title: Tattoo

text: British anthropologist Ling Roth in 1900 described four methods of skin marking and suggested they be differentiated under the names "tatu", "moko", "cicatrix", and "keloid". The first is by pricking that leaves the skin smooth as found in places including the Pacific Islands. The second is a tattoo combined with chiseling to leave furrows in the skin as found in places including New Zealand. The third is scarification using a knife or chisel as found in places including West Africa. The fourth and the last is scarification by irritating and re-opening a preexisting wound, and re-scarification to form a raised scar as found in places including Tasmania, Australia, Melanesia, and Central Africa.


title: Tattoo

text: The American Academy of Dermatology distinguishes five types of tattoos: traumatic tattoos that result from injuries, such as asphalt from road injuries or pencil lead; amateur tattoos; professional tattoos, both via traditional methods and modern tattoo machines; cosmetic tattoos, also known as "permanent makeup"; and medical tattoos.


title: Tattoo

text: A traumatic tattoo occurs when a substance such as asphalt or gunpowder is rubbed into a wound as the result of some kind of accident or trauma. When this involves carbon, dermatologists may call the mark a carbon stain instead of a tattoo. Coal miners could develop characteristic marks owing to coal dust getting into wounds. These are particularly difficult to remove as they tend to be spread across several layers of skin, and scarring or permanent discoloration is almost unavoidable depending on the location. An amalgam tattoo is when amalgam particles are implanted in to the soft tissues of the mouth, usually the gums, during dental filling placement or removal. Another example of such accidental tattoos is the result of a deliberate or accidental stabbing with a pencil or pen, leaving graphite or ink beneath the skin.


title: Tattoo

text: A well-known example is the Nazi practice of forcibly tattooing concentration camp inmates with identification numbers during the Holocaust as part of the Nazis' identification system, beginning in fall 1941. The SS introduced the practice at Auschwitz concentration camp in order to identify the bodies of registered prisoners in the concentration camps. During registration, guards would pierce the outlines of the serial-number digits onto the prisoners' arms. Of the Nazi concentration camps, only Auschwitz put tattoos on inmates. The tattoo was the prisoner's camp number, sometimes with a special symbol added: some Jews had a triangle, and Romani had the letter "Z" (from German "Zigeuner" for "Gypsy"). In May 1944, Jewish men received the letters "A" or "B" to indicate a particular series of numbers.


title: Tattoo

text: As early as the Zhou, Chinese authorities would employ facial tattoos as a punishment for certain crimes or to mark prisoners or slaves.


title: Tattoo

text: During the Roman Empire, gladiators and slaves were tattooed: exported slaves were tattooed with the words "tax paid", and it was a common practice to tattoo "fugitive" (denoted by the letters "FUG") on the foreheads of runaway slaves. Owing to the Biblical strictures against the practice, Emperor Constantine I banned tattooing the face around AD 330, and the Second Council of Nicaea banned all body markings as a pagan practice in AD 787.


title: Tattoo

text: In the period of early contact between the Māori and Europeans, the Māori people hunted and decapitated each other for their moko tattoos, which they traded for European items including axes and firearms. Moko tattoos were facial designs worn to indicate lineage, social position, and status within the tribe. The tattoo art was a sacred marker of identity among the Māori and also referred to as a vehicle for storing one's tapu, or spiritual being, in the afterlife.


title: Tattoo

text: Tattoos are sometimes used by forensic pathologists to help them identify burned, putrefied, or mutilated bodies. As tattoo pigment lies encapsulated deep in the skin, tattoos are not easily destroyed even when the skin is burned.


title: Tattoo

text: Pets, show animals, thoroughbred horses, and livestock are sometimes tattooed with animal identification marks. Ear tattoos are a method of identification for beef cattle. Tattooing with a 'slap mark' on the shoulder or on the ear is the standard identification method in commercial pig farming. Branding is used for similar reasons and is often performed without anesthesia, but is different from tattooing as no ink or dye is inserted during the process, the mark instead being caused by permanent scarring of the skin. Pet dogs and cats are sometimes tattooed with a serial number (usually in the ear, or on the inner thigh) via which their owners can be identified. However, the use of a microchip has become an increasingly popular choice and since 2016 is a legal requirement for all 8.5 million pet dogs in the UK.


title: Tattoo

text: Permanent makeup is the use of tattoos to enhance eyebrows, lips (liner and/or lipstick), eyes (liner), and even moles, usually with natural colors, as the designs are intended to resemble makeup.


title: Tattoo

text: A growing trend in the US and UK is to place artistic tattoos over the surgical scars of a mastectomy. "More women are choosing not to reconstruct after a mastectomy and tattoo over the scar tissue instead... The mastectomy tattoo will become just another option for post cancer patients and a truly personal way of regaining control over post cancer bodies..." However, the tattooing of nipples on reconstructed breasts remains in high demand.


title: Tattoo

text: Medical tattoos are used to ensure instruments are properly located for repeated application of radiotherapy and for the areola in some forms of breast reconstruction. Tattooing has also been used to convey medical information about the wearer (e.g., blood group, medical condition, etc.). Alzheimer patients may be tattooed with their names, so they may be easily identified if they go missing. Additionally, tattoos are used in skin tones to cover vitiligo, a skin pigmentation disorder.


title: Tattoo

text: SS blood group tattoos () were worn by members of the Waffen-SS in Nazi Germany during World War II to identify the individual's blood type. After the war, the tattoo was taken to be prima facie, if not perfect, evidence of being part of the Waffen-SS, leading to potential arrest and prosecution. This led a number of ex-Waffen-SS to shoot themselves through the arm with a gun, removing the tattoo and leaving scars like the ones resulting from pox inoculation, making the removal less obvious.


title: Tattoo

text: Tattoos were probably also used in ancient medicine as part of the treatment of the patient. In 1898, Daniel Fouquet, a medical doctor, wrote an article on "medical tattooing" practices in Ancient Egypt, in which he describes the tattooed markings on the female mummies found at the Deir el-Bahari site. He speculated that the tattoos and other scarifications observed on the bodies may have served a medicinal or therapeutic purpose: "The examination of these scars, some white, others blue, leaves in no doubt that they are not, in essence, ornament, but an established treatment for a condition of the pelvis, very probably chronic pelvic peritonitis."


title: Tattoo

text: Ötzi the iceman had a total of 61 tattoos, which may have been a form of acupuncture used to relieve pain. Radiological examination of Ötzi's bones showed "age-conditioned or strain-induced degeneration" corresponding to many tattooed areas, including osteochondrosis and slight spondylosis in the lumbar spine and wear-and-tear degeneration in the knee and especially in the ankle joints. If so, this is at least 2,000 years before acupuncture's previously known earliest use in China (c. 100 BCE).


title: Tattoo

text: Preserved tattoos on ancient mummified human remains reveal that tattooing has been practiced throughout the world for thousands of years. In 2015, scientific re-assessment of the age of the two oldest known tattooed mummies identified Ötzi as the oldest example then known. This body, with 61 tattoos, was found embedded in glacial ice in the Alps, and was dated to 3250 BCE. In 2018, the oldest figurative tattoos in the world were discovered on two mummies from Egypt which are dated between 3351 and 3017 BCE.


title: Tattoo

text: Ancient tattooing was most widely practiced among the Austronesian people. It was one of the early technologies developed by the Proto-Austronesians in Taiwan and coastal South China prior to at least 1500 BCE, before the Austronesian expansion into the islands of the Indo-Pacific. It may have originally been associated with headhunting. Tattooing traditions, including facial tattooing, can be found among all Austronesian subgroups, including Taiwanese Aborigines, Islander Southeast Asians, Micronesians, Polynesians, and the Malagasy people. Austronesians used the characteristic hafted skin-puncturing technique, using a small mallet and a piercing implement made from "Citrus" thorns, fish bone, bone, and oyster shells.


title: Tattoo

text: Ancient tattooing traditions have also been documented among Papuans and Melanesians, with their use of distinctive obsidian skin piercers. Some archeological sites with these implements are associated with the Austronesian migration into Papua New Guinea and Melanesia. But other sites are older than the Austronesian expansion, being dated to around 1650 to 2000 BCE, suggesting that there was a preexisting tattooing tradition in the region.


title: Tattoo

text: Among other ethnolinguistic groups, tattooing was also practiced among the Ainu people of Japan; some Austroasians of Indochina; Berber women of Tamazgha (North Africa); the Yoruba, Fulani and Hausa people of Nigeria; Native Americans of the Pre-Columbian Americas; and Picts of Iron Age Britain.


title: Tattoo

text: In 1566, French sailors abducted an Inuit woman and her child in modern-day Labrador and brought her to the city of Antwerp in the Dutch Republic. The mother was tattooed while the child was unmarked. In Antwerp, the two were put on display at a local tavern at least until 1567, with handbills promoting the event being distributed in the city. In 1577, English privateer Martin Frobisher captured two Inuit and brought them back to England for display. One of the Inuit was a tattooed woman from Baffin Island, who was illustrated by the English cartographer John White.


title: Tattoo

text: In 1691, William Dampier brought to London a Filipino man named Jeoly or Giolo from the island of Mindanao (Philippines) who had a tattooed body. Dampier exhibited Jeoly in a human zoo to make a fortune and falsely branded him as a "prince" to draw large crowds. At the time of exhibition, Jeoly was still grieving his mother, who Dampier also enslaved and had died at sea during their exploitation to Europe. Dampier claimed that he became friends with Jeoly, but with the intention to make money, he continued to exploit his "friend" by exhibiting him in a human zoo, where Jeoly died three months later. Jeoly's dead body was afterwards skinned, and his skinless body was disposed, while the tattooed skin was sold and displayed at Oxford.


title: Tattoo

text: It is commonly held that the modern popularity of tattooing stems from Captain James Cook's three voyages to the South Pacific in the late 18th century. Certainly, Cook's voyages and the dissemination of the texts and images from them brought more awareness about tattooing (and, as noted above, imported the word "tattow" into Western languages). On Cook's first voyage in 1768, his science officer and expedition botanist, Sir Joseph Banks, as well as artist Sydney Parkinson and many others of the crew, returned to England with a keen interest in tattoos with Banks writing about them extensively and Parkinson is believed to have gotten a tattoo himself in Tahiti. Banks was a highly regarded member of the English aristocracy who had acquired his position with Cook by co-financing the expedition with ten thousand pounds, a very large sum at the time. In turn, Cook brought back with him a tattooed Raiatean man, Omai, whom he presented to King George and the English Court. On subsequent voyages other crew members, from officers, such as American John Ledyard, to ordinary seamen, were tattooed.


