title: Indian cuisine

text: The interaction of various Indian diaspora communities with the native cultures in their new homes has resulted in the creation of many fusion cuisines, which blend aspects of Indian and other international cuisines. These cuisines tend to interpolate Indian seasoning and cooking techniques into their own national dishes.


title: Indian cuisine

text: Indian Chinese cuisine, also known as Indo-Chinese cuisine originated in the 19th century among the Chinese community of Calcutta, during the immigration of Hakka Chinese from Canton (present-day Guangzhou) seeking to escape the First and Second Opium Wars and political instability in the region. Upon exposure to local Indian cuisine, they incorporated many spices and cooking techniques into their own cuisine, thus creating a unique fusion of Indian and Chinese cuisine.


title: Indian cuisine

text: After 1947, many Cantonese immigrants opened their own restaurants in Calcutta, whose dishes combined aspects of Indian cuisine with Cantonese cuisine. In other parts of India, Indian Chinese cuisine is derived from Calcutta-Chinese cuisine, but bears little resemblance to their Chinese counterparts as the dishes tend to be flavoured with cumin, coriander seeds, and turmeric, which with a few regional exceptions, are not traditionally associated with Chinese cuisine. Chilli, ginger, garlic and "dahi" (yogurt) are also frequently used in dishes.


title: Indian cuisine

text: Popular dishes include Chicken Manchurian, chicken lollipop, chilli chicken, Hakka noodles, Hunan chicken, chow mein, and Szechwan fried rice.


title: Indian cuisine

text: Soups such as Manchow soup and sweet corn soup are very popular, whereas desserts include ice cream on honey-fried noodles and date pancakes.


title: Indian cuisine

text: Chowmein is now known as one of the most favorite Chinese dishes in India. Especially in West Bengal, it is one of the most loved street foods.


title: Indian cuisine

text: Thai cuisine was influenced by Indian cuisine, like as recorded by the Thai monk Buddhadasa Bhikku in his writing ‘India's Benevolence to Thailand’. He wrote that Thai people learned how to use spices in their food in various ways from Indians. Thais also obtained the methods of making herbal medicines (Ayurveda) from the Indians. Some plants like sarabhi of family Guttiferae, kanika or harsinghar, phikun or "Mimusops elengi" and bunnak or the rose chestnut etc. were brought from India.


title: Indian cuisine

text: Malaysian Indian cuisine, or the cooking of the ethnic Indian communities in Malaysia consists of adaptations of authentic dishes from India, as well as original creations inspired by the diverse food culture of Malaysia.


title: Indian cuisine

text: A typical Malaysian Indian dish is likely to be redolent with curry leaves, whole and powdered spice, and contains fresh coconut in various forms.


title: Indian cuisine

text: "Ghee" is still widely used for cooking, although vegetable oils and refined palm oils are now commonplace in home kitchens.


title: Indian cuisine

text: Indian Singaporean cuisine refers to foods and beverages produced and consumed in Singapore that are derived, wholly or in part, from South Asian culinary traditions.


title: Indian cuisine

text: The great variety of Singaporean food includes Indian food, which tends to be Tamil cuisine, especially local Tamil Muslim cuisine, although North Indian food has become more visible recently.


title: Indian cuisine

text: Indian dishes have become modified to different degrees, after years of contact with other Singaporean cultures, and in response to locally available ingredients, as well as changing local tastes.


title: Indian cuisine

text: Indian-Indonesian cuisine refers to food and beverages in Indonesian cuisine that have influenced Indian cuisine—especially from Tamil, Punjabi, and Gujarati cuisine. These dishes are well integrated, such as "appam", "biryani", "murtabak" and curry.


title: Indian cuisine

text: Filipino cuisine, found throughout the Philippines archipelago, has been historically influenced by the Indian cuisine. Indian influences can also be noted in rice-based delicacies such as "bibingka" (analogous to the Indonesian "bingka"), "puto", and "puto bumbong", where the latter two are plausibly derived from the south Indian "puttu", which also has variants throughout Maritime Southeast Asia (e.g. "kue putu", "putu mangkok").


title: Indian cuisine

text: The "kare-kare", more popular in Luzon, on the other hand could trace its origins from the Seven Years' War when the British occupied Manila from 1762 to 1764 with a force that included Indian sepoys, who had to improvise Indian dishes given the lack of spices in the Philippines to make curry. This is said to explain the name and its supposed thick, yellow-to-orange annatto and peanut-based sauce, which alludes to a type of curry.


title: Indian cuisine

text: Atchara of Philippines originated from the Indian "achar", which was transmitted to the Philippines via the acar of the Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei.


title: Indian cuisine

text: Anglo-Indian cuisine developed during the period of British colonial rule in India, as British officials interacted with their Indian cooks.


title: Indian cuisine

text: Well-known Anglo-Indian dishes include chutneys, salted beef tongue, kedgeree, ball curry, fish rissoles, and mulligatawny soup.


title: Indian cuisine

text: Many Indian desserts, or "mithai", are fried foods made with sugar, milk or condensed milk. Ingredients and preferred types of dessert vary by region. In the eastern part of India, for example, most are based on milk products.


title: Indian cuisine

text: Many are flavoured with almonds and pistachios, spiced with cardamon, nutmeg, cloves and black pepper, and decorated with nuts, or with gold or silver leaf. Popular Indian desserts include "rasogolla", "gulab jamun", "jalebi", "laddu", and "peda".


title: Indian cuisine

text: Tea is a staple beverage throughout India, since the country is one of the largest producers of tea in the world. The most popular varieties of tea grown in India include Assam tea, Darjeeling tea and Nilgiri tea. It is prepared by boiling the tea leaves in a mix of water, milk, and spices such as cardamom, cloves, cinnamon, and ginger. In India, tea is often enjoyed with snacks like biscuits and "pakoda".


title: Indian cuisine

text: Coffee is another popular beverage, but more popular in South India. Coffee is also cultivated in some parts of India. There are two varieties of coffee popular in India, which include Indian filter coffee and instant coffee.


title: Indian cuisine

text: "Lassi" is a traditional "dahi" (yogurt)-based drink in India. It is made by blending yogurt with water or milk and spices. Salted "lassi" is more common in villages of Punjab and in Porbandar, Gujarat. Traditional "lassi" is sometimes flavoured with ground roasted cumin. "Lassi" can also be flavoured with ingredients such as sugar, rose water, mango, lemon, strawberry, and saffron.


title: Indian cuisine

text: "Sharbat" is a sweet cold beverage prepared from fruits or flower petals. It can be served in concentrate form and eaten with a spoon, or diluted with water to create a drink. Popular "sharbats" are made from plants such as rose, sandalwood, "bel", "gurhal" (hibiscus), lemon, orange, pineapple, "sarasaparilla" and "kokum", "falsa" ("Grewia asiatica"). In Ayurveda, "sharbats" are believed to hold medicinal value.


title: Indian cuisine

text: "Thandai" is a cold drink prepared with a mixture of almonds, fennel seeds, watermelon kernels, rose petals, pepper, poppy seeds, cardamom, saffron, milk and sugar. It is native to India and is often associated with the Maha Shivaratri and Holi or Holla mahalla festival. Sometimes "bhaang" (cannabis) is added to prepare special thandai.


title: Indian cuisine

text: Other beverages include "nimbu pani" (lemonade), "chaas", "badam doodh" (almond milk with nuts and cardamom), "Aam panna", "kokum sharbat", and coconut water.


