantonese. Hokkien, which is mainly from Sumatra (Medan, Bagansiapiapi, Batam) is mostly spoken in Northern Jakarta, such as in Pantai Indah Kapuk, Pluit, and Kelapa Gading, meanwhile Hakka and Teochew, which are derived from the Chinese communities in Pontianak and Singkawang, are mainly spoken in West Jakarta, like in Tambora and Grogol Petamburan.
The Batak in Jakarta mostly speak Indonesian, while the older generation tends to speak their native languages, such as Batak Toba, Mandailing, and Karo, depending on which ancestral towns and places in North Sumatra they come from. The Minangkabau mainly speak Minangkabau together with Indonesian.
Religion in Jakarta (2022)
In 2017, Jakarta's religious composition was distributed over Islam (83.43%), Protestantism (8.63%), Catholicism (4.0%), Buddhism (3.74%), Hinduism (0.19%), and Confucianism (0.01%). About 231 people claimed to follow folk religions.
Most pesantren (Islamic boarding schools) in Jakarta are affiliated with the traditionalist Nahdlatul Ulama, modernist organisations mostly catering to a socioeconomic class of educated urban elites and merchant traders. They give priority to education, social welfare programs and religious propagation. Many Islamic organisations have headquarters in Jakarta, including Nahdlatul Ulama, Indonesian Ulema Council, Muhammadiyah, Indonesia Institute of Islamic Dawah, and Jaringan Islam Liberal.
The Roman Catholic community has a Metropolis, the Archdiocese of Jakarta that includes West Java as part of the ecclesiastical province. Jakarta also hosts the largest Buddhist adherents in Java Island, where most of the followers are the Chinese. Schools of Buddhism practiced in Indonesia vary, including Theravāda, Mahāyāna, Vajrayana, and Tridharma. The city also has Hindu community, which mainly are from Balinese and Indian people. There is also a Sikh and Baháʼí Faith community presence in Jakarta.
Jakarta GDP share by sector (2022)
Indonesia is the largest economy of ASEAN, and Jakarta is the economic nerve centre of the Indonesian archipelago. Jakarta's nominal GDP was US$203.702 billion and PPP GDP was US$602.946 billion in 2021, which is about 17% of Indonesia's. Jakarta ranked at 21 in the list of Cities Of Economic Influence Index in 2020 by CEOWORLD magazine. According to the Japan Center for Economic Research, GRP per capita of Jakarta will rank 28th among the 77 cities in 2030 from 41st in 2015, the largest in Southeast Asia. Savills Resilient Cities Index has predicted Jakarta to be within the top 20 cities in the world by 2028.
Jakarta's economy depends highly on manufacturing and service sectors such as banking, trading and financial. Industries include electronics, automotive, chemicals, mechanical engineering and biomedical sciences. The head office of Bank Indonesia and Indonesia Stock Exchange are located in the city. Most of the SOEs include Pertamina, PLN, Angkasa Pura, and Telkomsel operate head offices in the city, as do major Indonesian conglomerates, such as Salim Group, Sinar Mas Group, Astra International, Gudang Garam, Kompas-Gramedia, CT Corp, Emtek, and MNC Group. The headquarters of the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and Indonesian Employers Association are also located in the city. As of 2017, the city is home to six Forbes Global 2000, two Fortune 500 and seven Unicorn companies.
Google and Alibaba have regional cloud centers in Jakarta. In 2017, the economic growth was 6.22%. Throughout the same year, the total value of the investment was Rp 108.6 trillion (US$8 billion), an increase of 84.7% from the previous year. In 2021, nominal GDP per capita was estimated at Rp 274.710 million (US$19,199). The most significant contributions to GRDP were by finance, ownership and business services (29%); trade, hotel and restaurant sector (20%), and manufacturing industry sector (16%).
The Wealth Report 2015 by Knight Frank reported that 24 individuals in Indonesia in 2014 had wealth of at least US$1 billion and 18 live in Jakarta. The cost of living continues to rise. Both land prices and rents have become expensive. Mercer's 2017 Cost of Living Survey ranked Jakarta as 88th costliest city in the world for expatriates. Industrial development and the construction of new housing thrive on the outskirts, while commerce and banking remain concentrated in the city centre. Jakarta has a bustling luxury property market. Knight Frank, a global real estate consultancy based in London, reported in 2014 that Jakarta offered the highest return on high-end property investment in the world in 2013, citing a supply shortage and a sharply depreciated currency as reasons.
As of 2015, with a total of 550 hectares, Jakarta had the largest shopping mall floor area within a single city. Malls include Plaza Indonesia, Grand Indonesia, Sarinah, Plaza Senayan, Senayan City, Pacific Place, Gandaria City, ÆON Mall Jakarta Garden City and Tanjung Barat, Mall Taman Anggrek, Central Park Mall, as well as Pondok Indah Mall. Fashion retail brands in Jakarta include Debenhams at Senayan City and Lippo Mall Kemang Village, Japanese Sogo, Seibu at Grand Indonesia Shopping Town, and French brand, Galeries Lafayette, at Pacific Place. The Satrio-Casablanca shopping belt includes Kuningan City, Mal Ambassador, Kota Kasablanka, and Lotte Shopping Avenue. Shopping malls are also located at Grogol and Puri Indah in West Jakarta.
Traditional markets include Blok M, Mayestik, Tanah Abang, Senen, Pasar Baru, Glodok, Mangga Dua, Cempaka Mas, and Jatinegara. Special markets sell antique goods at Jalan Surabaya and gemstones in Rawabening Market.
Though Jakarta has been named the most popular location as per tag stories, and ranked eighth most-posted among the cities in the world in 2017 on image-sharing site Instagram, it is not a top international tourist destination. The city, however, is ranked as the fifth fastest-growing tourist destination among 132 cities according to MasterCard Global Destination Cities Index.
The World Travel and Tourism Council also listed Jakarta as among the top ten fastest-growing tourism cities in the world in 2017 and categorised it as an emerging performer, which will see a significant increase in tourist arrivals in less than ten years. According to Euromonitor International's latest Top 100 City Destinations Ranking of 2019, Jakarta ranked at 57th among 100 most visited cities of the world. Most of the visitors attracted to Jakarta are domestic tourists. As the gateway of Indonesia, Jakarta often serves as a stop-over for foreign visitors on their way to other Indonesian tourist destinations such as Bali, Lombok, Komodo Island and Yogyakarta. Jakarta is trying to attract more international tourist by MICE tourism, by arranging increasing numbers of conventions. In 2012, the tourism sector contributed Rp. 2.6 trillion (US$268.5 million) to the city's total direct income of Rp. 17.83 trillion (US$1.45 billion), a 17.9% increase from the previous year 2011.
Jakarta is home to numerous educational institutions. The University of Indonesia (UI) is the largest and oldest tertiary-level educational institution in Indonesia. It is a public institution with campuses in Salemba (Central Jakarta) and in Depok. The three other public universities in Jakarta are Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University Jakarta, the State University of Jakarta (UNJ), University of Pembangunan Nasional 'Veteran' Jakarta (UPN "Veteran" Jakarta), and Universitas Terbuka or Indonesia Open University. There is a vocational higher education, Politeknik Negeri Jakarta (PNJ). Some major private universities in Jakarta are Trisakti University, The Christian University of Indonesia, Mercu Buana University, Tarumanagara University, Atma Jaya Catholic University of Indonesia, Pelita Harapan University, Pertamina University, Bina Nusantara University, Jayabaya University, Persada Indonesia "YAI" University, and Pancasila University.
STOVIA (School tot Opleiding van Indische Artsen, now Universitas Indonesia) was the first high school in Jakarta, established in 1851. Jakarta houses many students from around Indonesia, many of whom reside in dormitories or home-stay residences. For basic education, a variety of primary and secondary schools are available, tagged with the public (national), private (national and bi-lingual national plus) and international labels. Four of the major international schools are the Gandhi Memorial International School, IPEKA International Christian School, Jakarta Intercultural School and the British School Jakarta. Other international schools include the Jakarta International Korean School, Bina Bangsa School, Jakarta International Multicultural School, Australian International School, New Zealand International School, Singapore International School, Jakarta Japanese School, and Sekolah Pelita Harapan.
As the capital of Indonesia, Jakarta is a melting pot of cultures from all ethnic groups of the country. Though Betawi people are an indigenous community of Jakarta, the city's culture represents many languages and ethnic groups, supports differences regarding religion, traditions and linguistics, rather than any single and dominant culture.
The Betawi culture is distinct from those of the Sundanese or Javanese, forming a language island in the surrounding area. Betawi arts have a "low profile" in Jakarta, and most Betawi people have moved to the suburbs. The cultures of the Javanese and other Indonesian ethnic groups have a "higher profile" than that of the Betawi. There is a significant Chinese influence in Betawi culture, reflected in the popularity of Chinese cakes and sweets, firecrackers and Betawi wedding attire that demonstrates Chinese and Arab influences.
Some festivals such as the Jalan Jaksa Festival, Kemang Festival, Festival Condet and Lebaran Betawi include efforts to preserve Betawi arts by inviting artists to display performances. Jakarta has several performing art centres, such as the classical concert hall Aula Simfonia Jakarta in Kemayoran, Taman Ismail Marzuki (TIM) art centre in Cikini, Gedung Kesenian Jakarta near Pasar Baru, Balai Sarbini in the Plaza Semanggi area, Bentara Budaya Jakarta in the Palmerah area, Pasar Seni (Art Market) in Ancol, and traditional Indonesian art performances at the pavilions of some provinces in Taman Mini Indonesia Indah. Traditional music is often found at high-class hotels, including Wayang and Gamelan performances. Javanese Wayang Orang performances can be found at Wayang Orang Bharata theatre.
Arts and culture festivals and exhibitions include the annual ARKIPEL – Jakarta International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival, Jakarta International Film Festival (JiFFest), Djakarta Warehouse Project, Jakarta Fashion Week, Jakarta Muslim Fashion Week, Jakarta Fashion & Food Festival (JFFF), Jakarnaval, Jakarta Night Festival, Kota Tua Creative Festival, Indonesia International Book Fair (IIBF), Indonesia Creative Products and Jakarta Arts and Crafts exhibition. Art Jakarta is a contemporary art fair, which is held annually. Flona Jakarta is a flora-and-fauna exhibition, held annually in August at Lapangan Banteng Park, featuring flowers, plant nurseries, and pets. Jakarta Fair is held annually from mid-June to mid-July to celebrate the anniversary of the city and is mostly centred around a trade fair. However, this month-long fair also features entertainment, including arts and music performances by local musicians. Jakarta International Java Jazz Festival (JJF) is one of the largest jazz festivals in the world, the biggest in the Southern hemisphere, and is held annually in March.
Several foreign art and culture centres in Jakarta promote culture and language through learning centres, libraries and art galleries. These include the Chinese Confucius Institute, the Dutch Erasmus Huis, the British Council, the French Alliance Française, the German Goethe-Institut, the Japan Foundation, and the Jawaharlal Nehru Indian Cultural Center.
All varieties of Indonesian cuisine have a presence in Jakarta. The local cuisine is Betawi cuisine, which reflects various foreign culinary traditions. Betawi cuisine is heavily influenced by Malay-Chinese Peranakan cuisine, Sundanese and Javanese cuisine, which is also influenced by Indian, Arabic and European cuisines. One of the most popular local dishes of Betawi cuisine is Soto Betawi which is prepared from chunks of beef and offal in rich and spicy cow's milk or coconut milk broth. Other popular Betawi dishes include soto kaki, nasi uduk, kerak telor (spicy omelette), nasi ulam, asinan, ketoprak, rujak and gado-gado Betawi (salad in peanut sauce).
Jakarta cuisine can be found in modest street-side warung food stalls and kaki lima (five legs) travelling vendors to high-end fine dining restaurants. Live music venues and exclusive restaurants are abundant. Many traditional foods from far-flung regions in Indonesia can be found in Jakarta. For example, traditional Padang restaurants and low-budget Warteg (Warung Tegal) food stalls are ubiquitous in the capital. Other popular street foods include nasi goreng (fried rice), sate (skewered meats), pecel lele (fried catfish), bakso (meatballs), bakpau (Chinese bun) and siomay (fish dumplings).
Jalan Sabang, Jalan Sidoarjo, Jalan Kendal at Menteng area, Kota Tua, Blok S, Blok M, Jalan Tebet, are all popular destinations for street-food lovers. Minangkabau street-food who sell Nasi Kapau, Sate Padang, and Soto Padang can be found at Jalan Kramat Raya and Jalan Bendungan Hilir in Central Jakarta. Chinese street-food is plentiful at Jalan Pangeran, Manga Besar and Petak Sembilan in the old Jakarta area, while the Little Tokyo area of Blok M has many Japanese style restaurants and bars.
Trendy restaurants, cafe and bars can be found at Menteng, Kemang, Jalan Senopati, Kuningan, Senayan, Pantai Indah Kapuk, and Kelapa Gading.
Lenggang Jakarta is a food court, accommodating small traders and street vendors, where Indonesian foods are available within a single compound. At present, there are two such food courts, located at Monas and Kemayoran. Thamrin 10 is a food and creative park located at Menteng, where varieties of food stall are available.
Global fast-food chains are present, and usually found in Shopping malls, along with local brands like Sederhana, J'CO, Es Teler 77, Kebab Turki, CFC, and Japanese HokBen and Yoshinoya. Foreign cuisines such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Singaporean, Indian, American, Australian, Malaysian, French, Mediterranean cuisines like Maghrebi, Turkish, Italian, Middle Eastern cuisine, and modern fusion food restaurants can all be found in Jakarta.
Jakarta hosted the 1962 Asian Games, and the 2018 Asian Games, co-hosted by Palembang. Jakarta also hosted the Southeast Asian Games in 1979, 1987, 1997 and 2011 (supporting Palembang). Gelora Bung Karno Stadium hosted the group stage, quarterfinal and final of the 2007 AFC Asian Cup along with Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. The largest capacity retractable roof stadium in Asia, Jakarta International Stadium, is located at Tanjung Priok district, completed in 2022.
The Senayan sports complex has several sports venues, including the Bung Karno football stadium, Madya Stadium, Istora Senayan, an aquatic arena, a baseball field, a basketball hall, a shooting range, several indoor and outdoor tennis courts. The Senayan complex was built in 1960 to accommodate the 1962 Asian Games. For basketball, the Kelapa Gading Sport Mall in Kelapa Gading, North Jakarta, with a capacity of 7,000 seats, is the home arena of the Indonesian national basketball team. The BritAma Arena serves as a playground for Satria Muda Pertamina Jakarta, the 2017 runner-up of the Indonesian Basketball League. Jakarta International Velodrome is a sporting facility located at Rawamangun, which was used as a venue for the 2018 Asian Games. It has a seating capacity of 3,500 for track cycling, and up to 8,500 for shows and concerts, which can also be used for various sports activities such as volleyball, badminton and futsal. Jakarta International Equestrian Park is an equestrian sports venue located at Pulomas, which was also used as a venue for 2018 Asian Games.
The Jakarta Car-Free Days are held weekly on Sunday on the main avenues of the city, Jalan Sudirman, and Jalan Thamrin, from 6 am to 11 am. The briefer Car-Free Day, which lasts from 6 am to 9 am, is held on every other Sunday. The event invites local pedestrians to do sports and exercise and have their activities on the streets that are usually full of traffic. Along the road from the Senayan traffic circle on Jalan Sudirman, South Jakarta, to the "Selamat Datang" Monument at the Hotel Indonesia traffic circle on Jalan Thamrin, north to the National Monument in Central Jakarta, cars are blocked from entering. During the event, morning gymnastics, callisthenics and aerobic exercises, futsal games, jogging, bicycling, skateboarding, badminton, karate, on-street library and musical performances take over the roads and the main parks.
Jakarta's most popular home football club is Persija, which plays in Liga 1. Another football team in Jakarta is Persitara which competes in Liga 3 and plays in Tugu Stadium.
Jakarta Marathon each November is recognised by AIMS and IAAF. It was established in 2013. It brings sports tourism. In 2015, more than 15,000 runners from 53 countries participated.
Jakarta successfully hosted the first Jakarta ePrix race of the Formula E championship in June 2022 at Ancol Circuit, North Jakarta.
Jakarta is home to most of the Indonesian national newspapers, besides some local-based newspapers. Daily local newspapers in Jakarta are Pos Kota and Warta Kota, as well as the now-defunct Indopos. National newspapers based in Jakarta include Kompas and Media Indonesia, most of them have a news segment covering the city. A number of business newspapers (Bisnis Indonesia, Investor Daily and Kontan) and sports newspaper (Super Ball) are also published.
Newspapers other than in Indonesian, mainly for a national and global audience, are also published daily. Examples are English-language newspapers The Jakarta Post and online-only The Jakarta Globe. Chinese language newspapers also circulate, such as Indonesia Shang Bao (印尼商报), Harian Indonesia (印尼星洲日报), and Guo Ji Ri Bao (国际日报). The only Japanese language newspaper is The Daily Jakarta Shimbun (じゃかるた新聞).
Around 75 radio stations broadcast in Jakarta, 52 on the FM band, and 23 on the AM band. Radio entities are based in Jakarta, for example, national radio networks MNC Trijaya FM, Prambors FM, Trax FM, I-Radio, Hard Rock FM, Delta FM, Global FM and the public radio RRI; as well as local stations Gen FM, Radio Elshinta and Z99,9.
Jakarta is the headquarters for Indonesia's public television TVRI as well as private national television networks, such as Metro TV, tvOne, Kompas TV, RCTI and NET. Jakarta has local television channels such as TVRI Jakarta, JakTV, Elshinta TV and KTV. Many TV stations are analogue PAL, but some are now converting to digital signals using DVB-T2 following a government plan to digital television migration.
Jakarta is administratively equal to a province with special status. The executive branch is headed by an elected governor and a vice governor, while the Jakarta Regional People's Representative Council (Indonesian: Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat Daerah Provinsi Daerah Khusus Ibukota Jakarta, DPRD DKI Jakarta) is the legislative branch with 106 directly elected members. The Jakarta City Hall at the south of Merdeka Square houses the office of the governor and the vice governor, and serves as the main administrative office.
Executive governance consists of five administrative cities (Indonesian: Kota Administrasi), each headed by a mayor (walikota) and one administrative regency (Indonesian: Kabupaten Administrasi) headed by a regent (bupati). Unlike other cities and regencies in Indonesia where the mayor or regent is directly elected, Jakarta's mayors and regents are chosen by the governor. Each city and regency is divided into administrative districts.
Aside from representatives to the provincial parliament, Jakarta sends 21 delegates to the national lower house parliament. The representatives are elected from Jakarta's three national electoral districts, which also include overseas voters. It also sends 4 delegates, just like other provinces, to the national upper house parliament.
The Jakarta Smart City (JSC) program was launched on 14 December 2014 with the goal for smart governance, smart people, smart mobility, smart economy, smart living and a smart environment in the city using the web and various smartphone-based apps.
The Greater Jakarta Metropolitan Regional Police (Indonesian: Polda Metro Jaya) is the police force that is responsible to maintain law, security, and order for the Jakarta metropolitan area. It is led by a two-star police general (Inspector General of Police) with the title of "Greater Jakarta Regional Police Chief" (Indonesian: Kepala Kepolisian Daerah Metro Jaya, abbreviated Kapolda Metro Jaya). Its office is located at Jl. Jenderal Sudirman Kav. 55, Senayan, Kebayoran Baru, South Jakarta and their hotline emergency number is 110.
The Jayakarta Military Regional Command (Indonesian: Komando Daerah Militer Jayakarta, abbreviated Kodam Jaya) is the territorial army of the Indonesian Army, which serves as a defence component for Jakarta and its surrounding areas (Greater Jakarta). It is led by an army Major General with the title of "Jakarta Military Regional Commander" (Indonesian: Panglima Daerah Militer Kodam Jaya, abbreviated Pangdam Jaya). The Jakarta Military Command is located at East Jakarta and oversees several military battalions ready for defending the capital city and its vital installations. It also assists the Jakarta Metropolitan Police during certain tasks, such as supporting security during state visits, VVIP security, and riot control.
The Jakarta provincial government relies on transfers from the central government for the bulk of its income. Local (non-central government) sources of revenue are incomes from various taxes such as vehicle ownership and vehicle transfer fees, among others. The ability of the regional government to respond to Jakarta's many problems is constrained by limited finances.
The provincial government consistently runs a surplus of between 15 and 20% of planned spending, primarily because of delays in procurement and other inefficiencies. Regular under-spending is a matter of public comment. In 2013, the budget was around Rp 50 trillion ($US5.2 billion), equivalent to around $US380 per citizen. Spending priorities were on education, transport, flood control, environment and social spending (such as health and housing). Jakarta's regional budget (APBD) was Rp 77.1 trillion ($US5.92 billion), Rp 83.2 trillion ($US6.2 billion), and Rp 89 trillion ($US6.35 billion) for the year of 2017, 2018 and 2019 respectively.
Jakarta consists of five Kota Administratif (Administrative cities/municipalities), each headed by a mayor, and one Kabupaten Administratif (Administrative regency). Each city and regency is divided into districts (kecamatan). The administrative cities/municipalities of Jakarta are:
The only administrative regency (kabupaten) of Jakarta is the Thousand Islands (Kepulauan Seribu), formerly a district within North Jakarta. It is a collection of 105 small islands located on the Java Sea. It is of high conservation value because of its unique ecosystems. Marine tourism, such as diving, water bicycling, and windsurfing, are the primary tourist activities in this territory. The main mode of transportation between the islands is speed boats or small ferries.
As a metropolitan area of about 30 million people, Jakarta has a variety of transport systems. Jakarta was awarded 2021 global Sustainable Transport Award (STA) for integrated public transportation system.
The city prioritized development of road networks, which were mostly designed to accommodate private vehicles. A notable feature of Jakarta's present road system is the toll road network. Composed of an inner and outer ring road and five toll roads radiating outwards, the network provides inner as well as outer city connections. An 'odd-even' policy limits road use to cars with either odd or even-numbered registration plates on a particular day as a transitional measure to alleviate traffic congestion until the future introduction of electronic road pricing.
There are many bus terminals in the city, from where buses operate on numerous routes to connect neighborhoods within the city limit, to other areas of Greater Jakarta and to cities across the island of Java. The biggest of the bus terminal is Pulo Gebang Bus Terminal, which is arguably the largest of its kind in Southeast Asia. Main terminus for long distance train services are Gambir and Pasar Senen. High-speed railways is connecting Jakarta to Bandung and another one is at the planning stage from Jakarta to Surabaya.
As of September 2022, Jakarta's public transport service coverage has reached 86 percent, which is targeted to Increase to 95 percent. Rapid transit in Greater Jakarta consists of TransJakarta bus rapid transit, Jakarta LRT, Jakarta MRT, KRL Commuterline, Jabodebek LRT, and Soekarno-Hatta Airport Rail Link. The city administration is building transit oriented development like Dukuh Atas TOD and CSW-ASEAN TOD in several area across Jakarta to facilitate commuters to transfer between different mode of public transportation.
Privately owned bus systems like Kopaja, MetroMini, Mayasari Bakti and PPD also provide important services for Jakarta commuters with numerous routes throughout the city, many routes are/will replaced/replaced by Minitrans and Metrotrans buses. Pedicabs are banned from the city for causing traffic congestion. Bajaj auto rickshaw provide local transportation in the back streets of some parts of the city. Angkot microbuses also play a major role in road transport of Jakarta. Taxicabs and ojeks (motorcycle taxis) are available in the city. As of January 2023, about 2.6 million people use public transportation daily in Jakarta.
The city administration has undertaken a project to build about 500 kilometers of bicycle lanes. As of June 2021, Jakarta already has 63 kilometers of bicycle lanes, and another 101 kilometers will be added by the end of the year 2021.
Soekarno–Hatta International Airport (CGK) is the main airport serving the Greater Jakarta area, while Halim Perdanakusuma Airport (HLP) accommodates private and low-cost domestic flights. Other airports in the Jakarta metropolitan area include Pondok Cabe Airport and an airfield on Pulau Panjang, part of the Thousand Island archipelago.
Jakarta is part of the Maritime Silk Road that runs from the Chinese coast via the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean and there to the Upper Adriatic region.
To transform the city into a more livable one, a ten-year urban regeneration project was undertaken, for Rp 571 trillion ($40.5 billion). The project aimed to develop infrastructure, including the creation of a better integrated public transit system and the improvement of the city's clean water and wastewater systems, housing and flood control systems.
Jakarta has many of the country's best-equipped private and public healthcare facilities. In 2012, the Governor of Jakarta Joko Widodo introduced a universal health care program, the 'Healthy Jakarta Card' (Kartu Jakarta Sehat, KJS). In January 2014, the Indonesian government launched a universal health care system called the Jaminan Kesehatan Nasional (JKN), which is run by BPJS Kesehatan. KJS is being integrated into JKN, and KJS cards are still valid as of 2018. As of 2021, 85.55% of the people of Jakarta is covered by JKN.
Government-run hospitals are of a good standard but are often overcrowded. Government-run specialised hospitals include Dr. Cipto Mangunkusumo Hospital, Gatot Soebroto Army Hospital, as well as community hospitals and puskesmas. Other options for healthcare services include private hospitals and clinics. The private healthcare sector has seen significant changes, since the government began allowing foreign investment in the private sector in 2010. While some private facilities are run by nonprofit or religious organisations, most are for-profit. Hospital chains such as Siloam, Pondok Indah Hospital Group, Mayapada, Mitra Keluarga, Medika, Medistra, Ciputra, Radjak Hospital Group, RS Bunda Group, and Hermina operate in the city.
Two private companies, PALYJA and Aetra, provide piped water in the western and eastern half of Jakarta respectively under 25-year concession contracts signed in 1998. A public asset holding company called PAM Jaya owns the infrastructure. Eighty per cent of the water distributed in Jakarta comes through the West Tarum Canal system from Jatiluhur reservoir on the Citarum River, 70 km (43 mi) southeast of the city. The water supply was privatised by President Suharto in 1998 to the French company Suez Environnement and the British company Thames Water International. Both companies subsequently sold their concessions to Indonesian companies. Customer growth in the first seven years of the concessions had been lower than before, possibly because of substantial inflation-adjusted tariff increases during this period. In 2005, tariffs were frozen, leading private water companies to cut down on investments.
According to PALYJA, the service coverage ratio increased substantially from 34% (1998) to 65% (2010) in the western half of the concession. According to data by the Jakarta Water Supply Regulatory Body, access in the eastern half of the city served by PTJ increased from about 57% in 1998 to about 67% in 2004 but stagnated afterwards. However, other sources cite much lower access figures for piped water supply to houses, excluding access provided through public hydrants: one study estimated access as low as 25% in 2005, while another estimated it to be as low as 18.5% in 2011. Those without access to piped water get water mostly from wells that are often salty and unsanitary. As of 2017, according to the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources, Jakarta had a crisis over clean water.
Jakarta hosts foreign embassies. Jakarta also serves as the seat of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Headquarters and is ASEAN's diplomatic capital.
Jakarta is a member of the Asian Network of Major Cities 21, C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group and ASEAN Smart Cities Network.
Jakarta signed sister city agreements with other cities, including Casablanca. To promote friendship between the two cities, the main avenue famous for its shopping and business centres was named after Jakarta's Moroccan sister city. No street in Casablanca is named after Jakarta. However, the Moroccan capital city of Rabat has an avenue named after Sukarno, Indonesia's first president, to commemorate his visit in 1960 and as a token of friendship.
Jakarta's sister cities are:
Jakarta has established a partnership with Rotterdam, especially on integrated urban water management, including capacity-building and knowledge exchange. This cooperation is mainly because both cities are dealing with similar problems; they lie in low-lying flat plains and are prone to flooding. Additionally, they have both implemented drainage systems involving canals, dams, and pumps vital for both cities for below-sea-level areas.