title: Tattoo

text: The first documented professional tattooist in Britain was Sutherland Macdonald, who operated out of a salon in London beginning in 1894. In Britain, tattooing was still largely associated with sailors and the lower or even criminal class, but by the 1870s had become fashionable among some members of the upper classes, including royalty, and in its upmarket form it could be an expensive and sometimes painful process. A marked class division on the acceptability of the practice continued for some time in Britain.


title: Tattoo

text: Tattooing of Catholic women in Bosnia and Herzegovina became widespread during the Ottoman rule and continued to the mid 20th century. Among the Catholic population, there was a widespread tradition of tattooing crosses on the hands, arms, chest, and forehead of girls between the ages of 6 to 16. This was done in order to prevent kidnapping by the Ottoman Turks and conversion to Islam.


title: Tattoo

text: Ethnographers believe that its origins predate both the Slavic migration to the Balkans and spread of Christianity, with evidence pointing far back to the prehistoric Illyrian tribes.


title: Tattoo

text: Many Indigenous peoples of North America practice tattooing. European explorers and traders who met Native Americans noticed these tattoos and wrote about them, and a few Europeans chose to be tattooed by Native Americans. See history of tattooing in North America.


title: Tattoo

text: By the time of the American Revolution, tattoos were already common among American sailors (see sailor tattoos). Tattoos were listed in protection papers, an identity certificate issued to prevent impressment into the British Royal Navy. Because protection papers were proof of American citizenship, Black sailors used them to show that they were freemen.


title: Tattoo

text: The first recorded professional tattoo shop in the US was established in the early 1870s by a German immigrant, Martin Hildebrandt. He had served as a Union soldier in the Civil War and tattooed many other soldiers.


title: Tattoo

text: Soon after the Civil War, tattoos became fashionable among upper-class young adults. This trend lasted until the beginning of World War I. The invention of the electric tattoo machine caused popularity of tattoos among the wealthy to drop off. The machine made the tattooing procedure both much easier and cheaper, thus, eliminating the status symbol tattoos previously held, as they were now affordable for all socioeconomic classes. The status symbol of a tattoo shifted from a representation of wealth to a mark typically seen on rebels and criminals. Despite this change, tattoos remained popular among military servicemen, a tradition that continues today.


title: Tattoo

text: In 1975, there were only 40 tattoo artists in the country; in 1980, there were more than 5,000 self-proclaimed tattoo artists, appearing in response to sudden demand.


title: Tattoo

text: Many studies have been done of the tattooed population and society's view of tattoos. In June 2006, the "Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology" published the results of a telephone survey of 2004: it found that 36% of Americans ages 18–29, 24% of those 30–40, and 15% of those 41–51 had a tattoo. In September 2006, the Pew Research Center conducted a telephone survey that found that 36% of Americans ages 18–25, 40% of those 26–40 and 10% of those 41–64 had a tattoo. They concluded that Generation X and Millennials express themselves through their appearance, and tattoos are a popular form of self-expression. In January 2008, a survey conducted online by Harris Interactive estimated that 14% of all adults in the United States have a tattoo, slightly down from 2003, when 16% had a tattoo. Among age groups, 9% of those ages 18–24, 32% of those 25–29, 25% of those 30–39 and 12% of those 40–49 have tattoos, as do 8% of those 50–64. Men are slightly more likely to have a tattoo than women.


title: Tattoo

text: Since the 1970s, tattoos have become a mainstream part of Western fashion, common both for men and women, and among all economic classes and to age groups from the later teen years to middle age. For many young Americans, the tattoo has taken on a decidedly different meaning than for previous generations. The tattoo has undergone "dramatic redefinition" and has shifted from a form of deviance to an acceptable form of expression.


title: Tattoo

text: As of 1 November 2006, Oklahoma became the last state to legalize tattooing, having banned it since 1963.


title: Tattoo

text: Branding was used by European authorities for marking criminals throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The practice was also used by British authorities to mark army deserters and military personnel court-martialed in Australia. In nineteenth century Australia tattoos were generally the result of personal rather than official decisions but British authorities started to record tattoos along with scars and other bodily markings to describe and manage convicts assigned for transportation. The practice of tattooing appears to have been a largely non-commercial enterprise during the convict period in Australia. For example, James Ross in the Hobart Almanac of 1833 describes how the convicts on board ship commonly spent time tattooing themselves with gunpowder. Out of a study of 10,180 convict records that were transported to then Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) between 1823 and 1853 about 37% of all men and about 15% of all women arrived with tattoos, making Australia at the time the most heavily tattooed English-speaking country.


title: Tattoo

text: By the beginning of the twentieth century, there were tattoo studios in Australia but they do not appear to have been numerous. For example, the Sydney tattoo studio of Fred Harris was touted as being the only tattoo studio in Sydney between 1916 and 1943. Tattoo designs often reflected the culture of the day and in 1923 Harris's small parlour experienced an increase in the number of women getting tattoos. Another popular trend was for women to have their legs tattooed so the designs could be seen through their stockings.


title: Tattoo

text: By 1937 Harris was one of Sydney's best-known tattoo artists and was inking around 2000 tattoos a year in his shop. Sailors provided most of the canvases for his work but among the more popular tattoos in 1938 were Australian flags and kangaroos for sailors of the visiting American Fleet.


title: Tattoo

text: There are currently over 2000 official tattoo practitioners in Australia and over 100 registered parlours and clinics, with the number of unregistered parlours and clinics are estimated to be double that amount. The demand over the last decade for tattoos in Australia has risen over 440%, making it an in demand profession in the country.


title: Tattoo

text: There are several large tattoo conventions held in Australia, some of which are considered the biggest in the southern hemisphere, with the best artists from around Oceana attending.


title: Tattoo

text: Tattooing involves the placement of pigment into the skin's dermis, the layer of dermal tissue underlying the epidermis. After initial injection, pigment is dispersed throughout a homogenized damaged layer down through the epidermis and upper dermis, in both of which the presence of foreign material activates the immune system's phagocytes to engulf the pigment particles. As healing proceeds, the damaged epidermis flakes away (eliminating surface pigment) while deeper in the skin granulation tissue forms, which is later converted to connective tissue by collagen growth. This mends the upper dermis, where pigment remains trapped within successive generations of macrophages, ultimately concentrating in a layer just below the dermis/epidermis boundary. Its presence there is stable, but in the long term (decades) the pigment tends to migrate deeper into the dermis, accounting for the degraded detail of old tattoos.


title: Tattoo

text: Some tribal cultures traditionally created tattoos by cutting designs into the skin and rubbing the resulting wound with ink, ashes or other agents; some cultures continue this practice, which may be an adjunct to scarification. Some cultures create tattooed marks by hand-tapping the ink into the skin using sharpened sticks or animal bones (made into needles) with clay formed disks or, in modern times, actual needles.


title: Tattoo

text: The most common method of tattooing in modern times is the electric tattoo machine, which inserts ink into the skin via a single needle or a group of needles that are soldered onto a bar, which is attached to an oscillating unit. The unit rapidly and repeatedly drives the needles in and out of the skin, usually 80 to 150 times a second. The needles are single-use needles that come packaged individually, or manufactured by artists, on-demand, as groupings dictate on a per-piece basis.


title: Tattoo

text: In modern tattooing, an artist may use thermal stencil paper or hectograph ink/stencil paper to first place a printed design on the skin before applying a tattoo design.


title: Tattoo

text: Tattooing is regulated in many countries because of the associated health risks to client and practitioner, specifically local infections and virus transmission. Disposable plastic aprons and eye protection can be worn depending on the risk of blood or other secretions splashing into the eyes or clothing of the tattooist. Hand hygiene, assessment of risks and appropriate disposal of all sharp objects and materials contaminated with blood are crucial areas. The tattoo artist must wash his or her hands and must also wash the area that will be tattooed. Gloves must be worn at all times and the wound must be wiped frequently with a wet disposable towel of some kind. All equipment must be sterilized in a certified autoclave before and after every use. It is good practice to provide clients with a printed consent form that outlines risks and complications as well as instructions for after care.


title: Tattoo

text: Among Austronesian societies, tattoos had various functions. Among men, they were strongly linked to the widespread practice of head-hunting raids. In head-hunting societies, like the Ifugao and Dayak people, tattoos were records of how many heads the warriors had taken in battle, and were part of the initiation rites into adulthood. The number, design, and location of tattoos, therefore, were indicative of a warrior's status and prowess. They were also regarded as magical wards against various dangers like evil spirits and illnesses. Among the Visayans of the pre-colonial Philippines, tattoos were worn by the "tumao" nobility and the "timawa" warrior class as permanent records of their participation and conduct in maritime raids known as "mangayaw". In Austronesian women, like the facial tattoos among the women of the Tayal and Māori people, they were indicators of status, skill, and beauty.


title: Tattoo

text: The Government of Meiji Japan had outlawed tattoos in the 19th century, a prohibition that stood for 70 years before being repealed in 1948. As of 6 June 2012, all new tattoos are forbidden for employees of the city of Osaka. Existing tattoos are required to be covered with proper clothing. The regulations were added to Osaka's ethical codes, and employees with tattoos were encouraged to have them removed. This was done because of the strong connection of tattoos with the yakuza, or Japanese organized crime, after an Osaka official in February 2012 threatened a schoolchild by showing his tattoo.


title: Tattoo

text: Tattoos had negative connotations in historical China, where criminals often had been marked by tattooing. The association of tattoos with criminals was transmitted from China to influence Japan. Today, tattoos have remained a taboo in Chinese society.


title: Tattoo

text: The Romans tattooed criminals and slaves, and in the 19th century released U.S. convicts, Australian convicts and British army deserters were identified by tattoos. Prisoners in Nazi concentration camps were tattooed with an identification number. Today, many prison inmates still tattoo themselves as an indication of time spent in prison.


title: Tattoo

text: Native Americans also used tattoos to represent their tribe. Catholic Croats of Bosnia used religious Christian tattooing, especially of children and women, for protection against conversion to Islam during the Ottoman rule in the Balkans.


title: Tattoo

text: Tattoos are strongly empirically associated with deviance, personality disorders and criminality. Although the general acceptance of tattoos is on the rise in Western society, they still carry a heavy stigma among certain social groups. Tattoos are generally considered an important part of the culture of the Russian mafia.