title: Indian cuisine

text: Modern carbonated cold drinks unique to southern India include beverages, such as "panner soda" or "goli soda", a mixture of carbonated water, rose water, rose milk, and sugar, "naranga soda", a mixture of carbonated water, salt and lemon juice, and "nannari sarbath", a mixture with "sarasaparilla".


title: Indian cuisine

text: "Sharbats" with carbonated water are the most popular non-alcoholic beverages in Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Street shops in Central Kerala and Madurai region of Tamil Nadu are well known for these drinks which are also called "kulukki sarbaths" in Kerala.


title: Indian cuisine

text: Most beers in India are either lagers (4.8 percent alcohol) or strong lagers (8.9 percent). The Indian beer industry has witnessed steady growth of 10–17 percent per year over the last ten years. Production exceeded 170 million cases during the 2008–2009 financial year. With the average age of the population decreasing and income levels on the rise, the popularity of beer in the country continues to increase.


title: Indian cuisine

text: Other popular alcoholic drinks in India include "fenny", a Goan liquor made from either coconut or the juice of the cashew apple. The state of Goa has registered for a geographical indicator to allow its "fenny" distilleries to claim exclusive rights to production of liquor under the name ""fenny"."


title: Indian cuisine

text: "Hadia" is a rice beer, created by mixing herbs with boiled rice and leaving the mixture to ferment for around a week. It is served cold and is less alcoholic than other Indian liquors. "Chuak" is a similar drink from Tripura.


title: Indian cuisine

text: Palm wine, locally known as "neera", is a sap extracted from inflorescences of various species of toddy palms.


title: Indian cuisine

text: "Chhaang" is consumed by the people of Sikkim and the Darjeeling Himalayan hill region of West Bengal. It is drunk cold or at room temperature in summer, and often hot during cold weather. "Chhaang" is similar to traditional beer, brewed from barley, millet, or rice.


title: Indian cuisine

text: "Kallu" ("Chetthu Kallu") is a popular natural alcohol extracted from coconut and pine trees in Kerala. It is sold in local "Kallu" shops and is consumed with fried fish and chicken. Its alcoholic content is increased by addition of distilled alcohol.


title: Indian cuisine

text: Indians consider a healthy breakfast important. They generally prefer to drink tea or coffee with breakfast, though food preferences vary regionally. North Indian people prefer "roti", "parathas", and a vegetable dish accompanied by "achar" (a pickle) and some curd. Various types of packaged pickles are available in the market. One of the oldest pickle-making companies in India is Harnarains, which started in the 1860s in Old Delhi.


title: Indian cuisine

text: People of Gujarat prefer "dhokla" and milk, while south Indians prefer "idli" and "dosa", generally accompanied by "sambhar" or "sagu" and various "chutneys".


title: Indian cuisine

text: Traditional lunch in India usually consists of a main dish of rice in the south and the east, and whole-wheat "rotis" in the north. It typically includes two or three kinds of vegetables, and sometimes items such as "kulcha", "naan", or "parathas". "Paan" (stuffed, spiced and folded betel leaves) which aids digestion is often eaten after lunch and dinner in many parts of India.


title: Indian cuisine

text: Indian families often gather for "evening snack time", similar to tea time to talk and have tea and snacks.


title: Indian cuisine

text: Dinner is considered the main meal of the day. Also, many households, especially in north and central India, prefer having sweets after the dinner (similar to the Western concept of dessert after meals).


title: Indian cuisine

text: Traditionally, meals in India are eaten while seated either on the floor, or on very low stools or mattress. Food is most often eaten with the hands rather than cutlery.


title: Indian cuisine

text: Often "roti" is used to scoop curry without allowing it to touch the hand. In the wheat-producing north, a piece of "roti" is gripped with the thumb and middle finger and ripped off while holding the "roti" down with the index finger.


title: Indian cuisine

text: A somewhat different method is used in the south for "dosai", "adai", and "uththappam", where the middle finger is pressed down to hold the bread and the forefinger and thumb used to grip and separate a small part. Traditional serving styles vary regionally throughout India.


title: Indian cuisine

text: Contact with other cultures has affected Indian dining etiquette. For example, the Anglo-Indian middle class commonly uses spoons and forks, as is traditional in Western culture.


title: Indian cuisine

text: In South India, cleaned banana leaves, which can be disposed of after meals, are used for serving food. When hot food is served on banana leaves, the leaves add distinctive aromas and taste to the food. Leaf plates are less common today, except on special occasions.


title: Indian cuisine

text: Indian migration has spread the culinary traditions of the subcontinent throughout the world. These cuisines have been adapted to local tastes, and have also affected local cuisines. The international appeal of curry has been compared to that of pizza. Indian "tandoor" dishes such as "chicken tikka" also enjoy widespread popularity.


title: Indian cuisine

text: A Roy Morgan Research survey taken between 2013 and 2018 found that Indian cuisine was the top-rated international food among 51% of Australians, behind Chinese, Italian, and Thai.


title: Indian cuisine

text: As in the United Kingdom and the United States, Indian cuisine is widely available in Canada, especially in the cities of Toronto, Vancouver, and Ottawa where the majority of Canadians of South Asian heritage live.


title: Indian cuisine

text: Indian food is gaining popularity in China, where there are many Indian restaurants in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. Hong Kong alone has more than 50 Indian restaurants, some of which date back to the 1980s. Most of the Indian restaurants in Hong Kong are in Tsim Sha Tsui.


title: Indian cuisine

text: The Indian culinary scene in the Middle East has been influenced greatly by the large Indian diaspora in these countries. Centuries of trade relations and cultural exchange resulted in a significant influence on each region's cuisines. The use of the "tandoor", which originated in northwestern India, is an example.


title: Indian cuisine

text: The large influx of Indian expatriates into Middle Eastern countries during the 1970s and 1980s led to a boom in Indian restaurants to cater to this population and was also widely influenced by the local and international cuisines.


title: Indian cuisine

text: Other cuisines which borrow inspiration from Indian cooking styles include Cambodian, Lao, Filipino, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Thai, and Burmese cuisines. The spread of vegetarianism in other parts of Asia is often credited to Hindu and Buddhist practices.


title: Indian cuisine

text: Indian cuisine is very popular in Southeast Asia, due to the strong Hindu and Buddhist cultural influence in the region. Indian cuisine has had considerable influence on Malaysian cooking styles and also enjoys popularity in Singapore. There are numerous North and South Indian restaurants in Singapore, mostly in Little India.


title: Indian cuisine

text: Singapore is also known for fusion cuisine combining traditional Singaporean cuisine with Indian influences. Fish head curry, for example, is a local creation. Indian influence on Malay cuisine dates to the 19th century.


title: Indian cuisine

text: The UK's first Indian restaurant, the Hindoostanee Coffee House, opened in 1810. By 2003, there were as many as 10,000 restaurants serving Indian cuisine in England and Wales alone. According to Britain's Food Standards Agency, the Indian food industry in the United Kingdom is worth 3.2 billion pounds, accounts for two-thirds of all eating out in the country, and serves about 2.5 million customers every week.


title: Indian cuisine

text: One of the best known examples of British Indian restaurant cuisine is "chicken tikka masala", which has also been called "a true British national dish."


title: Indian cuisine

text: Ireland's first Indian restaurant, the Indian Restaurant and Tea Rooms, opened in 1908 on Sackville Street, now O'Connell Street, in Dublin. Today, Indian restaurants are commonplace in most Irish cities and towns. Non-Chinese Asians are the fastest growing ethnic group in Ireland.