In addition to its sister cities, Jakarta cooperates with: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Jakarta (/dʒəˈkɑːrtə/; Indonesian pronunciation: [dʒaˈkarta] , Betawi: Jakarté), officially the Special Capital Region of Jakarta (Indonesian: Daerah Khusus Ibukota Jakarta) and formerly Batavia, is the capital and largest metropolis of Indonesia. Lying on the northwest coast of Java, the world's most populous island, Jakarta is the largest metropole in Southeast Asia, and serves as the diplomatic capital of ASEAN. Jakarta is bordered by two provinces: West Java to the south and east; and, since 2000, Banten to the west. Its coastline faces the Java Sea to the north, and it shares a maritime border with Lampung to the west.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Jakarta is the economic, cultural, and political centre of Indonesia. It possesses a province-level status and has a population of 10,679,951 as of mid-2022. Although Jakarta extends over only 661.23 km (255.30 sq mi) and thus has the smallest area of any Indonesian province, its metropolitan area covers 9,957.08 km (3,844.45 sq mi), which includes the satellite cities of Bogor, Depok, Tangerang, South Tangerang, and Bekasi, and has an estimated population of 35 million as of 2022, making it the largest urban area in Indonesia and the second-largest in the world (after Tokyo). Jakarta ranks first among the Indonesian provinces in the human development index. Jakarta's business and employment opportunities, along with its ability to offer a potentially higher standard of living compared to other parts of the country, have attracted migrants from across the Indonesian archipelago, making it a melting pot of numerous cultures.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Jakarta is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in Southeast Asia. Established in the fourth century as Sunda Kelapa, the city became an important trading port for the Sunda Kingdom. At one time, it was the de facto capital of the Dutch East Indies, when it was known as Batavia. Jakarta was officially a city within West Java until 1960 when its official status was changed to a province with special capital region distinction. As a province, its government consists of five administrative cities and one administrative regency. Jakarta is an alpha world city and is the seat of the ASEAN secretariat. Financial institutions such as the Bank of Indonesia, Indonesia Stock Exchange, and corporate headquarters of numerous Indonesian companies and multinational corporations are located in the city. In 2021, the city's GRP PPP was estimated at US$602.946 billion.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Jakarta's main challenges include rapid urban growth, ecological breakdown, gridlocked traffic, congestion, and flooding due to subsidence (sea level rise is relative, not absolute). Jakarta is sinking up to 17 cm (6.7 inches) annually, which has made the city more prone to flooding and one of the fastest-sinking capitals in the world. In response to these challenges, in August 2019, President Joko Widodo announced his agreement with an official study that the capital of Indonesia would be moved from Jakarta to the planned city of Nusantara, in the province of East Kalimantan on the island of Borneo. The Parliament approved the move on 18 January 2022.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Jakarta has been home to multiple settlements. Below is the list of names used during its existence:",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Sunda Kelapa (397–1527) Jayakarta (1527–1619) Batavia (1619–1942) Djakarta (1942–1972) Jakarta (1972–present)",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The name 'Jakarta' is derived from the word Jayakarta (Devanagari: जयकर्त) which is ultimately derived from the Sanskrit जय jaya (victorious), and कृत krta (accomplished, acquired), thus Jayakarta translates as 'victorious deed', 'complete act' or 'complete victory'. It was named for the Muslim troops of Fatahillah which successfully defeated and drove the Portuguese away from the city in 1527. Before it was called Jayakarta, the city was known as 'Sunda Kelapa'. Tomé Pires, a Portuguese apothecary, wrote the name of the city in his magnum opus as Jacatra or Jacarta during his journey to the East Indies.",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In the 17th century, the city was known as Koningin van het Oosten (Queen of the Orient), a name that was given for the urban beauty of downtown Batavia's canals, mansions and ordered city layout. After expanding to the south in the 19th century, this nickname came to be more associated with the suburbs (e.g. Menteng and the area around Merdeka Square), with their wide lanes, green spaces and villas. During the Japanese occupation, the city was renamed as Jakaruta Tokubetsu-shi (ジャカルタ特別市, Jakarta Special City).",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The north coast area of western Java including Jakarta was the location of prehistoric Buni culture that flourished from 400 BC to 100 AD. The area in and around modern Jakarta was part of the 4th-century Sundanese kingdom of Tarumanagara, one of the oldest Hindu kingdoms in Indonesia. The area of North Jakarta around Tugu became a populated settlement in the early 5th century. The Tugu inscription (probably written around 417 AD) discovered in Batutumbuh hamlet, Tugu village, Koja, North Jakarta, mentions that King Purnawarman of Tarumanagara undertook hydraulic projects; the irrigation and water drainage project of the Chandrabhaga river and the Gomati river near his capital. Following the decline of Tarumanagara, its territories, including the Jakarta area, became part of the Hindu Kingdom of Sunda. From the 7th to the early 13th century, the port of Sunda was under the Srivijaya maritime empire. According to the Chinese source, Chu-fan-chi, written circa 1225, Chou Ju-kua reported in the early 13th century that Srivijaya still ruled Sumatra, the Malay peninsula and western Java (Sunda). The source says the port of Sunda is strategic and thriving, mentioning pepper from Sunda as among the best in quality. The people worked in agriculture, and their houses were built on wooden piles. The harbour area became known as Sunda Kelapa, (Sundanese: ᮞᮥᮔ᮪ᮓ ᮊᮨᮜᮕ) and by the 14th century, it was an important trading port for the Sunda Kingdom.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The first European fleet, four Portuguese ships from Malacca, arrived in 1513 while looking for a route to obtain spices. The Sunda Kingdom made an alliance treaty with the Portuguese by allowing them to build a port in 1522 to defend against the rising power of Demak Sultanate from central Java. In 1527, Fatahillah, a Pasai-born military commander of Demak attacked and conquered Sunda Kelapa, driving out the Portuguese. Sunda Kelapa was renamed Jayakarta, and became a fiefdom of the Banten Sultanate, which became a major Southeast Asian trading centre.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Through the relationship with Prince Jayawikarta of the Banten Sultanate, Dutch ships arrived in 1596. In 1602, the British East India Company's first voyage, commanded by Sir James Lancaster, arrived in Aceh and sailed on to Banten where they were allowed to build a trading post. This site became the centre of British trade in the Indonesian archipelago until 1682. Jayawikarta is thought to have made trading connections with the British merchants, rivals of the Dutch, by allowing them to build houses directly across from the Dutch buildings in 1615.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "When relations between Prince Jayawikarta and the Dutch deteriorated, his soldiers attacked the Dutch fortress. His army and the British, however, were defeated by the Dutch, in part owing to the timely arrival of Jan Pieterszoon Coen. The Dutch burned the British fort and forced them to retreat on their ships. The victory consolidated Dutch power, and they renamed the city Batavia in 1619.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Commercial opportunities in the city attracted native and especially Chinese and Arab immigrants. This sudden population increase created burdens on the city. Tensions grew as the colonial government tried to restrict Chinese migration through deportations. Following a revolt, 5,000 Chinese were massacred by the Dutch and natives on 9 October 1740, and the following year, Chinese inhabitants were moved to Glodok outside the city walls. At the beginning of the 19th century, around 400 Arabs and Moors lived in Batavia, a number that changed little during the following decades. Among the commodities traded were fabrics, mainly imported cotton, batik and clothing worn by Arab communities.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The city began to expand further south as epidemics in 1835 and 1870 forced residents to move away from the port. The Koningsplein, now Merdeka Square was completed in 1818, the housing park of Menteng was started in 1913, and Kebayoran Baru was the last Dutch-built residential area. By 1930, Batavia had more than 500,000 inhabitants, including 37,067 Europeans. The city was expanded in 1935 through the annexation of the town of Meester Cornelis, modern Jatinegara.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "On 5 March 1942, the Japanese captured Batavia from Dutch control, and the city was named Jakarta (Jakarta Special City (ジャカルタ特別市, Jakaruta tokubetsu-shi), under the special status that was assigned to the city). After the war, the Dutch name Batavia was internationally recognised until full Indonesian independence on 27 December 1949. The city, now renamed Jakarta, was officially proclaimed the national capital of Indonesia.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "After World War II ended, Indonesian nationalists declared independence on 17 August 1945, and the government of Jakarta City was changed into the Jakarta National Administration in the following month. During the Indonesian National Revolution, Indonesian Republicans withdrew from Allied-occupied Jakarta and established their capital in Yogyakarta.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "After securing full independence, Jakarta again became the national capital in 1950. With Jakarta selected to host the 1962 Asian Games, Sukarno, envisaging Jakarta as a great international city, instigated large government-funded projects with openly nationalistic and modernist architecture. Projects included a cloverleaf interchange, a major boulevard (Jalan MH Thamrin-Sudirman), monuments such as The National Monument, Hotel Indonesia, a shopping centre, and a new building intended to be the headquarters of CONEFO. In October 1965, Jakarta was the site of an abortive coup attempt in which six top generals were killed, precipitating a violent anti-communist purge which killed at least 500,000 people, including some ethnic Chinese. The event marked the beginning of Suharto's New Order. The first government was led by a mayor until the end of 1960 when the office was changed to that of a governor. The last mayor of Jakarta was Soediro until he was replaced by Soemarno Sosroatmodjo as governor.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In 1966, Jakarta was declared a 'special capital region' (Daerah Khusus Ibukota), with a status equivalent to that of a province. Based on law No. 5 of 1974 relating to regional governments, the Jakarta Special Capital Region was confirmed as the capital of Indonesia and one of the country's then 26 provinces. Lieutenant General Ali Sadikin served as governor from 1966 to 1977; he rehabilitated roads and bridges, encouraged the arts, built hospitals and a large number of schools. He cleared out slum dwellers for new development projects — some for the benefit of the Suharto family,— and attempted to eliminate rickshaws and ban street vendors. He began control of migration to the city to stem overcrowding and poverty. Foreign investment contributed to a real estate boom that transformed the face of Jakarta. The boom ended with the 1997 Asian financial crisis, putting Jakarta at the centre of violence, protest, and political manoeuvring.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "After three decades in power, support for President Suharto began to wane. Tensions peaked when four students were shot dead at Trisakti University by security forces. Four days of riots and violence in 1998 ensued that killed an estimated 1,200, and destroyed or damaged 6,000 buildings, forcing Suharto to resign. Much of the rioting targeted Chinese Indonesians. In the post-Suharto era, Jakarta has remained the focal point of democratic change in Indonesia. Jemaah Islamiah-connected bombings occurred almost annually in the city between 2000 and 2005, with another in 2009. In August 2007, Jakarta held its first-ever election to choose a governor as part of a nationwide decentralisation program that allows direct local elections in several areas. Previously, governors were elected by the city's legislative body.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "During the Jokowi presidency, the Government adopted a plan to move Indonesia's capital to East Kalimantan.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Between 2016 and 2017, a series of terrorist attacks rocked Jakarta with scenes of multiple suicide bombings and gunfire. In suspicion to its links, the Islamic State, the perpetrator led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi claimed responsibility for the attacks.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Jakarta covers 661.23 km (255.30 sq mi), the smallest among any Indonesian provinces. However, its metropolitan area covers 6,392 km (2,468 sq mi), which extends into the two bordering provinces of West Java and Banten. The Greater Jakarta area includes three bordering regencies (Bekasi Regency, Tangerang Regency and Bogor Regency) and five adjacent cities (Bogor, Depok, Bekasi, Tangerang and South Tangerang).",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Jakarta is situated on the northwest coast of Java, at the mouth of the Ciliwung River on Jakarta Bay, an inlet of the Java Sea. It is strategically located near the Sunda Strait. The northern part of Jakarta is plain land, some areas of which are below sea level, and subject to frequent flooding. The southern parts of the city are hilly. It is one of only two Asian capital cities located in the southern hemisphere (along with East Timor's Dili). Officially, the area of the Jakarta Special District is 661.23 km (255 sq mi) of land area and 6,977 km (2,694 sq mi) of sea area. The Thousand Islands, which are administratively a part of Jakarta, are located in Jakarta Bay, north of the city.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Jakarta lies in a low and flat alluvial plain, ranging from −2 to 91 m (−7 to 299 ft) with an average elevation of 8 m (26 ft) above sea level with historically extensive swampy areas. Some parts of the city have been constructed on reclaimed tidal flats that occur around the area. Thirteen rivers flow through Jakarta. They are Ciliwung River, Kalibaru, Pesanggrahan, Cipinang, Angke River, Maja, Mookervart, Krukut, Buaran, West Tarum, Cakung, Petukangan, Sunter River and Grogol River. They flow from the Puncak highlands to the south of the city, then across the city northwards towards the Java Sea. The Ciliwung River divides the city into the western and eastern districts.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "These rivers, combined with the wet season rains and insufficient drainage due to clogging, make Jakarta prone to flooding.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Moreover, Jakarta is sinking about 5 to 10 cm (2.0 to 3.9 in) each year, and up to 20 cm (7.9 in) in the northern coastal areas. After a feasibility study, a ring dyke known as Giant Sea Wall Jakarta is under construction around Jakarta Bay to help cope with the threat from the sea. The dyke will be equipped with a pumping system and retention areas to defend against seawater and function as a toll road. The project is expected to be completed by 2025. In January 2014, the central government agreed to build two dams in Ciawi, Bogor and a 1.2 km (0.75 mi) tunnel from Ciliwung River to Cisadane River to ease flooding in the city. Nowadays, a 1.2 km (0.75 mi), with capacity 60 m (2,100 cu ft) per second, underground water tunnel between Ciliwung River and the East Flood Canal is being worked on to ease the Ciliwung River overflows. In 2023, the New York Times reported that in some places Jakarta is sinking up to 12 inches (30 cm) annually.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Environmental advocates point out that subsidence is driven by the extraction of groundwater, much of it illegal. Furthermore, the government's lack of strict regulation amplifies the issue as many recently built high-rise buildings, corporations, and factories around Jakarta opt for illegally extracting groundwater. In fact, in a recent inspection of 80 buildings in Jalan Thamrin, a busy road lined with skyscrapers and shopping malls, 56 buildings had a groundwater pump, and 33 were pumping groundwater illegally. This could be halted by stopping extraction (as the city of Tokyo has done), increasing efficiency, and finding other sources for water use. Moreover, increasing regulation through higher taxes or limiting groundwater pumping has proven to help cities like Shanghai, Tokyo, and San Jose relieve their subsidence issue. The rivers of Jakarta are highly polluted and currently unsuitable for drinking water.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Jakarta has architecturally significant buildings spanning distinct historical and cultural periods. Architectural styles reflect Malay, Sundanese, Javanese, Arabic, Chinese and Dutch influences. External influences inform the architecture of the Betawi house. The houses were built of nangka wood (Artocarpus integrifolia) and comprised three rooms. The shape of the roof is reminiscent of the traditional Javanese joglo. Additionally, the number of registered cultural heritage buildings has increased.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Colonial buildings and structures include those that were constructed during the colonial period. The dominant colonial styles can be divided into three periods: the Dutch Golden Age (17th to late 18th century), the transitional style period (late 18th century – 19th century), and Dutch modernism (20th century). Colonial architecture is apparent in houses and villas, churches, civic buildings and offices, mostly concentrated in the Jakarta Old Town and Central Jakarta. Architects such as J.C. Schultze and Eduard Cuypers designed some of the significant buildings. Schultze's works include Jakarta Art Building, the Indonesia Supreme Court Building and Ministry of Finance Building, while Cuypers designed Bank Indonesia Museum and Mandiri Museum. In the early 20th century, most buildings were built in Neo-Renaissance style. By the 1920s, the architectural taste had begun to shift in favour of rationalism and modernism, particularly art deco architecture. The elite suburb Menteng, developed during the 1910s, was the city's first attempt at creating an ideal and healthy housing for the middle class. The original houses had a longitudinal organisation, with overhanging eaves, large windows and open ventilation, all practical features for a tropical climate. These houses were developed by N.V. de Bouwploeg, and established by P.A.J. Moojen.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "After independence, the process of nation-building in Indonesia and demolishing the memory of colonialism was as important as the symbolic building of arterial roads, monuments, and government buildings. The National Monument in Jakarta, designed by Sukarno, is Indonesia's beacon of nationalism. In the early 1960s, Jakarta provided highways and super-scale cultural monuments as well as Senayan Sports Stadium. The parliament building features a hyperbolic roof reminiscent of German rationalist and Corbusian design concepts. Built-in 1996, Wisma 46 soars to a height of 262 m (860 ft) and its nib-shaped top celebrates technology and symbolises stereoscopy.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The urban construction boom continued during the 21st century. The Golden Triangle of Jakarta is one of the fastest evolving CBD's in the Asia-Pacific region. According to CTBUH and Emporis, there are 88 skyscrapers that reach or exceed 150 m (490 ft), which puts the city in the top 10 of world rankings. It has more buildings taller than 150 metres than any other Southeast Asian or Southern Hemisphere cities.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Most landmarks, monuments and statues in Jakarta were begun in the 1960s during the Sukarno era, then completed in the Suharto era, while some date from the colonial period. Although many of the projects were completed after his presidency, Sukarno, who was an architect, is credited for planning Jakarta's monuments and landmarks, as he desired the city to be the beacon of a powerful new nation. Among the monumental projects that were built, initiated, and planned during his administration are the National Monument, Istiqlal mosque, the Legislature Building, and the Gelora Bung Karno stadium. Sukarno also built many nationalistic monuments and statues in the capital city.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The most famous landmark, which became the symbol of the city, is the 132 m-tall (433 ft) obelisk of the National Monument (Monumen Nasional or Monas) in the centre of Merdeka Square. On its southwest corner stands a Mahabharata-themed Arjuna Wijaya chariot statue and fountain. Further south through Jalan M.H. Thamrin, one of the main avenues, the Selamat Datang monument stands on the fountain in the centre of the Hotel Indonesia roundabout. Other landmarks include the Istiqlal Mosque, Jakarta Cathedral and the Immanuel Church. The former Batavia Stadhuis, Sunda Kelapa port in Jakarta Old Town is another landmark. The Autograph Tower in Central Jakarta, at 382.9 metres is the tallest building in Indonesia. The most recent landmark built is the Jakarta International Stadium.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Some of the statues and monuments are nationalist, such as the West Irian Liberation Monument, the Tugu Tani, the Youth statue and the Dirgantara Monument. Some statues commemorate Indonesian national heroes, such as the Diponegoro and Kartini statues in Merdeka Square. The Sudirman and Thamrin statues are located on the streets bearing their names. There is also a statue of Sukarno and Hatta at the Proclamation Monument as well as at the entrance to Soekarno–Hatta International Airport.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In June 2011, Jakarta had only 10.5% green open spaces (Ruang Terbuka Hijau), although this grew to 13.94%. Public parks are included in public green open spaces. There are about 300 integrated child-friendly public spaces (RPTRA) in the city in 2019. As of 2014, 183 water reservoirs and lakes supported the greater Jakarta area.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Jakarta has a tropical monsoon climate (Am) according to the Köppen climate classification system. The wet season in Jakarta covers eight months: October to May. The remaining four months (June to September) constitute the city's drier season, having an average monthly rainfall of less than 100 mm (3.9 in). August qualifies as the genuine dry season month, as it has less than 60 mm (2.4 in) of rainfall. Across the western part of Java, the wet season peaks in January and February with an average monthly rainfall of 297.7 mm (11.72 in), and its dry season's low point is in August with a monthly average of 43.2 mm (1.70 in).",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Jakarta attracts people from across Indonesia, often in search of employment. The 1961 census showed that 51% of the city's population was born in Jakarta. Inward immigration tended to negate the effect of family planning programs. Ministry of Home Affairs (Kemendagri) tabulates its own data, which has improved since ID card requirements in last decade, lists Jakarta's population at 11,261,595 in yearend 2021.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Between 1961 and 1980, the population of Jakarta doubled, and during the period 1980–1990, the city's population grew annually by 3.7%. The 2010 census counted some 9.58 million people, well above government estimates. The population rose from 4.5 million in 1970 to 9.5 million in 2010, counting only legal residents, while the population of Greater Jakarta rose from 8.2 million in 1970 to 28.5 million in 2010. As of 2014, the population of Jakarta stood at 10 million, with a population density of 15,174 people/km. In 2014, the population of Greater Jakarta was 30 million, accounting for 11% of Indonesia's overall population. It is predicted to reach 35.6 million people by 2030 to become the world's biggest megacity. The gender ratio was 102.8 (males per 100 females) in 2010, and 101.3 in 2014.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Ethnic groups in Jakarta",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Jakarta is pluralistic and religiously diverse, without a majority ethnic group. As of 2010, 36.17% of the city's population were Javanese, 28.29% Betawi (locally established mixed race, cemented by diverse creole), 14.61% Sundanese, 6.62% Chinese, 3.42% Batak, 2.85% Minangkabau, 0.96% Malays, Indo and others 7.08%.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "The 'Betawi' (Orang Betawi, or 'people of Batavia') are immigrant descendants of the old city who became widely recognised as an ethnic group by the mid-19th century. They mostly descend from an eclectic mix of Southeast Asians brought or attracted to meet labour needs. They are thus a creole ethnic group who came from much of Indonesia. Over generations, most have intermarried with one or more ethnicities, especially people of Chinese, Arab and European descent. Most Betawis lived in the fringe zones with few Betawi-majority zones of central Jakarta. It is thus a conundrum for some Javanese people, especially multi-generational Jakarta residents, to identify as either Javanese or Betawi since living in a Betawi-majority district and speaking more of that creole and adapting is a matter of preference for such families.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "A significant Chinese community has lived in Jakarta for many centuries. They traditionally reside around old urban areas, such as Pinangsia, PIK, Pluit and Glodok (Jakarta's Chinatown) areas. They also can be found in the old Chinatowns of Senen and Jatinegara. As of 2001 they self-identified as being 5.5%, which was thought of as under-reported; this explains the 6.6% figure ten years later.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The Sumatran residents are diverse. According to the 2020 census, roughly 361,000 Batak; 300,960 Minangkabau and 101,370 Malays lived in the city. The number of Batak people has grown in ranking, from eighth in 1930 to fifth in 2000. Toba Batak is the largest subset in Jakarta. Working Minangkabau in the 1980s in high proportions were well-embedded merchants, artisans, doctors, teachers or journalists. Minang merchants are found in traditional markets, such as Tanah Abang and Senen.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Indonesian is the official and dominant language of Jakarta, while many elderly people speak Dutch or Chinese, depending on their upbringing. English is used for communication, especially in Central and South Jakarta. Each of the ethnic groups uses their mother tongue at home, such as Betawi, Javanese, and Sundanese. The Betawi language is distinct from those of the Sundanese or Javanese, forming itself as a language island in the surrounding area. It is mostly based on the East Malay dialect and enriched by loan words from Dutch, Portuguese, Sundanese, Javanese, Chinese, and Arabic. Over time, many Betawi words and phrases became integrated into Indonesian as Jakartan slang, and is used by most people regardless of their ethnic background.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The Chinese in Jakarta mainly speak Indonesian and English due to a strict language ban during Soeharto's New Order era; older people may be fluent in Hokkien dialect and Mandarin, meanwhile the youngsters are only fluent in Indonesian and English, some educated in Mandarin. With the recent urbanization of Chinese communities from several rural areas in Indonesia, other Chinese dialects have been brought into the Chinese community in Jakarta, such as Hakka, Teochew and Cantonese. Hokkien, which is mainly from Sumatra (Medan, Bagansiapiapi, Batam) is mostly spoken in Northern Jakarta, such as in Pantai Indah Kapuk, Pluit, and Kelapa Gading, meanwhile Hakka and Teochew, which are derived from the Chinese communities in Pontianak and Singkawang, are mainly spoken in West Jakarta, like in Tambora and Grogol Petamburan.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The Batak in Jakarta mostly speak Indonesian, while the older generation tends to speak their native languages, such as Batak Toba, Mandailing, and Karo, depending on which ancestral towns and places in North Sumatra they come from. The Minangkabau mainly speak Minangkabau together with Indonesian.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Religion in Jakarta (2022)",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "In 2017, Jakarta's religious composition was distributed over Islam (83.43%), Protestantism (8.63%), Catholicism (4.0%), Buddhism (3.74%), Hinduism (0.19%), and Confucianism (0.01%). About 231 people claimed to follow folk religions.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Most pesantren (Islamic boarding schools) in Jakarta are affiliated with the traditionalist Nahdlatul Ulama, modernist organisations mostly catering to a socioeconomic class of educated urban elites and merchant traders. They give priority to education, social welfare programs and religious propagation. Many Islamic organisations have headquarters in Jakarta, including Nahdlatul Ulama, Indonesian Ulema Council, Muhammadiyah, Indonesia Institute of Islamic Dawah, and Jaringan Islam Liberal.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The Roman Catholic community has a Metropolis, the Archdiocese of Jakarta that includes West Java as part of the ecclesiastical province. Jakarta also hosts the largest Buddhist adherents in Java Island, where most of the followers are the Chinese. Schools of Buddhism practiced in Indonesia vary, including Theravāda, Mahāyāna, Vajrayana, and Tridharma. The city also has Hindu community, which mainly are from Balinese and Indian people. There is also a Sikh and Baháʼí Faith community presence in Jakarta.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Jakarta GDP share by sector (2022)",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Indonesia is the largest economy of ASEAN, and Jakarta is the economic nerve centre of the Indonesian archipelago. Jakarta's nominal GDP was US$203.702 billion and PPP GDP was US$602.946 billion in 2021, which is about 17% of Indonesia's. Jakarta ranked at 21 in the list of Cities Of Economic Influence Index in 2020 by CEOWORLD magazine. According to the Japan Center for Economic Research, GRP per capita of Jakarta will rank 28th among the 77 cities in 2030 from 41st in 2015, the largest in Southeast Asia. Savills Resilient Cities Index has predicted Jakarta to be within the top 20 cities in the world by 2028.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Jakarta's economy depends highly on manufacturing and service sectors such as banking, trading and financial. Industries include electronics, automotive, chemicals, mechanical engineering and biomedical sciences. The head office of Bank Indonesia and Indonesia Stock Exchange are located in the city. Most of the SOEs include Pertamina, PLN, Angkasa Pura, and Telkomsel operate head offices in the city, as do major Indonesian conglomerates, such as Salim Group, Sinar Mas Group, Astra International, Gudang Garam, Kompas-Gramedia, CT Corp, Emtek, and MNC Group. The headquarters of the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and Indonesian Employers Association are also located in the city. As of 2017, the city is home to six Forbes Global 2000, two Fortune 500 and seven Unicorn companies.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Google and Alibaba have regional cloud centers in Jakarta. In 2017, the economic growth was 6.22%. Throughout the same year, the total value of the investment was Rp 108.6 trillion (US$8 billion), an increase of 84.7% from the previous year. In 2021, nominal GDP per capita was estimated at Rp 274.710 million (US$19,199). The most significant contributions to GRDP were by finance, ownership and business services (29%); trade, hotel and restaurant sector (20%), and manufacturing industry sector (16%).",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "The Wealth Report 2015 by Knight Frank reported that 24 individuals in Indonesia in 2014 had wealth of at least US$1 billion and 18 live in Jakarta. The cost of living continues to rise. Both land prices and rents have become expensive. Mercer's 2017 Cost of Living Survey ranked Jakarta as 88th costliest city in the world for expatriates. Industrial development and the construction of new housing thrive on the outskirts, while commerce and banking remain concentrated in the city centre. Jakarta has a bustling luxury property market. Knight Frank, a global real estate consultancy based in London, reported in 2014 that Jakarta offered the highest return on high-end property investment in the world in 2013, citing a supply shortage and a sharply depreciated currency as reasons.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "As of 2015, with a total of 550 hectares, Jakarta had the largest shopping mall floor area within a single city. Malls include Plaza Indonesia, Grand Indonesia, Sarinah, Plaza Senayan, Senayan City, Pacific Place, Gandaria City, ÆON Mall Jakarta Garden City and Tanjung Barat, Mall Taman Anggrek, Central Park Mall, as well as Pondok Indah Mall. Fashion retail brands in Jakarta include Debenhams at Senayan City and Lippo Mall Kemang Village, Japanese Sogo, Seibu at Grand Indonesia Shopping Town, and French brand, Galeries Lafayette, at Pacific Place. The Satrio-Casablanca shopping belt includes Kuningan City, Mal Ambassador, Kota Kasablanka, and Lotte Shopping Avenue. Shopping malls are also located at Grogol and Puri Indah in West Jakarta.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Traditional markets include Blok M, Mayestik, Tanah Abang, Senen, Pasar Baru, Glodok, Mangga Dua, Cempaka Mas, and Jatinegara. Special markets sell antique goods at Jalan Surabaya and gemstones in Rawabening Market.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Though Jakarta has been named the most popular location as per tag stories, and ranked eighth most-posted among the cities in the world in 2017 on image-sharing site Instagram, it is not a top international tourist destination. The city, however, is ranked as the fifth fastest-growing tourist destination among 132 cities according to MasterCard Global Destination Cities Index.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "The World Travel and Tourism Council also listed Jakarta as among the top ten fastest-growing tourism cities in the world in 2017 and categorised it as an emerging performer, which will see a significant increase in tourist arrivals in less than ten years. According to Euromonitor International's latest Top 100 City Destinations Ranking of 2019, Jakarta ranked at 57th among 100 most visited cities of the world. Most of the visitors attracted to Jakarta are domestic tourists. As the gateway of Indonesia, Jakarta often serves as a stop-over for foreign visitors on their way to other Indonesian tourist destinations such as Bali, Lombok, Komodo Island and Yogyakarta. Jakarta is trying to attract more international tourist by MICE tourism, by arranging increasing numbers of conventions. In 2012, the tourism sector contributed Rp. 2.6 trillion (US$268.5 million) to the city's total direct income of Rp. 17.83 trillion (US$1.45 billion), a 17.9% increase from the previous year 2011.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Jakarta is home to numerous educational institutions. The University of Indonesia (UI) is the largest and oldest tertiary-level educational institution in Indonesia. It is a public institution with campuses in Salemba (Central Jakarta) and in Depok. The three other public universities in Jakarta are Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University Jakarta, the State University of Jakarta (UNJ), University of Pembangunan Nasional 'Veteran' Jakarta (UPN \"Veteran\" Jakarta), and Universitas Terbuka or Indonesia Open University. There is a vocational higher education, Politeknik Negeri Jakarta (PNJ). Some major private universities in Jakarta are Trisakti University, The Christian University of Indonesia, Mercu Buana University, Tarumanagara University, Atma Jaya Catholic University of Indonesia, Pelita Harapan University, Pertamina University, Bina Nusantara University, Jayabaya University, Persada Indonesia \"YAI\" University, and Pancasila University.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "STOVIA (School tot Opleiding van Indische Artsen, now Universitas Indonesia) was the first high school in Jakarta, established in 1851. Jakarta houses many students from around Indonesia, many of whom reside in dormitories or home-stay residences. For basic education, a variety of primary and secondary schools are available, tagged with the public (national), private (national and bi-lingual national plus) and international labels. Four of the major international schools are the Gandhi Memorial International School, IPEKA International Christian School, Jakarta Intercultural School and the British School Jakarta. Other international schools include the Jakarta International Korean School, Bina Bangsa School, Jakarta International Multicultural School, Australian International School, New Zealand International School, Singapore International School, Jakarta Japanese School, and Sekolah Pelita Harapan.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "As the capital of Indonesia, Jakarta is a melting pot of cultures from all ethnic groups of the country. Though Betawi people are an indigenous community of Jakarta, the city's culture represents many languages and ethnic groups, supports differences regarding religion, traditions and linguistics, rather than any single and dominant culture.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "The Betawi culture is distinct from those of the Sundanese or Javanese, forming a language island in the surrounding area. Betawi arts have a \"low profile\" in Jakarta, and most Betawi people have moved to the suburbs. The cultures of the Javanese and other Indonesian ethnic groups have a \"higher profile\" than that of the Betawi. There is a significant Chinese influence in Betawi culture, reflected in the popularity of Chinese cakes and sweets, firecrackers and Betawi wedding attire that demonstrates Chinese and Arab influences.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Some festivals such as the Jalan Jaksa Festival, Kemang Festival, Festival Condet and Lebaran Betawi include efforts to preserve Betawi arts by inviting artists to display performances. Jakarta has several performing art centres, such as the classical concert hall Aula Simfonia Jakarta in Kemayoran, Taman Ismail Marzuki (TIM) art centre in Cikini, Gedung Kesenian Jakarta near Pasar Baru, Balai Sarbini in the Plaza Semanggi area, Bentara Budaya Jakarta in the Palmerah area, Pasar Seni (Art Market) in Ancol, and traditional Indonesian art performances at the pavilions of some provinces in Taman Mini Indonesia Indah. Traditional music is often found at high-class hotels, including Wayang and Gamelan performances. Javanese Wayang Orang performances can be found at Wayang Orang Bharata theatre.