title: Tattoo

text: Current cultural understandings of tattoos in Europe and North America have been greatly influenced by long-standing stereotypes based on deviant social groups in the 19th and 20th centuries. Particularly in North America, tattoos have been associated with stereotypes, folklore and racism. Not until the 1960s and 1970s did people associate tattoos with such societal outcasts as bikers and prisoners. Today, in the United States many prisoners and criminal gangs use distinctive tattoos to indicate facts about their criminal behavior, prison sentences and organizational affiliation. A teardrop tattoo, for example, can be symbolic of murder, or each tear represents the death of a friend. At the same time, members of the U.S. military have an equally well-established and longstanding history of tattooing to indicate military units, battles, kills, etc., an association that remains widespread among older Americans. In Japan, tattoos are associated with yakuza criminal groups, but there are non-yakuza groups such as Fukushi Masaichi's tattoo association that sought to preserve the skins of dead Japanese who have extensive tattoos. Tattooing is also common in the British Armed Forces. Depending on vocation, tattoos are accepted in a number of professions in America. Companies across many fields are increasingly focused on diversity and inclusion. Mainstream art galleries hold exhibitions of both conventional and custom tattoo designs, such as "Beyond Skin", at the Museum of Croydon.


title: Tattoo

text: In Britain, there is evidence of women with tattoos, concealed by their clothing, throughout the 20th century, and records of women tattooists such as Jessie Knight from the 1920s. A study of "at-risk" (as defined by school absenteeism and truancy) adolescent girls showed a positive correlation between body modification and negative feelings towards the body and low self-esteem; however, the study also demonstrated that a strong motive for body modification is the search for "self and attempts to attain mastery and control over the body in an age of increasing alienation". The prevalence of women in the tattoo industry in the 21st century, along with larger numbers of women bearing tattoos, appears to be changing negative perceptions.


title: Tattoo

text: In "Covered in Ink" by Beverly Yuen Thompson, she interviews heavily tattooed women in Washington, Miami, Orlando, Houston, Long Beach, and Seattle from 2007 to 2010 using participant observation and in-depth interviews of 70 women. Younger generations are typically more unbothered by heavily tattooed women, while older generation including the participants parents are more likely to look down on them, some even go to the extreme of disowning their children for getting tattoos. Typically how the family reacts is an indicator of their relationship in general. Family members who weren't accepting of tattoos often wanted to scrub the images off, pour holy water on them or have them surgically removed. Families who were emotionally accepting of their family members were able to maintain close bonds after tattooing.


title: Tattoo

text: Former sailor Rowland Hussey Macy, who formed Macy's department stores, used a red star tattoo that he had on his hand for the store's logo.


title: Tattoo

text: Tattoos have also been used in marketing and advertising with companies paying people to have logos of brands like HBO, Red Bull, ASOS.com and Sailor Jerry's rum tattooed in their bodies. This practice is known as "skinvertising".


title: Tattoo

text: B.T.'s Smokehouse, a barbecue restaurant located in Massachusetts, offered customers free meals for life if they had the logo of the establishment tattooed on a visible part of their bodies. Nine people took the business up on the offer.


title: Tattoo

text: The pain of tattooing can range from uncomfortable to excruciating depending on the location of the tattooing the body. The pain can cause fainting.


title: Tattoo

text: Because it requires breaking the immunologic barrier formed by the skin, tattooing carries health risks including infection and allergic reactions. Modern tattooists reduce health risks by following universal precautions working with single-use items and sterilizing their equipment after each use. Many jurisdictions require that tattooists have blood-borne pathogen training such as that provided through the Red Cross and OSHA. As of 2009 (in the United States) there have been no reported cases of HIV contracted from tattoos.


title: Tattoo

text: In amateur tattooing, such as the practice in prisons, there is an elevated risk of infection. Infections that can theoretically be transmitted by the use of unsterilized tattoo equipment or contaminated ink include surface infections of the skin, fungal infections, some forms of hepatitis, herpes simplex virus, HIV, staph, tetanus, and tuberculosis.


title: Tattoo

text: Tattoo inks have been described as "remarkably nonreactive histologically". However, cases of allergic reactions to tattoo inks, particularly certain colors, have been medically documented. This is sometimes due to the presence of nickel in an ink pigment, which triggers a common metal allergy. Occasionally, when a blood vessel is punctured during the tattooing procedure, a bruise/hematoma may appear. At the same time, a number of tattoo inks may contain hazardous substances, and a proposal has been submitted by the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) to restrict the intentional use or concentration limit of approximately 4000 substances when contained in tattoo inks. According to a study by the European Union Observatory for Nanomaterials (EUON), a number of modern-day tattoo inks contain nanomaterials. These engender significant nanotoxicological concerns.


title: Tattoo

text: Certain colours – red or similar colours such as purple, pink, and orange – tend to cause more problems and damage compared to other colours. Red ink has even caused skin and flesh damages so severe that the amputation of a leg or an arm has been necessary. If part of a tattoo (especially if red) begins to cause even minor troubles, like becoming itchy or worse, lumpy, then Danish experts strongly suggest to remove the red parts.


title: Tattoo

text: In 2017, researchers from the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France say the chemicals in tattoo ink can travel in the bloodstream and accumulate in the lymph nodes, obstructing their ability to fight infections. However, the authors noted in their paper that most tattooed individuals including the donors analyzed do not suffer from chronic inflammation.


title: Tattoo

text: Tattoo artists frequently recommend sun protection of skin to prevent tattoos from fading and to preserve skin integrity to make future tattooing easier.


title: Tattoo

text: While tattoos are considered permanent, it is sometimes possible to remove them, fully or partially, with laser treatments. Typically, carbon based pigments, or iron-oxide-based pigments, as well as some colored inks can be removed more completely than inks of other colors.


title: Tattoo

text: The expense and pain associated with removing tattoos are typically greater than the expense and pain associated with applying them. Methods other than laser tattoo removal methods include dermabrasion, salabrasion (scrubbing the skin with salt), reduction techniques, cryosurgery and excision—which is sometimes still used along with skin grafts for larger tattoos. These older methods, however, have been nearly completely replaced by laser removal treatment options.


title: Tattoo

text: A temporary tattoo is a non-permanent image on the skin resembling a permanent tattoo. As a form of body painting, temporary tattoos can be drawn, painted, or airbrushed.


title: Tattoo

text: Decal (press-on) temporary tattoos are used to decorate any part of the body. They may last for a day or for more than a week.


title: Tattoo

text: Foil temporary tattoos are a variation of decal-style temporary tattoos, printed using a foil stamping technique instead of using ink. The foil design is printed as a mirror image in order to be viewed in the right direction once it is applied to the skin. Each metallic tattoo is protected by a transparent protective film.


title: Tattoo

text: Although they have become more popular and usually require a greater investment, airbrush temporary tattoos are less likely to achieve the look of a permanent tattoo, and may not last as long as press-on temporary tattoos. An artist sprays on airbrush tattoos using a stencil with alcohol-based cosmetic inks. Like decal tattoos, airbrush temporary tattoos also are easily removed with rubbing alcohol or baby oil.


title: Tattoo

text: Another tattoo alternative is henna-based tattoos, which generally contain no additives. Henna is a plant-derived substance which is painted on the skin, staining it a reddish-orange-to-brown color. Because of the semi-permanent nature of henna, they lack the realistic colors typical of decal temporary tattoos. Due to the time-consuming application process, it is a relatively poor option for children. Dermatological publications report that allergic reactions to natural henna are very rare and the product is generally considered safe for skin application. Serious problems can occur, however, from the use of henna with certain additives. The FDA and medical journals report that painted black henna temporary tattoos are especially dangerous.


title: Tattoo

text: Decal temporary tattoos, when legally sold in the United States, have had their color additives approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as cosmetics – the FDA has determined these colorants are safe for "direct dermal contact". While the FDA has received some accounts of minor skin irritation, including redness and swelling, from this type of temporary tattoo, the agency has found these symptoms to be "child specific" and not significant enough to support warnings to the public. Unapproved pigments, however, which are sometimes used by non-US manufacturers, can provoke allergic reactions in anyone.


title: Tattoo

text: The types of airbrush paints manufactured for crafting, creating art or decorating clothing should never be used for tattooing. These paints can be allergenic or toxic.


title: Tattoo

text: The FDA regularly issues warnings to consumers about avoiding any temporary tattoos labeled as black henna or pre-mixed henna as these may contain potentially harmful ingredients including silver nitrate, carmine, pyrogallol, disperse orange dye and chromium. Black henna gets its color from paraphenylenediamine (PPD), a textile dye approved by the FDA for human use only in hair coloring. In Canada, the use of PPD on the skin, including hair dye, is banned. Research has linked these and other ingredients to a range of health problems including allergic reactions, chronic inflammatory reactions, and late-onset allergic reactions to related clothing and hairdressing dyes. They can cause these reactions long after application. Neither black henna nor pre-mixed henna are approved for cosmetic use by the FDA.


title: Tattoo

text: Egyptians originally used tattoos to show dedication to a god, and the tattoos were believed to convey divine protection. In Hinduism, Buddhism, and Neopaganism, tattoos are accepted. Southeast Asia has a tradition of protective tattoos variously known as "sak yant" or yantra tattoos that include Buddhist images, prayers, and symbols. Images of the Buddha or other religious figures have caused controversy in some Buddhist countries when incorporated into tattoos by Westerners who do not follow traditional customs regarding respectful display of images of Buddhas or deities.


title: Tattoo

text: Judaism generally prohibits tattoos among its adherents based on the commandments in Leviticus 19. Jews tend to believe this commandment only applies to Jews and not to gentiles. However, an increasing number of young Jews are getting tattoos either for fashion, or an expression of their faith.


title: Tattoo

text: There is no specific teaching in the New Testament prohibiting tattoos. Most Christian denominations believe that the Old Covenant ceremonial laws in Leviticus were abrogated with the coming of the New Covenant; that the prohibition of various cultural practices, including tattooing, was intended to distinguish the Israelites from neighbouring peoples for a limited period of time, and was not intended as a universal law to apply to the gentiles for all time. Many Coptic Christians in Egypt have a cross tattoo on their right wrist to differentiate themselves from Muslims. However, some Evangelical and fundamentalist Protestant denominations believe the commandment applies today for Christians and believe it is a sin to get a tattoo. In Catholic teaching, what is said in Leviticus (19:28) is taught not binding upon Christians for the same reason that the verse "nor shall there come upon you a garment of cloth made of two kinds of stuff" (Lev. 19:19) is not binding upon Christians. It is a matter of what the tattoo depicts. The Catholic Church says the images should not be immoral, such as sexually explicit, Satanic, or in any way opposed to the truths and teachings of Christianity.