title: Indian cuisine

text: A survey by "The Washington Post" in 2007 stated that more than 1,200 Indian food products had been introduced into the United States since 2000. There are numerous Indian restaurants across the US, which vary based on regional culture and climate. North Indian and South Indian cuisines are especially well represented. Most Indian restaurants in the United States serve Americanized versions of North Indian food, which is generally less spicy than its Indian equivalents.


title: Indian cuisine

text: At sit-down restaurants with North Indian cuisine (the most common), complimentary "papadum" is served with three dipping sauces—typically "hari chutney" (mint and cilantro), "imli chutney" (taramind), and a spicy red chili or onion "chutney"—in place of European-style bread before the meal.


title: Folklore

text: Folklore is shared by a particular group of people; it encompasses the traditions common to that culture, subculture or group. This includes oral traditions such as tales, legends, proverbs and jokes. They include material culture, ranging from traditional building styles common to the group. Folklore also includes customary lore, taking actions for folk beliefs, the forms and rituals of celebrations such as Christmas and weddings, folk dances and initiation rites. Each one of these, either singly or in combination, is considered a folklore artifact or traditional cultural expression. Just as essential as the form, folklore also encompasses the transmission of these artifacts from one region to another or from one generation to the next. Folklore is not something one can typically gain in a formal school curriculum or study in the fine arts. Instead, these traditions are passed along informally from one individual to another either through verbal instruction or demonstration. The academic study of folklore is called folklore studies or folkloristics, and it can be explored at undergraduate, graduate and Ph.D. levels.


title: Folklore

text: The word "folklore", a compound of "folk" and "lore", was coined in 1846 by the Englishman William Thoms, who contrived the term as a replacement for the contemporary terminology of "popular antiquities" or "popular literature". The second half of the word, "lore", comes from Old English lār 'instruction'. It is the knowledge and traditions of a particular group, frequently passed along by word of mouth.


title: Folklore

text: The concept of "folk" has varied over time. When Thoms first created this term, "folk" applied only to rural, frequently poor and illiterate peasants. A more modern definition of "folk" is a social group that includes two or more persons with common traits, who express their shared identity through distinctive traditions. "Folk is a flexible concept which can refer to a nation as in American folklore or to a single family." This expanded social definition of "folk" supports a broader view of the material, i.e. the lore, considered to be "folklore artifacts". These now include all "things people make with words (verbal lore), things they make with their hands (material lore), and things they make with their actions (customary lore)". Folklore is no longer considered to be limited to that which is old or obsolete. These folk artifacts continue to be passed along informally, as a rule anonymously, and always in multiple variants. The folk group is not individualistic, it is community-based and nurtures its lore in community. "As new groups emerge, new folklore is created… surfers, motorcyclists, ". In direct contrast to high culture, where any single work of a named artist is protected by copyright law, folklore is a function of shared identity within a common social group.


title: Folklore

text: Having identified folk artifacts, the professional folklorist strives to understand the "significance" of these beliefs, customs, and objects for the group, since these cultural units would not be passed along unless they had some continued relevance within the group. That meaning can however shift and morph, for example: the Halloween celebration of the 21st century is not the All Hallows' Eve of the Middle Ages, and even gives rise to its own set of urban legends independent of the historical celebration; the cleansing rituals of Orthodox Judaism were originally good public health in a land with little water, but now these customs signify for some people identification as an Orthodox Jew. By comparison, a common action such as tooth brushing, which is also transmitted within a group, remains a practical hygiene and health issue and does not rise to the level of a group-defining tradition. Tradition is initially remembered behavior; once it loses its practical purpose, there is no reason for further transmission unless it has been imbued with meaning beyond the initial practicality of the action. This meaning is at the core of folkloristics, the study of folklore.


title: Folklore

text: With an increasingly theoretical sophistication of the social sciences, it has become evident that folklore is a naturally occurring and necessary component of any social group; it is indeed all around us. Folklore does not have to be old or antiquated, it continues to be created and transmitted, and in any group it is used to differentiate between "us" and "them".


title: Folklore

text: Folklore began to distinguish itself as an autonomous discipline during the period of romantic nationalism, in Europe. A particular figure in this development was Johann Gottfried von Herder, whose writings in the 1770s presented oral traditions as organic processes grounded in locale. After the German states were invaded by Napoleonic France, Herder's approach was adopted by many of his fellow Germans, who systematized the recorded folk traditions, and used them in their process of nation building. This process was enthusiastically embraced by smaller nations, like Finland, Estonia, and Hungary, which were seeking political independence from their dominant neighbors.


title: Folklore

text: Folklore, as a field of study, further developed among 19th century European scholars, who were contrasting tradition with the newly developing modernity. Its focus was the oral folklore of the rural peasant populations, which were considered as residue and survivals of the past that continued to exist within the lower strata of society. The "Kinder- und Hausmärchen" of the Brothers Grimm (first published 1812) is the best known but by no means only collection of verbal folklore of the European peasantry of that time. This interest in stories, sayings and songs continued throughout the 19th century and aligned the fledgling discipline of folkloristics with literature and mythology. By the turn into the 20th century the number and sophistication of folklore studies and folklorists had grown both in Europe and North America. Whereas European folklorists remained focused on the oral folklore of the homogenous peasant populations in their regions, the American folklorists, led by Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, chose to consider Native American cultures in their research, and included the totality of their customs and beliefs as folklore. This distinction aligned American folkloristics with cultural anthropology and ethnology, using the same techniques of data collection in their field research. This divided alliance of folkloristics between the humanities in Europe and the social sciences in America offers a wealth of theoretical vantage points and research tools to the field of folkloristics as a whole, even as it continues to be a point of discussion within the field itself.


title: Folklore

text: The term "folkloristics", along with the alternative name "folklore studies", became widely used in the 1950s to distinguish the academic study of traditional culture from the folklore artifacts themselves. When the American Folklife Preservation Act (Public Law 94-201) was passed by the U.S. Congress in January 1976, to coincide with the Bicentennial Celebration, folkloristics in the United States came of age.


title: Folklore

text: "…[Folklife] means the traditional expressive culture shared within the various groups in the United States: familial, ethnic, occupational, religious, regional; expressive culture includes a wide range of creative and symbolic forms such as custom, belief, technical skill, language, literature, art, architecture, music, play, dance, drama, ritual, pageantry, handicraft; these expressions are mainly learned orally, by imitation, or in performance, and are generally maintained without benefit of formal instruction or institutional direction."


title: Folklore

text: Added to the extensive array of other legislation designed to protect the natural and cultural heritage of the United States, this law also marks a shift in national awareness. It gives voice to a growing understanding that cultural diversity is a national strength and a resource worthy of protection. Paradoxically, it is a unifying feature, not something that separates the citizens of a country. "We no longer view cultural difference as a problem to be solved, but as a tremendous opportunity. In the diversity of American folklife we find a marketplace teeming with the exchange of traditional forms and cultural ideas, a rich resource for Americans". This diversity is celebrated annually at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and many other folklife fests around the country.


title: Folklore

text: There are numerous other definitions. According to William Bascom major article on the topic there are "four functions to folklore":


title: Folklore

text: The folk of the 19th century, the social group identified in the original term "folklore", was characterized by being rural, illiterate and poor. They were the peasants living in the countryside, in contrast to the urban populace of the cities. Only toward the end of the century did the urban proletariat (on the coattails of Marxist theory) become included with the rural poor as folk. The common feature in this expanded definition of folk was their identification as the underclass of society.