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Arts and culture festivals and exhibitions include the annual ARKIPEL – Jakarta International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival, Jakarta International Film Festival (JiFFest), Djakarta Warehouse Project, Jakarta Fashion Week, Jakarta Muslim Fashion Week, Jakarta Fashion & Food Festival (JFFF), Jakarnaval, Jakarta Night Festival, Kota Tua Creative Festival, Indonesia International Book Fair (IIBF), Indonesia Creative Products and Jakarta Arts and Crafts exhibition. Art Jakarta is a contemporary art fair, which is held annually. Flona Jakarta is a flora-and-fauna exhibition, held annually in August at Lapangan Banteng Park, featuring flowers, plant nurseries, and pets. Jakarta Fair is held annually from mid-June to mid-July to celebrate the anniversary of the city and is mostly centred around a trade fair. However, this month-long fair also features entertainment, including arts and music performances by local musicians. Jakarta International Java Jazz Festival (JJF) is one of the largest jazz festivals in the world, the biggest in the Southern hemisphere, and is held annually in March.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Several foreign art and culture centres in Jakarta promote culture and language through learning centres, libraries and art galleries. These include the Chinese Confucius Institute, the Dutch Erasmus Huis, the British Council, the French Alliance Française, the German Goethe-Institut, the Japan Foundation, and the Jawaharlal Nehru Indian Cultural Center.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "All varieties of Indonesian cuisine have a presence in Jakarta. The local cuisine is Betawi cuisine, which reflects various foreign culinary traditions. Betawi cuisine is heavily influenced by Malay-Chinese Peranakan cuisine, Sundanese and Javanese cuisine, which is also influenced by Indian, Arabic and European cuisines. One of the most popular local dishes of Betawi cuisine is Soto Betawi which is prepared from chunks of beef and offal in rich and spicy cow's milk or coconut milk broth. Other popular Betawi dishes include soto kaki, nasi uduk, kerak telor (spicy omelette), nasi ulam, asinan, ketoprak, rujak and gado-gado Betawi (salad in peanut sauce).",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Jakarta cuisine can be found in modest street-side warung food stalls and kaki lima (five legs) travelling vendors to high-end fine dining restaurants. Live music venues and exclusive restaurants are abundant. Many traditional foods from far-flung regions in Indonesia can be found in Jakarta. For example, traditional Padang restaurants and low-budget Warteg (Warung Tegal) food stalls are ubiquitous in the capital. Other popular street foods include nasi goreng (fried rice), sate (skewered meats), pecel lele (fried catfish), bakso (meatballs), bakpau (Chinese bun) and siomay (fish dumplings).",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Jalan Sabang, Jalan Sidoarjo, Jalan Kendal at Menteng area, Kota Tua, Blok S, Blok M, Jalan Tebet, are all popular destinations for street-food lovers. Minangkabau street-food who sell Nasi Kapau, Sate Padang, and Soto Padang can be found at Jalan Kramat Raya and Jalan Bendungan Hilir in Central Jakarta. Chinese street-food is plentiful at Jalan Pangeran, Manga Besar and Petak Sembilan in the old Jakarta area, while the Little Tokyo area of Blok M has many Japanese style restaurants and bars.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Trendy restaurants, cafe and bars can be found at Menteng, Kemang, Jalan Senopati, Kuningan, Senayan, Pantai Indah Kapuk, and Kelapa Gading.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Lenggang Jakarta is a food court, accommodating small traders and street vendors, where Indonesian foods are available within a single compound. At present, there are two such food courts, located at Monas and Kemayoran. Thamrin 10 is a food and creative park located at Menteng, where varieties of food stall are available.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Global fast-food chains are present, and usually found in Shopping malls, along with local brands like Sederhana, J'CO, Es Teler 77, Kebab Turki, CFC, and Japanese HokBen and Yoshinoya. Foreign cuisines such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Singaporean, Indian, American, Australian, Malaysian, French, Mediterranean cuisines like Maghrebi, Turkish, Italian, Middle Eastern cuisine, and modern fusion food restaurants can all be found in Jakarta.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Jakarta hosted the 1962 Asian Games, and the 2018 Asian Games, co-hosted by Palembang. Jakarta also hosted the Southeast Asian Games in 1979, 1987, 1997 and 2011 (supporting Palembang). Gelora Bung Karno Stadium hosted the group stage, quarterfinal and final of the 2007 AFC Asian Cup along with Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. The largest capacity retractable roof stadium in Asia, Jakarta International Stadium, is located at Tanjung Priok district, completed in 2022.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "The Senayan sports complex has several sports venues, including the Bung Karno football stadium, Madya Stadium, Istora Senayan, an aquatic arena, a baseball field, a basketball hall, a shooting range, several indoor and outdoor tennis courts. The Senayan complex was built in 1960 to accommodate the 1962 Asian Games. For basketball, the Kelapa Gading Sport Mall in Kelapa Gading, North Jakarta, with a capacity of 7,000 seats, is the home arena of the Indonesian national basketball team. The BritAma Arena serves as a playground for Satria Muda Pertamina Jakarta, the 2017 runner-up of the Indonesian Basketball League. Jakarta International Velodrome is a sporting facility located at Rawamangun, which was used as a venue for the 2018 Asian Games. It has a seating capacity of 3,500 for track cycling, and up to 8,500 for shows and concerts, which can also be used for various sports activities such as volleyball, badminton and futsal. Jakarta International Equestrian Park is an equestrian sports venue located at Pulomas, which was also used as a venue for 2018 Asian Games.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "The Jakarta Car-Free Days are held weekly on Sunday on the main avenues of the city, Jalan Sudirman, and Jalan Thamrin, from 6 am to 11 am. The briefer Car-Free Day, which lasts from 6 am to 9 am, is held on every other Sunday. The event invites local pedestrians to do sports and exercise and have their activities on the streets that are usually full of traffic. Along the road from the Senayan traffic circle on Jalan Sudirman, South Jakarta, to the \"Selamat Datang\" Monument at the Hotel Indonesia traffic circle on Jalan Thamrin, north to the National Monument in Central Jakarta, cars are blocked from entering. During the event, morning gymnastics, callisthenics and aerobic exercises, futsal games, jogging, bicycling, skateboarding, badminton, karate, on-street library and musical performances take over the roads and the main parks.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Jakarta's most popular home football club is Persija, which plays in Liga 1. Another football team in Jakarta is Persitara which competes in Liga 3 and plays in Tugu Stadium.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Jakarta Marathon each November is recognised by AIMS and IAAF. It was established in 2013. It brings sports tourism. In 2015, more than 15,000 runners from 53 countries participated.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Jakarta successfully hosted the first Jakarta ePrix race of the Formula E championship in June 2022 at Ancol Circuit, North Jakarta.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Jakarta is home to most of the Indonesian national newspapers, besides some local-based newspapers. Daily local newspapers in Jakarta are Pos Kota and Warta Kota, as well as the now-defunct Indopos. National newspapers based in Jakarta include Kompas and Media Indonesia, most of them have a news segment covering the city. A number of business newspapers (Bisnis Indonesia, Investor Daily and Kontan) and sports newspaper (Super Ball) are also published.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Newspapers other than in Indonesian, mainly for a national and global audience, are also published daily. Examples are English-language newspapers The Jakarta Post and online-only The Jakarta Globe. Chinese language newspapers also circulate, such as Indonesia Shang Bao (印尼商报), Harian Indonesia (印尼星洲日报), and Guo Ji Ri Bao (国际日报). The only Japanese language newspaper is The Daily Jakarta Shimbun (じゃかるた新聞).",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Around 75 radio stations broadcast in Jakarta, 52 on the FM band, and 23 on the AM band. Radio entities are based in Jakarta, for example, national radio networks MNC Trijaya FM, Prambors FM, Trax FM, I-Radio, Hard Rock FM, Delta FM, Global FM and the public radio RRI; as well as local stations Gen FM, Radio Elshinta and Z99,9.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Jakarta is the headquarters for Indonesia's public television TVRI as well as private national television networks, such as Metro TV, tvOne, Kompas TV, RCTI and NET. Jakarta has local television channels such as TVRI Jakarta, JakTV, Elshinta TV and KTV. Many TV stations are analogue PAL, but some are now converting to digital signals using DVB-T2 following a government plan to digital television migration.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Jakarta is administratively equal to a province with special status. The executive branch is headed by an elected governor and a vice governor, while the Jakarta Regional People's Representative Council (Indonesian: Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat Daerah Provinsi Daerah Khusus Ibukota Jakarta, DPRD DKI Jakarta) is the legislative branch with 106 directly elected members. The Jakarta City Hall at the south of Merdeka Square houses the office of the governor and the vice governor, and serves as the main administrative office.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Executive governance consists of five administrative cities (Indonesian: Kota Administrasi), each headed by a mayor (walikota) and one administrative regency (Indonesian: Kabupaten Administrasi) headed by a regent (bupati). Unlike other cities and regencies in Indonesia where the mayor or regent is directly elected, Jakarta's mayors and regents are chosen by the governor. Each city and regency is divided into administrative districts.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Aside from representatives to the provincial parliament, Jakarta sends 21 delegates to the national lower house parliament. The representatives are elected from Jakarta's three national electoral districts, which also include overseas voters. It also sends 4 delegates, just like other provinces, to the national upper house parliament.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "The Jakarta Smart City (JSC) program was launched on 14 December 2014 with the goal for smart governance, smart people, smart mobility, smart economy, smart living and a smart environment in the city using the web and various smartphone-based apps.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "The Greater Jakarta Metropolitan Regional Police (Indonesian: Polda Metro Jaya) is the police force that is responsible to maintain law, security, and order for the Jakarta metropolitan area. It is led by a two-star police general (Inspector General of Police) with the title of \"Greater Jakarta Regional Police Chief\" (Indonesian: Kepala Kepolisian Daerah Metro Jaya, abbreviated Kapolda Metro Jaya). Its office is located at Jl. Jenderal Sudirman Kav. 55, Senayan, Kebayoran Baru, South Jakarta and their hotline emergency number is 110.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "The Jayakarta Military Regional Command (Indonesian: Komando Daerah Militer Jayakarta, abbreviated Kodam Jaya) is the territorial army of the Indonesian Army, which serves as a defence component for Jakarta and its surrounding areas (Greater Jakarta). It is led by an army Major General with the title of \"Jakarta Military Regional Commander\" (Indonesian: Panglima Daerah Militer Kodam Jaya, abbreviated Pangdam Jaya). The Jakarta Military Command is located at East Jakarta and oversees several military battalions ready for defending the capital city and its vital installations. It also assists the Jakarta Metropolitan Police during certain tasks, such as supporting security during state visits, VVIP security, and riot control.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "The Jakarta provincial government relies on transfers from the central government for the bulk of its income. Local (non-central government) sources of revenue are incomes from various taxes such as vehicle ownership and vehicle transfer fees, among others. The ability of the regional government to respond to Jakarta's many problems is constrained by limited finances.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "The provincial government consistently runs a surplus of between 15 and 20% of planned spending, primarily because of delays in procurement and other inefficiencies. Regular under-spending is a matter of public comment. In 2013, the budget was around Rp 50 trillion ($US5.2 billion), equivalent to around $US380 per citizen. Spending priorities were on education, transport, flood control, environment and social spending (such as health and housing). Jakarta's regional budget (APBD) was Rp 77.1 trillion ($US5.92 billion), Rp 83.2 trillion ($US6.2 billion), and Rp 89 trillion ($US6.35 billion) for the year of 2017, 2018 and 2019 respectively.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "Jakarta consists of five Kota Administratif (Administrative cities/municipalities), each headed by a mayor, and one Kabupaten Administratif (Administrative regency). Each city and regency is divided into districts (kecamatan). The administrative cities/municipalities of Jakarta are:",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "The only administrative regency (kabupaten) of Jakarta is the Thousand Islands (Kepulauan Seribu), formerly a district within North Jakarta. It is a collection of 105 small islands located on the Java Sea. It is of high conservation value because of its unique ecosystems. Marine tourism, such as diving, water bicycling, and windsurfing, are the primary tourist activities in this territory. The main mode of transportation between the islands is speed boats or small ferries.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "As a metropolitan area of about 30 million people, Jakarta has a variety of transport systems. Jakarta was awarded 2021 global Sustainable Transport Award (STA) for integrated public transportation system.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "The city prioritized development of road networks, which were mostly designed to accommodate private vehicles. A notable feature of Jakarta's present road system is the toll road network. Composed of an inner and outer ring road and five toll roads radiating outwards, the network provides inner as well as outer city connections. An 'odd-even' policy limits road use to cars with either odd or even-numbered registration plates on a particular day as a transitional measure to alleviate traffic congestion until the future introduction of electronic road pricing.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "There are many bus terminals in the city, from where buses operate on numerous routes to connect neighborhoods within the city limit, to other areas of Greater Jakarta and to cities across the island of Java. The biggest of the bus terminal is Pulo Gebang Bus Terminal, which is arguably the largest of its kind in Southeast Asia. Main terminus for long distance train services are Gambir and Pasar Senen. High-speed railways is connecting Jakarta to Bandung and another one is at the planning stage from Jakarta to Surabaya.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "As of September 2022, Jakarta's public transport service coverage has reached 86 percent, which is targeted to Increase to 95 percent. Rapid transit in Greater Jakarta consists of TransJakarta bus rapid transit, Jakarta LRT, Jakarta MRT, KRL Commuterline, Jabodebek LRT, and Soekarno-Hatta Airport Rail Link. The city administration is building transit oriented development like Dukuh Atas TOD and CSW-ASEAN TOD in several area across Jakarta to facilitate commuters to transfer between different mode of public transportation.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "Privately owned bus systems like Kopaja, MetroMini, Mayasari Bakti and PPD also provide important services for Jakarta commuters with numerous routes throughout the city, many routes are/will replaced/replaced by Minitrans and Metrotrans buses. Pedicabs are banned from the city for causing traffic congestion. Bajaj auto rickshaw provide local transportation in the back streets of some parts of the city. Angkot microbuses also play a major role in road transport of Jakarta. Taxicabs and ojeks (motorcycle taxis) are available in the city. As of January 2023, about 2.6 million people use public transportation daily in Jakarta.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "The city administration has undertaken a project to build about 500 kilometers of bicycle lanes. As of June 2021, Jakarta already has 63 kilometers of bicycle lanes, and another 101 kilometers will be added by the end of the year 2021.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "Soekarno–Hatta International Airport (CGK) is the main airport serving the Greater Jakarta area, while Halim Perdanakusuma Airport (HLP) accommodates private and low-cost domestic flights. Other airports in the Jakarta metropolitan area include Pondok Cabe Airport and an airfield on Pulau Panjang, part of the Thousand Island archipelago.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "Jakarta is part of the Maritime Silk Road that runs from the Chinese coast via the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean and there to the Upper Adriatic region.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "To transform the city into a more livable one, a ten-year urban regeneration project was undertaken, for Rp 571 trillion ($40.5 billion). The project aimed to develop infrastructure, including the creation of a better integrated public transit system and the improvement of the city's clean water and wastewater systems, housing and flood control systems.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "Jakarta has many of the country's best-equipped private and public healthcare facilities. In 2012, the Governor of Jakarta Joko Widodo introduced a universal health care program, the 'Healthy Jakarta Card' (Kartu Jakarta Sehat, KJS). In January 2014, the Indonesian government launched a universal health care system called the Jaminan Kesehatan Nasional (JKN), which is run by BPJS Kesehatan. KJS is being integrated into JKN, and KJS cards are still valid as of 2018. As of 2021, 85.55% of the people of Jakarta is covered by JKN.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "Government-run hospitals are of a good standard but are often overcrowded. Government-run specialised hospitals include Dr. Cipto Mangunkusumo Hospital, Gatot Soebroto Army Hospital, as well as community hospitals and puskesmas. Other options for healthcare services include private hospitals and clinics. The private healthcare sector has seen significant changes, since the government began allowing foreign investment in the private sector in 2010. While some private facilities are run by nonprofit or religious organisations, most are for-profit. Hospital chains such as Siloam, Pondok Indah Hospital Group, Mayapada, Mitra Keluarga, Medika, Medistra, Ciputra, Radjak Hospital Group, RS Bunda Group, and Hermina operate in the city.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "Two private companies, PALYJA and Aetra, provide piped water in the western and eastern half of Jakarta respectively under 25-year concession contracts signed in 1998. A public asset holding company called PAM Jaya owns the infrastructure. Eighty per cent of the water distributed in Jakarta comes through the West Tarum Canal system from Jatiluhur reservoir on the Citarum River, 70 km (43 mi) southeast of the city. The water supply was privatised by President Suharto in 1998 to the French company Suez Environnement and the British company Thames Water International. Both companies subsequently sold their concessions to Indonesian companies. Customer growth in the first seven years of the concessions had been lower than before, possibly because of substantial inflation-adjusted tariff increases during this period. In 2005, tariffs were frozen, leading private water companies to cut down on investments.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "According to PALYJA, the service coverage ratio increased substantially from 34% (1998) to 65% (2010) in the western half of the concession. According to data by the Jakarta Water Supply Regulatory Body, access in the eastern half of the city served by PTJ increased from about 57% in 1998 to about 67% in 2004 but stagnated afterwards. However, other sources cite much lower access figures for piped water supply to houses, excluding access provided through public hydrants: one study estimated access as low as 25% in 2005, while another estimated it to be as low as 18.5% in 2011. Those without access to piped water get water mostly from wells that are often salty and unsanitary. As of 2017, according to the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources, Jakarta had a crisis over clean water.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "Jakarta hosts foreign embassies. Jakarta also serves as the seat of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Headquarters and is ASEAN's diplomatic capital.",
"title": "International relations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "Jakarta is a member of the Asian Network of Major Cities 21, C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group and ASEAN Smart Cities Network.",
"title": "International relations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "Jakarta signed sister city agreements with other cities, including Casablanca. To promote friendship between the two cities, the main avenue famous for its shopping and business centres was named after Jakarta's Moroccan sister city. No street in Casablanca is named after Jakarta. However, the Moroccan capital city of Rabat has an avenue named after Sukarno, Indonesia's first president, to commemorate his visit in 1960 and as a token of friendship.",
"title": "International relations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "Jakarta's sister cities are:",
"title": "International relations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "Jakarta has established a partnership with Rotterdam, especially on integrated urban water management, including capacity-building and knowledge exchange. This cooperation is mainly because both cities are dealing with similar problems; they lie in low-lying flat plains and are prone to flooding. Additionally, they have both implemented drainage systems involving canals, dams, and pumps vital for both cities for below-sea-level areas.",
"title": "International relations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "In addition to its sister cities, Jakarta cooperates with:",
"title": "International relations"
}
]
| Jakarta, officially the Special Capital Region of Jakarta and formerly Batavia, is the capital and largest metropolis of Indonesia. Lying on the northwest coast of Java, the world's most populous island, Jakarta is the largest metropole in Southeast Asia, and serves as the diplomatic capital of ASEAN. Jakarta is bordered by two provinces: West Java to the south and east; and, since 2000, Banten to the west. Its coastline faces the Java Sea to the north, and it shares a maritime border with Lampung to the west. Jakarta is the economic, cultural, and political centre of Indonesia. It possesses a province-level status and has a population of 10,679,951 as of mid-2022. Although Jakarta extends over only 661.23 km2 (255.30 sq mi) and thus has the smallest area of any Indonesian province, its metropolitan area covers 9,957.08 km2 (3,844.45 sq mi), which includes the satellite cities of Bogor, Depok, Tangerang, South Tangerang, and Bekasi, and has an estimated population of 35 million as of 2022, making it the largest urban area in Indonesia and the second-largest in the world. Jakarta ranks first among the Indonesian provinces in the human development index. Jakarta's business and employment opportunities, along with its ability to offer a potentially higher standard of living compared to other parts of the country, have attracted migrants from across the Indonesian archipelago, making it a melting pot of numerous cultures. Jakarta is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in Southeast Asia. Established in the fourth century as Sunda Kelapa, the city became an important trading port for the Sunda Kingdom. At one time, it was the de facto capital of the Dutch East Indies, when it was known as Batavia. Jakarta was officially a city within West Java until 1960 when its official status was changed to a province with special capital region distinction. As a province, its government consists of five administrative cities and one administrative regency. Jakarta is an alpha world city and is the seat of the ASEAN secretariat. Financial institutions such as the Bank of Indonesia, Indonesia Stock Exchange, and corporate headquarters of numerous Indonesian companies and multinational corporations are located in the city. In 2021, the city's GRP PPP was estimated at US$602.946 billion. Jakarta's main challenges include rapid urban growth, ecological breakdown, gridlocked traffic, congestion, and flooding due to subsidence. Jakarta is sinking up to 17 cm (6.7 inches) annually, which has made the city more prone to flooding and one of the fastest-sinking capitals in the world. In response to these challenges, in August 2019, President Joko Widodo announced his agreement with an official study that the capital of Indonesia would be moved from Jakarta to the planned city of Nusantara, in the province of East Kalimantan on the island of Borneo. The Parliament approved the move on 18 January 2022. | 2001-10-28T19:22:51Z | 2023-12-30T13:47:28Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakarta |
16,277 | Jack Ruby | Jack Leon Ruby (born Jacob Leon Rubenstein; c. March 25, 1911 – January 3, 1967) was an American nightclub owner who murdered Lee Harvey Oswald on November 24, 1963, two days after Oswald was accused of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Ruby shot and mortally wounded Oswald on live television in the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters and was immediately arrested. In a trial, Ruby was found guilty and sentenced to death. The conviction was appealed, and he was to be granted a new trial, but Ruby became ill, was diagnosed with cancer, and died of a pulmonary embolism on January 3, 1967.
In 1964, the Warren Commission concluded that Ruby acted alone in killing Oswald, that Ruby shot Oswald on impulse and in retaliation for the Kennedy assassination. The commission's findings are challenged by various critics who hypothesize that Ruby was part of a conspiracy surrounding the Kennedy assassination.
Ruby was born Jacob Leon Rubenstein on or around March 25, 1911, in the Maxwell Street area of Chicago, the son of Joseph Rubenstein and Fannie Turek Rutkowski (or Rokowsky), both Polish-born Orthodox Jews. Ruby was the fifth of his parents' 10 surviving children. While he was growing up, his parents were often violent towards each other and frequently separated; Ruby's mother was eventually committed to a mental hospital. His troubled childhood and adolescence were marked by juvenile delinquency with time being spent in foster homes. At age 11 in 1922, he was arrested for truancy. Ruby eventually skipped school so often that he had to spend time at the Institute for Juvenile Research. Still a young man, he sold horse-racing tip sheets and various novelties, then acted as a business agent for a local refuse collectors union that later became part of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT).
From his early childhood, Ruby was nicknamed "Sparky" by those who knew him. His sister, Eva Grant, said that he acquired the nickname because he resembled a slow-moving horse named "Spark Plug" or "Sparky" in the contemporary comic strip Barney Google. ("Spark Plug" debuted as a character in the strip in 1922, when Ruby was 11.) Other accounts say that the name was given because of his quick temper. Grant stated that Ruby did not like the nickname, and was quick to fight anyone who called him that.
In the 1940s, Ruby frequented race tracks in Illinois and California. He was drafted in 1943 and served in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II, working as an aircraft mechanic at U.S. bases until 1946. He had an honorable record and was promoted to Private First Class. Upon discharge, in 1946, Ruby returned to Chicago.
In 1947, Ruby moved to Dallas, purportedly because of the failure of merchandise deals in Chicago and to help operate his sister's nightclub. Soon afterward he and his brothers shortened their surnames from Rubenstein to Ruby. The stated reason for this was that the name "Rubenstein" was too long and that he was "well known" as Jack Ruby. Ruby later went on to manage various nightclubs, strip clubs, and dance halls. He developed close ties to many Dallas Police officers who frequented his nightclubs, where he provided them with free liquor, prostitutes and other favors.
Ruby never married and had no children. At the time of the assassination, Ruby was living with George Senator, who referred to Ruby as "my boyfriend" during the Warren Commission hearing, but denied the two being homosexual lovers. Warren Commission lawyer Burt Griffin later told author Gerald Posner: "I'm not sure if Senator was honest with us about his relationship with Ruby. People did not advertise their homosexuality in 1963".
Some critics have said that Ruby was involved in illegal activity such as gambling, narcotics, and prostitution.
A 1956 FBI report stated that informant Eileen Curry had moved to Dallas in January with her boyfriend James Breen after jumping bail on narcotics charges. Breen told her that he had made connections with a large narcotics setup operating between Texas, Mexico, and the East, and that "James got the okay to operate through Ruby of Dallas."
Dallas County Sheriff Steve Guthrie told the FBI that he believed that Ruby "operated some prostitution activities and other vices in his club" in Dallas.
Dallas disc jockey Kenneth Dowe testified that Ruby was known around the station for "procuring women for different people who came to town".
According to people interviewed by law enforcement and the Warren Commission, Ruby was desperate to attract attention to himself and to his club. He knew a great number of people in Dallas, but he had only a few friends. His business ventures remained unsuccessful and he was heavily in debt.
The commission received reports of Ruby's penchant for violence. He had a volatile temper, and often resorted to violence with employees who had upset him. He acted as the bouncer of his own club and beat his customers on at least 25 occasions. The fights would often end with Ruby throwing his victims down the club's stairs. In one fight with a man, the man bit Ruby's left index finger so badly that the doctors had it amputated.
Stories of Ruby's eccentric and unstable behavior describe him as sometimes taking his shirt or other clothes off in social gatherings, and either hitting his chest like a gorilla or rolling around on the floor. During conversations, he could change the topic suddenly in mid-sentence. He sometimes welcomed a guest to his club, but on other nights forbade the same guest from entering. He was described by those who knew him as "a kook", "totally unpredictable", "a psycho", and "suffering from some form of disturbance".
During the 1970s, prominent psychiatrist Irene Jakab, who was known for her use of art therapy in diagnosing and treating patients with mental illness, analyzed artwork that had been created by Ruby while he was in jail. While assessing one of Ruby's drawings, which had been included as part of art exhibits at the World Congress of Psychiatry meeting in Waikiki, Hawaii and the University of Hawaii in late August and early September 1977, she observed that his work conveyed "repressed aggression and secretiveness," adding:
Notice how he really constricts himself so as not to reveal himself. He hides behind all those geometrical lines and pointed edges. You can feel his controlled aggression.
The Warren Commission attempted to reconstruct Ruby's movements from November 21, 1963, through November 24. The Commission reported that he was attending to his duties as the proprietor of the Carousel Club located at 1312 1/2 Commerce St. in downtown Dallas and the Vegas Club in the city's Oak Lawn district from the afternoon of November 21 to the early hours of November 22. A number of Dallas police officers were meeting in the office of Assistant District Attorney Ben Ellis when Ruby entered and passed out business cards advertising a gig by Jada, a stripper at the Carousel. According to Lt. W. F. Dyson, Ruby introduced himself to Ellis and added: "You probably don't know me now, but you will."
According to the Warren Commission, on November 22, Ruby was in the second-floor advertising offices of the Dallas Morning News, five blocks away from the Texas School Book Depository, placing weekly advertisements for his nightclubs when he learned of the assassination around 12:45 p.m. According to witnesses, Ruby was visibly shaken. Ruby then made phone calls to his assistant at the Carousel Club and to his sister. The Commission stated that an employee of the Dallas Morning News estimated that Ruby left the newspaper's offices at 1:30 p.m., but indicated that other testimony suggested that he had left earlier. According to the Warren Commission, Ruby arrived back at the Carousel Club shortly before 1:45 p.m. to notify employees that the club would be closed that evening.
John Newnam, an employee at the newspaper's advertisement department, testified that Ruby became upset over an anti-Kennedy ad published in the Morning News that was signed by "The American Fact-Finding Committee, Bernard Weissman, Chairman." Ruby was sensitive to antisemitism and was distressed that an ad attacking the President was signed by a person with a "Jewish name." Early the next morning, Ruby noticed a political billboard featuring the text "IMPEACH EARL WARREN" in block letters. Ruby's sister Eva testified that Ruby had told her that he believed that the anti-Kennedy ad and the anti-Warren sign were connected and were a plot by a "gentile" to blame the assassination on the Jews.
Ruby was seen in the halls of the Dallas Police Headquarters on several occasions after Oswald's arrest for the murder of Dallas policeman J. D. Tippit. He was present at an arranged press meeting with Oswald. A reporter asked Oswald, "Did you kill the President?" and Oswald answered, "No, I have not been charged with that. In fact, nobody has said that to me yet. The first thing I heard about it was when the newspaper reporters in the hall asked me that question." Another reporter told Oswald that he had been charged and Oswald reacted with a look of astonishment. Newsreel footage from WFAA-TV (Dallas) and NBC shows that Ruby impersonated a newspaper reporter during a press conference held by District Attorney Henry Wade at Dallas Police Headquarters that night. Wade briefed reporters that Oswald was a member of the anti-Castro Free Cuba Committee. Ruby was one of several people there who spoke up to correct Wade, saying, "Henry, that's the Fair Play for Cuba Committee", a pro-Castro organization. Ruby later told the FBI that he had his .38 Colt Cobra revolver in his right pocket during the press conference.
On November 24, Ruby drove into town with his pet dachshund Sheba to send an emergency money order at the Wells Fargo on Main Street to one of his employees. The time stamp was 11:17 a.m. for the transaction. Ruby then walked half a block to the Dallas police headquarters, where he made his way into the basement.
At 11:21 a.m. CST, Oswald was being escorted by Dallas police Detectives Jim Leavelle and L. C. Graves through the police basement to an armored car that was to take him to the nearby county jail, when Ruby emerged from a crowd of reporters with his revolver aimed at Oswald's abdomen and shot him at point blank range, mortally wounding him. Oswald screamed "Oh!" in pain and his hands clutched at his stomach as he slumped to the floor, moaning. Police detective Billy Combest, who knew Ruby, exclaimed, "Jack, you son of a bitch!" The armored car had rolled down the ramp at the moment Ruby emerged and slightly hit Ruby's leg almost immediately after he fired, causing him to almost lose balance as he was immediately subdued by police while Oswald was carried back into the basement level jail office. Combest asked Oswald, "Do you have anything you want to tell us now?" Oswald shook his head.
Drifting in and out of consciousness, Oswald was placed onto an ambulance and was driven to Parkland Memorial Hospital, the same hospital where President Kennedy had died two days earlier. Leavelle and Graves along with Frederick Bieberdorf, a medical student on duty, rode in the ambulance. Bieberdorf said that several blocks before reaching the hospital, Oswald started thrashing about, resisting Beiberdorf's efforts of heart massage and attempting to free an oxygen mask over his mouth. At Parkland, Oswald was treated by the same surgeons who had tried to save Kennedy; they determined Ruby's bullet had entered Oswald's left side in the front part of the abdomen and caused extensive damage to his spleen, stomach, aorta, vena cava, kidney, liver, diaphragm, and eleventh rib before coming to rest on his right side. Oswald died at 1:07 p.m.
A network television pool camera was broadcasting live to cover Oswald's transfer; millions of people watching on NBC saw the shooting as it happened and on other networks within minutes afterward. Several photographs were taken of the event, capturing the moments around when Ruby pulled the trigger. In 1964, Robert H. Jackson of the Dallas Times Herald was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Photography for his image of the shooting of Oswald.
Great indignation was directed towards Ruby's murder of Oswald. Many felt that the killing had robbed the nation of essential information and had left questions unanswered. Former Vice President Richard Nixon said, "(Oswald was) also entitled to a trial..." "...two wrongs don't make a right." Oswald's murder compounded initial suspicions that the Kennedy assassination was part of a larger plot.
Not all were shocked. The crowd outside the headquarters burst into applause when they heard that Oswald had been shot. In Dallas and elsewhere in the nation, Oswald was hated in death, and Ruby was viewed as a hero by some citizens, and during his time in jail, he received many letters from the public, often praising him for his deed.