title: Tattoo

text: Tattoos are considered to be haram for many Sunni Muslims, based on rulings from scholars and passages in the Sunni Hadith. Shia Islam does not prohibit tattooing, and many Shia Muslims (Lebanese, Iraqis, Yemenis, Iranians) have tattoos, specifically with religious themes.


title: Justin Hawkins

text: Justin David Hawkins (born 17 March 1975) is an English musician, singer, songwriter, and YouTube personality best known for being the founder, lead singer, and lead guitarist of The Darkness. He was influenced by rock bands of the 1970s and 1980s (particularly Queen, Aerosmith, Def Leppard, and AC/DC), Hawkins is the lead singer and guitarist for the band Hot Leg, formed in 2008 and now on hiatus.


title: Justin Hawkins

text: Hawkins began playing clubs and pubs with the Darkness before they were signed by record label Atlantic Records. Their debut album, "Permission to Land", went straight to number two in the UK charts upon its release on 7 July 2003, before going to number one and staying there for four weeks, eventually going on to sell 1.5 million copies in the UK. 3.5m copies over all. The Darkness took inspiration for some of their work from the local north Suffolk area, including "Black Shuck", which mentions the nearby village Blythburgh. The success of this album led to heavy touring for the band, including European portions of Metallica's Summer Sanitarium Tour 2003. They went on to headline the Carling Festival in 2004. The band won three BRIT Awards in 2004 in response to the album, "Best Group", "Best Rock Group" and "Best Album". They also won two Kerrang! awards in 2004 for "Best Live Act" and "Best British Band". The third single from the album, "I Believe in a Thing Called Love", was a substantial hit in the UK, as was their tilt at the Christmas 2003 number 1, "Christmas Time (Don't Let the Bells End)", which only just fell short, both singles reaching No. 2 in 2003. The band also appeared in the video for Band Aid 20, with Justin singing a number of lines.


title: Justin Hawkins

text: By late 2004 the band's constant media coverage had started to lead to a general public backlash, and Hawkins and the band themselves seemed to show signs that they were disillusioned with their constant media appearances, infamously walking off of an episode of the U.S.-nationally syndicated radio talk show "Loveline" on 19 April 2004.


title: Justin Hawkins

text: In October 2005, a month before the album "One Way Ticket to Hell... And Back" was to be officially released, Hawkins won an eBay auction for a copy of "One Way Ticket to Hell... and Back" for £350 under the username 'turbogunhawk'. He claimed he did this so that he could track down whoever sold the digitally-marked advance copy of the album and try to prevent it from happening again.


title: Justin Hawkins

text: "One Way Ticket", the first single from their second album, was released on 14 November 2005, debuting and peaking at number 8 on the UK Singles chart. The album itself was released on 28 November 2005, to somewhat mixed reviews. The album was produced by rock producer Roy Thomas Baker, best known for his work with Queen. Early sales figures in the UK showed the album had not sold as well its predecessor, "Permission to Land". The album debuted at no. 11, and fell to number 34 in the second week of its release. Although it went on to achieve platinum status, this was in stark contrast with their debut's five times platinum status.


title: Justin Hawkins

text: The second single taken from their second album was "Is It Just Me?", released on 20 February 2006. The single gained a preliminary position of No. 6 all that week, but finally charted at number 8. Hawkins announced when on stage that their third single to be released from the album was "Girlfriend". Released 22 May, "Girlfriend" charted at number 39.


title: Justin Hawkins

text: The band followed up their second album with a tour of the UK and Ireland, consisting of 12 dates in the major cities. The tour opened in Dublin's Point Depot on 4 February and closed in the Nottingham Arena on 20 February. Few of the venues sold out, their appeal seemingly having become more selective. Their world tour, which followed, arrived in Australia and Japan after touring Scandinavia and Continental Europe in March.


title: Justin Hawkins

text: In October 2006, Hawkins left the Darkness. Although drug and alcohol problems were initially cited as the main reason, later on national television, Hawkins would claim that he had grown tired of the constant routine of the band, recording and promoting an album, going on tours for months, back in the studio, etc. which he considered "monotonous and boring" and "could not understand how bands like the Rolling Stones could sustain it". For his time with the Darkness, Hawkins placed at number 35 on "Spin" list of the greatest frontmen of all time.


title: Justin Hawkins

text: In 2011 the band reunited and toured Europe, Asia and North America throughout 2011 and 2012 in support of their new album "Hot Cakes". They then released "Last Of Our Kind" in 2015.


title: Justin Hawkins

text: The band returned in 2017 with "Pinewood Smile," their first album to come through Cooking Vinyl. Ahead of the album's announcement, The Darkness toured Europe in support of Guns N' Roses and played a number of festivals in the UK and Europe during the summer. In 2018, they released their "Live At Hammersmith" album.


title: Justin Hawkins

text: 2019 saw The Darkness release the album "Easter Is Cancelled" on 4 October; the album charted in the top 10 in the UK.


title: Justin Hawkins

text: In January 2020, The Darkness released a new video for "In Another Life", which featured model Abbey Clancy. The track then made the BBC Radio 2 B-List.


title: Justin Hawkins

text: In 2005, Hawkins set up a solo project, called British Whale. His debut single, "This Town Ain't Big Enough for Both of Us", a cover of the 1974 hit by Sparks, was released on 15 August, reached No. 6 on the UK Singles Chart. The music video depicts Hawkins competing in a game show against World Darts Champion Phil Taylor, and features Sparks's Ron and Russell Mael as the show's hosts.


title: Justin Hawkins

text: In 2006 Hawkins released a second single, available only to download, an unofficial World Cup anthem called "England".


title: Justin Hawkins

text: Hawkins sang backing vocals on Sweet's song "Hell Raiser" for Def Leppard's 2006 covers album "Yeah!"


title: Justin Hawkins

text: In early 2007, he became half of one of six acts competing to represent the UK in the Eurovision Song Contest competition in Helsinki in a duet with singer Beverlei Brown. He entered "Making Your Mind Up" with Beverlei Brown singing a song entitled "They Don’t Make 'Em Like They Used To" but did not win the competition.


title: Justin Hawkins

text: On 16 March 2007, he appeared on the Comic Relief evening during the half-hour Top Gear of the Pops programme. This saw him performing Billy Ocean's "Red Light Spells Danger" with the three Top Gear presenters.


title: Justin Hawkins

text: Later that month, on 29 March, Hawkins created a new Myspace profile featuring songs that were planned to be included on his upcoming solo album entitled "Panther". The songs are titled "You Can't Hurt Me Anymore", "I've Met Jesus" and "Whichever". On 12 May, Hawkins added a further song to his profile, "Gay in the 80's", to appear on the same album. Later, on 13 July, he removed all the songs, and mentioned "You'll just have to wait". He later announced a new band line-up and name: Hot Leg. The aforementioned songs featured on the Hot Leg album "Red Light Fever".


title: Justin Hawkins

text: Hawkins also announced that he had been participating in the recording of two Magnet Watch albums entitled "Nude Horizon" and "Party Party Time Time". On 8 November 2007, at 3:00 am, Hawkins posted a MySpace blog containing directions to Do the Green Thing, an organisation for which he has composed a new song, "Do It in the Dark", to accompany a short film that encourages people to switch off and save energy. The song has not been released as a single but is available as a free download.


title: Justin Hawkins

text: Hawkins supplied the singing and guitar playing for Kurtz, the lead singer of the "bad guy band" Mantyz in the BBC's animated series "Freefonix", which debuted on 4 January 2008.


title: Justin Hawkins

text: In the film "Telstar", a film about Joe Meek's life and career that was released on 19 June 2009, he played the role of Screaming Lord Sutch.


title: Justin Hawkins

text: With Hot Leg in November 2008, he toured the UK supporting Alter Bridge (4–13 November) and Extreme (14–24 November).


title: Justin Hawkins

text: Hawkins has also worked with British pop-rock band Saving Aimee, having recently completed producing their debut album. He also lent his "truth larynx" to the track "Party All Day (Fuck All Night)" guesting on the 2009 Steel Panther release, "Feel the Steel". Hawkins recently worked with Adam Lambert on the track "Music Again" off his debut album.


title: Justin Hawkins

text: Justin played the role of Josh, a burned out rockstar in the 2010 movie "Psychosis". The movie also featured three Hot Leg songs.


title: Justin Hawkins

text: Hawkins also appeared on the Meat Loaf album "Hang Cool Teddy Bear", where he co-wrote two songs ("Love Is Not Real" and "California Isn't Big Enough"). He also provided guitar on "California Isn't Big Enough" and backing vocals on "Love Is Not Real" and "Los Angeloser".


title: Justin Hawkins

text: In 2012, Hawkins appeared in a Samsung commercial for their Galaxy Note smartphone during Super Bowl XLVI. In the same year, Hawkins and brother Dan appeared in the ZingZillas episode Electric Guitar.


title: Justin Hawkins

text: In 2016, Hawkins appeared on the De La Soul album "and the Anonymous Nobody..." providing vocals on the track "Lord Intended".


title: Justin Hawkins

text: In 2020, Hawkins participated in the UK version of "The Masked Singer", appearing as Chameleon. His identity was revealed in the third episode when he was voted out. During his time on the show he performed renditions of "Creep" by Radiohead, "Feel It Still" by Portugal. The Man, and "True Colors" by Cyndi Lauper.


title: Justin Hawkins

text: In 2021, Hawkins launched his YouTube channel "Justin Hawkins Rides Again" where he reviews music, commentates on the music industry and answers fan questions. As of December 2022, the channel has 320,000 subscribers.


title: Justin Hawkins

text: On September 3rd 2022, Hawkins participated in the Taylor Hawkins Tribute Concert, where he joined John Lousteau and The Coattail Riders to perform "Louise", "Range Rover Bitch" and "It's Over". He then joined Wolfgang Van Halen, Dave Grohl and Josh Freese to perform "On Fire" and "Hot for Teacher" by Van Halen. He also made an appearance with Brian Johnson to perform "Back in Black". Later, he joined the surviving members of Queen to perform "Under Pressure".


title: Justin Hawkins

text: Hawkins currently resides in Switzerland near his ex-wife and daughter, he has spoken on his YouTube channel of still living nearby despite his separation to be near his daughter. Hawkins follows a vegan diet.