title: Folklore

text: Moving forward into the 20th century, in tandem with new thinking in the , folklorists also revised and expanded their concept of the folk group. By the 1960s it was understood that social groups, i.e. folk groups, were all around us; each individual is enmeshed in a multitude of differing identities and their concomitant social groups. The first group that each of us is born into is the family, and each family has its own unique family folklore. As a child grows into an individual, its identities also increase to include age, language, ethnicity, occupation, etc. Each of these cohorts has its own folklore, and as one folklorist points out, this is "not idle speculation… Decades of fieldwork have demonstrated conclusively that these groups do have their own folklore." In this modern understanding, folklore is a function of shared identity within any social group.


title: Folklore

text: This folklore can include jokes, sayings and expected behavior in multiple variants, always transmitted in an informal manner. For the most part it will be learned by observation, imitation, repetition or correction by other group members. This informal knowledge is used to confirm and re-inforce the identity of the group. It can be used both internally within the group to express their common identity, for example in an initiation ceremony for new members. Or it can be used externally to differentiate the group from outsiders, like a folkdance demonstration at a community festival. Significant to folklorists here is that there are two opposing but equally valid ways to use this in the study of a group: you can start with an identified group in order to explore its folklore, or you can identify folklore items and use them to identify the social group.


title: Folklore

text: Beginning in the 1960s, a further expansion of the concept of folk began to unfold through the study of folklore. Individual researchers identified folk groups that had previously been overlooked and ignored. One notable example of this is found in an issue of the "Journal of American Folklore", published in 1975, which is dedicated exclusively to articles on women's folklore, with approaches that had not come from a man's perspective. Other groups that were highlighted as part of this broadened understanding of the folk group were non-traditional families, occupational groups, and families that pursued the production of folk items over multiple generations.


title: Folklore

text: Individual folklore artifacts are commonly classified as one of three types: material, verbal or customary lore. For the most part self-explanatory, these categories include physical objects (material folklore), common sayings, expressions, stories and songs (verbal folklore), and beliefs and ways of doing things (customary folklore). There is also a fourth major subgenre defined for children's folklore and games (childlore), as the collection and interpretation of this fertile topic is particular to school yards and neighborhood streets. Each of these genres and their subtypes is intended to organize and categorize the folklore artifacts; they provide common vocabulary and consistent labeling for folklorists to communicate with each other.


title: Folklore

text: That said, each artifact is unique; in fact one of the characteristics of all folklore artifacts is their variation within genres and types. This is in direct contrast to manufactured goods, where the goal in production is to create identical products and any variations are considered mistakes. It is however just this required variation that makes identification and classification of the defining features a challenge. And while this classification is essential for the subject area of folkloristics, it remains just labeling, and adds little to an understanding of the traditional development and meaning of the artifacts themselves.


title: Folklore

text: Necessary as they are, genre classifications are misleading in their oversimplification of the subject area. Folklore artifacts are never self-contained, they do not stand in isolation but are particulars in the self-representation of a community. Different genres are frequently combined with each other to mark an event. So a birthday celebration might include a song or formulaic way of greeting the birthday child (verbal), presentation of a cake and wrapped presents (material), as well as customs to honor the individual, such as sitting at the head of the table, and blowing out the candles with a wish. There might also be special games played at birthday parties which are not generally played at other times. Adding to the complexity of the interpretation, the birthday party for a seven-year-old will not be identical to the birthday party for that same child as a six-year-old, even though they follow the same model. For each artifact embodies a single variant of a performance in a given time and space. The task of the folklorist becomes to identify within this surfeit of variables the constants and the expressed meaning that shimmer through all variations: honoring of the individual within the circle of family and friends, gifting to express their value and worth to the group, and of course, the festival food and drink as signifiers of the event.


title: Folklore

text: The formal definition of verbal lore is words, both written and oral, that are "spoken, sung, voiced forms of traditional utterance that show repetitive patterns." Crucial here are the repetitive patterns. Verbal lore is not just any conversation, but words and phrases conforming to a traditional configuration recognized by both the speaker and the audience. For narrative types by definition have consistent structure, and follow an existing model in their narrative form. As just one simple example, in English the phrase "An elephant walks into a bar…" instantaneously flags the following text as a joke. It might be one you've already heard, but it might be one that the speaker has just thought up within the current context. Another example is the child's song Old MacDonald Had a Farm, where each performance is distinctive in the animals named, their order and their sounds. Songs such as this are used to express cultural values (farms are important, farmers are old and weather-beaten) and teach children about different domesticated animals.


title: Folklore

text: Verbal folklore was the original folklore, the artifacts defined by William Thoms as older, oral cultural traditions of the rural populace. In his 1846 published call for help in documenting antiquities, Thoms was echoing scholars from across the European continent to collect artifacts of verbal lore. By the beginning of the 20th century these collections had grown to include artifacts from around the world and across several centuries. A system to organize and categorize them became necessary. Antti Aarne published a first classification system for folktales in 1910. This was later expanded into the Aarne–Thompson classification system by Stith Thompson and remains the standard classification system for European folktales and other types of oral literature. As the number of classified oral artifacts grew, similarities were noted in items that had been collected from very different geographic regions, ethnic groups and epochs, giving rise to the Historic–Geographic Method, a methodology that dominated folkloristics in the first half of the 20th century.


title: Folklore

text: When William Thoms first published his appeal to document the verbal lore of the rural populations, it was believed these folk artifacts would die out as the population became literate. Over the past two centuries this belief has proven to be wrong; folklorists continue to collect verbal lore in both written and spoken form from all social groups. Some variants might have been captured in published collections, but much of it is still transmitted orally and indeed continues to be generated in new forms and variants at an alarming rate.


title: Folklore

text: The genre of material culture includes all artifacts that can be touched, held, lived in, or eaten. They are tangible objects with a physical or mental presence, either intended for permanent use or to be used at the next meal. Most of these folklore artifacts are single objects that have been created by hand for a specific purpose; however, folk artifacts can also be mass-produced, such as dreidels or Christmas decorations. These items continue to be considered folklore because of their long (pre-industrial) history and their customary use. All of these material objects "existed prior to and continue alongside mechanized industry. … [They are] transmitted across the generations and subject to the same forces of conservative tradition and individual variation" that are found in all folk artifacts. Folklorists are interested in the physical form, the method of manufacture or construction, the pattern of use, as well as the procurement of the raw materials. The meaning to those who both make and use these objects is important. Of primary significance in these studies is the complex balance of continuity over change in both their design and their decoration.


title: Folklore

text: In Europe, prior to the Industrial Revolution, everything was made by hand. While some folklorists of the 19th century wanted to secure the oral traditions of the rural folk before the populace became literate, other folklorists sought to identify hand-crafted objects before their production processes were lost to industrial manufacturing. Just as verbal lore continues to be actively created and transmitted in today's culture, so these handicrafts can still be found all around us, with possibly a shift in purpose and meaning. There are many reasons for continuing to handmake objects for use, for example these skills may be needed to repair manufactured items, or a unique design might be required which is not (or cannot be) found in the stores. Many crafts are considered as simple home maintenance, such as cooking, sewing and carpentry. For many people, handicrafts have also become an enjoyable and satisfying hobby. Handmade objects are often regarded as prestigious, where extra time and thought is spent in their creation and their uniqueness is valued. For the folklorist, these hand-crafted objects embody multifaceted relationships in the lives of the craftsmen and the users, a concept that has been lost with mass-produced items that have no connection to an individual craftsman.