After his arrest, Ruby said that he had been distraught over President Kennedy's death and had helped the city of Dallas "redeem" itself in the eyes of the public, and that he was "saving Mrs. Kennedy the discomfiture of coming back to trial." He also claimed that he shot Oswald on the spur of the moment when the opportunity presented itself, without considering any reason for doing so. Ruby said that he was an admirer of President Kennedy and the Kennedy family, that he cried when he heard that the President was shot, "in mourning" after, "cried a great deal" Saturday afternoon, and was depressed that night. The grief over the assassination, Ruby stated, finally "reached the point of insanity," suddenly compelling him to shoot when Oswald walked in front of him in the basement that Sunday morning. At the time of the shooting, Ruby said that he was taking phenmetrazine, a central nervous system stimulant. Ruby also said that he entered the police basement by coming down the Main Street ramp. Later, Ruby expressed remorse to his brother Earl saying he never wanted Oswald to die.
Jack Ruby asked Dallas attorney Tom Howard to represent him. Howard accepted and asked Ruby if he could think of anything that might damage his defense. Ruby responded that there would be a problem if a man by the name of "Davis" should come up. Ruby told his attorney that he "had been involved with Davis, who was a gunrunner entangled in anti-Castro efforts."
Ruby's brother Earl replaced Howard with prominent San Francisco defense attorney Melvin Belli, who agreed to represent him pro bono. Lawyer Joe H. Tonahill also signed on to assist with Ruby's defense. At his bond hearing in January 1964, while talking to reporters, Jack Ruby tearfully said regarding the assassination of Kennedy, in a high, choked voice, that he could not understand "how a great man like that could be lost."
Ruby testified that he thought he said, "You killed my President, you rat!" as he shot Oswald. Officer McMillon testified he heard Ruby say, "You rat son of a bitch, you shot the president". This was disputed by television footage showing McMillon looking in the opposite direction from the shooting. Dallas police sergeant Patrick Dean testified that when Ruby was arrested, Ruby said he thought about killing Oswald two nights earlier, to show the world that "Jews have guts." Detective Don Archer said Ruby had told him he intended to shoot Oswald three times, and McMillon corroborated this. On March 14, 1964, Ruby was convicted of murder with malice and was sentenced to death.
Ruby's conviction was overturned by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on the grounds that "an oral confession of premeditation made while in police custody" should have been ruled inadmissible, because it violated a Texas criminal statute. The court also ruled that the venue should have been changed to a Texas county other than the one in which the high-profile crime had been committed.
During the six months following the Kennedy assassination, Ruby repeatedly asked to speak to the members of the Warren Commission. The commission initially showed no interest, but Ruby's sister Eileen wrote letters to the commission and her letters became public. The Commission then agreed to talk to Ruby. In June 1964, Chief Justice Earl Warren, Representative (and future President) Gerald R. Ford of Michigan, and other commission members went to Dallas to see Ruby. Ruby asked Warren several times to take him to Washington D.C., saying that "my life is in danger here" and that he wanted an opportunity to make additional statements. He added that the people from whom he felt himself to be in danger were the John Birch Society of Dallas, including Edwin Walker, who he claimed were trying to falsely implicate him as being involved in a conspiracy to assassinate the President. He added: "I want to tell the truth, and I can't tell it here." Warren told Ruby that he would be unable to comply, because many legal barriers would need to be overcome, and public interest in the situation would be too heavy. Warren also told Ruby that the commission would have no way of protecting him, since it had no police powers. Ruby said that he wanted to convince President Lyndon Johnson that he was not part of any conspiracy to kill Kennedy.
Eventually, the appellate court agreed with Ruby's lawyers that he should be granted a new trial. On October 5, 1966, the court ruled that his motion for a change of venue before the original trial court should have been granted. Ruby's conviction and death sentence were overturned. Arrangements were underway for a new trial to be held in February 1967 in Wichita Falls, Texas, but Ruby was admitted to Parkland Hospital on December 9, 1966, suffering from pneumonia, where he was diagnosed with cancer in his liver, lungs, and brain. His condition rapidly deteriorated. An armed guard was placed outside his room but family and friends were allowed to visit. On December 16, Earl Ruby, accompanied by one of his brother's lawyers, smuggled a tape recorder hidden in a briefcase into Jack's room to record an interview about his murder of Oswald. Ruby maintained that he entered the basement by coming down the ramp, had killed Oswald out of grief over the assassination, and denied knowing Oswald prior. According to an unnamed Associated Press source, Ruby made a final statement from his hospital bed on December 19, that he had acted alone. "There is nothing to hide," Ruby said, "there was no one else."
Ruby died of a pulmonary embolism on January 3, 1967, at Parkland Hospital. He was buried beside his parents in the Westlawn Cemetery in Norridge, Illinois.
The Warren Commission found no evidence linking Ruby's killing of Oswald with any broader conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy. The report provided a detailed biography of Ruby's life and activities to help ascertain whether he was involved in a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy. The Commission also tackled widespread rumours that Ruby and Oswald knew each other and that Oswald was seen at the Carousel Club. Television footage that showed Oswald glance briefly in Ruby's direction as he emerged to shoot him, indicating to some observers a look of recognition, compounded such suspicion. Careful analysis of the footage indicate Oswald was looking at reporter Ike Pappas who had held his microphone out towards Oswald and asked, "Do you have anything to say in your defense?" They concluded that various witnesses lacked credibility and that there was no solid evidence linking the two men. The Commission indicated that there was not a "significant link between Ruby and organized crime" and said he acted independently in killing Oswald.
Warren Commission investigator David Belin said that postal inspector Harry Holmes arrived unannounced at the Dallas police station on the morning that Ruby shot Oswald and, upon invitation by the investigators, had questioned Oswald, thus delaying his transfer by half an hour. Belin noted that, had Ruby been part of a conspiracy, he would have been downtown 30 minutes earlier, when Oswald had been scheduled to be transferred. The commission accepted Ruby's claim that he entered the police basement via the Main Street ramp. Author Norman Mailer and others have questioned why Ruby would have left his beloved dog in his car if his killing of Oswald had been planned.
Some of Ruby's friends, relatives (notably his brother Earl and sister Eva) and associates, supported the official conclusion that Ruby acted alone, maintaining that he was upset over President Kennedy's death, even crying on occasions and closing his clubs for three days as a mark of respect. They also refuted conspiracy theorists' claims, saying that Ruby's connection with gangsters was minimal at most and that he was not the sort of person who would be entrusted to be part of a conspiracy.
Dallas reporter Tony Zoppi, who knew Ruby well, claimed that one "would have to be crazy" to entrust Ruby with anything as important as a high-level plot to kill Kennedy since he "couldn't keep a secret for five minutes ... Jack was one of the most talkative guys you would ever meet. He'd be the worst fellow in the world to be part of a conspiracy, because he just plain talked too much." He and others described Ruby as the sort who enjoyed being at "the center of attention", trying to make friends with people and being more of a nuisance.
Some writers, including former Los Angeles District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi, dismiss Ruby's connections to organized crime as being highly minimal: "It is very noteworthy that without exception, not one of these conspiracy theorists knew or had ever met Jack Ruby. Without our even resorting to his family and roommate, all of whom think the suggestion of Ruby being connected to the mob is ridiculous, those who knew him, unanimously and without exception, think the notion of his being connected to the Mafia, and then killing Oswald for them, is nothing short of laughable."
Bill Alexander, who prosecuted Ruby for Oswald's murder, equally rejected any suggestions that Ruby was involved with organized crime, claiming that conspiracy theorists based it on the claim that "A knew B, and Ruby knew B back in 1950, so he must have known A, and that must be the link to the conspiracy."
Ruby's brother Earl denied allegations that Jack was involved in racketeering Chicago nightclubs, and author Gerald Posner suggested in his book Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, that witnesses may have confused Ruby with Harry Rubenstein, a convicted Chicago felon. Entertainment reporter Tony Zoppi was also dismissive of mob ties and described Ruby as a "born loser".
Many critics have not accepted the conclusions of the Warren Commission and have proposed several other theories.
White House correspondent Seth Kantor was a passenger in Kennedy's motorcade. He testified that he had visited Parkland Hospital after Kennedy was shot, and that he felt a tug on his coat as he entered the hospital at about 1:30 p.m. He turned around to see Jack Ruby, who called him by his first name and shook his hand. He said that he had become acquainted with Ruby while he was a reporter for the Dallas Times Herald newspaper. According to Kantor, Ruby asked him if he thought that it would be a good idea for him to close his nightclubs for the next three nights because of the tragedy, and Kantor responded without thinking that doing so would be a good idea.
Ruby denied that he had been at Parkland Hospital and the Warren Commission dismissed Kantor's testimony, saying that the encounter at Parkland Hospital would have to have taken place in a span of a few minutes before and after 1:30 pm, as evidenced by telephone company records of calls made by both people. The commission also pointed to contradictory witness testimony and to the lack of video confirmation of Ruby at the scene. The Commission concluded that "Kantor probably did not see Ruby at Parkland Hospital" and "may have been mistaken about both the time and the place that he saw Ruby."
In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations re-examined Kantor's testimony and stated, "the Warren Commission concluded that Kantor was mistaken" about his Parkland encounter with Ruby, but "the Committee determined he probably was not."
Kantor also reported that Ruby might have tampered with evidence while at Parkland. Kantor researched the Ruby case for years. He wrote in Who Was Jack Ruby?:
The mob was Ruby's "friend." And Ruby could well have been paying off an IOU the day he was used to kill Lee Harvey Oswald. Remember: "I have been used for a purpose," the way Ruby expressed it to Chief Justice Warren in their June 7, 1964 session. It would not have been hard for the mob to maneuver Ruby through the ranks of a few negotiable police.
The House Select Committee on Assassinations wrote in its 1979 Final Report:
Ruby's shooting of Oswald was not a spontaneous act, in that it involved at least some premeditation. Similarly, the committee believed it was less likely that Ruby entered the police basement without assistance, even though the assistance may have been provided with no knowledge of Ruby's intentions.... The committee was troubled by the apparently unlocked doors along the stairway route and the removal of security guards from the area of the garage nearest the stairway shortly before the shooting.... There is also evidence that the Dallas Police Department withheld relevant information from the Warren Commission concerning Ruby's entry to the scene of the Oswald transfer.
The HSCA suggested Ruby might have entered the basement via a stairway accessible from an alleyway next to the Dallas Municipal Building.
Lieutenant Billy Grammer, a dispatcher for the Dallas Police Department, said that he received an anonymous phone call at 3 a.m. on November 24 from a man who told him that he knew of the plan to move Oswald from the basement and warned that, unless the plans were changed, "we are going to kill him." After Oswald was shot, Grammer claimed to have recognized Ruby as the caller. Grammer believed that Ruby's shooting of Oswald was "a planned event."
In his Warren Commission testimony, Detective Don Archer claimed that, after his arrest, Ruby looked him straight in the eye and said, "Well, I intended to shoot him three times." Kantor wrote that Ruby's response to Archer did not suggest a spontaneous reaction, and that he implied having prior intention.
Ruby's explanation for killing Oswald would be exposed "as a fabricated legal ploy", according to the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Ruby wrote a note to attorney Joseph Tonahill: "Joe, you should know this. My first lawyer Tom Howard told me to say that I shot Oswald so that Caroline and Mrs. Kennedy wouldn't have to come to Dallas to testify. OK?"
G. Robert Blakey, who was chief counsel for the House Select Committee on Assassinations from 1977 to 1979, said: "The most plausible explanation for the murder of Oswald by Jack Ruby was that Ruby had stalked him on behalf of organized crime, trying to reach him on at least three occasions in the forty-eight hours before he silenced him forever."
Russell Moore, an acquaintance of Ruby, testified to the Commission that Ruby expressed no bitterness towards Oswald and called him "a good looking guy," comparing him to the actor Paul Newman. Announcer Glen Duncan also said Ruby described Oswald as a "fairly nice looking kid" comparing him to Newman.
David Scheim noted in his book Contract on America that while some said that Ruby was upset over the weekend of the assassination, others said that he was not. TV newsman Vic Robertson Jr. saw Ruby at police headquarters on Friday night and said that he "appeared to be anything but under stress or strain. He seemed happy, jovial, was joking and laughing." Duncan also said that Ruby "was not grieving" and seemed "happy that evidence was piling up against Oswald."
Scheim also suggests that Ruby made a "candid confession" when giving testimony to the Warren Commission. During his testimony, Ruby teared up when talking about a Saturday morning eulogy for Kennedy, but after composing himself, inexplicably said, "I must be a great actor, I tell you that." Ruby also remarked that "they didn't ask me another question: 'If I loved the President so much, why wasn't I at the parade?'" (referring to the presidential motorcade) and "it's strange that perhaps I didn't vote for President Kennedy, or didn't vote at all, that I should build up such a great affection for him." Ruby's club stripper Jada, during an interview with ABC's Paul Good, said that "I believe [Ruby] disliked Bobby Kennedy".
Schiem also noted some who knew Ruby who stated that the patriotic statements which Ruby professed were quite out of character. Ruby's gambling business partner Harry Hall said "Ruby was the type who was interested in any way to make money," and he also said that he "could not conceive of Ruby doing anything out of patriotism." Jack Kelly had known Ruby since 1943, and he "scoffed at the idea of a patriotic motive..." and felt that Ruby would have killed Oswald "for publicity [or] for money". Ruby's friend Paul Jones also said that he doubted that Ruby "would have become emotionally upset and killed Oswald on the spur of the moment. He felt Ruby would have done it for money."
Ruby's lawyers, led by Sam Houston Clinton, appealed to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals after his 1964 conviction, the highest criminal court in Texas. Ruby's lawyers argued that he could not have received a fair trial in Dallas because of the excessive publicity surrounding the case. In an interview with reporters in March 1965, Ruby stated: "Everything pertaining to what's happening has never come to the surface. The world will never know the true facts of what occurred, my motive. The people who had so much to gain, and had such an ulterior motive for putting me in the position I'm in, will never let the true facts come above board to the world." A reporter asked, "Are these people in very high positions, Jack?", and he responded, "Yes."
Kantor speculated in 1978 that the "Davis" that Ruby mentioned to Tom Howard may have been Thomas Eli Davis III, a CIA-connected mercenary.
Dallas Deputy Sheriff Al Maddox claimed: "Ruby told me, he said, 'Well, they injected me for a cold.' He said it was cancer cells. That's what he told me, Ruby did. I said you don't believe that bullshit. He said, 'I damn sure do!' One day when I started to leave, Ruby shook hands with me and I could feel a piece of paper in his palm." It was a note in which Ruby claimed that he was part of a conspiracy, and that his role was to silence Oswald. Not long before Ruby died, according to an article in the London Sunday Times, he told psychiatrist Werner Teuter that the assassination was "an act of overthrowing the government" and that he knew "who had President Kennedy killed". He added: "I am doomed. I do not want to die. But I am not insane. I was framed to kill Oswald."
On March 11, 1959, according FBI agent Charles W. Flynn of the Dallas Office approached Ruby to become a federal informant due to his job as a night club operator, since he "might have knowledge of the criminal element in Dallas". Ruby was willing to become an informant and was contacted by the FBI eight times between March 11, 1959, and October 2, 1959, but he provided no information to the Bureau; he was not paid, and contact ceased.
Scheim theorised that Mafia leaders Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante Jr. and organized labor leader Jimmy Hoffa ordered the assassination of Kennedy. Scheim cited in particular a 25-fold increase in the number of out-of-state telephone calls from Jack Ruby to associates of these crime bosses in the months before the assassination. According to author Vincent Bugliosi, both the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations determined that all of these calls were related to Ruby seeking help from the American Guild of Variety Artists in a matter concerning two of his competitors. The House Select Committee on Assassinations report stated that "most of Ruby's phone calls during late 1963 were related to his labor troubles. In the light of the identity of some of the individuals with whom Ruby spoke, however, the possibility of other matters being discussed could not be dismissed."
Bill Bonanno, son of New York Mafia boss Joseph Bonanno, stated in Bound By Honor that he realized that certain Mafia families were involved in the JFK assassination when Ruby killed Oswald, since Bonanno was aware that Ruby was an associate of Chicago mobster Sam Giancana.
Some conspiracy theorists have suggested Ruby had links to organized crime. The House Select Committee on Assassinations undertook a similar investigation of Ruby in 1979, 15 years after the written report, and said that he "had a significant number of associations and direct and indirect contacts with underworld figures" and "the Dallas criminal element," but that he was not a member of organized crime.
Ruby was said to have been acquainted with the Mafia. The HSCA said that Ruby had known Chicago mobster Sam Giancana and Joseph Campisi since 1947 and had been seen with them on many occasions. After an investigation of Joe Campisi, the HSCA found:
While Campisi's technical characterization in federal law enforcement records as an organized crime member has ranged from definite to suspected to negative, it is clear that he was an associate or friend of many Dallas-based organized crime members, particularly Joseph Civello, during the time he was the head of the Dallas organization. There was no indication that Campisi had engaged in any specific organized crime-related activities.
G. Robert Blakey, the chief counsel for the HSCA, called Campisi "the No. 2 man in the mob in Dallas." He wrote in a 1993 article for The Washington Post: "It is difficult to dispute the underworld pedigree of Jack Ruby, though the Warren Commission did it in 1964. Similarly, a PBS Frontline investigation into the connections between Ruby and Dallas organized crime figures reported the following:
In 1963, Sam and Joe Campisi were leading figures in the Dallas underworld. Jack knew the Campisis and had been seen with them on many occasions. The Campisis were lieutenants of Carlos Marcello, the Mafia boss who had reportedly talked of killing the President.
On the night before Kennedy was assassinated, Ruby and Ralph Paul had dinner together at the Egyptian Lounge run by Joe and Sam Campisi. After Ruby was jailed for killing Oswald, Joe Campisi "regularly visited" him.
Howard P. Willens was the third-highest official in the Department of Justice and assistant counsel to J. Lee Rankin. He helped organize the Warren Commission. Willens also outlined the commission's investigative priorities and terminated an investigation of Ruby's Cuban related activities. An FBI report states that Willens' father had been Tony Accardo's next-door neighbor going back to 1958. In 1946, Tony Accardo allegedly asked Jack Ruby to go to Texas with Mafia associates Pat Manno and Romie Nappi to make sure that Dallas County Sheriff Steve Gutherie would acquiesce to the Mafia's expansion into Dallas.
Ruby went to see a man named Lewis McWillie in Cuba four years before the assassination. McWillie had previously run illegal gambling establishments in Texas, and Ruby considered him one of his closest friends. McWillie was supervising gambling activities at Havana's Tropicana Club when Ruby visited him in August 1959. Ruby told the Warren Commission that his August trip to Cuba was merely a social visit at the invitation of McWillie. The HSCA later concluded that Ruby "most likely was serving as a courier for gambling interests". The committee also found circumstantial but not conclusive evidence that "Ruby met with Santo Trafficante Jr. in Cuba sometime in 1959."
James E. Beaird, who claimed to be a poker-playing friend of Ruby, told The Dallas Morning News and the FBI that Ruby smuggled guns and ammunition from Galveston Bay, Texas to Fidel Castro's guerrillas in Cuba in the late 1950s. Beaird said that Ruby "was in it for the money. It wouldn't matter which side, just the one that would pay him the most." Beaird said that the guns were stored in a two-story house near the waterfront, and that he saw Ruby and his associates load "many boxes of new guns, including automatic rifles and handguns" on a 50-foot military-surplus boat. He claimed that "each time that the boat left with guns and ammunition, Jack Ruby was on the boat."
Conversely, some conspiracy theorists have focused on Ruby's connections to the police in regards to his murder of Oswald, and dismiss his mob connections as a misdirection.
This article incorporates public domain material from Warren Commission Report, Appendix 16: A Biography of Jack Ruby. National Archives and Records Administration. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Jack Leon Ruby (born Jacob Leon Rubenstein; c. March 25, 1911 – January 3, 1967) was an American nightclub owner who murdered Lee Harvey Oswald on November 24, 1963, two days after Oswald was accused of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Ruby shot and mortally wounded Oswald on live television in the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters and was immediately arrested. In a trial, Ruby was found guilty and sentenced to death. The conviction was appealed, and he was to be granted a new trial, but Ruby became ill, was diagnosed with cancer, and died of a pulmonary embolism on January 3, 1967.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "In 1964, the Warren Commission concluded that Ruby acted alone in killing Oswald, that Ruby shot Oswald on impulse and in retaliation for the Kennedy assassination. The commission's findings are challenged by various critics who hypothesize that Ruby was part of a conspiracy surrounding the Kennedy assassination.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Ruby was born Jacob Leon Rubenstein on or around March 25, 1911, in the Maxwell Street area of Chicago, the son of Joseph Rubenstein and Fannie Turek Rutkowski (or Rokowsky), both Polish-born Orthodox Jews. Ruby was the fifth of his parents' 10 surviving children. While he was growing up, his parents were often violent towards each other and frequently separated; Ruby's mother was eventually committed to a mental hospital. His troubled childhood and adolescence were marked by juvenile delinquency with time being spent in foster homes. At age 11 in 1922, he was arrested for truancy. Ruby eventually skipped school so often that he had to spend time at the Institute for Juvenile Research. Still a young man, he sold horse-racing tip sheets and various novelties, then acted as a business agent for a local refuse collectors union that later became part of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT).",
"title": "Early life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "From his early childhood, Ruby was nicknamed \"Sparky\" by those who knew him. His sister, Eva Grant, said that he acquired the nickname because he resembled a slow-moving horse named \"Spark Plug\" or \"Sparky\" in the contemporary comic strip Barney Google. (\"Spark Plug\" debuted as a character in the strip in 1922, when Ruby was 11.) Other accounts say that the name was given because of his quick temper. Grant stated that Ruby did not like the nickname, and was quick to fight anyone who called him that.",
"title": "Early life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In the 1940s, Ruby frequented race tracks in Illinois and California. He was drafted in 1943 and served in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II, working as an aircraft mechanic at U.S. bases until 1946. He had an honorable record and was promoted to Private First Class. Upon discharge, in 1946, Ruby returned to Chicago.",
"title": "Early life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In 1947, Ruby moved to Dallas, purportedly because of the failure of merchandise deals in Chicago and to help operate his sister's nightclub. Soon afterward he and his brothers shortened their surnames from Rubenstein to Ruby. The stated reason for this was that the name \"Rubenstein\" was too long and that he was \"well known\" as Jack Ruby. Ruby later went on to manage various nightclubs, strip clubs, and dance halls. He developed close ties to many Dallas Police officers who frequented his nightclubs, where he provided them with free liquor, prostitutes and other favors.",
"title": "Early life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Ruby never married and had no children. At the time of the assassination, Ruby was living with George Senator, who referred to Ruby as \"my boyfriend\" during the Warren Commission hearing, but denied the two being homosexual lovers. Warren Commission lawyer Burt Griffin later told author Gerald Posner: \"I'm not sure if Senator was honest with us about his relationship with Ruby. People did not advertise their homosexuality in 1963\".",
"title": "Early life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Some critics have said that Ruby was involved in illegal activity such as gambling, narcotics, and prostitution.",
"title": "Illegal activities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "A 1956 FBI report stated that informant Eileen Curry had moved to Dallas in January with her boyfriend James Breen after jumping bail on narcotics charges. Breen told her that he had made connections with a large narcotics setup operating between Texas, Mexico, and the East, and that \"James got the okay to operate through Ruby of Dallas.\"",
"title": "Illegal activities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Dallas County Sheriff Steve Guthrie told the FBI that he believed that Ruby \"operated some prostitution activities and other vices in his club\" in Dallas.",
"title": "Illegal activities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Dallas disc jockey Kenneth Dowe testified that Ruby was known around the station for \"procuring women for different people who came to town\".",
"title": "Illegal activities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "According to people interviewed by law enforcement and the Warren Commission, Ruby was desperate to attract attention to himself and to his club. He knew a great number of people in Dallas, but he had only a few friends. His business ventures remained unsuccessful and he was heavily in debt.",
"title": "Character"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The commission received reports of Ruby's penchant for violence. He had a volatile temper, and often resorted to violence with employees who had upset him. He acted as the bouncer of his own club and beat his customers on at least 25 occasions. The fights would often end with Ruby throwing his victims down the club's stairs. In one fight with a man, the man bit Ruby's left index finger so badly that the doctors had it amputated.",
"title": "Character"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Stories of Ruby's eccentric and unstable behavior describe him as sometimes taking his shirt or other clothes off in social gatherings, and either hitting his chest like a gorilla or rolling around on the floor. During conversations, he could change the topic suddenly in mid-sentence. He sometimes welcomed a guest to his club, but on other nights forbade the same guest from entering. He was described by those who knew him as \"a kook\", \"totally unpredictable\", \"a psycho\", and \"suffering from some form of disturbance\".",
"title": "Character"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "During the 1970s, prominent psychiatrist Irene Jakab, who was known for her use of art therapy in diagnosing and treating patients with mental illness, analyzed artwork that had been created by Ruby while he was in jail. While assessing one of Ruby's drawings, which had been included as part of art exhibits at the World Congress of Psychiatry meeting in Waikiki, Hawaii and the University of Hawaii in late August and early September 1977, she observed that his work conveyed \"repressed aggression and secretiveness,\" adding:",
"title": "Character"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Notice how he really constricts himself so as not to reveal himself. He hides behind all those geometrical lines and pointed edges. You can feel his controlled aggression.",
"title": "Character"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The Warren Commission attempted to reconstruct Ruby's movements from November 21, 1963, through November 24. The Commission reported that he was attending to his duties as the proprietor of the Carousel Club located at 1312 1/2 Commerce St. in downtown Dallas and the Vegas Club in the city's Oak Lawn district from the afternoon of November 21 to the early hours of November 22. A number of Dallas police officers were meeting in the office of Assistant District Attorney Ben Ellis when Ruby entered and passed out business cards advertising a gig by Jada, a stripper at the Carousel. According to Lt. W. F. Dyson, Ruby introduced himself to Ellis and added: \"You probably don't know me now, but you will.\"",
"title": "John F. Kennedy assassination"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "According to the Warren Commission, on November 22, Ruby was in the second-floor advertising offices of the Dallas Morning News, five blocks away from the Texas School Book Depository, placing weekly advertisements for his nightclubs when he learned of the assassination around 12:45 p.m. According to witnesses, Ruby was visibly shaken. Ruby then made phone calls to his assistant at the Carousel Club and to his sister. The Commission stated that an employee of the Dallas Morning News estimated that Ruby left the newspaper's offices at 1:30 p.m., but indicated that other testimony suggested that he had left earlier. According to the Warren Commission, Ruby arrived back at the Carousel Club shortly before 1:45 p.m. to notify employees that the club would be closed that evening.",
"title": "John F. Kennedy assassination"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "John Newnam, an employee at the newspaper's advertisement department, testified that Ruby became upset over an anti-Kennedy ad published in the Morning News that was signed by \"The American Fact-Finding Committee, Bernard Weissman, Chairman.\" Ruby was sensitive to antisemitism and was distressed that an ad attacking the President was signed by a person with a \"Jewish name.\" Early the next morning, Ruby noticed a political billboard featuring the text \"IMPEACH EARL WARREN\" in block letters. Ruby's sister Eva testified that Ruby had told her that he believed that the anti-Kennedy ad and the anti-Warren sign were connected and were a plot by a \"gentile\" to blame the assassination on the Jews.",
"title": "John F. Kennedy assassination"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Ruby was seen in the halls of the Dallas Police Headquarters on several occasions after Oswald's arrest for the murder of Dallas policeman J. D. Tippit. He was present at an arranged press meeting with Oswald. A reporter asked Oswald, \"Did you kill the President?\" and Oswald answered, \"No, I have not been charged with that. In fact, nobody has said that to me yet. The first thing I heard about it was when the newspaper reporters in the hall asked me that question.\" Another reporter told Oswald that he had been charged and Oswald reacted with a look of astonishment. Newsreel footage from WFAA-TV (Dallas) and NBC shows that Ruby impersonated a newspaper reporter during a press conference held by District Attorney Henry Wade at Dallas Police Headquarters that night. Wade briefed reporters that Oswald was a member of the anti-Castro Free Cuba Committee. Ruby was one of several people there who spoke up to correct Wade, saying, \"Henry, that's the Fair Play for Cuba Committee\", a pro-Castro organization. Ruby later told the FBI that he had his .38 Colt Cobra revolver in his right pocket during the press conference.",
"title": "John F. Kennedy assassination"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "On November 24, Ruby drove into town with his pet dachshund Sheba to send an emergency money order at the Wells Fargo on Main Street to one of his employees. The time stamp was 11:17 a.m. for the transaction. Ruby then walked half a block to the Dallas police headquarters, where he made his way into the basement.",
"title": "John F. Kennedy assassination"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "At 11:21 a.m. CST, Oswald was being escorted by Dallas police Detectives Jim Leavelle and L. C. Graves through the police basement to an armored car that was to take him to the nearby county jail, when Ruby emerged from a crowd of reporters with his revolver aimed at Oswald's abdomen and shot him at point blank range, mortally wounding him. Oswald screamed \"Oh!\" in pain and his hands clutched at his stomach as he slumped to the floor, moaning. Police detective Billy Combest, who knew Ruby, exclaimed, \"Jack, you son of a bitch!\" The armored car had rolled down the ramp at the moment Ruby emerged and slightly hit Ruby's leg almost immediately after he fired, causing him to almost lose balance as he was immediately subdued by police while Oswald was carried back into the basement level jail office. Combest asked Oswald, \"Do you have anything you want to tell us now?\" Oswald shook his head.",
"title": "John F. Kennedy assassination"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Drifting in and out of consciousness, Oswald was placed onto an ambulance and was driven to Parkland Memorial Hospital, the same hospital where President Kennedy had died two days earlier. Leavelle and Graves along with Frederick Bieberdorf, a medical student on duty, rode in the ambulance. Bieberdorf said that several blocks before reaching the hospital, Oswald started thrashing about, resisting Beiberdorf's efforts of heart massage and attempting to free an oxygen mask over his mouth. At Parkland, Oswald was treated by the same surgeons who had tried to save Kennedy; they determined Ruby's bullet had entered Oswald's left side in the front part of the abdomen and caused extensive damage to his spleen, stomach, aorta, vena cava, kidney, liver, diaphragm, and eleventh rib before coming to rest on his right side. Oswald died at 1:07 p.m.",
"title": "John F. Kennedy assassination"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "A network television pool camera was broadcasting live to cover Oswald's transfer; millions of people watching on NBC saw the shooting as it happened and on other networks within minutes afterward. Several photographs were taken of the event, capturing the moments around when Ruby pulled the trigger. In 1964, Robert H. Jackson of the Dallas Times Herald was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Photography for his image of the shooting of Oswald.",
"title": "John F. Kennedy assassination"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Great indignation was directed towards Ruby's murder of Oswald. Many felt that the killing had robbed the nation of essential information and had left questions unanswered. Former Vice President Richard Nixon said, \"(Oswald was) also entitled to a trial...\" \"...two wrongs don't make a right.\" Oswald's murder compounded initial suspicions that the Kennedy assassination was part of a larger plot.",
"title": "John F. Kennedy assassination"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Not all were shocked. The crowd outside the headquarters burst into applause when they heard that Oswald had been shot. In Dallas and elsewhere in the nation, Oswald was hated in death, and Ruby was viewed as a hero by some citizens, and during his time in jail, he received many letters from the public, often praising him for his deed.",