title: Justin Hawkins

text: Hawkins is a football fan, having supported Manchester United growing up, but he is now primarily a supporter of Norwich City.


title: Justin Hawkins

text: Hawkins is seen playing Gibson Les Paul Customs almost exclusively. He is most commonly seen playing an alpine white model which he used with the Darkness (as seen in the "I Believe in a Thing Called Love" & "Love is Only a Feeling" music videos), and with Hot Leg. It is rare to see him use another guitar, although he can be seen playing a custom Ibanez Jem for the song "Bald". He has also been seen using an ebony Gibson Les Paul Custom, a one-off Gibson "Less Paul" custom sculpted to resemble a shell, and a custom finished blue Les Paul standard airbrushed with the mythical dog Black Shuck and Blythburgh church. In 2004 Gibson issued a limited run of Justin Hawkins signature Les Paul Customs based on the '68 RI with abalone and mother of pearl "flame" inlays on the fretboard, a sparkle finish in either Silverburst or Pinkburst (a Blueburst and Redburst have also been pictured, as well as a one-off Gold Mirror finish produced by SimS Custom Guitars). These have become highly valuable because of their scarcity and unique features.


title: Justin Hawkins

text: Hawkins used Mesa Boogie dual and triple rectifier amplifiers rather than Marshall Amplification when performing with the Darkness. The stacks he was using had custom-made speaker cabs coated in red leather. During his time in Hot Leg he was exclusively seen using Cornford MK50H II's in white vinyl with two Cornford, 16-ohm, 4x12 cabinets loaded with Celestion "Vintage 30s". Since the Darkness reformation he has been seen using multiple modified Marshall 1959 MKII Plexi Reissue guitar amps with a boosted gain stage run through Marshall 1960B cabinets. Between 2016 and 2021, Hawkins used EVH and Wizard amplifiers. From December 2021, Hawkins has used Laney JH3000 heads and GS 4x12 cabinets.


title: Justin Hawkins

text: In a 2012 edition of "Guitarist Magazine's" video series "On the Road with..." Hawkins's pedal setup consisted of a Boss Analog Delay, a Pro Co RAT, a Diamond Pedals Compressor, a Boss TU-3 Tuner, and a Dunlop Cry Baby DCR-2SR rack module which allows him to have three separate wah-wah pedals strategically placed around the stage. As of 2016, Hawkins does not use any pedals.


title: Justin Hawkins

text: Hawkins can be seen playing a Martin Backpacker travel guitar in the earlier episodes of his YouTube channel, "Justin Hawkins Rides Again".


title: Great Chinese Famine

text: The Great Chinese Famine () was a period between 1959 and 1961 in the history of the People's Republic of China (PRC) characterized by widespread famine. Some scholars have also included the years 1958 or 1962. It is widely regarded as the deadliest famine and one of the greatest man-made disasters in human history, with an estimated death toll due to starvation that ranges in the tens of millions (15 to 55 million). The most stricken provinces were Anhui (18% dead), Chongqing (15%), Sichuan (13%), Guizhou (11%) and Hunan (8%).


title: Great Chinese Famine

text: The major contributing factors in the famine were the policies of the Great Leap Forward (1958 to 1962) and people's communes, launched by Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party Mao Zedong, such as inefficient distribution of food within the nation's planned economy; requiring the use of poor agricultural techniques; the Four Pests campaign that reduced sparrow populations (which disrupted the ecosystem); over-reporting of grain production; and ordering millions of farmers to switch to iron and steel production. During the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference in early 1962, Liu Shaoqi, then President of China, formally attributed 30% of the famine to natural disasters and 70% to man-made errors ("三分天灾, 七分人祸"). After the launch of Reforms and Opening Up, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officially stated in June 1981 that the famine was mainly due to the mistakes of the Great Leap Forward as well as the Anti-Rightist Campaign, in addition to some natural disasters and the Sino-Soviet split.


title: Great Chinese Famine

text: Policy changes affecting how farming was organized coincided with droughts and floods. As a result, year-over-year grain production fell dramatically in China. The harvest was down by 15% in 1959 compared to 1958, and by 1960, it was at 70% of its 1958 level. Specifically, according to China's governmental data, crop production decreased from 200 million tons (or 400 billion jin) in 1958 to 170 million tons (or 340 billion jin) in 1959, and to 143.5 million tons (or 287 billion jin) in 1960.


title: Great Chinese Famine

text: The excess mortality associated with the famine has been estimated by former CCP officials and international experts, with most giving a number in the range of 15–55 million deaths. According to historian Mobo Gao, those who are anti-Communist want to stretch the death toll number as high as possible, whereas those who are sympathetic to the Chinese Revolution would like to see the numbers as low as possible. Some specific estimates include the following (ranging from lowest to highest):


title: Great Chinese Famine

text: Due to the lack of food and incentive to marry at that time, according to China's official statistics, China's population in 1961 was about 658,590,000, some 14,580,000 lower than in 1959. The birth rate decreased from 2.922% (1958) to 2.086% (1960) and the death rate increased from 1.198% (1958) to 2.543% (1960), while the average numbers for 1962–1965 are about 4% and 1%, respectively. The mortality in the birth and death rates both peaked in 1961 and began recovering rapidly after that, as shown on the chart of census data displayed here. Lu Baoguo, a Xinhua reporter based in Xinyang, explained to Yang Jisheng why he never reported on his experience:


title: Great Chinese Famine

text: There are widespread oral reports, though no official documentation, of human cannibalism being practiced in various forms as a result of the famine. To survive, people had to resort to every possible means, from eating earth and poisons to stealing and killing and even to eating human flesh. Due to the scale of the famine, some have speculated that the resulting cannibalism could be described as "on a scale unprecedented in the history of the 20th century".


title: Great Chinese Famine

text: The Great Chinese Famine was caused by a combination of radical agricultural policies, social pressure, economic mismanagement, and natural disasters such as droughts and floods in farming regions.


title: Great Chinese Famine

text: The Chinese Communist Party introduced drastic changes in farming policy during the Great Leap Forward, prohibiting private farm ownership.


title: Great Chinese Famine

text: During the Great Leap Forward, farming was organized into people's communes and the cultivation of privately owned plots was forbidden. The agricultural economy was centrally planned, and regional Party leaders were given production quotas for the communes under their control. Their output was then appropriated by the state and distributed at its discretion. In 2008, former deputy editor of Yanhuang Chunqiu and author Yang Jisheng would summarize his perspective of the effect of the production targets as an inability for supply to be redirected to where it was most demanded:


title: Great Chinese Famine

text: The degree to which people's communes lessened or worsened the famine is controversial. Each region dealt with the famine differently, and timelines of the famine are not uniform across China. One argument is that excessive eating took place in the mess halls, and that this directly led to a worsening of the famine. If excessive eating had not taken place, one scholar argued, "the worst of the Great Leap Famine could still have been avoided in mid-1959". However, dire hunger did not set in to places like Da Fo village until 1960, and the public dining hall participation rate was found not to be a meaningful cause of famine in Anhui and Jiangxi. In Da Fo village, "food "output" did not decline in reality, but there was an astonishing loss of food "availability" associated with Maoist state appropriation".


title: Great Chinese Famine

text: Along with collectivization, the central government decreed several changes in agricultural techniques that would be based on the ideas of later-discredited Russian agronomist Trofim Lysenko. One of these ideas was close planting, whereby the density of seedlings was at first tripled and then doubled again. The theory was that plants of the same species would not compete with each other. In natural cycles they did fully compete, which actually stunted growth and resulted in lower yields.


title: Great Chinese Famine

text: Another policy known as "deep plowing" was based on the ideas of Lysenko's colleague Terentiy Maltsev, who encouraged peasants across China to eschew normal plowing depths of 15–20 centimeters and instead plow deeply into the soil (1 to 2 Chinese feet or 33 to 66 cm). The deep plowing theory stated that the most fertile soil was deep in the earth, and plowing unusually deeply would allow extra-strong root growth. While deep plowing can increase yields in some contexts, the policy is generally considered to have hindered yields in China.


title: Great Chinese Famine

text: In the Four Pests campaign, citizens were called upon to destroy mosquitoes, rats, flies, and sparrows. The mass eradication of the sparrows resulted in an increase of the population of crop-eating insects, which had no predators without the sparrows.


title: Great Chinese Famine

text: Beginning in 1957, the Chinese Communist Party began to report excessive production of grain because of pressure from superiors. However, the actual production of grain throughout China was decreasing from 1957 to 1961. For example:


title: Great Chinese Famine

text: This series of events resulted in an "illusion of superabundance" (浮夸风), and the Party believed that they had an excess of grain. On the contrary, the crop yields were lower than average. For instance, Beijing believed that "in 1960 state granaries would have 50 billion "jin" of grain", when they actually contained 12.7 billion "jin." The effects of the illusion of superabundance were significant, leaving some historians to argue that it was the major cause of much of the starvation throughout China. Yang Dali argued that there were three main consequences from the illusion of superabundance:


title: Great Chinese Famine

text: Iron and steel production was identified as a key requirement for economic advancement, and millions of peasants were ordered away from agricultural work to join the iron and steel production workforce. Much of the iron produced by the peasant population ended up being too weak to be used commercially.


title: Great Chinese Famine

text: Economists Xin Meng, Nancy Qian and Pierre Yared showed that, much as Nobel laureate Amartya Sen had earlier claimed, aggregate production was sufficient for avoiding famine and that the famine was caused by over-procurement and poor distribution within the country. They show that unlike most other famines, there were surprisingly more deaths in places that produced more food per capita, explaining that the inflexibility in the centrally planned food procurement system explains at least half of the famine mortality. Economic historians James Kung and Shuo Chen show that there was more over-procurement in places where politicians faced more competition.


title: Great Chinese Famine

text: In addition, policies from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the central government, particularly the Three Red Banners and the Socialist Education Movement (SEM), proved to be ideologically detrimental to the worsening famine. The Three Red Banners of the CCP "sparked the fanaticism of 1958". The implementation of the Mass line, one of the three banners which told people to "go all out, aim high, and build socialism with greater, better, and more economical results", is cited in connection to the pressures officials felt to report a superabundance of grain. The SEM, established in 1957, also led to the severity of the famine in various ways, including causing the "illusion of superabundance" (浮夸风). Once the exaggerations of crop yields from the Mass Line were reported, "no one dared to 'dash cold water on further reports. The SEM also led to the establishment of conspiracy theories in which the peasants were believed to be pretending to be hungry in order to sabotage the state grain purchase.