title: Folklore

text: Many traditional crafts, such as ironworking and glass-making, have been elevated to the fine or applied arts and taught in art schools; or they have been repurposed as folk art, characterized as objects whose decorative form supersedes their utilitarian needs. Folk art is found in hex signs on Pennsylvania Dutch barns, tin man sculptures made by metalworkers, front yard Christmas displays, decorated school lockers, carved gun stocks, and tattoos. "Words such as naive, self-taught, and individualistic are used to describe these objects, and the exceptional rather than the representative creation is featured." This is in contrast to the understanding of folklore artifacts that are nurtured and passed along within a community.


title: Folklore

text: Many objects of material folklore are challenging to classify, difficult to archive, and unwieldy to store. The assigned task of museums is to preserve and make use of these bulky artifacts of material culture. To this end, the concept of the living museum has developed, beginning in Scandinavia at the end of the 19th century. These open-air museums not only display the artifacts, but also teach visitors how the items were used, with actors reenacting the everyday lives of people from all segments of society, relying heavily on the material artifacts of a pre-industrial society. Many locations even duplicate the processing of the objects, thus creating new objects of an earlier historic time period. Living museums are now found throughout the world as part of a thriving heritage industry.


title: Folklore

text: This list represents just a small sampling of objects and skills that are included in studies of material culture.


title: Folklore

text: Customary culture is remembered enactment, i.e. re-enactment. It is the patterns of expected behavior within a group, the "traditional and expected way of doing things" A custom can be a single gesture, such as thumbs down or a handshake. It can also be a complex interaction of multiple folk customs and artifacts as seen in a child's birthday party, including verbal lore (Happy Birthday song), material lore (presents and a birthday cake), special games (Musical chairs) and individual customs (making a wish as you blow out the candles). Each of these is a folklore artifact in its own right, potentially worthy of investigation and cultural analysis. Together they combine to build the custom of a birthday party celebration, a scripted combination of multiple artifacts which have meaning within their social group.


title: Folklore

text: Folklorists divide customs into several different categories. A custom can be a seasonal celebration, such as Thanksgiving or New Year's. It can be a life cycle celebration for an individual, such as baptism, birthday or wedding. A custom can also mark a community festival or event; examples of this are Carnival in Cologne or Mardi Gras in New Orleans. This category also includes the Smithsonian Folklife Festival celebrated each summer on the Mall in Washington, DC. A fourth category includes customs related to folk beliefs. Walking under a ladder is just one of many symbols considered unlucky. Occupational groups tend to have a rich history of customs related to their life and work, so the traditions of sailors or lumberjacks. The area of ecclesiastical folklore, which includes modes of worship not sanctioned by the established church tends to be so large and complex that it is usually treated as a specialized area of folk customs; it requires considerable expertise in standard church ritual in order to adequately interpret folk customs and beliefs that originated in official church practice. Folklore customs has an amazing selection of beautiful and unique dresses for women that are perfect for any occasion all over the world.


title: Folklore

text: Customary folklore is always a performance, be it a single gesture or a complex of scripted customs, and participating in the custom, either as performer or audience, signifies acknowledgment of that social group. Some customary behavior is intended to be performed and understood only within the group itself, so the handkerchief code sometimes used in the gay community or the initiation rituals of the Freemasons. Other customs are designed specifically to represent a social group to outsiders, those who do not belong to this group. The St. Patrick's Day Parade in New York and in other communities across the continent is a single example of an ethnic group parading their separateness (differential behavior), and encouraging Americans of all stripes to show alliance to this colorful ethnic group.


title: Folklore

text: These festivals and parades, with a target audience of people who do not belong to the social group, intersect with the interests and mission of public folklorists, who are engaged in the documentation, preservation, and presentation of traditional forms of folklife. With a swell in popular interest in folk traditions, these community celebrations are becoming more numerous throughout the western world. While ostensibly parading the diversity of their community, economic groups have discovered that these folk parades and festivals are good for business. All shades of people are out on the streets, eating, drinking and spending. This attracts support not only from the business community, but also from federal and state organizations for these local street parties. Paradoxically, in parading diversity within the community, these events have come to authenticate true community, where business interests ally with the varied (folk) social groups to promote the interests of the community as a whole.


title: Folklore

text: Childlore is a distinct branch of folklore that deals with activities passed on by children to other children, away from the influence or supervision of an adult. Children's folklore contains artifacts from all the standard folklore genres of verbal, material, and customary lore; it is however the child-to-child conduit that distinguishes these artifacts. For childhood is a social group where children teach, learn and share their own traditions, flourishing in a street culture outside the purview of adults. This is also ideal where it needs to be collected; as Iona and Peter Opie demonstrated in their pioneering book "Children's Games in Street and Playground". Here the social group of children is studied on its own terms, not as a derivative of adult social groups. It is shown that the culture of children is quite distinctive; it is generally unnoticed by the sophisticated world of adults, and quite as little affected by it.


title: Folklore

text: Of particular interest to folklorists here is the mode of transmission of these artifacts; this lore circulates exclusively within an informal pre-literate children's network or folk group. It does not include artifacts taught to children by adults. However children can take the taught and teach it further to other children, turning it into childlore. Or they can take the artifacts and turn them into something else; so Old McDonald's farm is transformed from animal noises to the scatological version of animal poop. This childlore is characterized by "its lack of dependence on literary and fixed form. Children…operate among themselves in a world of informal and oral communication, unimpeded by the necessity of maintaining and transmitting information by written means. This is as close as folklorists can come to observing the transmission and social function of this folk knowledge before the spread of literacy during the 19th century.


title: Folklore

text: As we have seen with the other genres, the original collections of children's lore and games in the 19th century was driven by a fear that the culture of childhood would die out. Early folklorists, among them Alice Gomme in Britain and William Wells Newell in the United States, felt a need to capture the unstructured and unsupervised street life and activities of children before it was lost. This fear proved to be unfounded. In a comparison of any modern school playground during recess and the painting of "Children's Games" by Pieter Breugel the Elder we can see that the activity level is similar, and many of the games from the 1560 painting are recognizable and comparable to modern variations still played today.


title: Folklore

text: These same artifacts of childlore, in innumerable variations, also continue to serve the same function of learning and practicing skills needed for growth. So bouncing and swinging rhythms and rhymes encourage development of balance and coordination in infants and children. Verbal rhymes like Peter Piper picked... serve to increase both the oral and aural acuity of children. Songs and chants, accessing a different part of the brain, are used to memorize series (Alphabet song). They also provide the necessary beat to complex physical rhythms and movements, be it hand-clapping, jump roping, or ball bouncing. Furthermore, many physical games are used to develop strength, coordination and endurance of the players. For some team games, negotiations about the rules can run on longer than the game itself as social skills are rehearsed. Even as we are just now uncovering the neuroscience that undergirds the developmental function of this childlore, the artifacts themselves have been in play for centuries.


title: Folklore

text: A case has been made for considering folk history as a distinct sub-category of folklore, an idea that has received attention from such folklorists as Richard Dorson. This field of study is represented in "The Folklore Historian", an annual journal sponsored by the History and Folklore Section of the American Folklore Society and concerned with the connections of folklore with history, as well as the history of folklore studies.