"title": "John F. Kennedy assassination"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "After his arrest, Ruby said that he had been distraught over President Kennedy's death and had helped the city of Dallas \"redeem\" itself in the eyes of the public, and that he was \"saving Mrs. Kennedy the discomfiture of coming back to trial.\" He also claimed that he shot Oswald on the spur of the moment when the opportunity presented itself, without considering any reason for doing so. Ruby said that he was an admirer of President Kennedy and the Kennedy family, that he cried when he heard that the President was shot, \"in mourning\" after, \"cried a great deal\" Saturday afternoon, and was depressed that night. The grief over the assassination, Ruby stated, finally \"reached the point of insanity,\" suddenly compelling him to shoot when Oswald walked in front of him in the basement that Sunday morning. At the time of the shooting, Ruby said that he was taking phenmetrazine, a central nervous system stimulant. Ruby also said that he entered the police basement by coming down the Main Street ramp. Later, Ruby expressed remorse to his brother Earl saying he never wanted Oswald to die.",
"title": "Prosecution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Jack Ruby asked Dallas attorney Tom Howard to represent him. Howard accepted and asked Ruby if he could think of anything that might damage his defense. Ruby responded that there would be a problem if a man by the name of \"Davis\" should come up. Ruby told his attorney that he \"had been involved with Davis, who was a gunrunner entangled in anti-Castro efforts.\"",
"title": "Prosecution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Ruby's brother Earl replaced Howard with prominent San Francisco defense attorney Melvin Belli, who agreed to represent him pro bono. Lawyer Joe H. Tonahill also signed on to assist with Ruby's defense. At his bond hearing in January 1964, while talking to reporters, Jack Ruby tearfully said regarding the assassination of Kennedy, in a high, choked voice, that he could not understand \"how a great man like that could be lost.\"",
"title": "Prosecution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Ruby testified that he thought he said, \"You killed my President, you rat!\" as he shot Oswald. Officer McMillon testified he heard Ruby say, \"You rat son of a bitch, you shot the president\". This was disputed by television footage showing McMillon looking in the opposite direction from the shooting. Dallas police sergeant Patrick Dean testified that when Ruby was arrested, Ruby said he thought about killing Oswald two nights earlier, to show the world that \"Jews have guts.\" Detective Don Archer said Ruby had told him he intended to shoot Oswald three times, and McMillon corroborated this. On March 14, 1964, Ruby was convicted of murder with malice and was sentenced to death.",
"title": "Prosecution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Ruby's conviction was overturned by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on the grounds that \"an oral confession of premeditation made while in police custody\" should have been ruled inadmissible, because it violated a Texas criminal statute. The court also ruled that the venue should have been changed to a Texas county other than the one in which the high-profile crime had been committed.",
"title": "Prosecution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "During the six months following the Kennedy assassination, Ruby repeatedly asked to speak to the members of the Warren Commission. The commission initially showed no interest, but Ruby's sister Eileen wrote letters to the commission and her letters became public. The Commission then agreed to talk to Ruby. In June 1964, Chief Justice Earl Warren, Representative (and future President) Gerald R. Ford of Michigan, and other commission members went to Dallas to see Ruby. Ruby asked Warren several times to take him to Washington D.C., saying that \"my life is in danger here\" and that he wanted an opportunity to make additional statements. He added that the people from whom he felt himself to be in danger were the John Birch Society of Dallas, including Edwin Walker, who he claimed were trying to falsely implicate him as being involved in a conspiracy to assassinate the President. He added: \"I want to tell the truth, and I can't tell it here.\" Warren told Ruby that he would be unable to comply, because many legal barriers would need to be overcome, and public interest in the situation would be too heavy. Warren also told Ruby that the commission would have no way of protecting him, since it had no police powers. Ruby said that he wanted to convince President Lyndon Johnson that he was not part of any conspiracy to kill Kennedy.",
"title": "Prosecution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Eventually, the appellate court agreed with Ruby's lawyers that he should be granted a new trial. On October 5, 1966, the court ruled that his motion for a change of venue before the original trial court should have been granted. Ruby's conviction and death sentence were overturned. Arrangements were underway for a new trial to be held in February 1967 in Wichita Falls, Texas, but Ruby was admitted to Parkland Hospital on December 9, 1966, suffering from pneumonia, where he was diagnosed with cancer in his liver, lungs, and brain. His condition rapidly deteriorated. An armed guard was placed outside his room but family and friends were allowed to visit. On December 16, Earl Ruby, accompanied by one of his brother's lawyers, smuggled a tape recorder hidden in a briefcase into Jack's room to record an interview about his murder of Oswald. Ruby maintained that he entered the basement by coming down the ramp, had killed Oswald out of grief over the assassination, and denied knowing Oswald prior. According to an unnamed Associated Press source, Ruby made a final statement from his hospital bed on December 19, that he had acted alone. \"There is nothing to hide,\" Ruby said, \"there was no one else.\"",
"title": "Prosecution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Ruby died of a pulmonary embolism on January 3, 1967, at Parkland Hospital. He was buried beside his parents in the Westlawn Cemetery in Norridge, Illinois.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The Warren Commission found no evidence linking Ruby's killing of Oswald with any broader conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy. The report provided a detailed biography of Ruby's life and activities to help ascertain whether he was involved in a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy. The Commission also tackled widespread rumours that Ruby and Oswald knew each other and that Oswald was seen at the Carousel Club. Television footage that showed Oswald glance briefly in Ruby's direction as he emerged to shoot him, indicating to some observers a look of recognition, compounded such suspicion. Careful analysis of the footage indicate Oswald was looking at reporter Ike Pappas who had held his microphone out towards Oswald and asked, \"Do you have anything to say in your defense?\" They concluded that various witnesses lacked credibility and that there was no solid evidence linking the two men. The Commission indicated that there was not a \"significant link between Ruby and organized crime\" and said he acted independently in killing Oswald.",
"title": "Official investigations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Warren Commission investigator David Belin said that postal inspector Harry Holmes arrived unannounced at the Dallas police station on the morning that Ruby shot Oswald and, upon invitation by the investigators, had questioned Oswald, thus delaying his transfer by half an hour. Belin noted that, had Ruby been part of a conspiracy, he would have been downtown 30 minutes earlier, when Oswald had been scheduled to be transferred. The commission accepted Ruby's claim that he entered the police basement via the Main Street ramp. Author Norman Mailer and others have questioned why Ruby would have left his beloved dog in his car if his killing of Oswald had been planned.",
"title": "Official investigations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Some of Ruby's friends, relatives (notably his brother Earl and sister Eva) and associates, supported the official conclusion that Ruby acted alone, maintaining that he was upset over President Kennedy's death, even crying on occasions and closing his clubs for three days as a mark of respect. They also refuted conspiracy theorists' claims, saying that Ruby's connection with gangsters was minimal at most and that he was not the sort of person who would be entrusted to be part of a conspiracy.",
"title": "Official investigations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Dallas reporter Tony Zoppi, who knew Ruby well, claimed that one \"would have to be crazy\" to entrust Ruby with anything as important as a high-level plot to kill Kennedy since he \"couldn't keep a secret for five minutes ... Jack was one of the most talkative guys you would ever meet. He'd be the worst fellow in the world to be part of a conspiracy, because he just plain talked too much.\" He and others described Ruby as the sort who enjoyed being at \"the center of attention\", trying to make friends with people and being more of a nuisance.",
"title": "Official investigations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Some writers, including former Los Angeles District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi, dismiss Ruby's connections to organized crime as being highly minimal: \"It is very noteworthy that without exception, not one of these conspiracy theorists knew or had ever met Jack Ruby. Without our even resorting to his family and roommate, all of whom think the suggestion of Ruby being connected to the mob is ridiculous, those who knew him, unanimously and without exception, think the notion of his being connected to the Mafia, and then killing Oswald for them, is nothing short of laughable.\"",
"title": "Official investigations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Bill Alexander, who prosecuted Ruby for Oswald's murder, equally rejected any suggestions that Ruby was involved with organized crime, claiming that conspiracy theorists based it on the claim that \"A knew B, and Ruby knew B back in 1950, so he must have known A, and that must be the link to the conspiracy.\"",
"title": "Official investigations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Ruby's brother Earl denied allegations that Jack was involved in racketeering Chicago nightclubs, and author Gerald Posner suggested in his book Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, that witnesses may have confused Ruby with Harry Rubenstein, a convicted Chicago felon. Entertainment reporter Tony Zoppi was also dismissive of mob ties and described Ruby as a \"born loser\".",
"title": "Official investigations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Many critics have not accepted the conclusions of the Warren Commission and have proposed several other theories.",
"title": "Other investigations and dissenting theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "White House correspondent Seth Kantor was a passenger in Kennedy's motorcade. He testified that he had visited Parkland Hospital after Kennedy was shot, and that he felt a tug on his coat as he entered the hospital at about 1:30 p.m. He turned around to see Jack Ruby, who called him by his first name and shook his hand. He said that he had become acquainted with Ruby while he was a reporter for the Dallas Times Herald newspaper. According to Kantor, Ruby asked him if he thought that it would be a good idea for him to close his nightclubs for the next three nights because of the tragedy, and Kantor responded without thinking that doing so would be a good idea.",
"title": "Other investigations and dissenting theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Ruby denied that he had been at Parkland Hospital and the Warren Commission dismissed Kantor's testimony, saying that the encounter at Parkland Hospital would have to have taken place in a span of a few minutes before and after 1:30 pm, as evidenced by telephone company records of calls made by both people. The commission also pointed to contradictory witness testimony and to the lack of video confirmation of Ruby at the scene. The Commission concluded that \"Kantor probably did not see Ruby at Parkland Hospital\" and \"may have been mistaken about both the time and the place that he saw Ruby.\"",
"title": "Other investigations and dissenting theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations re-examined Kantor's testimony and stated, \"the Warren Commission concluded that Kantor was mistaken\" about his Parkland encounter with Ruby, but \"the Committee determined he probably was not.\"",
"title": "Other investigations and dissenting theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Kantor also reported that Ruby might have tampered with evidence while at Parkland. Kantor researched the Ruby case for years. He wrote in Who Was Jack Ruby?:",
"title": "Other investigations and dissenting theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The mob was Ruby's \"friend.\" And Ruby could well have been paying off an IOU the day he was used to kill Lee Harvey Oswald. Remember: \"I have been used for a purpose,\" the way Ruby expressed it to Chief Justice Warren in their June 7, 1964 session. It would not have been hard for the mob to maneuver Ruby through the ranks of a few negotiable police.",
"title": "Other investigations and dissenting theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "The House Select Committee on Assassinations wrote in its 1979 Final Report:",
"title": "Other investigations and dissenting theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Ruby's shooting of Oswald was not a spontaneous act, in that it involved at least some premeditation. Similarly, the committee believed it was less likely that Ruby entered the police basement without assistance, even though the assistance may have been provided with no knowledge of Ruby's intentions.... The committee was troubled by the apparently unlocked doors along the stairway route and the removal of security guards from the area of the garage nearest the stairway shortly before the shooting.... There is also evidence that the Dallas Police Department withheld relevant information from the Warren Commission concerning Ruby's entry to the scene of the Oswald transfer.",
"title": "Other investigations and dissenting theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The HSCA suggested Ruby might have entered the basement via a stairway accessible from an alleyway next to the Dallas Municipal Building.",
"title": "Other investigations and dissenting theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Lieutenant Billy Grammer, a dispatcher for the Dallas Police Department, said that he received an anonymous phone call at 3 a.m. on November 24 from a man who told him that he knew of the plan to move Oswald from the basement and warned that, unless the plans were changed, \"we are going to kill him.\" After Oswald was shot, Grammer claimed to have recognized Ruby as the caller. Grammer believed that Ruby's shooting of Oswald was \"a planned event.\"",
"title": "Other investigations and dissenting theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "In his Warren Commission testimony, Detective Don Archer claimed that, after his arrest, Ruby looked him straight in the eye and said, \"Well, I intended to shoot him three times.\" Kantor wrote that Ruby's response to Archer did not suggest a spontaneous reaction, and that he implied having prior intention.",
"title": "Other investigations and dissenting theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Ruby's explanation for killing Oswald would be exposed \"as a fabricated legal ploy\", according to the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Ruby wrote a note to attorney Joseph Tonahill: \"Joe, you should know this. My first lawyer Tom Howard told me to say that I shot Oswald so that Caroline and Mrs. Kennedy wouldn't have to come to Dallas to testify. OK?\"",
"title": "Other investigations and dissenting theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "G. Robert Blakey, who was chief counsel for the House Select Committee on Assassinations from 1977 to 1979, said: \"The most plausible explanation for the murder of Oswald by Jack Ruby was that Ruby had stalked him on behalf of organized crime, trying to reach him on at least three occasions in the forty-eight hours before he silenced him forever.\"",
"title": "Other investigations and dissenting theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Russell Moore, an acquaintance of Ruby, testified to the Commission that Ruby expressed no bitterness towards Oswald and called him \"a good looking guy,\" comparing him to the actor Paul Newman. Announcer Glen Duncan also said Ruby described Oswald as a \"fairly nice looking kid\" comparing him to Newman.",
"title": "Other investigations and dissenting theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "David Scheim noted in his book Contract on America that while some said that Ruby was upset over the weekend of the assassination, others said that he was not. TV newsman Vic Robertson Jr. saw Ruby at police headquarters on Friday night and said that he \"appeared to be anything but under stress or strain. He seemed happy, jovial, was joking and laughing.\" Duncan also said that Ruby \"was not grieving\" and seemed \"happy that evidence was piling up against Oswald.\"",
"title": "Other investigations and dissenting theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Scheim also suggests that Ruby made a \"candid confession\" when giving testimony to the Warren Commission. During his testimony, Ruby teared up when talking about a Saturday morning eulogy for Kennedy, but after composing himself, inexplicably said, \"I must be a great actor, I tell you that.\" Ruby also remarked that \"they didn't ask me another question: 'If I loved the President so much, why wasn't I at the parade?'\" (referring to the presidential motorcade) and \"it's strange that perhaps I didn't vote for President Kennedy, or didn't vote at all, that I should build up such a great affection for him.\" Ruby's club stripper Jada, during an interview with ABC's Paul Good, said that \"I believe [Ruby] disliked Bobby Kennedy\".",
"title": "Other investigations and dissenting theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Schiem also noted some who knew Ruby who stated that the patriotic statements which Ruby professed were quite out of character. Ruby's gambling business partner Harry Hall said \"Ruby was the type who was interested in any way to make money,\" and he also said that he \"could not conceive of Ruby doing anything out of patriotism.\" Jack Kelly had known Ruby since 1943, and he \"scoffed at the idea of a patriotic motive...\" and felt that Ruby would have killed Oswald \"for publicity [or] for money\". Ruby's friend Paul Jones also said that he doubted that Ruby \"would have become emotionally upset and killed Oswald on the spur of the moment. He felt Ruby would have done it for money.\"",
"title": "Other investigations and dissenting theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Ruby's lawyers, led by Sam Houston Clinton, appealed to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals after his 1964 conviction, the highest criminal court in Texas. Ruby's lawyers argued that he could not have received a fair trial in Dallas because of the excessive publicity surrounding the case. In an interview with reporters in March 1965, Ruby stated: \"Everything pertaining to what's happening has never come to the surface. The world will never know the true facts of what occurred, my motive. The people who had so much to gain, and had such an ulterior motive for putting me in the position I'm in, will never let the true facts come above board to the world.\" A reporter asked, \"Are these people in very high positions, Jack?\", and he responded, \"Yes.\"",
"title": "Other investigations and dissenting theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Kantor speculated in 1978 that the \"Davis\" that Ruby mentioned to Tom Howard may have been Thomas Eli Davis III, a CIA-connected mercenary.",
"title": "Other investigations and dissenting theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Dallas Deputy Sheriff Al Maddox claimed: \"Ruby told me, he said, 'Well, they injected me for a cold.' He said it was cancer cells. That's what he told me, Ruby did. I said you don't believe that bullshit. He said, 'I damn sure do!' One day when I started to leave, Ruby shook hands with me and I could feel a piece of paper in his palm.\" It was a note in which Ruby claimed that he was part of a conspiracy, and that his role was to silence Oswald. Not long before Ruby died, according to an article in the London Sunday Times, he told psychiatrist Werner Teuter that the assassination was \"an act of overthrowing the government\" and that he knew \"who had President Kennedy killed\". He added: \"I am doomed. I do not want to die. But I am not insane. I was framed to kill Oswald.\"",
"title": "Other investigations and dissenting theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "On March 11, 1959, according FBI agent Charles W. Flynn of the Dallas Office approached Ruby to become a federal informant due to his job as a night club operator, since he \"might have knowledge of the criminal element in Dallas\". Ruby was willing to become an informant and was contacted by the FBI eight times between March 11, 1959, and October 2, 1959, but he provided no information to the Bureau; he was not paid, and contact ceased.",
"title": "Other investigations and dissenting theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Scheim theorised that Mafia leaders Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante Jr. and organized labor leader Jimmy Hoffa ordered the assassination of Kennedy. Scheim cited in particular a 25-fold increase in the number of out-of-state telephone calls from Jack Ruby to associates of these crime bosses in the months before the assassination. According to author Vincent Bugliosi, both the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations determined that all of these calls were related to Ruby seeking help from the American Guild of Variety Artists in a matter concerning two of his competitors. The House Select Committee on Assassinations report stated that \"most of Ruby's phone calls during late 1963 were related to his labor troubles. In the light of the identity of some of the individuals with whom Ruby spoke, however, the possibility of other matters being discussed could not be dismissed.\"",
"title": "Other investigations and dissenting theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Bill Bonanno, son of New York Mafia boss Joseph Bonanno, stated in Bound By Honor that he realized that certain Mafia families were involved in the JFK assassination when Ruby killed Oswald, since Bonanno was aware that Ruby was an associate of Chicago mobster Sam Giancana.",
"title": "Other investigations and dissenting theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Some conspiracy theorists have suggested Ruby had links to organized crime. The House Select Committee on Assassinations undertook a similar investigation of Ruby in 1979, 15 years after the written report, and said that he \"had a significant number of associations and direct and indirect contacts with underworld figures\" and \"the Dallas criminal element,\" but that he was not a member of organized crime.",
"title": "Other investigations and dissenting theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Ruby was said to have been acquainted with the Mafia. The HSCA said that Ruby had known Chicago mobster Sam Giancana and Joseph Campisi since 1947 and had been seen with them on many occasions. After an investigation of Joe Campisi, the HSCA found:",
"title": "Other investigations and dissenting theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "While Campisi's technical characterization in federal law enforcement records as an organized crime member has ranged from definite to suspected to negative, it is clear that he was an associate or friend of many Dallas-based organized crime members, particularly Joseph Civello, during the time he was the head of the Dallas organization. There was no indication that Campisi had engaged in any specific organized crime-related activities.",
"title": "Other investigations and dissenting theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "G. Robert Blakey, the chief counsel for the HSCA, called Campisi \"the No. 2 man in the mob in Dallas.\" He wrote in a 1993 article for The Washington Post: \"It is difficult to dispute the underworld pedigree of Jack Ruby, though the Warren Commission did it in 1964. Similarly, a PBS Frontline investigation into the connections between Ruby and Dallas organized crime figures reported the following:",
"title": "Other investigations and dissenting theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "In 1963, Sam and Joe Campisi were leading figures in the Dallas underworld. Jack knew the Campisis and had been seen with them on many occasions. The Campisis were lieutenants of Carlos Marcello, the Mafia boss who had reportedly talked of killing the President.",
"title": "Other investigations and dissenting theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "On the night before Kennedy was assassinated, Ruby and Ralph Paul had dinner together at the Egyptian Lounge run by Joe and Sam Campisi. After Ruby was jailed for killing Oswald, Joe Campisi \"regularly visited\" him.",
"title": "Other investigations and dissenting theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Howard P. Willens was the third-highest official in the Department of Justice and assistant counsel to J. Lee Rankin. He helped organize the Warren Commission. Willens also outlined the commission's investigative priorities and terminated an investigation of Ruby's Cuban related activities. An FBI report states that Willens' father had been Tony Accardo's next-door neighbor going back to 1958. In 1946, Tony Accardo allegedly asked Jack Ruby to go to Texas with Mafia associates Pat Manno and Romie Nappi to make sure that Dallas County Sheriff Steve Gutherie would acquiesce to the Mafia's expansion into Dallas.",
"title": "Other investigations and dissenting theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Ruby went to see a man named Lewis McWillie in Cuba four years before the assassination. McWillie had previously run illegal gambling establishments in Texas, and Ruby considered him one of his closest friends. McWillie was supervising gambling activities at Havana's Tropicana Club when Ruby visited him in August 1959. Ruby told the Warren Commission that his August trip to Cuba was merely a social visit at the invitation of McWillie. The HSCA later concluded that Ruby \"most likely was serving as a courier for gambling interests\". The committee also found circumstantial but not conclusive evidence that \"Ruby met with Santo Trafficante Jr. in Cuba sometime in 1959.\"",
"title": "Other investigations and dissenting theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "James E. Beaird, who claimed to be a poker-playing friend of Ruby, told The Dallas Morning News and the FBI that Ruby smuggled guns and ammunition from Galveston Bay, Texas to Fidel Castro's guerrillas in Cuba in the late 1950s. Beaird said that Ruby \"was in it for the money. It wouldn't matter which side, just the one that would pay him the most.\" Beaird said that the guns were stored in a two-story house near the waterfront, and that he saw Ruby and his associates load \"many boxes of new guns, including automatic rifles and handguns\" on a 50-foot military-surplus boat. He claimed that \"each time that the boat left with guns and ammunition, Jack Ruby was on the boat.\"",
"title": "Other investigations and dissenting theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Conversely, some conspiracy theorists have focused on Ruby's connections to the police in regards to his murder of Oswald, and dismiss his mob connections as a misdirection.",
"title": "Other investigations and dissenting theories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "This article incorporates public domain material from Warren Commission Report, Appendix 16: A Biography of Jack Ruby. National Archives and Records Administration.",
"title": "References"
}
]
| Jack Leon Ruby was an American nightclub owner who murdered Lee Harvey Oswald on November 24, 1963, two days after Oswald was accused of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Ruby shot and mortally wounded Oswald on live television in the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters and was immediately arrested. In a trial, Ruby was found guilty and sentenced to death. The conviction was appealed, and he was to be granted a new trial, but Ruby became ill, was diagnosed with cancer, and died of a pulmonary embolism on January 3, 1967. In 1964, the Warren Commission concluded that Ruby acted alone in killing Oswald, that Ruby shot Oswald on impulse and in retaliation for the Kennedy assassination. The commission's findings are challenged by various critics who hypothesize that Ruby was part of a conspiracy surrounding the Kennedy assassination. | 2001-10-29T13:35:56Z | 2023-12-30T06:51:38Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ruby |
16,278 | James Randi | James Randi (born Randall James Hamilton Zwinge; August 7, 1928 – October 20, 2020) was a Canadian-American stage magician, author and scientific skeptic who extensively challenged paranormal and pseudoscientific claims. He was the co-founder of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), and founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF). Randi began his career as a magician under the stage name The Amazing Randi and later chose to devote most of his time to investigating paranormal, occult, and supernatural claims. Randi retired from practicing magic at age 60, and from his foundation at 87.
Although often referred to as a "debunker", Randi said he disliked the term's connotations and preferred to describe himself as an "investigator". He wrote about paranormal phenomena, skepticism, and the history of magic. He was a frequent guest on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, famously exposing fraudulent faith healer Peter Popoff, and was occasionally featured on the television program Penn & Teller: Bullshit!
Before Randi's retirement, JREF sponsored the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge, which offered a prize of one million US dollars to eligible applicants who could demonstrate evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event under test conditions agreed to by both parties.
Randi was born on August 7, 1928, in Toronto, Canada. He was the son of Marie Alice (née Paradis; 1906–1987) and George Randall Zwinge (1903–1967), an executive at Bell Telephone Company. He was of French, Danish and Austrian descent. He had a younger brother and sister. He took up magic after seeing Harry Blackstone Sr. and reading conjuring books while spending 13 months in a body cast following a bicycle accident. He confounded doctors, who expected he would never walk again. He often skipped classes, and at 17, dropped out of high school to perform as a conjurer in a carnival roadshow. He practiced as a mentalist in local nightclubs and at Toronto's Canadian National Exhibition and wrote for Montreal's tabloid press. As a teenager, he stumbled upon a church where the pastor claimed to read minds. When Randi interrupted the performance and showed the parishioners how the trick worked, the pastor's wife called the police and Randi spent four hours in a jail cell. This inspired his career as a scientific skeptic.
In his 20s, Randi posed as an astrologer, and to establish that they merely were doing simple tricks, he briefly wrote an astrological column in the Canadian tabloid Midnight under the name "Zo-ran" by simply shuffling up items from newspaper astrology columns and pasting them randomly into a column. In his 30s, Randi worked in the UK, Europe, Philippine nightclubs, and Japan. He witnessed many tricks that were presented as being supernatural. One of his earliest reported experiences was that of seeing an evangelist using a version of the "one-ahead" technique to convince churchgoers of his divine powers.
Although defining himself as a conjuror, Randi began a career as a professional stage magician and escapologist in 1946. He initially presented himself under his real name, Randall Zwinge, which he later dropped in favor of "The Amazing Randi". Early in his career, he performed numerous escape acts from jail cells and safes around the world. On February 7, 1956, he appeared live on NBC's Today show, where he remained for 104 minutes in a sealed metal coffin that had been submerged in a hotel swimming pool, breaking what was said to be Harry Houdini's record of 93 minutes, though Randi called attention to the fact that he was much younger than Houdini had been when he established the original record in 1926.
Randi was a frequent guest on the Long John Nebel program on New York City radio station WOR, and did character voices for commercials. After Nebel moved to WNBC in 1964, Randi was given Nebel's time slot on WOR, where he hosted The Amazing Randi Show until January 1966, and often had guests who defended paranormal claims, among them Randi's then-friend James W. Moseley. Randi stated that he was fired from WOR over complaints from the archbishop of New York that Randi had said on-air that "Jesus Christ was a religious nut," a claim that Randi disputed.
Randi also hosted numerous television specials and went on several world tours. As "The Amazing Randi" he appeared regularly on the New York-based children's television series Wonderama from 1959 to 1967. In 1970, he auditioned for a revival of the 1950s children's show The Magic Clown, which showed briefly in Detroit and in Kenya, but was never picked up. In the February 2, 1974, issue of the British conjuring magazine Abracadabra, Randi, in defining the community of magicians, stated: "I know of no calling which depends so much upon mutual trust and faith as does ours." In the December 2003 issue of The Linking Ring, the monthly publication of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, it is stated: "Perhaps Randi's ethics are what make him Amazing" and "The Amazing Randi not only talks the talk, he walks the walk."
During Alice Cooper's 1973–1974 Billion Dollar Babies tour, Randi performed on stage both as a mad dentist and as Cooper's executioner. He also built several of the stage props, including the guillotine. In a 1976 performance for the Canadian TV special World of Wizards, Randi escaped from a straitjacket while suspended upside-down over Niagara Falls.
Randi has been accused of actually using "psychic powers" to perform acts such as spoon bending. According to James Alcock, at a meeting where Randi was duplicating the performances of Uri Geller, a professor from the University at Buffalo shouted out that Randi was a fraud. Randi said: "Yes, indeed, I'm a trickster, I'm a cheat, I'm a charlatan, that's what I do for a living. Everything I've done here was by trickery." The professor shouted back: "That's not what I mean. You're a fraud because you're pretending to do these things through trickery, but you're actually using psychic powers and misleading us by not admitting it." A similar event involved Senator Claiborne Pell, a confirmed believer in psychic phenomena. When Randi personally demonstrated to Pell that he could reveal—by simple trickery—a concealed drawing that had been secretly made by the senator, Pell refused to believe that it was a trick, saying: "I think Randi may be a psychic and doesn't realize it." Randi consistently denied having any paranormal powers or abilities.
Randi was a member of the Society of American Magicians (SAM), the International Brotherhood of Magicians (IBM), and The Magic Circle in the UK, holding the rank of "Member of the Inner Magic Circle with Gold Star."
Randi wrote ten books, among them Conjuring (1992), a biographical history of prominent magicians. The book is subtitled Being a Definitive History of the Venerable Arts of Sorcery, Prestidigitation, Wizardry, Deception, & Chicanery and of the Mountebanks & Scoundrels Who have Perpetrated these Subterfuges on a Bewildered Public, in short, MAGIC! The book's cover indicates it is by "James Randi, Esq., A Contrite Rascal Once Dedicated to these Wicked Practices but Now Almost Totally Reformed". The book features the most influential magicians and tells some of their history, often in the context of strange deaths and careers on the road. This work expanded on Randi's second book, Houdini, His Life and Art. This illustrated work was published in 1976 and was co-authored with Bert Sugar. It focuses on the professional and private life of Houdini.
Randi's book, The Magic World of the Amazing Randi (1989), was intended as a children's introduction to magic tricks. In addition to his magic books, he wrote several educational works about paranormal and pseudoscientific claims. These include biographies of Uri Geller and Nostradamus, as well as reference material on other major paranormal figures. In 2011, he was working on A Magician in the Laboratory, which recounted his application of skepticism to science. He was a member of the all-male literary banqueting club the Trap Door Spiders, which served as the basis of his friend Isaac Asimov's fictional group of mystery solvers, the Black Widowers.
Other books by Randi include Flim-Flam! (1982), The Faith Healers (1987), James Randi, Psychic Investigator (1991), Test Your ESP Potential (1982), and An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural (1995).
Randi was a regular contributor to Skeptic magazine, penning the "'Twas Brillig ..." column, and also served on its editorial board. He was a frequent contributor to Skeptical Inquirer magazine, published by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, of which he was also a fellow.
Randi gained the international spotlight in 1972 when he publicly challenged the claims of Uri Geller. He accused Geller of being nothing more than a charlatan and a fraud who used standard magic tricks to accomplish his allegedly paranormal feats, and he presented his claims in the book The Truth About Uri Geller (1982).