title: Great Chinese Famine

text: Local governments had just as much, if not more, influence on the famine than did higher rungs of government. As the Great Leap Forward progressed, many provincial leaders began aligning themselves with Mao and higher Party leaders. Local leaders were forced to choose between doing what was best for their community and guarding their reputation politically. Landlords began "denouncing any opposition as 'conservative rightism, which is defined broadly as anything anti-communist. In an environment of conspiracy theories directed against peasants, saving extra grain for a family to eat, espousing the belief that the Great Leap Forward should not be implemented, or merely not working hard enough were all seen as forms of "conservative rightism". Peasants became unable to speak openly on collectivization and state grain purchase. With a culture of fear and recrimination at both a local and official level, speaking and acting against the famine became a seemingly impossible task.


title: Great Chinese Famine

text: The influence of local government in the famine can be seen in the comparison between the provinces of Anhui and Jiangxi. Anhui, having a radical pro-Mao government, was led by Zeng Xisheng who was "dictatorial", with ties to Mao. Zeng firmly believed in the Great Leap Forward and tried to build relationships with higher officials rather than maintain local ties. Zeng proposed agricultural projects without consulting colleagues, which caused Anhui's agriculture to fail terribly. Zhang Kaifan, a party secretary and deputy-governor of the province, heard rumours of a famine breaking out in Anhui and disagreed with many of Zeng's policies. Zeng reported Zhang to Mao for such speculations. As a result, Mao labeled Zhang "a member of the 'Peng Dehuai anti-Party military clique and he was purged from the local party. Zeng was unable to report on the famine when it became an emergency situation, as this would prove his hypocrisy. For this he was described as a "blatant political radical who almost single-handedly damaged Anhui".


title: Great Chinese Famine

text: Jiangxi encountered a situation almost opposite to that of Anhui. The leaders of Jiangxi publicly opposed some of the Great Leap programs, quietly made themselves unavailable, and even appeared to take a passive attitude towards the Maoist economy. As the leaders worked collaboratively among themselves, they also worked with the local population. By creating an environment in which the Great Leap Forward did not become fully implemented, the Jiangxi government "did their best to minimize damage". From these findings, scholars Manning and Wemheuer concluded that much of the severity of the famine was due to provincial leaders and their responsibility for their regions.


title: Great Chinese Famine

text: In 1958, there was a notable regional flood of the Yellow River which affected part of Henan Province and Shandong Province. It was reported as the most severe flood of the Yellow River since 1933. In July 1958, the Yellow River flood affected 741,000 people in 1708 villages and inundated over 3.04 million mu (over half a million acres) of cultivated fields. The largest torrent of the flood was smoothly directed into the Bohai Sea on 27 July, and the government declared a "victory over the flood" after sending a rescue team of over 2 million people. The spokesperson of the Flood Prevention Center of Chinese government stated on 27 July 1958, that:


title: Great Chinese Famine

text: But the government was encouraged to report success and hide failures. Because the 2 million farm laborers from the two provinces were ordered away from the fields to serve as a rescue team and were repairing the banks of the river instead of tending to their fields, "crops are neglected and much of the harvest is left to rot in the fields". On the other hand, historian Frank Dikötter has argued that most floods during the famine were not due to unusual weather, but to massive, poorly planned and poorly executed irrigation works which were part of the Great Leap Forward. At this time, encouraged by Mao Zedong, people in China were building a large number of dams and thousands of kilometers of new irrigation canals in an attempt to move water from wet areas to areas that were experiencing drought. Some of the works, such as the Red Flag Canal, made positive contributions to irrigation, but researchers have pointed out that the massive hydraulic construction project led to many deaths due to starvation, epidemics, and drowning, which contributed to the famine.


title: Great Chinese Famine

text: However, there have been disagreements on the significance of the drought and floods in causing the Great Famine. According to published data from Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences (), the drought in 1960 was not uncommon and its severity was only considered "mild" compared to that in other years—it was less serious than those in 1955, 1963, 1965–1967, and so on. Moreover, Yang Jisheng, who was a senior journalist from Xinhua News Agency, reports that Xue Muqiao, then head of the National Statistics Bureau of China, said in 1958, "We give whatever figures the upper-level wants" to overstate natural disasters and relieve official responsibility for deaths due to starvation. Yang claimed that he investigated other sources including a non-government archive of meteorological data from 350 weather stations across China, and the droughts, floods, and temperatures during 1958–1961 were within the typical patterns for China. According to Basil Ashton:


title: Great Chinese Famine

text: Despite these claims, other scholars have provided provincial-level demographic panel data which quantitatively proved that weather was also an important factor, particularly in those provinces which experienced excessively wet conditions. According to economist Daniel Houser and others, 69% of the Famine was due to government policies while the rest (31%) was due to natural disasters.


title: Great Chinese Famine

text: Local party leaders, for their part, conspired to cover up shortfalls and reassign blame in order to protect their own lives and positions. Mao was kept unaware of some of the starvation of villagers in the rural areas who were suffering, as the birth rate began to plummet and deaths increased in 1958 and 1959. In 1960, as gestures of solidarity, Mao ate no meat for seven months and Zhou Enlai cut his monthly grain consumption.


title: Great Chinese Famine

text: In visits to Henan province in 1958, Mao observed what local officials claimed was increases in crop yield of one thousand to three thousand percent achieved, supposedly, in massive 24-hour pushes organized by the officials which they called "sputnik launches". But the numbers were faked, and so were the fields that Mao observed, which had been carefully prepared in advance of Mao's visit by local officials, who removed shoots of grain from various fields and carefully transplanted them into a field prepared especially for Mao, which appeared to be a bumper crop.


title: Great Chinese Famine

text: The local officials became trapped by these sham demonstrations to Mao, and exhorted the peasants to reach unattainable goals, by "deep ploughing and close planting", among other techniques. This ended up making things much worse; the crop failed completely, leaving barren fields. No one was in a position to challenge Mao's ideas as incorrect, so peasants went to extreme lengths to keep up the charade; some grew seedlings in their bedding and coats and, after the seedlings quickly sprouted, "planted" them in fields—the bedding made the plants look high and healthy.


title: Great Chinese Famine

text: Like in the massive Soviet-created famine in Ukraine (the Holodomor), doctors were prohibited from listing "starvation" as a cause of death on death certificates. This kind of deception was far from uncommon; a famous propaganda picture from the famine shows Chinese children from Shandong province ostensibly standing atop a field of wheat, so densely grown that it could apparently support their weight. In reality, they were standing on a bench concealed beneath the plants, and the "field" was again entirely composed of individually transplanted stalks.


title: Great Chinese Famine

text: In April and May 1961, Liu Shaoqi, then President of the People's Republic of China, concluded after 44 days of field research in villages of Hunan that the causes of the famine were 30% natural disaster and 70% human error (三分天灾, 七分人祸).


title: Great Chinese Famine

text: In January and February 1962, the "7000 Cadres Conference" took place in Beijing, which was attended by more than 7,000 CCP officials nationwide. During the conference, Liu formally announced his conclusion on the causes of the great famine, while the Great Leap Forward was declared "over" by the Chinese Communist Party. The policies of Mao Zedong were criticized.


title: Great Chinese Famine

text: The failure of the Great Leap Forward as well as the famine forced Mao Zedong to withdraw from active decision-making within the CCP and the central government, and turn various future responsibilities over to Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. A series of economic reforms were carried out by Liu and Deng and others, including policies such as "sanzi yibao" (三自一包) which allowed free market and household responsibility for agricultural production.


title: Great Chinese Famine

text: However, the disagreement between Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping over economic and social policy grew larger. In 1963, Mao launched the Socialist Education Movement and in 1966, he launched the Cultural Revolution, during which Liu was accused of being a traitor and enemy agent for attributing only 30% to natural calamities. Liu was beaten and denied medicine for diabetes and pneumonia; he died in 1969. On the other hand, Deng was accused of being a "capitalist roader" during the Cultural Revolution and was purged twice.


title: Great Chinese Famine

text: In December 1978, Deng Xiaoping became the new Paramount Leader of China and launched the historic Reforms and Opening Up program which fundamentally changed the agricultural and industrial system in China. Until the early 1980s, the Chinese government's stance, reflected by the name "Three Years of Natural Disasters", was that the famine was largely a result of a series of natural disasters compounded by several planning errors. During the "Boluan Fanzheng" period in June 1981, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officially changed the name to "Three Years of Difficulty", and stated that the famine was mainly due to the mistakes of the Great Leap Forward as well as the Anti-Rightist Campaign, in addition to some natural disasters and the Sino-Soviet split. Academic studies on the Great Chinese Famine also became more active in mainland China after 1980, when the government started to release some demographic data to the public. A number of high-ranking Chinese officials had expressed their views on the famine:


title: Great Chinese Famine

text: Researchers outside China have argued that the massive institutional and policy changes which accompanied the Great Leap Forward were the key factors in the famine, or at least worsened nature-induced disasters. In particular, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen puts this famine in a global context, arguing that lack of democracy is the major culprit: "Indeed, no substantial famine has ever occurred in a democratic country—no matter how poor." He adds that it is "hard to imagine that anything like this could have happened in a country that goes to the polls regularly and that has an independent press. During that terrible calamity the government faced no pressure from newspapers, which were controlled, and none from opposition parties, which were absent." Sen estimated: "Despite the gigantic size of excess mortality in the Chinese famine, the extra mortality in India from regular deprivation in normal times vastly overshadows the former. [...] India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame."


title: Gunsmoke

text: Gunsmoke is an American radio and television Western drama series created by director Norman Macdonnell and writer John Meston. It centers on Dodge City, Kansas, in the 1870s, during the settlement of the American West. The central character is lawman Marshal Matt Dillon, played by William Conrad on radio and James Arness on television. When aired in the United Kingdom, the television series was initially titled Gun Law, later reverting to "Gunsmoke".


title: Gunsmoke

text: The radio series ran from 1952 to 1961. John Dunning wrote that among radio drama enthusiasts, ""Gunsmoke" is routinely placed among the best shows of any kind and any time." The television series ran for 20 seasons from 1955 to 1975, and lasted for 635 episodes. At the end of its run in 1975, "Los Angeles Times" columnist Cecil Smith wrote: ""Gunsmoke" was the dramatization of the American epic legend of the west. Our own "Iliad" and "Odyssey", created from standard elements of the dime novel and the pulp Western as romanticized by [Ned] Buntline, [Bret] Harte, and [Mark] Twain. It was ever the stuff of legend."