title: Folklore

text: The study of folk history is particularly well developed in Ireland, where the "Handbook of Irish Folklore" (the standard book used by field workers of the Irish Folklore Commission) recognizes "historical tradition" as a separate category, traditionally referred to as "seanchas". Henry Glassie made a pioneering contribution in his classic study, "Passing the Time in Ballymenone". Another notable exponent is historian Guy Beiner who has presented in-depth studies of Irish folk history, identifying a number of characteristic genres for what he has named "history telling", such as stories (divided into tales and "mini-histories"), songs and ballads (especially rebel songs), poems, rhymes, toasts, prophecies, proverbs and sayings, place-names, and a variety of commemorative ritual practices. These are often recited by dedicated storytellers ("seanchaithe") and folk historians ("staireolaithe"). Beiner has since adopted the term "vernacular historiography" in an attempt to move beyond the confines of "the artificial divides between oral and literary cultures that lie at the heart of conceptualizations of oral tradition".


title: Folklore

text: Lacking context, folklore artifacts would be uninspiring objects without any life of their own. It is only through performance that the artifacts come alive as an active and meaningful component of a social group; the intergroup communication arises in the performance and this is where transmission of these cultural elements takes place. American folklorist Roger D. Abrahams has described it thus: "Folklore is folklore only when performed. As organized entities of performance, items of folklore have a sense of control inherent in them, a power that can be capitalized upon and enhanced through effective performance." Without transmission, these items are not folklore, they are just individual quirky tales and objects.


title: Folklore

text: This understanding in folkloristics only occurred in the second half of the 20th century, when the two terms "folklore performance" and "text and context" dominated discussions among folklorists. These terms are not contradictory or even mutually exclusive. As borrowings from other fields of study, one or the other linguistic formulation is more appropriate to any given discussion. Performance is frequently tied to verbal and customary lore, whereas context is used in discussions of material lore. Both formulations offer different perspectives on the same folkloric understanding, specifically that folklore artifacts need to remain embedded in their cultural environment if we are to gain insight into their meaning for the community.


title: Folklore

text: The concept of cultural (folklore) performance is shared with ethnography and anthropology among other social sciences. The cultural anthropologist Victor Turner identified four universal characteristics of cultural performance: playfulness, framing, the use of symbolic language, and employing the subjunctive mood. In viewing the performance, the audience leaves the daily reality to move into a mode of make-believe, or "what if?" It is self-evident that this fits well with all types of verbal lore, where reality has no place among the symbols, fantasies, and nonsense of traditional tales, proverbs, and jokes. Customs and the lore of children and games also fit easily into the language of a folklore performance.


title: Folklore

text: Material culture requires some moulding to turn it into a performance. Should we consider the performance of the creation of the artifact, as in a quilting party, or the performance of the recipients who use the quilt to cover their marriage bed? Here the language of context works better to describe the quilting of patterns copied from the grandmother, quilting as a social event during the winter months, or the gifting of a quilt to signify the importance of the event. Each of these—the traditional pattern chosen, the social event, and the gifting—occur within the broader context of the community. Even so, when considering context, the structure and characteristics of performance can be recognized, including an audience, a framing event, and the use of decorative figures and symbols, all of which go beyond the utility of the object.


title: Folklore

text: Before the Second World War, folk artifacts had been understood and collected as cultural shards of an earlier time. They were considered individual vestigial artifacts, with little or no function in the contemporary culture. Given this understanding, the goal of the folklorist was to capture and document them before they disappeared. They were collected with no supporting data, bound in books, archived and classified more or less successfully. The Historic–Geographic Method worked to isolate and track these collected artifacts, mostly verbal lore, across space and time.


title: Folklore

text: Following the Second World War, folklorists began to articulate a more holistic approach toward their subject matter. In tandem with the growing sophistication in the , attention was no longer limited to the isolated artifact, but extended to include the artifact embedded in an active cultural environment. One early proponent was Alan Dundes with his essay "Texture, Text and Context", first published 1964. A public presentation in 1967 by Dan Ben-Amos at the American Folklore Society brought the behavioral approach into open debate among folklorists. In 1972 Richard Dorson called out the "young Turks" for their movement toward a behavioral approach to folklore. This approach "shifted the conceptualization of folklore as an extractable item or 'text' to an emphasis on folklore as a kind of human behavior and communication. Conceptualizing folklore as behavior redefined the job of folklorists..."


title: Folklore

text: Folklore became a verb, an action, something that people do, not just something that they have. It is in the performance and the active context that folklore artifacts get transmitted in informal, direct communication, either verbally or in demonstration. Performance includes all the different modes and manners in which this transmission occurs.


title: Folklore

text: Transmission is a communicative process requiring a binary: one individual or group who actively transmits information in some form to another individual or group. Each of these is a defined role in the folklore process. The tradition-bearer is the individual who actively passes along the knowledge of an artifact; this can be either a mother singing a lullaby to her baby, or an Irish dance troupe performing at a local festival. They are named individuals, usually well known in the community as knowledgeable in their traditional lore. They are not the anonymous "folk", the nameless mass without of history or individuality.


title: Folklore

text: The audience of this performance is the other half in the transmission process; they listen, watch, and remember. Few of them will become active tradition-bearers; many more will be passive tradition-bearers who maintain a memory of this specific traditional artifact, in both its presentation and its content.


title: Folklore

text: There is active communication between the audience and the performer. The performer is presenting to the audience; the audience in turn, through its actions and reactions, is actively communicating with the performer. The purpose of this performance is not to create something new but to re-create something that already exists; the performance is words and actions which are known, recognized and valued by both the performer and the audience. For folklore is first and foremost remembered behavior. As members of the same cultural reference group, they identify and value this performance as a piece of shared cultural knowledge.


title: Folklore

text: To initiate the performance, there must be a frame of some sort to indicate that what is to follow is indeed performance. The frame brackets it as outside of normal discourse. In customary lore such as life cycle celebrations (ex. birthday) or dance performances, the framing occurs as part of the event, frequently marked by location. The audience goes to the event location to participate. Games are defined primarily by rules, it is with the initiation of the rules that the game is framed. The folklorist Barre Toelken describes an evening spent in a Navaho family playing string figure games, with each of the members shifting from performer to audience as they create and display different figures to each other.


title: Folklore

text: In verbal lore, the performer will start and end with recognized linguistic formulas. An easy example is seen in the common introduction to a joke: "Have you heard the one...", "Joke of the day...", or "An elephant walks into a bar". Each of these signals to the listeners that the following is a joke, not to be taken literally. The joke is completed with the punch line of the joke. Another traditional narrative marker in English is the framing of a fairy tale between the phrases "Once upon a time" and "They all lived happily ever after." Many languages have similar phrases which are used to frame a traditional tale. Each of these linguistic formulas removes the bracketed text from ordinary discourse, and marks it as a recognized form of stylized, formulaic communication for both the performer and the audience.


title: Folklore

text: Framing as a narrative device serves to signal to both the story teller and the audience that the narrative which follows is indeed a fiction (verbal lore), and not to be understood as historical fact or reality. It moves the framed narration into the subjunctive mood, and marks a space in which "fiction, history, story, tradition, art, teaching, all exist within the narrated or performed expressive 'event' outside the normal realms and constraints of reality or time." This shift from the realis to the irrealis mood is understood by all participants within the reference group. It enables these fictional events to contain meaning for the group, and can lead to very real consequences.