Believing that it was important to get columnists and TV personalities to challenge Geller and others like him, Randi and CSICOP reached out in an attempt to educate them. Randi said that CSICOP had a "very substantial influence on the printed media ... in those days." During this effort, Randi made contact with Johnny Carson and discovered that he was "very much on our side. He wasn't only a comedian ... he was a great thinker." According to Randi, when he was on The Tonight Show, Carson broke his usual protocol of not talking with guests before their entrance on stage, but instead would ask what Randi wanted to be emphasized in the interview. "He wanted to be aware of how he could help me."
In 1973, Geller appeared on The Tonight Show, and this appearance is recounted in the Nova documentary "Secrets of the Psychics".
In the documentary, Randi says that Carson "had been a magician himself and was skeptical" of Geller's claimed paranormal powers, so before the date of taping, Randi was asked "to help prevent any trickery". Per Randi's advice, the show prepared its own props without informing Geller, and did not let Geller or his staff "anywhere near them". When Geller joined Carson on stage, he appeared surprised that he was not going to be interviewed, but instead was expected to display his abilities using the provided articles. Geller said "This scares me" and "I'm surprised because before this program your producer came and he read me at least 40 questions you were going to ask me." Geller was unable to display any paranormal abilities, saying "I don't feel strong" and expressing his displeasure at feeling like he was being "pressed" to perform by Carson. According to Adam Higginbotham's November 7, 2014 article in The New York Times:
The result was a legendary immolation, in which Geller offered up flustered excuses to his host as his abilities failed him again and again. "I sat there for 22 minutes, humiliated," Geller told me, when I spoke to him in September. "I went back to my hotel, devastated. I was about to pack up the next day and go back to Tel Aviv. I thought, That's it—I'm destroyed."
However, this appearance on The Tonight Show, which Carson and Randi had orchestrated to debunk Geller's claimed abilities, backfired. According to Higginbotham:
To Geller's astonishment, he was immediately booked on The Merv Griffin Show. He was on his way to becoming a paranormal superstar. "That Johnny Carson show made Uri Geller," Geller said. To an enthusiastically trusting public, his failure only made his gifts seem more real: if he were performing magic tricks, they would surely work every time.
According to Higginbotham, this result caused Randi to realize that much more must be done to stop Geller and those like him. So in 1976, Randi approached Ray Hyman, a psychologist who had observed the tests of Geller's ability at Stanford and thought them slipshod, and suggested they create an organization dedicated to combating pseudoscience. Later that same year, together with Martin Gardner, a Scientific American columnist whose writing had helped hone Hyman's and Randi's skepticism, they formed the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP).
Using donations and sales of their magazine, Skeptical Inquirer, they and secular humanist philosopher Paul Kurtz took seats on the executive board, with Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan joining as founding members. Randi travelled the world on behalf of CSICOP, becoming its public face, and according to Hyman, the face of the skeptical movement.
András G. Pintér, producer and co-host of the European Skeptics Podcast, called Randi the grandfather of European skepticism by virtue of Randi "playing a role in kickstarting several European organizations."
Geller sued Randi and CSICOP for $15 million in 1991 and lost. Geller's suit against CSICOP was thrown out in 1995, and he was ordered to pay $120,000 for filing a frivolous lawsuit. The legal costs Randi incurred used almost all of a $272,000 MacArthur Foundation grant awarded to Randi in 1986 for his work. Randi also dismissed Geller's claims that he was capable of the kind of psychic photography associated with the case of Ted Serios. It is a matter, Randi argued, of trick photography using a simple hand-held optical device. During the period of Geller's legal dispute, CSICOP's leadership, wanting to avoid becoming a target of Geller's litigation, demanded that Randi refrain from commenting on Geller. Randi refused and resigned, though he maintained a respectful relationship with the group, which in 2006 changed its name to the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI). In 2010, Randi was one of 16 new CSI fellows elected by its board.
Randi went on to write many articles criticizing beliefs and claims regarding the paranormal. He also demonstrated flaws in studies suggesting the existence of paranormal phenomena; in his Project Alpha hoax, Randi successfully planted two fake psychics in a privately funded psychic research experiment.
Randi appeared on numerous TV shows, sometimes to directly debunk the claimed abilities of fellow guests. In a 1981 appearance on That's My Line, Randi appeared opposite claimed psychic James Hydrick, who said that he could move objects with his mind and appeared to demonstrate this claim on live television by turning a page in a telephone book without touching it. Randi, having determined that Hydrick was surreptitiously blowing on the book, arranged foam packaging peanuts on the table in front of the telephone book for the demonstration. This prevented Hydrick from demonstrating his abilities, which would have been exposed when the blowing moved the packaging. Randi writes that, eventually, Hydrick "confessed everything".
Randi was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1986. The fellowship's five-year $272,000 grant helped support Randi's investigations of faith healers, including W. V. Grant, Ernest Angley, and Peter Popoff, whom Randi first exposed on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in February 1986. Hearing about his investigation of Popoff, Carson invited Randi onto his show without seeing the evidence he was going to reveal. Carson appeared stunned after Randi showed a brief video segment from one of Popoff's broadcasts showing him calling out a woman in the audience, revealed personal information about her that he claimed came from God, and then performed a laying-on-of-hands healing to drive the devil from her body. Randi then replayed the video, but with some of the sound dubbed in that he and his investigating team captured during the event using a radio scanner and recorder. Their scanner had detected the radio frequency Popoff's wife Elizabeth was using backstage to broadcast directions and information to a miniature radio receiver hidden in Popoff's left ear. That information had been gathered by Popoff's assistants, who had handed out "prayer cards" to the audience before the show, instructing them to write down all the information Popoff would need to pray for them.
The news coverage generated by Randi's exposé on The Tonight Show led to many TV stations dropping Popoff's show, eventually forcing him into bankruptcy in September 1987. However, the televangelist returned soon after with faith-healing infomercials that reportedly attracted more than $23 million in 2005 from viewers sending in money for promised healing and prosperity. The Canadian Centre for Inquiry's Think Again! TV documented one of Popoff's more recent performances before a large audience who gathered in Toronto on May 26, 2011, hoping to be saved from illness and poverty.
In February 1988, Randi tested the gullibility of the media by perpetrating a hoax of his own. By teaming up with Australia's 60 Minutes program and by releasing a fake press package, he built up publicity for a "spirit channeler" named Carlos, who was actually artist José Alvarez, Randi's partner. While performing as Carlos, Alvarez was prompted by Randi using sophisticated radio equipment. According to the 60 Minutes program on the Carlos hoax, "it was claimed that Alvarez would not have had the audience he did at the Opera House (and the resulting potential sales therefrom) had the media coverage been more aggressive (and factual)", though an analysis by The Skeptic's Tim Mendham concluded that, while the media coverage of Alvarez's appearances was not credulous, the hoax "at least showed that they could benefit by being a touch more sceptical". The hoax was exposed on 60 Minutes Australia; "Carlos" and Randi explained how they had pulled it off.
In his book The Faith Healers, Randi wrote that his anger and relentlessness arose from compassion for the victims of fraud. Randi was also critical of João de Deus, a.k.a. "John of God", a self-proclaimed psychic surgeon who had received international attention. Randi observed, referring to psychic surgery, "To any experienced conjurer, the methods by which these seeming miracles are produced are very obvious."
In 1982, Randi verified the abilities of Arthur Lintgen, a Philadelphia doctor, who was able to identify the classical music recorded on a vinyl LP solely by examining the grooves on the record. However, Lintgen did not claim to have any paranormal ability, merely knowledge of the way that the groove forms patterns on particular recordings.
In 1988, John Maddox, editor of the prominent science journal Nature, asked Randi to join the supervision and observation of the homeopathy experiments conducted by Jacques Benveniste's team. Once Randi's stricter protocol for the experiment was in place, the positive results could not be reproduced.
Randi stated that Daniel Dunglas Home, who could allegedly play an accordion that was locked in a cage without touching it, was caught cheating on a few occasions, but the incidents were never made public. He also stated that the actual instrument in use was a one-octave mouth organ concealed under Home's large mustache and that other one-octave mouth organs were found in Home's belongings after his death. According to Randi, author William Lindsay Gresham told Randi "around 1960" that he had seen these mouth organs in the Home collection at the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Eric J. Dingwall, who catalogued Home's collection on its arrival at the SPR does not record the presence of the mouth organs. According to Peter Lamont, the author of an extensive Home biography, "It is unlikely Dingwall would have missed these or did not make them public." The fraudulent medium Henry Slade also played an accordion while held with one hand under a table. Slade and Home played the same pieces. They had at one time lived near each other in the U.S. The magician Chung Ling Soo exposed how Slade had performed the trick.
Randi distinguished between pseudoscience and "crackpot science". He regarded most of parapsychology as pseudoscience because of the way in which it is approached and conducted, but nonetheless saw it as a legitimate subject that "should be pursued", and from which real scientific discoveries may develop. Randi regarded crackpot science as "equally wrong" as pseudoscience, but with no scientific pretensions.
Despite multiple debunkings, Randi did not like to be called a "debunker", preferring to call himself a "skeptic" or an "investigator":
(...) if you go into a situation calling yourself a debunker then it is as if you have prejudged the topic. It's not neutral or scientific, and it can turn people against you.
Skeptics and magicians Penn & Teller credit Randi and his career as a skeptic for their own careers. During an interview at TAM! 2012, Penn stated that Flim-Flam! was an early influence on him, and said "If not for Randi there would not be Penn & Teller as we are today." He went on to say "Outside of my family ... no one is more important in my life. Randi is everything to me."
At the NECSS skeptic conference in 2017, Randi was asked by George Hrab what a "'skeptic coming of age ceremony' would look like" and Randi talked about what it was like as a child to learn about the speed of light and how that felt like he was looking into the past. Randi stated "More kids need to be stunned".
At The Amaz!ng Meeting in 2011 (TAM 9) the Independent Investigations Group (IIG) organized a tribute to Randi. The group gathered together with other attendees, put on fake white beards, and posed for a large group photo with Randi. At the CSICon in 2017, in absence of Randi, the IIG organized another group photo with leftover beards from the 2011 photo. After Randi was sent the photo, he replied, "I'm always very touched by any such expression. This is certainly no exception. You have my sincere gratitude. I suspect, however that a couple of those beards were fake. But I'm in a forgiving mood at the moment. I'm frankly very touched. I'll see you at the next CSICon. Thank you all."
In a 2019 Skeptical Inquirer magazine article, Harriet Hall, a friend of Randi, compares him to the fictional Albus Dumbledore. Hall describes their long white beards, flamboyant clothing, associated with a bird (Dumbledore with a phoenix and Randi with Pegasus). They both are caring and have "immense brainpower" and both "can perform impressive feats of magic". She states that Randi is one of "major inspirations for the skeptical work I do ... He's way better than Dumbledore!".
Exploring Psychic Powers ... Live was a two-hour television special aired live on June 7, 1989, wherein Randi examined several people claiming psychic powers. Hosted by actor Bill Bixby, the program offered $100,000 (Randi's $10,000 prize plus $90,000 put up by the show's syndicator, LBS Communications, Inc.) to anyone who could demonstrate genuine psychic powers.
In 1996, Randi established the James Randi Educational Foundation. Randi and his colleagues publish in JREF's blog, Swift. Topics have included the interesting mathematics of the one-seventh area triangle, a classic geometric puzzle. In his weekly commentary, Randi often gave examples of what he considered the nonsense that he dealt with every day.
Beginning in 2003, the JREF annually hosted The Amaz!ng Meeting, a gathering of scientists, skeptics, and atheists. The last meeting was in 2015, coinciding with Randi's retirement from the JREF.
Randi began a series of conferences known as "The Amazing Meeting" (TAM) which quickly became the largest gathering of skeptics in the world, drawing audiences from Asia, Europe, South America, and the UK. It also attracted a large percentage of younger attendees. Randi was regularly featured on many podcasts, including The Skeptics Society's official podcast Skepticality and the Center for Inquiry's official podcast Point of Inquiry. From September 2006 onwards, he occasionally contributed to The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast with a column called "Randi Speaks". In addition, The Amazing Show was a podcast in which Randi shared various anecdotes in an interview format.
In 2014, Part2Filmworks released An Honest Liar, a feature film documentary, written by Tyler Measom and Greg O'Toole, and directed and produced by Measom and Justin Weinstein. The film, which was funded through Kickstarter, focuses on Randi's life, his investigations, and his relationship with longtime partner José Alvarez (born Deyvi Orangel Peña Arteaga), to whom he was married in 2013. The film was screened at the Tribeca Film Festival, at Toronto's Hot Docs film festival, and at the June 2014 AFI Docs Festival in Silver Spring, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., where it won the Audience Award for Best Feature. It also received positive reviews from critics. The film was featured on the PBS Independent Lens series, shown in the U.S. and Canada, on March 28, 2016.
In December 2014, Randi flew to Australia to take part in "An Evening with James Randi" tour, organized by Think Inc. This tour included a screening of An Honest Liar followed by a "fireside chat" with Randi on stage. Cities visited were Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane, Melbourne, and Sydney. MC in Adelaide was Dr. Paul Willis with Richard Saunders interviewing Randi. MC in Perth was Jake Farr-Wharton with Richard Saunders interviewing Randi. MC for Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney was Richard Saunders with Lawrence Leung interviewing Randi.
In 2017, Randi appeared in animated form on the website Holy Koolaid, in which he discussed the challenge of finding the balance between connecting sincerely with his audience and at the same time tricking/fooling them with an artful ruse, and indicated that this is a balance with which many magicians struggle.
The James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) offered a prize of US$1,000,000 to anyone able to demonstrate a supernatural ability under scientific testing criteria agreed to by both sides. Based on the paranormal challenges of John Nevil Maskelyne and Houdini, the foundation began in 1996, when Randi put up $1,000 of his own money payable to anyone who could provide objective proof of the paranormal. The prize money grew to $1,000,000, and had formal published rules. No one progressed past the preliminary test, which was set up with parameters agreed to by both Randi and the applicant. He refused to accept any challengers who might suffer serious injury or death as a result of the testing.
On April 1, 2007, it was ruled that only persons with an established, nationally recognized media profile and the backing of a reputable academic were allowed to apply for the challenge, in order to avoid wasting JREF resources on frivolous claimants.
On Larry King Live, March 6, 2001, Larry King asked claimed medium Sylvia Browne if she would take the challenge and she agreed. Randi appeared with Browne on Larry King Live six months later, and she again appeared to accept his challenge. However, according to Randi, she ultimately refused to be tested, and the Randi Foundation kept a clock on its website recording the number of weeks since Browne allegedly accepted the challenge without following through, until Browne's death in November 2013.
During a subsequent appearance on Larry King Live on June 5, 2001, Randi challenged Rosemary Altea, another claimed medium, to undergo testing for the million dollars, but Altea refused to address the question. Instead Altea replied only, "I agree with what he says, that there are many, many people who claim to be spiritual mediums, they claim to talk to the dead. There are many people, we all know this. There are cheats and charlatans everywhere." On January 26, 2007, Altea and Randi again appeared on the show, and Altea again refused to answer whether or not she would take the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge.
In October 2007, claimed psychic John Edward appeared on Headline Prime, hosted by Glenn Beck. When asked if he would take "the Amazing Randi's" challenge, Edward responded, "It's funny. I was on Larry King Live once, and they asked me the same question. And I made a joke [then], and I'll say the same thing here: why would I allow myself to be tested by somebody who's got an adjective as a first name?" Beck simply allowed Edward to continue, ignoring the challenge.
Randi asked British businessman Jim McCormick, the inventor of the bogus ADE 651 bomb detector, to take the challenge in October 2008. Randi called the ADE 651 "a useless quack device which cannot perform any other function than separating naive persons from their money. It's a fake, a scam, a swindle, and a blatant fraud. Prove me wrong and take the million dollars." There was no response from McCormick. According to Iraqi investigators, the ADE 651, which was corruptly sold to the Baghdad bomb squad, was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of civilians who died as a result of terrorist bombs which were not detected at checkpoints. On April 23, 2013, McCormick was convicted of three counts of fraud at the Old Bailey in London; he was subsequently sentenced to ten years' imprisonment for his part in the ADE 651 scandal, which Randi was the first to expose.
A public log of past participants in the Million Dollar Challenge exists. In 2015, after Randi's retirement, his foundation said the Million Dollar Challenge would no longer consider applicants unless they meet a set of minimum protocols, to reduce the amount of frivolous claims.
Randi was involved in a variety of legal disputes, but said that he had "never paid even one dollar or even one cent to anyone who ever sued me." However, he said, he had paid out large sums to defend himself in these suits.
Randi met magician Uri Geller in the early 1970s, and found Geller to be "Very charming. Likable, beautiful, affectionate, genuine, forward-going, handsome—everything!" But Randi viewed Geller as a con-man, and began a long effort to expose him as a fraud. According to Randi, Geller tried to sue him several times, accusing him of libel. Geller never won, save for a ruling in a Japanese court that ordered Randi to pay Geller one-third of one per cent of what Geller had requested. This ruling was cancelled, and the matter dropped, when Geller decided to concentrate on another legal matter.
In May 1991, Geller sued Randi and CSICOP for $15 million on a charge of slander, after Randi told the International Herald Tribune that Geller had "tricked even reputable scientists" with stunts that "are the kind that used to be on the back of cereal boxes", referring to the old spoon-bending trick. The court dismissed the case and Geller had to settle at a cost to him of $120,000, after Randi produced a cereal box which bore instructions on how to do the spoon-bending trick. Geller's lawyer Don Katz was disbarred mid-way into this action and Geller ended up suing him. After failing to pay by the deadline imposed by the court, Geller was sanctioned an additional $20,000. Geller sued both Randi and CSICOP in the 1980s. CSICOP argued that the organization was not responsible for Randi's statements. The court agreed that including CSICOP was frivolous and dropped them from the action, leaving Randi to face the action alone, along with the legal costs. Geller was ordered to pay substantial damages, but only to CSICOP.
In 1993, a jury in the U.S. District Court in Baltimore found Randi liable for defaming Eldon Byrd for calling him a child molester in a magazine story and a "shopping market molester" in a 1988 speech. However, the jury found that Byrd was not entitled to any monetary damages after hearing testimony that he had sexually molested and later married his sister-in-law. The jury also cleared the other defendant in the case, CSICOP.
Late in 1996, Randi launched a libel suit against a Toronto-area psychic named Earl Gordon Curley. Curley had made multiple objectionable comments about Randi on Usenet. Despite suggesting to Randi on Usenet that Randi should sue—Curley's comments implying that if Randi did not sue, then his allegations must be true—Curley seemed entirely surprised when Randi actually retained Toronto's largest law firm and initiated legal proceedings. The suit was eventually dropped in 1998 when Earl Curley died at the age of 51 of "alcohol toxicity".
Allison DuBois, on whose life the television series Medium was based, threatened Randi with legal action for using a photo of her from her website in his December 17, 2004, commentary without her permission. Randi removed the photo and subsequently used a caricature of DuBois when mentioning her on his site, beginning with his December 23, 2005, commentary.
Sniffex, producer of a dowsing bomb detection device, sued Randi and the JREF in 2007, and lost. Sniffex sued Randi for his comments regarding a government test in which the Sniffex device failed. The company was later investigated and charged with fraud.
Randi was a registered Democrat. In April 2009, he released a statement endorsing the legalization of most illegal drugs.
Randi had been reported as a believer in Social Darwinist theories, although he would denounce the ideologies and movements that formed around the theories in 2013.
Randi's parents were members of the Anglican Church but rarely attended services. He attended Sunday school at St. Cuthbert's Church in Toronto a few times as a child, but he independently decided to stop going after receiving no answer to his request for proof of the teachings of the Church.
In his essay "Why I Deny Religion, How Silly and Fantastic It Is, and Why I'm a Dedicated and Vociferous Bright", Randi, who identified himself as an atheist, opined that many accounts in religious texts, including the virgin birth, the miracles of Jesus Christ, and the parting of the Red Sea by Moses, are not believable. Randi refers to the Virgin Mary as being "impregnated by a ghost of some sort, and as a result produced a son who could walk on water, raise the dead, turn water into wine, and multiply loaves of bread and fishes" and questions how Adam and Eve's family "managed to populate the Earth without committing incest". He wrote that, compared to the Bible, "The Wizard of Oz is more believable. And much more fun."
Clarifying his view of atheism, Randi wrote "I've said it before: there are two sorts of atheists. One sort claims that there is no deity, the other claims that there is no evidence that proves the existence of a deity; I belong to the latter group, because if I were to claim that no god exists, I would have to produce evidence to establish that claim, and I cannot. Religious persons have by far the easier position; they say they believe in a deity because that's their preference, and they've read it in a book. That's their right."
In An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural (1995), he examines various spiritual practices skeptically. Of the meditation techniques of Guru Maharaj Ji, he writes "Only the very naive were convinced that they had been let in on some sort of celestial secret." In 2003, he was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto.
In a discussion with Kendrick Frazier at CSICon 2016, Randi stated "I think that a belief in a deity is ... an unprovable claim ... and a rather ridiculous claim. It is an easy way out to explain things to which we have no answer." He then summarized his current concern with religious belief as follows: "A belief in a god is one of the most damaging things that infests humanity at this particular moment in history. It may improve, and I see signs that it may be improving, and I'll leave it at that."
When Randi hosted his own radio show in the 1960s, he lived in a small house in Rumson, New Jersey, that featured a sign on the premises that read: "Randi—Charlatan".
In the 1970s and 80s, Randi supported seven foster children.
In 1987, Randi became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Randi said that one reason he became an American citizen was an incident while he was on tour with Alice Cooper, during which the Royal Canadian Mounted Police searched the band's lockers during a performance, completely ransacking the room, but finding nothing illegal.
In February 2006, Randi underwent coronary artery bypass surgery. The weekly commentary updates to his Web site were made by guests while he was hospitalized. Randi recovered after his surgery and was able to help organize and attend The Amaz!ng Meeting in 2007 in Las Vegas, Nevada, his annual convention of scientists, magicians, skeptics, atheists, and freethinkers.
Randi was diagnosed with colorectal cancer in June 2009. He had a series of small tumors removed from his intestines during laparoscopic surgery. He announced the diagnosis a week later at The Amaz!ng Meeting 7, as well as the fact that he was scheduled to begin chemotherapy in the following weeks. He also said at the conference: "One day, I'm gonna die. That's all there is to it. Hey, it's too bad, but I've got to make room. I'm using a lot of oxygen and such—I think it's good use of oxygen myself, but of course, I'm a little prejudiced on the matter."
Randi underwent his final chemotherapy session in December 2009, later saying that his chemotherapy experience was not so unpleasant as he had imagined it might be. In a video posted in April 2010, Randi stated that he had been given a clean bill of health.
In a 2010 blog entry, Randi came out as gay, a move he said was inspired by seeing the 2008 biographical drama film Milk.
Randi married Venezuelan artist José Alvarez (born Deyvi Orangel Peña Arteaga) on July 2, 2013, in Washington, D.C. In 1986, Randi met Alvarez in a Fort Lauderdale public library, having recently moved to Florida. Alvarez, who was then known as Peña, had left his native land in fear of his life after being threatened for being homosexual. The alias Peña used, Jose Alvarez, was already an actual person in the United States. The identity confusion caused the real Alvarez some legal and financial difficulties. Peña was arrested for identity theft and faced deportation. They resided in Plantation, Florida.
In the 1993 documentary Secrets of the Psychics, Randi stated, "I've never involved myself in narcotics of any kind; I don't smoke; I don't drink, because that can easily just fuzz the edges of my rationality, fuzz the edges of my reasoning powers, and I want to be as aware as I possibly can. That means giving up a lot of fantasies that might be comforting in some ways, but I'm willing to give that up in order to live in an actually real world, as close as I can get to it".
In a video released in October 2017, Randi revealed that he had recently suffered a minor stroke, and that he was under medical advice not to travel during his recovery, so would be unable to attend CSICon 2017 in Las Vegas later that month.
Randi died at his home on October 20, 2020, at the age of 92. The James Randi Educational Foundation attributed his death to "age-related causes". The Center for Inquiry said that Randi "was the public face of skeptical inquiry, bringing a sense of fun and mischievousness to a serious mission." Kendrick Frazier said, as part of the statement, "Despite his ferocity in challenging all forms of nonsense, in person he was a kind and gentle man."