title: Gunsmoke

text: In the late 1940s, CBS chairman William S. Paley, a fan of the "Philip Marlowe" radio series, asked his programming chief, Hubell Robinson, to develop a hard core Western series, about a "Philip Marlowe of the Old West". Robinson delegated this to his West Coast CBS vice president, Harry Ackerman, who had developed the "Philip Marlowe" series.


title: Gunsmoke

text: Ackerman and his scriptwriters, Mort Fine and David Friedkin, created an audition script called "Mark Dillon Goes to Gouge Eye" based on one of their Michael Shayne radio scripts, "The Case of the Crooked Wheel" from mid-1948. Two versions were recorded. The first, recorded in June 1949, was very much like a hard core detective series and starred Michael Rye (credited as Rye Billsbury) as Dillon; the second, recorded in July 1949, starred "Straight Arrow" actor Howard Culver in a more Western, lighter version of the same script. CBS liked the Culver version better, and Ackerman was told to proceed.


title: Gunsmoke

text: A complication arose when Culver's contract as the star of "Straight Arrow" would not allow him to do another Western series. The project was suspended for three years, when producer Norman Macdonnell and writer John Meston discovered it while creating an adult Western series of their own.


title: Gunsmoke

text: Macdonnell and Meston wanted to create a radio Western for adults, in contrast to the prevailing juvenile fare such as "The Lone Ranger" and "The Cisco Kid". "Gunsmoke" was set in Dodge City, Kansas, during the thriving cattle days of the 1870s. Dunning notes, "The show drew critical acclaim for unprecedented realism."


title: Gunsmoke

text: The radio series first aired on CBS on April 26, 1952, with the episode "Billy the Kid", written by Walter Newman, and ended on June 18, 1961. The show stars William Conrad as Marshal Matt Dillon, Howard McNear as Doc Charles Adams, Georgia Ellis as Kitty Russell, and Parley Baer as Dillon's assistant, Chester Wesley Proudfoot.


title: Gunsmoke

text: Matt Dillon was played on radio by William Conrad and on TV by James Arness. Two versions of the same pilot episode titled "Mark Dillon Goes to Gouge Eye" were produced with Rye Billsbury and Howard Culver playing Marshal Mark Dillon as the lead, not yet played by Conrad. Conrad was one of the last actors to audition for the role of Marshal Dillon. With a resonantly powerful and distinctive voice, Conrad was already one of radio's busiest actors. Though Meston championed him, Macdonnell thought Conrad might be overexposed. During his audition, however, Conrad won over Macdonnell after reading only a few lines. Dillon, as portrayed by Conrad, was a lonely, isolated man, toughened by a hard life. Macdonnell later claimed, "Much of Matt Dillon's character grew out of Bill Conrad."


title: Gunsmoke

text: Meston relished the upending of cherished Western fiction clichés and said that few Westerns gave any inkling of how brutal the Old West was in reality. Many episodes were based on man's cruelty to man and woman, in as much as the prairie woman's life and the painful treatment of women as chattels were touched on well ahead of the time of most media. As originally pitched to CBS executives, this was to be an adult Western, not a grown-up "Hopalong Cassidy".


title: Gunsmoke

text: Dunning writes that Meston was especially disgusted by the archetypal Western hero and set out "to destroy [that type of] character he loathed". In Meston's view, "Dillon was almost as scarred as the homicidal psychopaths who drifted into Dodge from all directions."


title: Gunsmoke

text: Howard McNear starred as Dr. Charles Adams in the radio series, and Milburn Stone portrayed Dr. Galen Adams in the television version. In the radio series, "Doc" Adams was initially a self-interested and somewhat dark character with a predilection for constantly attempting to increase his revenue through the procurement of autopsy fees. He was acerbic, somewhat mercenary, and borderline alcoholic, in the program's early years. His real name was Dr. Calvin Moore. He came west and changed his name to escape a charge of murder. However, McNear's performances steadily became more warm-hearted and sympathetic. Doc wandered throughout the territories until he settled in Dodge City 17 years later under the name of Charles Adams. Conrad borrowed the surname from cartoonist Charles Addams as a testament to Doc's initially ghoulish comportment. Milburn Stone was given free rein to choose the character's first name, and chose that of the ancient Greek physician and medical researcher Galen.


title: Gunsmoke

text: Kitty was played by actress Georgia Ellis on radio, and by Amanda Blake on TV. Ellis first appeared in the radio episode "Billy the Kid" (April 26, 1952) as "Francie Richards" – a former girlfriend of Matt Dillon's and the widow of a criminal, but the character of "Miss Kitty" did not appear until the May 10, 1952, episode "Jaliscoe". Sometime in 1959, Ellis was billed as Georgia Hawkins instead of Georgia Ellis. Amanda Blake appeared in over 500 episodes of the television series, with her last being the April 1, 1974, episode titled, "The Disciple".


title: Gunsmoke

text: In the radio series, Kitty's profession was hinted at, but never explicit; in a 1953 interview with "Time", Macdonnell declared, "Kitty is just someone Matt has to visit every once in a while". The magazine observed that she is "obviously not selling chocolate bars". The television show first portrayed Kitty as a saloon dance hall employee, then from season two, episode 36 ("Daddy-O"), as half-owner of the Long Branch Saloon.


title: Gunsmoke

text: Dillon and Kitty clearly have a close personal relationship. In a July 2, 2002, Associated Press interview with Bob Thomas, Arness explained, "If they were man and wife, it would make a lot of difference. The people upstairs decided it was better to leave the show as it was, which I totally agreed with."


title: Gunsmoke

text: "Gunsmoke" is often a somber program, particularly in its early years. Dunning writes that Dillon "played his hand and often lost. He arrived too late to prevent a lynching. He amputated a dying man's leg and lost the patient anyway. He saved a girl from brutal rapists, then found himself unable to offer her what she needed to stop her from moving into ... life as a prostitute." Some listeners, such as Dunning, argue the radio version was more realistic. Episodes were aimed at adults with some of the most explicit content of their time, including violent crimes, scalpings, massacres, and opium addicts. Many episodes end on a somber note, and villains often get away with their crimes.


title: Gunsmoke

text: The program was set after the arrival of the railroad in Dodge City (1872) and Kansas had been a state since 1861. In reality, a U.S. Marshal (actually a deputy marshal, because only the senior officer in the district holds the title "marshal") would not be based in Dodge City and would not be involved in local law enforcement.


title: Gunsmoke

text: Apart from the doleful tone, "Gunsmoke" is distinct from other radio Westerns, as the dialogue is often slow and halting, and the outstanding sound effects give a palpable sense of the prairie setting. The effects are subtle but multilayered, giving the show a spacious feel. John Dunning wrote, "The listener heard extraneous dialogue in the background, just above the muted shouts of kids playing in an alley. He heard noises from the next block, too, where the inevitable dog was barking."


title: Gunsmoke

text: "Gunsmoke" is unique from other Westerns in that it was unsponsored in the first few years of production. The program was funded by CBS in the first two years. Series producers said that if the show were sponsored, they would have to "clean the show up". The producers wanted to find a sponsor that would allow them to keep the show the way it was.


title: Gunsmoke

text: Not long after the radio show began, talk began of adapting it to television. Privately, Macdonnell had a guarded interest in taking the show to television, but publicly, he declared, "our show is perfect for radio", and he feared, as Dunning writes, ""Gunsmoke" confined by a picture could not possibly be as authentic or attentive to detail. ... In the end, CBS simply took it away from Macdonnell and began preparing for the television version."


title: Gunsmoke

text: Conrad and the others were given auditions, but they were little more than token effortsespecially in Conrad's case, due to his obesity. However, Meston was kept as the main writer. In the early years, most of the TV episodes were adapted from the radio scripts, often using identical scenes and dialogue. Dunning wrote, "That radio fans considered the TV show a sham and its players impostors should surprise no one. That the TV show was not a sham is due in no small part to the continued strength of Meston's scripts."


title: Gunsmoke

text: Macdonnell and Meston continued the radio version of "Gunsmoke" until 1961, making it one of the most enduring vintage radio dramas.


title: Gunsmoke

text: Conrad directed two television episodes, in 1963 and 1971, and McNear appeared on six, playing characters other than Doc, including three times as storekeeper Howard Rudd.


title: Gunsmoke

text: The TV series ran from September 10, 1955, to March 31, 1975, on CBS, with 635 total episodes. It is the second Western television series written for adults, premiering on September 10, 1955, four days after "The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp". The first 12 seasons aired Saturdays at 10 pm, seasons 13 through 16 aired Mondays at 7:30 pm, and the last four seasons aired Mondays at 8 pm. During its second season in 1956, the program joined the list of the top-10 television programs broadcast in the United States. It quickly moved to number one and stayed there until 1961. It remained among the top-20 programs until 1964.


title: Gunsmoke

text: When "Gunsmoke" was adapted for television in 1955, contrary to a campaign to persuade the network, the network was not interested in bringing either Conrad or his radio costars to the television medium. Conrad's weight was rumored to be a deciding factor. Denver Pyle was also considered for the role, as was Raymond Burr, who was ultimately also seen as too heavy for the part. Charles Warren, television "Gunsmoke"s first director, said, "His voice was fine, but he was too big. When he stood up, his chair stood with him." It has long been rumored that John Wayne was offered the role of Matt Dillon; according to Dennis Weaver's comments on the 50th Anniversary DVD, disc one, episode "Hack Prine", John Wayne was never even considered for the role; to have done so would have been preposterous, since Wayne was a top movie leading man. The belief that Wayne was asked to star is disputed by Warren. Although he agrees Wayne encouraged Arness to take the role, Warren says, "I hired Jim Arness on the strength of a picture he's done for me ... I never thought for a moment of offering it to Wayne."


title: Gunsmoke

text: According to Thomas "Duke" Miller, a TV and movie celebrity expert, this story was told to him by legendary actor James Stewart: "Jimmy said he was in the office with Charles Warren when Mr. Wayne came in. Mr. Warren asked Wayne if he knew James Arness, and Mr. Wayne said yes. Mr. Warren told Mr. Wayne about the transition of the show from radio to TV, and Mr. Wayne readily agreed that James Arness would be a terrific choice for the part of Matt Dillon. I have no reason to doubt the story, because Jimmy absolutely knew everybody."


title: Gunsmoke

text: In the end, the primary roles were all recast, with Arness as Marshal Matt Dillon (on the recommendation of Wayne, who also introduced the pilot), Dennis Weaver as Chester Goode, Milburn Stone as Dr. G. "Doc" Adams (later Galen "Doc" Adams), and Amanda Blake as Miss Kitty Russell. Macdonnell became the associate producer of the TV show and later the producer. Meston was head writer.