title: Folklore

text: The theory of self-correction in folklore transmission was first articulated by the folklorist Walter Anderson in the 1920s; this posits a feedback mechanism which would keep folklore variants closer to the original form.


title: Folklore

text: This theory addresses the question about how, with multiple performers and multiple audiences, the artifact maintains its identity across time and geography. Anderson credited the audience with censoring narrators who deviated too far from the known (traditional) text.


title: Folklore

text: Any performance is a two-way communication process. The performer addresses the audience with words and actions; the audience in turn actively responds to the performer. If this performance deviates too far from audience expectations of the familiar folk artifact, they will respond with negative feedback. Wanting to avoid more negative reaction, the performer will adjust his performance to conform to audience expectations. "Social reward by an audience [is] a major factor in motivating narrators..." It is this dynamic feedback loop between performer and audience which gives stability to the text of the performance.


title: Folklore

text: In reality, this model is not so simplistic; there are multiple redundancies in the active folklore process. The performer has heard the tale multiple times, he has heard it from different story tellers in multiple versions. In turn, he tells the tale multiple times to the same or a different audience, and they expect to hear the version they know. This expanded model of redundancy in a non-linear narrative process makes it difficult to innovate during any single performance; corrective feedback from the audience will be immediate. "At the heart of both autopoetic self-maintenance and the 'virality' of meme transmission... it is enough to assume that some sort of recursive action maintains a degree of integrity [of the artifact] in certain features ... sufficient to allow us to recognize it as an instance of its type."


title: Folklore

text: For material folk artifacts, it becomes more fruitful to return to the terminology of Alan Dundes: text and context. Here the text designates the physical artifact itself, the single item made by an individual for a specific purpose. The context is then unmasked by observation and questions concerning both its production and its usage. Why was it made, how was it made, who will use it, how will they use it, where did the raw materials come from, who designed it, etc. These questions are limited only by the skill of the interviewer.


title: Folklore

text: In his study of southeastern Kentucky chair makers, Michael Owen Jones describes production of a chair within the context of the life of the craftsman. For Henry Glassie in his study of Folk Housing in Middle Virginia, the investigation concerns the historical pattern he finds repeated in the dwellings of this region: the house is planted in the landscape just as the landscape completes itself with the house. The artisan in his roadside stand or shop in the nearby town wants to make and display products which appeal to customers. There is "a craftsperson's eagerness to produce 'satisfactory items' due to a close personal contact with the customer and expectations to serve the customer again." Here the role of consumer "... is the basic force responsible for the continuity and discontinuity of behavior."


title: Folklore

text: In material culture the context becomes the cultural environment in which the object is made (chair), used (house), and sold (wares). None of these artisans is "anonymous" folk; they are individuals making a living with the tools and skills learned within and valued in the context of their community.


title: Folklore

text: No two performances are identical. The performer attempts to keep the performance within expectations, but this happens despite a multitude of changing variables. He has given this performance one time more or less, the audience is different, the social and political environment has changed. In the context of material culture, no two hand-crafted items are identical. Sometimes these deviations in the performance and the production are unintentional, just part of the process. But sometimes these deviations are intentional; the performer or artisan want to play with the boundaries of expectation and add their own creative touch. They perform within the tension of conserving the recognized form and adding innovation.


title: Folklore

text: The folklorist Barre Toelken identifies this tension as "a combination of both changing ('dynamic') and static ('conservative') elements that evolve and change through sharing, communication and performance." Over time, the cultural context shifts and morphs: new leaders, new technologies, new values, new awareness. As the context changes, so must the artifact, for without modifications to map existing artifacts into the evolving cultural landscape, they lose their meaning. Joking as an active form of verbal lore makes this tension visible as joke cycles come and go to reflect new issues of concern. Once an artifact is no longer applicable to the context, transmission becomes a nonstarter; it loses relevancy for a contemporary audience. If it is not transmitted, then it is no longer folklore and becomes instead an historic relic.