The following are Guinness World Records: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "James Randi (born Randall James Hamilton Zwinge; August 7, 1928 – October 20, 2020) was a Canadian-American stage magician, author and scientific skeptic who extensively challenged paranormal and pseudoscientific claims. He was the co-founder of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), and founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF). Randi began his career as a magician under the stage name The Amazing Randi and later chose to devote most of his time to investigating paranormal, occult, and supernatural claims. Randi retired from practicing magic at age 60, and from his foundation at 87.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Although often referred to as a \"debunker\", Randi said he disliked the term's connotations and preferred to describe himself as an \"investigator\". He wrote about paranormal phenomena, skepticism, and the history of magic. He was a frequent guest on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, famously exposing fraudulent faith healer Peter Popoff, and was occasionally featured on the television program Penn & Teller: Bullshit!",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Before Randi's retirement, JREF sponsored the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge, which offered a prize of one million US dollars to eligible applicants who could demonstrate evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event under test conditions agreed to by both parties.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Randi was born on August 7, 1928, in Toronto, Canada. He was the son of Marie Alice (née Paradis; 1906–1987) and George Randall Zwinge (1903–1967), an executive at Bell Telephone Company. He was of French, Danish and Austrian descent. He had a younger brother and sister. He took up magic after seeing Harry Blackstone Sr. and reading conjuring books while spending 13 months in a body cast following a bicycle accident. He confounded doctors, who expected he would never walk again. He often skipped classes, and at 17, dropped out of high school to perform as a conjurer in a carnival roadshow. He practiced as a mentalist in local nightclubs and at Toronto's Canadian National Exhibition and wrote for Montreal's tabloid press. As a teenager, he stumbled upon a church where the pastor claimed to read minds. When Randi interrupted the performance and showed the parishioners how the trick worked, the pastor's wife called the police and Randi spent four hours in a jail cell. This inspired his career as a scientific skeptic.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In his 20s, Randi posed as an astrologer, and to establish that they merely were doing simple tricks, he briefly wrote an astrological column in the Canadian tabloid Midnight under the name \"Zo-ran\" by simply shuffling up items from newspaper astrology columns and pasting them randomly into a column. In his 30s, Randi worked in the UK, Europe, Philippine nightclubs, and Japan. He witnessed many tricks that were presented as being supernatural. One of his earliest reported experiences was that of seeing an evangelist using a version of the \"one-ahead\" technique to convince churchgoers of his divine powers.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Although defining himself as a conjuror, Randi began a career as a professional stage magician and escapologist in 1946. He initially presented himself under his real name, Randall Zwinge, which he later dropped in favor of \"The Amazing Randi\". Early in his career, he performed numerous escape acts from jail cells and safes around the world. On February 7, 1956, he appeared live on NBC's Today show, where he remained for 104 minutes in a sealed metal coffin that had been submerged in a hotel swimming pool, breaking what was said to be Harry Houdini's record of 93 minutes, though Randi called attention to the fact that he was much younger than Houdini had been when he established the original record in 1926.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Randi was a frequent guest on the Long John Nebel program on New York City radio station WOR, and did character voices for commercials. After Nebel moved to WNBC in 1964, Randi was given Nebel's time slot on WOR, where he hosted The Amazing Randi Show until January 1966, and often had guests who defended paranormal claims, among them Randi's then-friend James W. Moseley. Randi stated that he was fired from WOR over complaints from the archbishop of New York that Randi had said on-air that \"Jesus Christ was a religious nut,\" a claim that Randi disputed.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Randi also hosted numerous television specials and went on several world tours. As \"The Amazing Randi\" he appeared regularly on the New York-based children's television series Wonderama from 1959 to 1967. In 1970, he auditioned for a revival of the 1950s children's show The Magic Clown, which showed briefly in Detroit and in Kenya, but was never picked up. In the February 2, 1974, issue of the British conjuring magazine Abracadabra, Randi, in defining the community of magicians, stated: \"I know of no calling which depends so much upon mutual trust and faith as does ours.\" In the December 2003 issue of The Linking Ring, the monthly publication of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, it is stated: \"Perhaps Randi's ethics are what make him Amazing\" and \"The Amazing Randi not only talks the talk, he walks the walk.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "During Alice Cooper's 1973–1974 Billion Dollar Babies tour, Randi performed on stage both as a mad dentist and as Cooper's executioner. He also built several of the stage props, including the guillotine. In a 1976 performance for the Canadian TV special World of Wizards, Randi escaped from a straitjacket while suspended upside-down over Niagara Falls.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Randi has been accused of actually using \"psychic powers\" to perform acts such as spoon bending. According to James Alcock, at a meeting where Randi was duplicating the performances of Uri Geller, a professor from the University at Buffalo shouted out that Randi was a fraud. Randi said: \"Yes, indeed, I'm a trickster, I'm a cheat, I'm a charlatan, that's what I do for a living. Everything I've done here was by trickery.\" The professor shouted back: \"That's not what I mean. You're a fraud because you're pretending to do these things through trickery, but you're actually using psychic powers and misleading us by not admitting it.\" A similar event involved Senator Claiborne Pell, a confirmed believer in psychic phenomena. When Randi personally demonstrated to Pell that he could reveal—by simple trickery—a concealed drawing that had been secretly made by the senator, Pell refused to believe that it was a trick, saying: \"I think Randi may be a psychic and doesn't realize it.\" Randi consistently denied having any paranormal powers or abilities.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Randi was a member of the Society of American Magicians (SAM), the International Brotherhood of Magicians (IBM), and The Magic Circle in the UK, holding the rank of \"Member of the Inner Magic Circle with Gold Star.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Randi wrote ten books, among them Conjuring (1992), a biographical history of prominent magicians. The book is subtitled Being a Definitive History of the Venerable Arts of Sorcery, Prestidigitation, Wizardry, Deception, & Chicanery and of the Mountebanks & Scoundrels Who have Perpetrated these Subterfuges on a Bewildered Public, in short, MAGIC! The book's cover indicates it is by \"James Randi, Esq., A Contrite Rascal Once Dedicated to these Wicked Practices but Now Almost Totally Reformed\". The book features the most influential magicians and tells some of their history, often in the context of strange deaths and careers on the road. This work expanded on Randi's second book, Houdini, His Life and Art. This illustrated work was published in 1976 and was co-authored with Bert Sugar. It focuses on the professional and private life of Houdini.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Randi's book, The Magic World of the Amazing Randi (1989), was intended as a children's introduction to magic tricks. In addition to his magic books, he wrote several educational works about paranormal and pseudoscientific claims. These include biographies of Uri Geller and Nostradamus, as well as reference material on other major paranormal figures. In 2011, he was working on A Magician in the Laboratory, which recounted his application of skepticism to science. He was a member of the all-male literary banqueting club the Trap Door Spiders, which served as the basis of his friend Isaac Asimov's fictional group of mystery solvers, the Black Widowers.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Other books by Randi include Flim-Flam! (1982), The Faith Healers (1987), James Randi, Psychic Investigator (1991), Test Your ESP Potential (1982), and An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural (1995).",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Randi was a regular contributor to Skeptic magazine, penning the \"'Twas Brillig ...\" column, and also served on its editorial board. He was a frequent contributor to Skeptical Inquirer magazine, published by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, of which he was also a fellow.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Randi gained the international spotlight in 1972 when he publicly challenged the claims of Uri Geller. He accused Geller of being nothing more than a charlatan and a fraud who used standard magic tricks to accomplish his allegedly paranormal feats, and he presented his claims in the book The Truth About Uri Geller (1982).",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Believing that it was important to get columnists and TV personalities to challenge Geller and others like him, Randi and CSICOP reached out in an attempt to educate them. Randi said that CSICOP had a \"very substantial influence on the printed media ... in those days.\" During this effort, Randi made contact with Johnny Carson and discovered that he was \"very much on our side. He wasn't only a comedian ... he was a great thinker.\" According to Randi, when he was on The Tonight Show, Carson broke his usual protocol of not talking with guests before their entrance on stage, but instead would ask what Randi wanted to be emphasized in the interview. \"He wanted to be aware of how he could help me.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In 1973, Geller appeared on The Tonight Show, and this appearance is recounted in the Nova documentary \"Secrets of the Psychics\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In the documentary, Randi says that Carson \"had been a magician himself and was skeptical\" of Geller's claimed paranormal powers, so before the date of taping, Randi was asked \"to help prevent any trickery\". Per Randi's advice, the show prepared its own props without informing Geller, and did not let Geller or his staff \"anywhere near them\". When Geller joined Carson on stage, he appeared surprised that he was not going to be interviewed, but instead was expected to display his abilities using the provided articles. Geller said \"This scares me\" and \"I'm surprised because before this program your producer came and he read me at least 40 questions you were going to ask me.\" Geller was unable to display any paranormal abilities, saying \"I don't feel strong\" and expressing his displeasure at feeling like he was being \"pressed\" to perform by Carson. According to Adam Higginbotham's November 7, 2014 article in The New York Times:",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The result was a legendary immolation, in which Geller offered up flustered excuses to his host as his abilities failed him again and again. \"I sat there for 22 minutes, humiliated,\" Geller told me, when I spoke to him in September. \"I went back to my hotel, devastated. I was about to pack up the next day and go back to Tel Aviv. I thought, That's it—I'm destroyed.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "However, this appearance on The Tonight Show, which Carson and Randi had orchestrated to debunk Geller's claimed abilities, backfired. According to Higginbotham:",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "To Geller's astonishment, he was immediately booked on The Merv Griffin Show. He was on his way to becoming a paranormal superstar. \"That Johnny Carson show made Uri Geller,\" Geller said. To an enthusiastically trusting public, his failure only made his gifts seem more real: if he were performing magic tricks, they would surely work every time.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "According to Higginbotham, this result caused Randi to realize that much more must be done to stop Geller and those like him. So in 1976, Randi approached Ray Hyman, a psychologist who had observed the tests of Geller's ability at Stanford and thought them slipshod, and suggested they create an organization dedicated to combating pseudoscience. Later that same year, together with Martin Gardner, a Scientific American columnist whose writing had helped hone Hyman's and Randi's skepticism, they formed the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP).",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Using donations and sales of their magazine, Skeptical Inquirer, they and secular humanist philosopher Paul Kurtz took seats on the executive board, with Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan joining as founding members. Randi travelled the world on behalf of CSICOP, becoming its public face, and according to Hyman, the face of the skeptical movement.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "András G. Pintér, producer and co-host of the European Skeptics Podcast, called Randi the grandfather of European skepticism by virtue of Randi \"playing a role in kickstarting several European organizations.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Geller sued Randi and CSICOP for $15 million in 1991 and lost. Geller's suit against CSICOP was thrown out in 1995, and he was ordered to pay $120,000 for filing a frivolous lawsuit. The legal costs Randi incurred used almost all of a $272,000 MacArthur Foundation grant awarded to Randi in 1986 for his work. Randi also dismissed Geller's claims that he was capable of the kind of psychic photography associated with the case of Ted Serios. It is a matter, Randi argued, of trick photography using a simple hand-held optical device. During the period of Geller's legal dispute, CSICOP's leadership, wanting to avoid becoming a target of Geller's litigation, demanded that Randi refrain from commenting on Geller. Randi refused and resigned, though he maintained a respectful relationship with the group, which in 2006 changed its name to the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI). In 2010, Randi was one of 16 new CSI fellows elected by its board.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Randi went on to write many articles criticizing beliefs and claims regarding the paranormal. He also demonstrated flaws in studies suggesting the existence of paranormal phenomena; in his Project Alpha hoax, Randi successfully planted two fake psychics in a privately funded psychic research experiment.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Randi appeared on numerous TV shows, sometimes to directly debunk the claimed abilities of fellow guests. In a 1981 appearance on That's My Line, Randi appeared opposite claimed psychic James Hydrick, who said that he could move objects with his mind and appeared to demonstrate this claim on live television by turning a page in a telephone book without touching it. Randi, having determined that Hydrick was surreptitiously blowing on the book, arranged foam packaging peanuts on the table in front of the telephone book for the demonstration. This prevented Hydrick from demonstrating his abilities, which would have been exposed when the blowing moved the packaging. Randi writes that, eventually, Hydrick \"confessed everything\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Randi was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1986. The fellowship's five-year $272,000 grant helped support Randi's investigations of faith healers, including W. V. Grant, Ernest Angley, and Peter Popoff, whom Randi first exposed on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in February 1986. Hearing about his investigation of Popoff, Carson invited Randi onto his show without seeing the evidence he was going to reveal. Carson appeared stunned after Randi showed a brief video segment from one of Popoff's broadcasts showing him calling out a woman in the audience, revealed personal information about her that he claimed came from God, and then performed a laying-on-of-hands healing to drive the devil from her body. Randi then replayed the video, but with some of the sound dubbed in that he and his investigating team captured during the event using a radio scanner and recorder. Their scanner had detected the radio frequency Popoff's wife Elizabeth was using backstage to broadcast directions and information to a miniature radio receiver hidden in Popoff's left ear. That information had been gathered by Popoff's assistants, who had handed out \"prayer cards\" to the audience before the show, instructing them to write down all the information Popoff would need to pray for them.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The news coverage generated by Randi's exposé on The Tonight Show led to many TV stations dropping Popoff's show, eventually forcing him into bankruptcy in September 1987. However, the televangelist returned soon after with faith-healing infomercials that reportedly attracted more than $23 million in 2005 from viewers sending in money for promised healing and prosperity. The Canadian Centre for Inquiry's Think Again! TV documented one of Popoff's more recent performances before a large audience who gathered in Toronto on May 26, 2011, hoping to be saved from illness and poverty.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "In February 1988, Randi tested the gullibility of the media by perpetrating a hoax of his own. By teaming up with Australia's 60 Minutes program and by releasing a fake press package, he built up publicity for a \"spirit channeler\" named Carlos, who was actually artist José Alvarez, Randi's partner. While performing as Carlos, Alvarez was prompted by Randi using sophisticated radio equipment. According to the 60 Minutes program on the Carlos hoax, \"it was claimed that Alvarez would not have had the audience he did at the Opera House (and the resulting potential sales therefrom) had the media coverage been more aggressive (and factual)\", though an analysis by The Skeptic's Tim Mendham concluded that, while the media coverage of Alvarez's appearances was not credulous, the hoax \"at least showed that they could benefit by being a touch more sceptical\". The hoax was exposed on 60 Minutes Australia; \"Carlos\" and Randi explained how they had pulled it off.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In his book The Faith Healers, Randi wrote that his anger and relentlessness arose from compassion for the victims of fraud. Randi was also critical of João de Deus, a.k.a. \"John of God\", a self-proclaimed psychic surgeon who had received international attention. Randi observed, referring to psychic surgery, \"To any experienced conjurer, the methods by which these seeming miracles are produced are very obvious.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In 1982, Randi verified the abilities of Arthur Lintgen, a Philadelphia doctor, who was able to identify the classical music recorded on a vinyl LP solely by examining the grooves on the record. However, Lintgen did not claim to have any paranormal ability, merely knowledge of the way that the groove forms patterns on particular recordings.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "In 1988, John Maddox, editor of the prominent science journal Nature, asked Randi to join the supervision and observation of the homeopathy experiments conducted by Jacques Benveniste's team. Once Randi's stricter protocol for the experiment was in place, the positive results could not be reproduced.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Randi stated that Daniel Dunglas Home, who could allegedly play an accordion that was locked in a cage without touching it, was caught cheating on a few occasions, but the incidents were never made public. He also stated that the actual instrument in use was a one-octave mouth organ concealed under Home's large mustache and that other one-octave mouth organs were found in Home's belongings after his death. According to Randi, author William Lindsay Gresham told Randi \"around 1960\" that he had seen these mouth organs in the Home collection at the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Eric J. Dingwall, who catalogued Home's collection on its arrival at the SPR does not record the presence of the mouth organs. According to Peter Lamont, the author of an extensive Home biography, \"It is unlikely Dingwall would have missed these or did not make them public.\" The fraudulent medium Henry Slade also played an accordion while held with one hand under a table. Slade and Home played the same pieces. They had at one time lived near each other in the U.S. The magician Chung Ling Soo exposed how Slade had performed the trick.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Randi distinguished between pseudoscience and \"crackpot science\". He regarded most of parapsychology as pseudoscience because of the way in which it is approached and conducted, but nonetheless saw it as a legitimate subject that \"should be pursued\", and from which real scientific discoveries may develop. Randi regarded crackpot science as \"equally wrong\" as pseudoscience, but with no scientific pretensions.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Despite multiple debunkings, Randi did not like to be called a \"debunker\", preferring to call himself a \"skeptic\" or an \"investigator\":",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "(...) if you go into a situation calling yourself a debunker then it is as if you have prejudged the topic. It's not neutral or scientific, and it can turn people against you.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Skeptics and magicians Penn & Teller credit Randi and his career as a skeptic for their own careers. During an interview at TAM! 2012, Penn stated that Flim-Flam! was an early influence on him, and said \"If not for Randi there would not be Penn & Teller as we are today.\" He went on to say \"Outside of my family ... no one is more important in my life. Randi is everything to me.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "At the NECSS skeptic conference in 2017, Randi was asked by George Hrab what a \"'skeptic coming of age ceremony' would look like\" and Randi talked about what it was like as a child to learn about the speed of light and how that felt like he was looking into the past. Randi stated \"More kids need to be stunned\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "At The Amaz!ng Meeting in 2011 (TAM 9) the Independent Investigations Group (IIG) organized a tribute to Randi. The group gathered together with other attendees, put on fake white beards, and posed for a large group photo with Randi. At the CSICon in 2017, in absence of Randi, the IIG organized another group photo with leftover beards from the 2011 photo. After Randi was sent the photo, he replied, \"I'm always very touched by any such expression. This is certainly no exception. You have my sincere gratitude. I suspect, however that a couple of those beards were fake. But I'm in a forgiving mood at the moment. I'm frankly very touched. I'll see you at the next CSICon. Thank you all.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "In a 2019 Skeptical Inquirer magazine article, Harriet Hall, a friend of Randi, compares him to the fictional Albus Dumbledore. Hall describes their long white beards, flamboyant clothing, associated with a bird (Dumbledore with a phoenix and Randi with Pegasus). They both are caring and have \"immense brainpower\" and both \"can perform impressive feats of magic\". She states that Randi is one of \"major inspirations for the skeptical work I do ... He's way better than Dumbledore!\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Exploring Psychic Powers ... Live was a two-hour television special aired live on June 7, 1989, wherein Randi examined several people claiming psychic powers. Hosted by actor Bill Bixby, the program offered $100,000 (Randi's $10,000 prize plus $90,000 put up by the show's syndicator, LBS Communications, Inc.) to anyone who could demonstrate genuine psychic powers.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "In 1996, Randi established the James Randi Educational Foundation. Randi and his colleagues publish in JREF's blog, Swift. Topics have included the interesting mathematics of the one-seventh area triangle, a classic geometric puzzle. In his weekly commentary, Randi often gave examples of what he considered the nonsense that he dealt with every day.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Beginning in 2003, the JREF annually hosted The Amaz!ng Meeting, a gathering of scientists, skeptics, and atheists. The last meeting was in 2015, coinciding with Randi's retirement from the JREF.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Randi began a series of conferences known as \"The Amazing Meeting\" (TAM) which quickly became the largest gathering of skeptics in the world, drawing audiences from Asia, Europe, South America, and the UK. It also attracted a large percentage of younger attendees. Randi was regularly featured on many podcasts, including The Skeptics Society's official podcast Skepticality and the Center for Inquiry's official podcast Point of Inquiry. From September 2006 onwards, he occasionally contributed to The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast with a column called \"Randi Speaks\". In addition, The Amazing Show was a podcast in which Randi shared various anecdotes in an interview format.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "In 2014, Part2Filmworks released An Honest Liar, a feature film documentary, written by Tyler Measom and Greg O'Toole, and directed and produced by Measom and Justin Weinstein. The film, which was funded through Kickstarter, focuses on Randi's life, his investigations, and his relationship with longtime partner José Alvarez (born Deyvi Orangel Peña Arteaga), to whom he was married in 2013. The film was screened at the Tribeca Film Festival, at Toronto's Hot Docs film festival, and at the June 2014 AFI Docs Festival in Silver Spring, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., where it won the Audience Award for Best Feature. It also received positive reviews from critics. The film was featured on the PBS Independent Lens series, shown in the U.S. and Canada, on March 28, 2016.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "In December 2014, Randi flew to Australia to take part in \"An Evening with James Randi\" tour, organized by Think Inc. This tour included a screening of An Honest Liar followed by a \"fireside chat\" with Randi on stage. Cities visited were Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane, Melbourne, and Sydney. MC in Adelaide was Dr. Paul Willis with Richard Saunders interviewing Randi. MC in Perth was Jake Farr-Wharton with Richard Saunders interviewing Randi. MC for Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney was Richard Saunders with Lawrence Leung interviewing Randi.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "In 2017, Randi appeared in animated form on the website Holy Koolaid, in which he discussed the challenge of finding the balance between connecting sincerely with his audience and at the same time tricking/fooling them with an artful ruse, and indicated that this is a balance with which many magicians struggle.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) offered a prize of US$1,000,000 to anyone able to demonstrate a supernatural ability under scientific testing criteria agreed to by both sides. Based on the paranormal challenges of John Nevil Maskelyne and Houdini, the foundation began in 1996, when Randi put up $1,000 of his own money payable to anyone who could provide objective proof of the paranormal. The prize money grew to $1,000,000, and had formal published rules. No one progressed past the preliminary test, which was set up with parameters agreed to by both Randi and the applicant. He refused to accept any challengers who might suffer serious injury or death as a result of the testing.",
"title": "One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "On April 1, 2007, it was ruled that only persons with an established, nationally recognized media profile and the backing of a reputable academic were allowed to apply for the challenge, in order to avoid wasting JREF resources on frivolous claimants.",
"title": "One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "On Larry King Live, March 6, 2001, Larry King asked claimed medium Sylvia Browne if she would take the challenge and she agreed. Randi appeared with Browne on Larry King Live six months later, and she again appeared to accept his challenge. However, according to Randi, she ultimately refused to be tested, and the Randi Foundation kept a clock on its website recording the number of weeks since Browne allegedly accepted the challenge without following through, until Browne's death in November 2013.",
"title": "One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "During a subsequent appearance on Larry King Live on June 5, 2001, Randi challenged Rosemary Altea, another claimed medium, to undergo testing for the million dollars, but Altea refused to address the question. Instead Altea replied only, \"I agree with what he says, that there are many, many people who claim to be spiritual mediums, they claim to talk to the dead. There are many people, we all know this. There are cheats and charlatans everywhere.\" On January 26, 2007, Altea and Randi again appeared on the show, and Altea again refused to answer whether or not she would take the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge.",
"title": "One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "In October 2007, claimed psychic John Edward appeared on Headline Prime, hosted by Glenn Beck. When asked if he would take \"the Amazing Randi's\" challenge, Edward responded, \"It's funny. I was on Larry King Live once, and they asked me the same question. And I made a joke [then], and I'll say the same thing here: why would I allow myself to be tested by somebody who's got an adjective as a first name?\" Beck simply allowed Edward to continue, ignoring the challenge.",
"title": "One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Randi asked British businessman Jim McCormick, the inventor of the bogus ADE 651 bomb detector, to take the challenge in October 2008. Randi called the ADE 651 \"a useless quack device which cannot perform any other function than separating naive persons from their money. It's a fake, a scam, a swindle, and a blatant fraud. Prove me wrong and take the million dollars.\" There was no response from McCormick. According to Iraqi investigators, the ADE 651, which was corruptly sold to the Baghdad bomb squad, was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of civilians who died as a result of terrorist bombs which were not detected at checkpoints. On April 23, 2013, McCormick was convicted of three counts of fraud at the Old Bailey in London; he was subsequently sentenced to ten years' imprisonment for his part in the ADE 651 scandal, which Randi was the first to expose.",
"title": "One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "A public log of past participants in the Million Dollar Challenge exists. In 2015, after Randi's retirement, his foundation said the Million Dollar Challenge would no longer consider applicants unless they meet a set of minimum protocols, to reduce the amount of frivolous claims.",
"title": "One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Randi was involved in a variety of legal disputes, but said that he had \"never paid even one dollar or even one cent to anyone who ever sued me.\" However, he said, he had paid out large sums to defend himself in these suits.",
"title": "Legal disputes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Randi met magician Uri Geller in the early 1970s, and found Geller to be \"Very charming. Likable, beautiful, affectionate, genuine, forward-going, handsome—everything!\" But Randi viewed Geller as a con-man, and began a long effort to expose him as a fraud. According to Randi, Geller tried to sue him several times, accusing him of libel. Geller never won, save for a ruling in a Japanese court that ordered Randi to pay Geller one-third of one per cent of what Geller had requested. This ruling was cancelled, and the matter dropped, when Geller decided to concentrate on another legal matter.",
"title": "Legal disputes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "In May 1991, Geller sued Randi and CSICOP for $15 million on a charge of slander, after Randi told the International Herald Tribune that Geller had \"tricked even reputable scientists\" with stunts that \"are the kind that used to be on the back of cereal boxes\", referring to the old spoon-bending trick. The court dismissed the case and Geller had to settle at a cost to him of $120,000, after Randi produced a cereal box which bore instructions on how to do the spoon-bending trick. Geller's lawyer Don Katz was disbarred mid-way into this action and Geller ended up suing him. After failing to pay by the deadline imposed by the court, Geller was sanctioned an additional $20,000. Geller sued both Randi and CSICOP in the 1980s. CSICOP argued that the organization was not responsible for Randi's statements. The court agreed that including CSICOP was frivolous and dropped them from the action, leaving Randi to face the action alone, along with the legal costs. Geller was ordered to pay substantial damages, but only to CSICOP.",
"title": "Legal disputes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "In 1993, a jury in the U.S. District Court in Baltimore found Randi liable for defaming Eldon Byrd for calling him a child molester in a magazine story and a \"shopping market molester\" in a 1988 speech. However, the jury found that Byrd was not entitled to any monetary damages after hearing testimony that he had sexually molested and later married his sister-in-law. The jury also cleared the other defendant in the case, CSICOP.",
"title": "Legal disputes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Late in 1996, Randi launched a libel suit against a Toronto-area psychic named Earl Gordon Curley. Curley had made multiple objectionable comments about Randi on Usenet. Despite suggesting to Randi on Usenet that Randi should sue—Curley's comments implying that if Randi did not sue, then his allegations must be true—Curley seemed entirely surprised when Randi actually retained Toronto's largest law firm and initiated legal proceedings. The suit was eventually dropped in 1998 when Earl Curley died at the age of 51 of \"alcohol toxicity\".",
"title": "Legal disputes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Allison DuBois, on whose life the television series Medium was based, threatened Randi with legal action for using a photo of her from her website in his December 17, 2004, commentary without her permission. Randi removed the photo and subsequently used a caricature of DuBois when mentioning her on his site, beginning with his December 23, 2005, commentary.",
"title": "Legal disputes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Sniffex, producer of a dowsing bomb detection device, sued Randi and the JREF in 2007, and lost. Sniffex sued Randi for his comments regarding a government test in which the Sniffex device failed. The company was later investigated and charged with fraud.",
"title": "Legal disputes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Randi was a registered Democrat. In April 2009, he released a statement endorsing the legalization of most illegal drugs.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Randi had been reported as a believer in Social Darwinist theories, although he would denounce the ideologies and movements that formed around the theories in 2013.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Randi's parents were members of the Anglican Church but rarely attended services. He attended Sunday school at St. Cuthbert's Church in Toronto a few times as a child, but he independently decided to stop going after receiving no answer to his request for proof of the teachings of the Church.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "In his essay \"Why I Deny Religion, How Silly and Fantastic It Is, and Why I'm a Dedicated and Vociferous Bright\", Randi, who identified himself as an atheist, opined that many accounts in religious texts, including the virgin birth, the miracles of Jesus Christ, and the parting of the Red Sea by Moses, are not believable. Randi refers to the Virgin Mary as being \"impregnated by a ghost of some sort, and as a result produced a son who could walk on water, raise the dead, turn water into wine, and multiply loaves of bread and fishes\" and questions how Adam and Eve's family \"managed to populate the Earth without committing incest\". He wrote that, compared to the Bible, \"The Wizard of Oz is more believable. And much more fun.\"",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Clarifying his view of atheism, Randi wrote \"I've said it before: there are two sorts of atheists. One sort claims that there is no deity, the other claims that there is no evidence that proves the existence of a deity; I belong to the latter group, because if I were to claim that no god exists, I would have to produce evidence to establish that claim, and I cannot. Religious persons have by far the easier position; they say they believe in a deity because that's their preference, and they've read it in a book. That's their right.\"",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "In An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural (1995), he examines various spiritual practices skeptically. Of the meditation techniques of Guru Maharaj Ji, he writes \"Only the very naive were convinced that they had been let in on some sort of celestial secret.\" In 2003, he was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "In a discussion with Kendrick Frazier at CSICon 2016, Randi stated \"I think that a belief in a deity is ... an unprovable claim ... and a rather ridiculous claim. It is an easy way out to explain things to which we have no answer.\" He then summarized his current concern with religious belief as follows: \"A belief in a god is one of the most damaging things that infests humanity at this particular moment in history. It may improve, and I see signs that it may be improving, and I'll leave it at that.\"",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "When Randi hosted his own radio show in the 1960s, he lived in a small house in Rumson, New Jersey, that featured a sign on the premises that read: \"Randi—Charlatan\".",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "In the 1970s and 80s, Randi supported seven foster children.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "In 1987, Randi became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Randi said that one reason he became an American citizen was an incident while he was on tour with Alice Cooper, during which the Royal Canadian Mounted Police searched the band's lockers during a performance, completely ransacking the room, but finding nothing illegal.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "In February 2006, Randi underwent coronary artery bypass surgery. The weekly commentary updates to his Web site were made by guests while he was hospitalized. Randi recovered after his surgery and was able to help organize and attend The Amaz!ng Meeting in 2007 in Las Vegas, Nevada, his annual convention of scientists, magicians, skeptics, atheists, and freethinkers.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Randi was diagnosed with colorectal cancer in June 2009. He had a series of small tumors removed from his intestines during laparoscopic surgery. He announced the diagnosis a week later at The Amaz!ng Meeting 7, as well as the fact that he was scheduled to begin chemotherapy in the following weeks. He also said at the conference: \"One day, I'm gonna die. That's all there is to it. Hey, it's too bad, but I've got to make room. I'm using a lot of oxygen and such—I think it's good use of oxygen myself, but of course, I'm a little prejudiced on the matter.\"",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Randi underwent his final chemotherapy session in December 2009, later saying that his chemotherapy experience was not so unpleasant as he had imagined it might be. In a video posted in April 2010, Randi stated that he had been given a clean bill of health.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "In a 2010 blog entry, Randi came out as gay, a move he said was inspired by seeing the 2008 biographical drama film Milk.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Randi married Venezuelan artist José Alvarez (born Deyvi Orangel Peña Arteaga) on July 2, 2013, in Washington, D.C. In 1986, Randi met Alvarez in a Fort Lauderdale public library, having recently moved to Florida. Alvarez, who was then known as Peña, had left his native land in fear of his life after being threatened for being homosexual. The alias Peña used, Jose Alvarez, was already an actual person in the United States. The identity confusion caused the real Alvarez some legal and financial difficulties. Peña was arrested for identity theft and faced deportation. They resided in Plantation, Florida.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "In the 1993 documentary Secrets of the Psychics, Randi stated, \"I've never involved myself in narcotics of any kind; I don't smoke; I don't drink, because that can easily just fuzz the edges of my rationality, fuzz the edges of my reasoning powers, and I want to be as aware as I possibly can. That means giving up a lot of fantasies that might be comforting in some ways, but I'm willing to give that up in order to live in an actually real world, as close as I can get to it\".",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "In a video released in October 2017, Randi revealed that he had recently suffered a minor stroke, and that he was under medical advice not to travel during his recovery, so would be unable to attend CSICon 2017 in Las Vegas later that month.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Randi died at his home on October 20, 2020, at the age of 92. The James Randi Educational Foundation attributed his death to \"age-related causes\". The Center for Inquiry said that Randi \"was the public face of skeptical inquiry, bringing a sense of fun and mischievousness to a serious mission.\" Kendrick Frazier said, as part of the statement, \"Despite his ferocity in challenging all forms of nonsense, in person he was a kind and gentle man.\"",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "The following are Guinness World Records:",
"title": "World records"
}
]
| James Randi was a Canadian-American stage magician, author and scientific skeptic who extensively challenged paranormal and pseudoscientific claims. He was the co-founder of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), and founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF). Randi began his career as a magician under the stage name The Amazing Randi and later chose to devote most of his time to investigating paranormal, occult, and supernatural claims. Randi retired from practicing magic at age 60, and from his foundation at 87. Although often referred to as a "debunker", Randi said he disliked the term's connotations and preferred to describe himself as an "investigator". He wrote about paranormal phenomena, skepticism, and the history of magic. He was a frequent guest on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, famously exposing fraudulent faith healer Peter Popoff, and was occasionally featured on the television program Penn & Teller: Bullshit! Before Randi's retirement, JREF sponsored the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge, which offered a prize of one million US dollars to eligible applicants who could demonstrate evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event under test conditions agreed to by both parties. | 2001-10-29T23:26:38Z | 2023-12-15T16:57:49Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Randi |
16,279 | James Lind | James Lind FRSE FRCPE (4 October 1716 – 13 July 1794) was a Scottish physician. He was a pioneer of naval hygiene in the Royal Navy. By conducting one of the first ever clinical trials, he developed the theory that citrus fruits cured scurvy.
Lind argued for the health benefits of better ventilation aboard naval ships, the improved cleanliness of sailors' bodies, clothing and bedding, and below-deck fumigation with sulphur and arsenic. He also proposed that fresh water could be obtained by distilling sea water. His work advanced the practice of preventive medicine and improved nutrition.
Lind was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1716 into a family of merchants, then headed by his father, James Lind. He had an elder sister. He was educated at the High School in Edinburgh.
In 1731 he began his medical studies as an apprentice of George Langlands, a fellow of the Incorporation of Surgeons which preceded the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. In 1739, he entered the Navy as a surgeon's mate, serving in the Mediterranean, off the coast of West Africa and in the West Indies. By 1747 he had become surgeon of HMS Salisbury in the Channel Fleet, and conducted his experiment on scurvy while that ship was patrolling the Bay of Biscay. Just after that patrol he left the Navy, wrote his MD thesis on venereal diseases and earned his degree from the University of Edinburgh Medical School, and was granted a licence to practise in Edinburgh.
Scurvy is a disease caused by a vitamin C deficiency, but in Lind's day, the concept of vitamins was unknown. Vitamin C is necessary for healthy connective tissue. In 1740 the catastrophic result of then-Commodore George Anson's circumnavigation attracted much attention in Europe; out of 1900 men, 1400 died, most of them allegedly from scurvy. According to Lind, scurvy caused more deaths in the British fleets than French and Spanish arms.
Since antiquity in some parts of the world, and since the 17th century in England, it had been known that citrus fruit had an antiscorbutic effect. John Woodall (1570–1643), an English military surgeon of the British East India Company recommended them but their use did not become widespread. John Fryer (1650–1733) too noted in 1698 the value of citrus fruits in curing sailors of scurvy. Although Lind was not the first to suggest citrus as a cure for scurvy, he was the first to study its effect by a systematic experiment in 1747. It was one of the first reported, controlled, clinical experiments in history, particularly because of its use of control groups.
Lind thought that scurvy was due to putrefaction of the body that could be helped by acids, so he included an acidic dietary supplement in the experiment. This began after two months at sea when the ship was afflicted with scurvy. He divided twelve scorbutic sailors into six groups of two. They all received the same diet, but in addition group one was given a quart of cider daily, group two twenty-five drops of elixir of vitriol (sulfuric acid), group three six spoonfuls of vinegar, group four half a pint of seawater, group five two oranges and one lemon, and the last group a spicy paste plus a drink of barley water. The treatment of group five stopped after six days when they ran out of fruit, but by that time one sailor was fit for duty while the other had almost recovered. Apart from that, only group one showed any effect from its treatment.
Shortly after this experiment, Lind retired from the Navy and practised privately as a physician. In 1753, he published A treatise of the scurvy, that was mostly ignored. In 1758, he was appointed chief physician of the Royal Naval Hospital Haslar at Gosport. When James Cook went on his first voyage he carried wort (0.1 mg vitamin C per 100 g), sauerkraut (10–15 mg per 100 g) and a syrup, or "rob", of oranges and lemons (the juice contains 40–60 mg of vitamin C per 100 g) as antiscorbutics, but only the results of the trials on wort were published. In 1762 Lind's Essay on the most effectual means of preserving the health of seamen appeared. In it he recommended growing salad—i.e. watercress (43 mg vitamin C per 100 g)—on wet blankets. This was put into practice, and in the winter of 1775 the British Army in North America was supplied with mustard and cress seeds. However Lind, like most of the medical profession, believed that scurvy came from ill-digested and putrefying food within the body, bad water, excessive work, and living in a damp atmosphere that prevented healthful perspiration. Thus, while he recognised the benefits of citrus fruit (although he weakened the effect by switching to a boiled concentrated or "rob", the production of which destroys vitamin C), he never advocated citrus juice as a single solution. He believed that scurvy had multiple causes which therefore required multiple remedies.