title: Gunsmoke

text: The series was filmed at the present site of California Lutheran University (CLU) and nearby Wildwood Regional Park in Thousand Oaks, California.


title: Gunsmoke

text: In 1975, CBS made the decision not to renew "Gunsmoke" for a 21st season, without making any public announcement or informing the producers or cast members ahead of time. The entire cast was stunned by the cancellation, as they were unaware that CBS was considering it. According to Arness, "We didn't do a final, wrap-up show. We finished the 20th year, we all expected to go on for another season, or two or three. The (network) never told anybody they were thinking of cancelling." The cast and crew read the news in the trade papers. This seemed to have been a habit of CBS. Three other popular shows, "Gilligan's Island", "Lost in Space", and "The Incredible Hulk", met the same abrupt fate.


title: Gunsmoke

text: Chester and Festus Haggen are Dillon's sidekicks, though others became acting deputies for - to -year stints: Quint Asper (Burt Reynolds) (1962–65), Thad Greenwood (Roger Ewing) (1965–67), and Newly O'Brien (Buck Taylor) (1967–75), who served as both back-up deputy and doctor-in-training, having some studies in medicine through his uncle, which then continued under Doc Adams. Initially on the fringes of Dodge society, Festus Haggen was slowly phased in as a reliable sidekick and part-time deputy to Matt Dillon when Reynolds left in 1965. When Milburn Stone temporarily left for heart bypass surgery in 1971, Pat Hingle played Dr. John Chapman for several episodes.


title: Gunsmoke

text: The "Gunsmoke" radio theme song and later TV theme is titled "Old Trails", also known as "Boothill". The "Gunsmoke" theme was composed by Rex Koury. The original radio version was conducted by Koury. The TV version was thought to have been first conducted by CBS west coast music director Lud Gluskin. The lyrics of the theme, never aired on the radio or television show, were recorded and released by Tex Ritter in 1955. Ritter was backed on that Capitol record by Rex Koury and the radio "Gunsmoke" orchestra. William Lava composed the original theme music for television, as noted in the program credits.


title: Gunsmoke

text: From 1955 to 1961, "Gunsmoke" is a half-hour show, retitled "Marshal Dillon" in syndication. It then went to an hour-long format. The series was retitled "Gun Law" in the UK. The "Marshal Dillon" syndicated reruns of half-hour episodes lasted from 1961 until 1964 on CBS, originally on Tuesday nights within its time in reruns.


title: Gunsmoke

text: In syndication, the entire 20-year run of "Gunsmoke" is separated into three packages by CBS Television Distribution:


title: Gunsmoke

text: The program currently airs on four major venues: TV Land, which has carried the show since its inception in 1996, Encore Westerns, INSP, and Weigel Broadcasting's MeTV digital subchannel network. Individual stations such as KFWD in Dallas also carry the series in their markets. It has also been shown on satellite channel CBS Action in the UK, Ireland and Poland. The series also appears intermittently on MeTV's themed sister network Decades, which CBS holds a partial interest in; it appears on the schedule depending on the theme and year a particular day has.


title: Gunsmoke

text: In 2006, as part of "Gunsmoke"s 50th anniversary on TV, selected episodes were released on DVD in three different box sets. Twelve episodes, from 1955 to 1964, were selected for the "Gunsmoke: Volume I" box set, and another twelve episodes, from 1964 to 1975, were selected for the "Gunsmoke: Volume II" box set. Both sets are also available as a combined single "Gift Box Set". A third unique DVD box set, known as "Gunsmoke: The Directors Collection", was also released with 10 selected episodes from certain seasons throughout the series' 20-year history. All of these box sets are available on Region 1 DVD from Paramount Home Entertainment and CBS DVD.


title: Gunsmoke

text: Additionally, Paramount Home Entertainment and CBS DVD have released the series in its entirety on DVD for 13 years between 2007 and 2020 in Region 1 (all of the seasons except for season one and seasons sixteen through twenty were split into two volumes). A complete series box set was released on May 5, 2020. All DVDs have been released with English audio and close captioning from season 1 to 5 and starting season 6 English SDH.


title: Gunsmoke

text: In 1987, CBS commissioned a reunion movie titled "". James Arness and Amanda Blake returned in their iconic roles of Matt Dillon and Miss Kitty, with Fran Ryan returning as Kitty's friend and saloon-owner Hannah and Buck Taylor as Newly O'Brian. Doc Adams and Festus Haggen were not featured in the film. Milburn Stone had died 7 years earlier in 1980 and the role of Doc was not recast. Ken Curtis balked at the salary offer he received and said that he should be paid based on Festus's importance in the character hierarchy. The screenwriters responded to Curtis's absence by making Newly the new Dodge City marshal. The film, shot in Alberta, features a now-retired Marshal Dillon being attacked and a vengeful former rival returning to Dodge City to entrap him.


title: Gunsmoke

text: In 1990, the second telefilm, "Gunsmoke: The Last Apache", premiered. Because Amanda Blake had died the year before, the writers revisited a 1973 episode for the movie. The episode was based on "Matt's Love Story". In the episode, Matt loses his memory and his heart during a brief liaison with "Mike" Yardner (played by Michael Learned, better known for playing Olivia in "The Waltons"). In the film, Learned returns as Mike, who reveals to Marshal Dillon that he is the father of their daughter, Beth (played by Amy Stock-Poynton) and asks him for help in saving her from a band on Apaches. Other films included "" (1992), "" (1993), and "" (1994). Arness stars in all five made-for-television movies.


title: Gunsmoke

text: "Gunsmoke" was TV's number-one-ranked show from 1957 to 1961, then expanded to one hour, and slipped into a decline. In 1967, the 12th season, CBS planned to cancel the series, but widespread viewer reaction (including a mention in Congress and the behind-the-scenes pressure from Babe Paley, the wife of CBS's longtime president William S. Paley) prevented its demise. On the Biography Channel's "Behind The Scenes: Gilligan's Island" (2002), "Gilligan's Island" producer Sherwood Schwartz states that Babe pressured her husband not to cancel "Gunsmoke" in 1967, so the network cut "Gilligan's Island", instead. The show continued in its new time slot at 8 pm on Mondays. This scheduling move led to a spike in ratings that had it once again rally to the top 10 in the Nielsen ratings, which again saved the series when CBS purged most of its rural content in 1971. The series remained in the top 10 until the 1973–74 television season. In September 1975, though still ranking among the top-30 programs in the ratings, "Gunsmoke" was canceled after a 20-year run; it was replaced by "Mary Tyler Moore" spin-offs "Rhoda" and "Phyllis" (though "Rhoda" actually debuted while "Gunsmoke" was still airing first-run). Thirty TV westerns came and went during its 20-year tenure, and "Gunsmoke" was the sole survivor, with "Alias Smith and Jones" and "Bonanza" both leaving the airwaves years earlier in January 1973.


title: Gunsmoke

text: "Gunsmoke" has one spin-off series, "Dirty Sally", a semicomedy starring Jeanette Nolan as an old woman and Dack Rambo as a young gunfighter, leaving Dodge City for California to pan for gold. The program lasted 14 weeks and aired in the first half of 1974, a year before "Gunsmoke" ended.


title: Gunsmoke

text: The television series was the longest-running, primetime, live-action television series at 20 seasons, until September 2019 with the 21st-season premiere of "". The original "Law & Order", which was canceled in 2010 after tying "Gunsmoke"s longevity record for a live-action, primetime television series, began its 21st season in February 2022. , it had the highest number of scripted episodes for any U.S. primetime, commercial, live-action television series. On April 29, 2018, "The Simpsons" surpassed the show for the most scripted episodes. Some foreign-made programs have been broadcast in the U.S. and contend for the position as the longest-running prime-time series. , "Gunsmoke" was rated fourth globally, after "Doctor Who" (1963–present), "Taggart" (1983–2010), and "The Bill" (1984–2010).


title: Gunsmoke

text: "Gunsmoke" is the last fictional primetime show that debuted in the 1950s to leave the air and only three shows from the 1960s that lasted past its final season in 1974–75.


title: Gunsmoke

text: James Arness and Milburn Stone portrayed their "Gunsmoke" characters for 20 consecutive years, a feat later matched by Kelsey Grammer as the character Frasier Crane, but over two half-hour sitcoms ("Cheers" and "Frasier"). This feat would be surpassed by Mariska Hargitay, who has portrayed the character Olivia Benson on "" for over 23 consecutive years to date. George Walsh, the announcer for "Gunsmoke", began in 1952 on the radio series and continued until the television series was canceled in 1975.


title: Gunsmoke

text: James Arness, Milburn Stone, Ken Curtis, Dennis Weaver, and Amanda Blake are all inductees of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.


title: Gunsmoke

text: Dodge City's Boot Hill Museum has a tribute to "Gunsmoke", including set furniture from the 1960s and an old television tuned to the show. Signed photographs from the show's actors and other memorabilia are on display including a vest worn by Sam the bartender and a dress worn by Miss Kitty. In 2015, several of the surviving staff reunited at Wild West Fest in Dodge City, including stars Burt Reynolds, Buck Taylor, Jess Walton, Bruce Boxleitner, and writer Jim Byrnes.


title: Gunsmoke

text: German-American political philosopher and Plato scholar Leo Strauss was a fervent fan of "Gunsmoke". Strauss "had one vice, or rather obsession. He would never miss a Saturday night TV program called Gunsmoke, a western about Marshall Matt Dillon in Dodge City, Kansas, and his many exploits. Strauss once said that the situation in the Old West was an excellent representation, unintentional or not, of what Hobbes meant by the state of nature."


title: Gunsmoke

text: The Hartland toy company included an 8" (1/9th scale) plastic Matt Dillion figure and his horse Old Faithful Buck in their line of famous TV cowboys and horses during the 1950s.


title: Gunsmoke

text: Lowell Toy Manufacturing Corporation ("It's a Lowell Game") issued "Gunsmoke" as game No. 822. Other products include "Gunsmoke" puzzles,


title: Fourth wall

text: The fourth wall is a performance convention in which an invisible, imaginary wall separates actors from the audience. While the audience can see through this "wall", the convention assumes the actors act as if they cannot. From the 16th century onward, the rise of illusionism in staging practices, which culminated in the realism and naturalism of the theatre of the 19th century, led to the development of the fourth wall concept.