The medical establishment ashore continued to believe that scurvy was a disease of putrefaction, curable by the administration of elixir of vitriol, infusions of wort and other remedies designed to 'ginger up' the system. It could not account for the effect of citrus fruits and so dismissed the evidence of them as unproven and anecdotal. In the Navy however, experience had convinced many officers and surgeons that citrus juices provided the answer to scurvy, even if the reason was unknown. On the insistence of senior officers, led by Rear Admiral Alan Gardner in 1794, lemon juice was issued on board the Suffolk on a twenty-three-week, non-stop voyage to India. The daily ration of two-thirds of an ounce mixed in grog contained just about the minimum daily intake of 10 mg vitamin C. There was no serious outbreak of scurvy. This resulted in widespread demand for lemon juice, backed by the Sick and Hurt Board whose numbers had recently been augmented by two practical naval surgeons who knew of Lind's experiments with citrus. The following year, the Admiralty accepted the Board's recommendation that lemon juice be issued routinely to the whole fleet. Another Scot, Archibald Menzies, brought citrus plants to Kealakekua Bay in Hawaii on the Vancouver Expedition, to help the Navy re-supply in the Pacific. This was not the end of scurvy in the Navy, as lemon juice was at first in such short supply that it could only be used in home waters under the direction of surgeons, rather than as a preventative. Only after 1800 did the supply increase so that, at the insistence of Admiral Lord St Vincent, it began to be issued generally.
Lind noticed that typhus disappeared from the top floor of his hospital, where patients were bathed and given clean clothes and bedding. However, incidence was very high on the lower floors where such measures were not in place. Lind recommended that sailors be stripped, shaved, scrubbed, and issued clean clothes and bedding regularly. Thereafter, British seamen did not suffer from typhus, giving the British navy a significant advantage over the French.
In the 18th century ships took along water, cordial and milk in casks. According to the Regulations and Instructions relating to His Majesty's Service at Sea, which had been published in 1733 by the Admiralty, sailors were entitled to a gallon of weak beer daily (5/6 of a British gallon, equivalent to the modern American gallon or slightly more than three and a half litres). As the beer had been boiled in the brewing process, it was reasonably free from bacteria and lasted for months, unlike water. In the Mediterranean, wine was also issued, often fortified with brandy.
A frigate with 240 men, with stores for four months, carried more than one hundred tons of drinkable liquid. Water quality depended on its source, the condition of casks and for how long it had been kept. In normal times, sailors were not allowed to take any water away. When water was scarce, it was rationed and rain collected with spread sails. Fresh water was also obtained when possible en voyage, but watering places were often marshy, and in the tropics infested with malaria.
In 1759, Lind discovered that steam from heated salt water was fresh. He proposed to use solar energy for the distillation of water. But only when a new type of cooking stove was introduced in 1810 was production of fresh water by distillation possible on a useful scale.
Lind's final work was published in 1768; the Essay on Diseases Incidental to Europeans in Hot Climates, with the Method of Preventing their fatal Consequences. It was a work on the symptoms and treatments of tropical disease, but was not specific to naval medicine and served more as a general text for doctors and British emigrants. The Essay was used as a medical text in Britain for fifty years following publication. Seven editions were printed, including two after Lind's death.
Lind married Isabella Dickie and had two sons, John and James. In 1773 he was living on Princes Street in a brand new house facing Edinburgh Castle.
The elder son, John FRSE (1751–1794), studied medicine at St Andrews University and graduated in 1777, then succeeded his father as chief physician at Haslar Hospital in 1783. James (1765–1823), also embarked on a career with the British navy. His cousin was James Lind (1736–1812).
James rose to the rank of post-captain, and was notable for his role in the Battle of Vizagapatam in 1804, for which he was knighted.
Lind died at Gosport in Hampshire in 1794. He was buried in St Mary's Parish Churchyard in Portchester.
Lind's is one of twenty-three names on the Frieze of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine building in Keppel Street, London. Names were selected by a committee of unknown constitution who deemed them to be pioneers in public health and tropical medicine. At University of Edinburgh Medical School there is the James Lind commemorative plaque unveiled in 1953, funded by citrus growers of California and Arizona. The James Lind Alliance is named after him. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
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"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Lind argued for the health benefits of better ventilation aboard naval ships, the improved cleanliness of sailors' bodies, clothing and bedding, and below-deck fumigation with sulphur and arsenic. He also proposed that fresh water could be obtained by distilling sea water. His work advanced the practice of preventive medicine and improved nutrition.",
"title": ""
},
{
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"text": "Lind was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1716 into a family of merchants, then headed by his father, James Lind. He had an elder sister. He was educated at the High School in Edinburgh.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In 1731 he began his medical studies as an apprentice of George Langlands, a fellow of the Incorporation of Surgeons which preceded the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. In 1739, he entered the Navy as a surgeon's mate, serving in the Mediterranean, off the coast of West Africa and in the West Indies. By 1747 he had become surgeon of HMS Salisbury in the Channel Fleet, and conducted his experiment on scurvy while that ship was patrolling the Bay of Biscay. Just after that patrol he left the Navy, wrote his MD thesis on venereal diseases and earned his degree from the University of Edinburgh Medical School, and was granted a licence to practise in Edinburgh.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Scurvy is a disease caused by a vitamin C deficiency, but in Lind's day, the concept of vitamins was unknown. Vitamin C is necessary for healthy connective tissue. In 1740 the catastrophic result of then-Commodore George Anson's circumnavigation attracted much attention in Europe; out of 1900 men, 1400 died, most of them allegedly from scurvy. According to Lind, scurvy caused more deaths in the British fleets than French and Spanish arms.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Since antiquity in some parts of the world, and since the 17th century in England, it had been known that citrus fruit had an antiscorbutic effect. John Woodall (1570–1643), an English military surgeon of the British East India Company recommended them but their use did not become widespread. John Fryer (1650–1733) too noted in 1698 the value of citrus fruits in curing sailors of scurvy. Although Lind was not the first to suggest citrus as a cure for scurvy, he was the first to study its effect by a systematic experiment in 1747. It was one of the first reported, controlled, clinical experiments in history, particularly because of its use of control groups.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Lind thought that scurvy was due to putrefaction of the body that could be helped by acids, so he included an acidic dietary supplement in the experiment. This began after two months at sea when the ship was afflicted with scurvy. He divided twelve scorbutic sailors into six groups of two. They all received the same diet, but in addition group one was given a quart of cider daily, group two twenty-five drops of elixir of vitriol (sulfuric acid), group three six spoonfuls of vinegar, group four half a pint of seawater, group five two oranges and one lemon, and the last group a spicy paste plus a drink of barley water. The treatment of group five stopped after six days when they ran out of fruit, but by that time one sailor was fit for duty while the other had almost recovered. Apart from that, only group one showed any effect from its treatment.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Shortly after this experiment, Lind retired from the Navy and practised privately as a physician. In 1753, he published A treatise of the scurvy, that was mostly ignored. In 1758, he was appointed chief physician of the Royal Naval Hospital Haslar at Gosport. When James Cook went on his first voyage he carried wort (0.1 mg vitamin C per 100 g), sauerkraut (10–15 mg per 100 g) and a syrup, or \"rob\", of oranges and lemons (the juice contains 40–60 mg of vitamin C per 100 g) as antiscorbutics, but only the results of the trials on wort were published. In 1762 Lind's Essay on the most effectual means of preserving the health of seamen appeared. In it he recommended growing salad—i.e. watercress (43 mg vitamin C per 100 g)—on wet blankets. This was put into practice, and in the winter of 1775 the British Army in North America was supplied with mustard and cress seeds. However Lind, like most of the medical profession, believed that scurvy came from ill-digested and putrefying food within the body, bad water, excessive work, and living in a damp atmosphere that prevented healthful perspiration. Thus, while he recognised the benefits of citrus fruit (although he weakened the effect by switching to a boiled concentrated or \"rob\", the production of which destroys vitamin C), he never advocated citrus juice as a single solution. He believed that scurvy had multiple causes which therefore required multiple remedies.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The medical establishment ashore continued to believe that scurvy was a disease of putrefaction, curable by the administration of elixir of vitriol, infusions of wort and other remedies designed to 'ginger up' the system. It could not account for the effect of citrus fruits and so dismissed the evidence of them as unproven and anecdotal. In the Navy however, experience had convinced many officers and surgeons that citrus juices provided the answer to scurvy, even if the reason was unknown. On the insistence of senior officers, led by Rear Admiral Alan Gardner in 1794, lemon juice was issued on board the Suffolk on a twenty-three-week, non-stop voyage to India. The daily ration of two-thirds of an ounce mixed in grog contained just about the minimum daily intake of 10 mg vitamin C. There was no serious outbreak of scurvy. This resulted in widespread demand for lemon juice, backed by the Sick and Hurt Board whose numbers had recently been augmented by two practical naval surgeons who knew of Lind's experiments with citrus. The following year, the Admiralty accepted the Board's recommendation that lemon juice be issued routinely to the whole fleet. Another Scot, Archibald Menzies, brought citrus plants to Kealakekua Bay in Hawaii on the Vancouver Expedition, to help the Navy re-supply in the Pacific. This was not the end of scurvy in the Navy, as lemon juice was at first in such short supply that it could only be used in home waters under the direction of surgeons, rather than as a preventative. Only after 1800 did the supply increase so that, at the insistence of Admiral Lord St Vincent, it began to be issued generally.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Lind noticed that typhus disappeared from the top floor of his hospital, where patients were bathed and given clean clothes and bedding. However, incidence was very high on the lower floors where such measures were not in place. Lind recommended that sailors be stripped, shaved, scrubbed, and issued clean clothes and bedding regularly. Thereafter, British seamen did not suffer from typhus, giving the British navy a significant advantage over the French.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In the 18th century ships took along water, cordial and milk in casks. According to the Regulations and Instructions relating to His Majesty's Service at Sea, which had been published in 1733 by the Admiralty, sailors were entitled to a gallon of weak beer daily (5/6 of a British gallon, equivalent to the modern American gallon or slightly more than three and a half litres). As the beer had been boiled in the brewing process, it was reasonably free from bacteria and lasted for months, unlike water. In the Mediterranean, wine was also issued, often fortified with brandy.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "A frigate with 240 men, with stores for four months, carried more than one hundred tons of drinkable liquid. Water quality depended on its source, the condition of casks and for how long it had been kept. In normal times, sailors were not allowed to take any water away. When water was scarce, it was rationed and rain collected with spread sails. Fresh water was also obtained when possible en voyage, but watering places were often marshy, and in the tropics infested with malaria.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In 1759, Lind discovered that steam from heated salt water was fresh. He proposed to use solar energy for the distillation of water. But only when a new type of cooking stove was introduced in 1810 was production of fresh water by distillation possible on a useful scale.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Lind's final work was published in 1768; the Essay on Diseases Incidental to Europeans in Hot Climates, with the Method of Preventing their fatal Consequences. It was a work on the symptoms and treatments of tropical disease, but was not specific to naval medicine and served more as a general text for doctors and British emigrants. The Essay was used as a medical text in Britain for fifty years following publication. Seven editions were printed, including two after Lind's death.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Lind married Isabella Dickie and had two sons, John and James. In 1773 he was living on Princes Street in a brand new house facing Edinburgh Castle.",
"title": "Family"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The elder son, John FRSE (1751–1794), studied medicine at St Andrews University and graduated in 1777, then succeeded his father as chief physician at Haslar Hospital in 1783. James (1765–1823), also embarked on a career with the British navy. His cousin was James Lind (1736–1812).",
"title": "Family"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "James rose to the rank of post-captain, and was notable for his role in the Battle of Vizagapatam in 1804, for which he was knighted.",
"title": "Family"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Lind died at Gosport in Hampshire in 1794. He was buried in St Mary's Parish Churchyard in Portchester.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Lind's is one of twenty-three names on the Frieze of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine building in Keppel Street, London. Names were selected by a committee of unknown constitution who deemed them to be pioneers in public health and tropical medicine. At University of Edinburgh Medical School there is the James Lind commemorative plaque unveiled in 1953, funded by citrus growers of California and Arizona. The James Lind Alliance is named after him.",
"title": "Recognition"
}
]
| James Lind was a Scottish physician. He was a pioneer of naval hygiene in the Royal Navy. By conducting one of the first ever clinical trials, he developed the theory that citrus fruits cured scurvy. Lind argued for the health benefits of better ventilation aboard naval ships, the improved cleanliness of sailors' bodies, clothing and bedding, and below-deck fumigation with sulphur and arsenic. He also proposed that fresh water could be obtained by distilling sea water. His work advanced the practice of preventive medicine and improved nutrition. | 2001-10-30T11:48:07Z | 2023-12-31T14:22:46Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lind |
16,283 | James Clavell | James Clavell (born Charles Edmund Dumaresq Clavell; 10 October 1921 – 7 September 1994) was an Australian-born British (later naturalized American) writer, screenwriter, director, and World War II veteran and prisoner of war. Clavell is best known as the author of his Asian Saga novels, a number of which have had television adaptations. Clavell also wrote such screenplays as those for The Fly (1958) (based on the short story by George Langelaan) and The Great Escape (1963) (based on the personal account of Paul Brickhill). He directed the popular 1967 film To Sir, with Love for which he also wrote the script.
Born in Australia, Clavell was the son of Commander Richard Charles Clavell, a Royal Navy officer who was stationed in Australia with the Royal Australian Navy from 1920 to 1922. Richard Clavell was posted back to England when James was nine months old. Clavell was educated at Portsmouth Grammar School.
In 1940, Clavell joined the Royal Artillery. Though trained for desert warfare, after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 he was sent to Singapore to fight the Japanese. The ship taking his unit was sunk en route to Singapore, and the survivors were picked up by a Dutch boat fleeing to India. The commander, described by Clavell years later as a "total twit", insisted that they be dropped off at the nearest port to fight the war despite having no weapons.
Shot in the face, he was captured in Java in 1942 and sent to a Japanese prisoner of war camp on Java. Later he was transferred to Changi Prison in Singapore.
In 1981, Clavell recounted:
Changi became my university instead of my prison. Among the inmates there were experts in all walks of life—the high and the low roads. I studied and absorbed everything I could from physics to counterfeiting, but most of all I learned the art of surviving, the most important course of all.
Prisoners were fed a quarter of a pound of rice per day, one egg per week and occasional vegetables. Clavell believed that if atomic bombs had not been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki he would not have survived the war.
Clavell did not talk about his wartime experiences with anyone, even his wife, for 15 years after the war. For a time he carried a can of sardines in his pocket at all times and fought an urge to forage for food in trash cans. He also experienced bad dreams and a nervous stomach kept him awake at night.
By 1946 Clavell had become a captain, but a motorcycle accident ended his military career. He enrolled with the University of Birmingham, where he met April Stride, an actress, whom he married in 1949 (date of marriage sometimes given as 1951). He would visit her on the film sets where she was working and began to be interested in becoming a film director.
Clavell entered the film industry via distribution and worked at that in England for a number of years. He tried to get into producing but had no luck so started writing screenplays. In 1954 he moved to New York, then to Hollywood. While trying to break into screenwriting he paid the bills working as a carpenter.
In 1956, he sold a script about pilots to RKO, Far Alert. The same year Michael Pate bought a story of his, Forbidden Territory, for filming.
Neither was filmed but Far Alert kept being sold and re-sold. "In 18 months it brought in $87,000", he later said. "We kept getting paid for writing it and rewriting it as it went from one studio to another. It was wonderful." It was later sold to Fox where it attracted the attention of Robert L. Lippert who hired Clavell to write the science-fiction horror movie The Fly (1958). This became a hit and launched Clavell as a screenwriter.
He wrote Watusi (1959) for director Kurt Neumann, who had also made The Fly.
Clavell wrote Five Gates to Hell (1959) for Lippert, and when they could not find a suitable director, Clavell was given the job.
Paramount hired Clavell to write a film about the Bounty mutineers. It ended up not being made. Neither was a proposed movie about Francis Gary Powers made. Clavell did write, produce, and direct a Western at Paramount, Walk Like a Dragon (1960).
In 1959, Clavell wrote "Moon Landing" and "First Woman in the Moon", two episodes of Men into Space, a "day after tomorrow"-style science fiction drama, which depicted, in realistic terms, the (at the time) near future of space exploration.
In 1960, he had written a Broadway show with John Sturges, White Alice, a thriller set in the Arctic. It was never produced.
In 1960, the Writers Guild went on strike, meaning Clavell was unable to work. He decided to write a novel, King Rat, based on his time at Changi. It took him three months and several more months after that to rework it. The book was published in 1962 and sold well. It was turned into a film in 1965.
In 1961, Clavell announced he had formed his own company, Cee Productions, who would make the films King Rat, White Alice and No Hands on the Clock.
In 1962, he signed a multi picture contract with a Canadian company to produce and direct two films there, Circle of Greed and The Sweet and the Bitter. Only the second was made and it was not released until 1967.
He wrote scripts for the war films The Great Escape (1963) and 633 Squadron (1964).
He wrote a short story, "The Children's Story" (1964) and the script for The Satan Bug (1965), directed by John Sturges who had made The Great Escape. He also wrote Richard Sahib for Sturges which was never made.
Clavell wanted to write a second novel because "that separates the men from the boys". The money from King Rat enabled him to spend two years researching and then writing what became Tai-Pan (1966). It was a huge best-seller, and Clavell sold the film rights for a sizeable amount (although the film would not be made until 1986).
Clavell returned to filmmaking. He wrote, produced and directed To Sir, With Love (1967), featuring Sidney Poitier and based on E. R. Braithwaite's semiautobiographical 1959 book. It was a huge critical and commercial success.
Clavell was now in much demand as a filmmaker. He produced and directed Where's Jack? (1969), a highwayman film which was a commercial failure. So too was an epic film about the Thirty Years' War, The Last Valley (1971).
Clavell returned to novel writing, which was the focus of the remainder of his career. He spent three years researching and writing Shōgun (1975), about an Englishman who becomes a samurai in feudal Japan. It was another massive best seller. Clavell was heavily involved in the 1980 miniseries which starred Richard Chamberlain and achieved huge ratings.
In the late 1970s he spent three years researching and writing his fourth novel, Noble House (1981), set in Hong Kong in 1963. It was another best seller and was turned into a miniseries in 1986.
Clavell briefly returned to filmmaking and directed a thirty-minute adaptation of his novelette The Children's Story. He was meant to do a sequel to Shogun but instead wrote a novel about the 1979 revolution in Iran, Whirlwind (1986).
Clavell eventually returned to the Shogun sequel, writing Gai-Jin (1993). This was his last completed novel.
The New York Times said that "Clavell has a gift. It may be something that cannot be taught or earned. He breathes narrative ... He writes in the oldest and grandest tradition that fiction knows". His first novel, King Rat (1962), was a semi-fictional account of his prison experiences at Changi. When the book was published it became an immediate best-seller, and three years later it was adapted as a movie. His next novel, Tai-Pan (1966), was a fictional account of Jardine Matheson's successful career in Hong Kong, as told via the character who was to become Clavell's heroic archetype, Dirk Struan. Struan's descendants were characters in almost all of his following books. Tai-Pan was adapted as a movie in 1986.
Clavell's third novel, Shōgun (1975), is set in 17th century Japan, and it tells the story of a shipwrecked English navigator in Japan, based on that of William Adams. When the story was made into a TV miniseries in 1980, produced by Clavell, it became the second highest rated miniseries in history with an audience of more than 120 million, after Roots.
Clavell's fourth novel, Noble House (1981), became a best-seller that year and was adapted into a TV miniseries in 1988.
Following the success of Noble House, Clavell wrote Thrump-o-moto (1985), Whirlwind (1986), and Gai-Jin (1993).
Peter Marlowe is Clavell's author surrogate and a character of the novels King Rat and Noble House (1981); he is also mentioned once (as a friend of Andrew Gavallan's) in Whirlwind (1986). Featured most prominently in King Rat, Marlowe is an English prisoner of war in Changi Prison during World War II. In Noble House, set two decades later, he is a novelist researching a book about Hong Kong. Marlowe's ancestors are also mentioned in other Clavell novels.
In Noble House Marlowe is mentioned as having written a novel about Changi which, although fictionalised, is based on real events (like those in King Rat). When asked which character was based on him, Marlowe answers, "Perhaps I'm not there at all", although in a later scene, he admits he was "the hero, of course".
The Asian Saga consists of six novels:
In 1963 Clavell became a naturalised citizen of the United States. Politically, he was said to have been an ardent individualist and proponent of laissez-faire capitalism, as many of his books' heroes exemplify. Clavell admired Ayn Rand, founder of the Objectivist school of philosophy, and sent her a copy of Noble House during 1981 inscribed: "This is for Ayn Rand—one of the real, true talents on this earth for which many, many thanks. James C, New York, 2 September 81."
Between 1970 and 1990, Clavell lived at Fredley Manor near Mickleham, located in Surrey in South East England.
In 1994, Clavell died in Switzerland from a stroke while suffering from cancer. He died one month before his 73rd birthday.
After sponsorship by his widow, the library and archive of the Royal Artillery Museum at the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, in southeast London, was renamed the James Clavell Library in his honour. The library was later closed pending the opening of a new facility in Salisbury, Wiltshire; however, James Clavell Square on the Royal Arsenal development on Woolwich riverside remains. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "James Clavell (born Charles Edmund Dumaresq Clavell; 10 October 1921 – 7 September 1994) was an Australian-born British (later naturalized American) writer, screenwriter, director, and World War II veteran and prisoner of war. Clavell is best known as the author of his Asian Saga novels, a number of which have had television adaptations. Clavell also wrote such screenplays as those for The Fly (1958) (based on the short story by George Langelaan) and The Great Escape (1963) (based on the personal account of Paul Brickhill). He directed the popular 1967 film To Sir, with Love for which he also wrote the script.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Born in Australia, Clavell was the son of Commander Richard Charles Clavell, a Royal Navy officer who was stationed in Australia with the Royal Australian Navy from 1920 to 1922. Richard Clavell was posted back to England when James was nine months old. Clavell was educated at Portsmouth Grammar School.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In 1940, Clavell joined the Royal Artillery. Though trained for desert warfare, after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 he was sent to Singapore to fight the Japanese. The ship taking his unit was sunk en route to Singapore, and the survivors were picked up by a Dutch boat fleeing to India. The commander, described by Clavell years later as a \"total twit\", insisted that they be dropped off at the nearest port to fight the war despite having no weapons.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Shot in the face, he was captured in Java in 1942 and sent to a Japanese prisoner of war camp on Java. Later he was transferred to Changi Prison in Singapore.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In 1981, Clavell recounted:",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Changi became my university instead of my prison. Among the inmates there were experts in all walks of life—the high and the low roads. I studied and absorbed everything I could from physics to counterfeiting, but most of all I learned the art of surviving, the most important course of all.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Prisoners were fed a quarter of a pound of rice per day, one egg per week and occasional vegetables. Clavell believed that if atomic bombs had not been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki he would not have survived the war.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Clavell did not talk about his wartime experiences with anyone, even his wife, for 15 years after the war. For a time he carried a can of sardines in his pocket at all times and fought an urge to forage for food in trash cans. He also experienced bad dreams and a nervous stomach kept him awake at night.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "By 1946 Clavell had become a captain, but a motorcycle accident ended his military career. He enrolled with the University of Birmingham, where he met April Stride, an actress, whom he married in 1949 (date of marriage sometimes given as 1951). He would visit her on the film sets where she was working and began to be interested in becoming a film director.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Clavell entered the film industry via distribution and worked at that in England for a number of years. He tried to get into producing but had no luck so started writing screenplays. In 1954 he moved to New York, then to Hollywood. While trying to break into screenwriting he paid the bills working as a carpenter.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In 1956, he sold a script about pilots to RKO, Far Alert. The same year Michael Pate bought a story of his, Forbidden Territory, for filming.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Neither was filmed but Far Alert kept being sold and re-sold. \"In 18 months it brought in $87,000\", he later said. \"We kept getting paid for writing it and rewriting it as it went from one studio to another. It was wonderful.\" It was later sold to Fox where it attracted the attention of Robert L. Lippert who hired Clavell to write the science-fiction horror movie The Fly (1958). This became a hit and launched Clavell as a screenwriter.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "He wrote Watusi (1959) for director Kurt Neumann, who had also made The Fly.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Clavell wrote Five Gates to Hell (1959) for Lippert, and when they could not find a suitable director, Clavell was given the job.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Paramount hired Clavell to write a film about the Bounty mutineers. It ended up not being made. Neither was a proposed movie about Francis Gary Powers made. Clavell did write, produce, and direct a Western at Paramount, Walk Like a Dragon (1960).",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In 1959, Clavell wrote \"Moon Landing\" and \"First Woman in the Moon\", two episodes of Men into Space, a \"day after tomorrow\"-style science fiction drama, which depicted, in realistic terms, the (at the time) near future of space exploration.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In 1960, he had written a Broadway show with John Sturges, White Alice, a thriller set in the Arctic. It was never produced.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In 1960, the Writers Guild went on strike, meaning Clavell was unable to work. He decided to write a novel, King Rat, based on his time at Changi. It took him three months and several more months after that to rework it. The book was published in 1962 and sold well. It was turned into a film in 1965.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In 1961, Clavell announced he had formed his own company, Cee Productions, who would make the films King Rat, White Alice and No Hands on the Clock.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In 1962, he signed a multi picture contract with a Canadian company to produce and direct two films there, Circle of Greed and The Sweet and the Bitter. Only the second was made and it was not released until 1967.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "He wrote scripts for the war films The Great Escape (1963) and 633 Squadron (1964).",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "He wrote a short story, \"The Children's Story\" (1964) and the script for The Satan Bug (1965), directed by John Sturges who had made The Great Escape. He also wrote Richard Sahib for Sturges which was never made.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Clavell wanted to write a second novel because \"that separates the men from the boys\". The money from King Rat enabled him to spend two years researching and then writing what became Tai-Pan (1966). It was a huge best-seller, and Clavell sold the film rights for a sizeable amount (although the film would not be made until 1986).",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Clavell returned to filmmaking. He wrote, produced and directed To Sir, With Love (1967), featuring Sidney Poitier and based on E. R. Braithwaite's semiautobiographical 1959 book. It was a huge critical and commercial success.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Clavell was now in much demand as a filmmaker. He produced and directed Where's Jack? (1969), a highwayman film which was a commercial failure. So too was an epic film about the Thirty Years' War, The Last Valley (1971).",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Clavell returned to novel writing, which was the focus of the remainder of his career. He spent three years researching and writing Shōgun (1975), about an Englishman who becomes a samurai in feudal Japan. It was another massive best seller. Clavell was heavily involved in the 1980 miniseries which starred Richard Chamberlain and achieved huge ratings.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In the late 1970s he spent three years researching and writing his fourth novel, Noble House (1981), set in Hong Kong in 1963. It was another best seller and was turned into a miniseries in 1986.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Clavell briefly returned to filmmaking and directed a thirty-minute adaptation of his novelette The Children's Story. He was meant to do a sequel to Shogun but instead wrote a novel about the 1979 revolution in Iran, Whirlwind (1986).",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Clavell eventually returned to the Shogun sequel, writing Gai-Jin (1993). This was his last completed novel.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The New York Times said that \"Clavell has a gift. It may be something that cannot be taught or earned. He breathes narrative ... He writes in the oldest and grandest tradition that fiction knows\". His first novel, King Rat (1962), was a semi-fictional account of his prison experiences at Changi. When the book was published it became an immediate best-seller, and three years later it was adapted as a movie. His next novel, Tai-Pan (1966), was a fictional account of Jardine Matheson's successful career in Hong Kong, as told via the character who was to become Clavell's heroic archetype, Dirk Struan. Struan's descendants were characters in almost all of his following books. Tai-Pan was adapted as a movie in 1986.",
"title": "Novelist"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Clavell's third novel, Shōgun (1975), is set in 17th century Japan, and it tells the story of a shipwrecked English navigator in Japan, based on that of William Adams. When the story was made into a TV miniseries in 1980, produced by Clavell, it became the second highest rated miniseries in history with an audience of more than 120 million, after Roots.",
"title": "Novelist"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Clavell's fourth novel, Noble House (1981), became a best-seller that year and was adapted into a TV miniseries in 1988.",
"title": "Novelist"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Following the success of Noble House, Clavell wrote Thrump-o-moto (1985), Whirlwind (1986), and Gai-Jin (1993).",
"title": "Novelist"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Peter Marlowe is Clavell's author surrogate and a character of the novels King Rat and Noble House (1981); he is also mentioned once (as a friend of Andrew Gavallan's) in Whirlwind (1986). Featured most prominently in King Rat, Marlowe is an English prisoner of war in Changi Prison during World War II. In Noble House, set two decades later, he is a novelist researching a book about Hong Kong. Marlowe's ancestors are also mentioned in other Clavell novels.",
"title": "Novelist"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In Noble House Marlowe is mentioned as having written a novel about Changi which, although fictionalised, is based on real events (like those in King Rat). When asked which character was based on him, Marlowe answers, \"Perhaps I'm not there at all\", although in a later scene, he admits he was \"the hero, of course\".",
"title": "Novelist"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The Asian Saga consists of six novels:",
"title": "Novelist"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In 1963 Clavell became a naturalised citizen of the United States. Politically, he was said to have been an ardent individualist and proponent of laissez-faire capitalism, as many of his books' heroes exemplify. Clavell admired Ayn Rand, founder of the Objectivist school of philosophy, and sent her a copy of Noble House during 1981 inscribed: \"This is for Ayn Rand—one of the real, true talents on this earth for which many, many thanks. James C, New York, 2 September 81.\"",
"title": "Politics and later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Between 1970 and 1990, Clavell lived at Fredley Manor near Mickleham, located in Surrey in South East England.",
"title": "Politics and later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "In 1994, Clavell died in Switzerland from a stroke while suffering from cancer. He died one month before his 73rd birthday.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "After sponsorship by his widow, the library and archive of the Royal Artillery Museum at the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, in southeast London, was renamed the James Clavell Library in his honour. The library was later closed pending the opening of a new facility in Salisbury, Wiltshire; however, James Clavell Square on the Royal Arsenal development on Woolwich riverside remains.",
"title": "Death and legacy"
}
]
| James Clavell was an Australian-born British writer, screenwriter, director, and World War II veteran and prisoner of war. Clavell is best known as the author of his Asian Saga novels, a number of which have had television adaptations. Clavell also wrote such screenplays as those for The Fly (1958) and The Great Escape (1963). He directed the popular 1967 film To Sir, with Love for which he also wrote the script. | 2002-02-25T15:51:15Z | 2023-12-18T06:25:38Z | [
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"Template:James Clavell",
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clavell |
16,284 | Joliet | Joliet or Jolliet may refer to: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Joliet or Jolliet may refer to:",
"title": ""
}
]
| Joliet or Jolliet may refer to: | 2022-11-09T18:59:40Z | [
"Template:TOC right",
"Template:Disambiguation"
]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joliet |
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