title: Folklore

text: Folklorists have begun to identify how the advent of electronic communications will modify and change the performance and transmission of folklore artifacts. It is clear that the internet is modifying folkloric process, not killing it, as despite the historic association between folklore and anti-modernity, people continue to use traditional expressive forms in new media, including the internet. Jokes and joking are as plentiful as ever both in traditional face-to-face interactions and through electronic transmission. New communication modes are also transforming traditional stories into many different configurations. The fairy tale Snow White is now offered in multiple media forms for both children and adults, including a television show and video game.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: The Winchester Mystery House is a mansion in San Jose, California, that was once the personal residence of Sarah Winchester, the widow of firearms magnate William Wirt Winchester. The house became a tourist attraction nine months after Winchester's death in 1922. The Victorian and Gothic style mansion is renowned for its size and its architectural curiosities.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: It is sometimes claimed to be one of the “most haunted places in the world”, but there is no evidence to support this belief. Much of the lore regarding the Winchester House and its owner is fanciful, unverified, and often provably false.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: Sarah Winchester, always called Sallie, after her paternal grandmother, was born in 1839 in New Haven, Connecticut. She married William Wirt Winchester in 1862.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: In 1866, Winchester gave birth to a baby girl whom they named Annie Pardee Winchester. The baby did not thrive, and was diagnosed with marasmus and died a month after birth.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: Between the fall of 1880 and the spring of 1881, Winchester's mother, father-in-law, and husband died. She was left with a large inheritance from her husband.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: In 1884 her eldest sister, Mary Converse died. Around this time she began developing rheumatoid arthritis and her doctor suggested that a warmer and drier climate might help improve her health. In 1885, at the age of 46, Winchester moved to California from New Haven, Connecticut. According to Mary Jo Ignoffo in her book "Captive of the Labyrinth: Sarah L. Winchester, Heiress to the Rifle Fortune" her doctor's recommendation, her happy memories of traveling to San Francisco with her husband in the 1870s and advertising about the weather and health benefits of California were possible factors in Winchester's decision for her move.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: In 1886 Edward "Ned" Rambo, a San Francisco agent for the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, took Winchester on a tour of the Santa Clara valley to look for a home. He showed her a forty-five-acre ranch for sale that was located near San Jose. She purchased the property from John Hamm which included a two-story, eight-room farmhouse. Since the property reminded her of Llanada Alavesa from the Basque area, she named her new home Llanada Villa.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: In 1890, Winchester's niece, Daisy Merriman aged around twenty-one, came to live with her. Merriman became Winchester's administrative assistant, looking after business correspondence and banking. They attended charitable events together and were paying members of "Associated Charities" and the "Red Cross." In 1903, Winchester paid for Daisy's wedding to Frederick Marriott III. That same year, Winchester purchased several homes and properties in Atherton. One of the homes was offered to Daisy and her new husband to live in, which they accepted. Winchester subsequently purchased a home for the couple closer to the train station for Fredrick to travel to work from. In 1904, Winchester purchased a large property near the hamlet of Burlingame, north of Coyote Point, then bought a houseboat, or ark as they were called at the time, instead of building a house.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: Winchester and her husband had developed an interest in architecture and interior design while building a home on Prospect Hill in New Haven. With plans to expand the farmhouse, Winchester hired at least two architects but dismissed them, deciding to do the planning herself. She designed the rooms one by one, supervised the project, and sought advice from the carpenters she hired. She took inspiration for the house from the world's fairs that were common then. While the home was similar in scope to other homes built then, it was unusual for a woman to look after such a project and, Colin Dickey states in his book "Ghostland: an American History in Haunted Places", she could be considered an architectural pioneer of her time.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: She was known to rebuild and abandon construction if the progress did not meet her expectations, which resulted in a maze-like design. In the "San Jose News" of 1897, it was reported that a seven-story tower was torn down and rebuilt sixteen times. As a result of her expansions, there are walled-off exterior windows and doors that were not removed as the house grew in size. Multiple levels, up to five, were added to different parts of the home. The design was essentially Victorian, with elements of Gothic and Romanesque features.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: There was carved wood on the ballroom walls and ceilings. Woods such as teak, maple, and mahogany were used to make an intricate pattern on the ballroom floor. A large, brick fireplace was framed by two windows that included quotes from Shakespeare. The second floor had bedrooms that each had adjoining sitting rooms and sewing rooms. The wall coverings had a leather or metal appearance, known as Lincrusta wall coverings. The ceilings had mouldings, stencils, and faux finishes. There were chandeliers from Germany, art glass from Austria, furnishings from Asia, and paintings from France. An annunciator, an early form of intercom, which was a common feature of large homes during this time period, was installed for calling servants. There existed an indoor garden with slanted floors that would carry excess water to trap doors which had pipes that would supply water to the outdoor flowers. A generator was installed for a water pump and electricity. Because of Winchester's height of four feet ten inches and health issues, a stairway that has 44 steps that only rises ten feet was built.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: The windows are unusual since they are pastel-colored, asymmetrical in their design, and have sharp bevels. The windows on the upper levels had a spider-web tracery, a popular design then. The windows to the right and left of the brick fireplace feature Shakespearean quotes from "Richard II" and "Troilus and Cressida". It has been claimed by tour guides and articles over the years that the windows were made by Tiffany & Co despite the fact that the company rarely used beveled glass. This style of window is also found at Craigdarroch Castle in British Columbia, Canada, prompting architectural historian Jim Wolf to believe that the windows were made by the same company. Wolf determined that glass artist John Mallon from Alexander Dunsmuir's company, the Pacific American Decorative Company, was the most likely artisan of the windows. This theory was confirmed when an envelope postmarked July 1894, which had the seal of Dunsmuir's company on it and a scribbled note that appears to be in Winchester's hand, was discovered in the wall of one of the dining rooms that was being restored. Many of the art glass windows that were purchased were never installed and have been housed in a storage room.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: Winchester would take breaks from construction on a regular basis, some lasting months, to rest since Winchester tired easily. This slowed construction considerably and is counter to the claims made in articles and by tour guides that she had the house under construction around the clock for thirty-eight straight years, until her death in 1922.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: As claimed by Bruce Spoon, a student from San Jose State College who decided to write his master's thesis about Winchester in 1951, the reasons for building her large home were to keep workers employed and to express her artistic vision. He reached this conclusion after interviewing people who remembered her and after reviewing newspaper and magazine articles.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: When the 1906 San Francisco earthquake hit, the Llanada Villa was severely damaged. Though there are rumors that Winchester was trapped in the San Jose home, there is no evidence that she was there. She owned several homes in California and after the earthquake spent most of her time at her home in Atherton.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: The seven-story tower and most of the chimneys collapsed. One entire wing was destroyed along with the third and fourth story additions. Winchester had the rubble removed but had little more done to the property after the earthquake. This left doors that opened to nothing, where balconies had once been, pipes that were protruding from what were once window boxes, and staircases that once led to upper floors, ending suddenly.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: After 1910, due to failing health, Winchester did not work on the San Jose home except for odd maintenance jobs and adding an elevator in 1916. At this time she dedicated her time to finances and building an investment portfolio. Mary Jo Ignoffo claims that, "She was far more successful constructing an investment portfolio than a mansion..."


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: When Winchester died in 1922 the house had 160 rooms, 2,000 doors, 10,000 windows, 47 stairways, 47 fireplaces, 13 bathrooms, and 6 kitchens.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: The house became a tourist attraction nine months after Winchester's death in 1922. The house was in disrepair and considered to be of no monetary value. A group of investors purchased the property subsequently leasing the house to John and Mayme Brown who turned it into an attraction. They later purchased the house in 1931. There were many room additions and deletions made to the home after Winchester's death.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: The first tour guide of the house was Mayme Brown. Past neighbors, friends, and workers for Winchester were distressed when they read about superstitious claims being made about the house and Winchester, and were upset the Browns were making money off of falsehoods. They described Winchester as clearheaded and savvier with finances and business than most men.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: In 1924 Harry Houdini briefly visited the house and was reportedly impressed by its unusual layout and architectural novelties, but could not make a detailed investigation because of more pressing engagements. According to some accounts, Houdini suggested tour operators employ "Winchester mystery house" as a promotional name for the property.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: When Keith Kittle, a past Disneyland and Frontier Village employee, became the general manager in 1973, the house was in poor shape. He had the house renovated in the 1970s and 1980s and added a Winchester rifle museum. He sought historical landmark status and began an advertising campaign that included large billboards along the highways. The billboards feature a silhouetted house with implications that a ghost encounter was possible. Attendance increased as he played off the history and superstition that was already circulating. Kittle was general manager until 1996.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: As of September 2022, the house is owned and operated by Winchester Mystery House, LLC, which is a private company that represents the descendants of the Browns. "Captive of the Labyrinth" author Mary Jo Ignoffo wrote that tour guides are required to follow a script emphasizing fabrications and inaccuracies. According to Ignoffo, one guide lamented, "I feel so torn because I have to tell people untruths! Every time I go through the house and have to talk about 13s and other 'kooky' things, my heart breaks a little for Sarah...I have to bite my tongue every time I hear a guest say, 'what a nutcase.'"


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: Winchester's story has been embellished over the years by various rumors, hyperbole and myths, and popular writers have misrepresented or invented details about the house and its owner in order to enhance the legend.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: Claims of Winchester inheriting as much as $20 million and earning $1,000 per day in royalties from her inheritance can be found in tourist literature purchased at the Winchester Mystery House. Ignoffo states that her husband's estate in 1881 was valued at $362,330 but this amount included approximately $300,000 of stock that Winchester would only inherit when her mother-in-law died, which did not happen until 1898. With the addition of her husband's Winchester Repeating Arms Company shares, she owned a total of 777 shares valuing $77,700, which paid average dividends of $7,770 annually between 1880 and 1885.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: Myths around her decision to move from the east coast to California are thought to have originated from author Susy Smith in her book "Prominent American Ghosts," published in 1967. In Smith's version of events, Winchester visited a medium in Boston named Adam Coons who told her that she and her family were being haunted by the ghosts of people killed by Winchester rifles, that she must construct a house for these ghosts, and that she must never complete the project. This assertion of Winchester meeting with a medium has been repeated in brochures and articles ever since. According to Ignoffo, while it is plausible that Winchester did meet with a psychic medium since this was a common practice for women of her status at the time, there is no evidence that she did so.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: Emily Mace, a scholar, and others have looked through issues of "Banner of Light," which was a spiritualist periodical, and in the Boston city directories, which listed spiritualists in the area, and no one named Adam Coons could be found.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: Beginning around 1895, Winchester started appearing in newspapers. The articles in these local papers were filled with speculation about Winchester and the ongoing construction of her San Jose home. Her lack of interaction with neighbors and the known fact that her money came from the firearms industry, fed into a superstitious narrative, despite large, ornate homes being commonly built by the wealthy. The newspapers declared that the reason that the construction was ongoing, was that Winchester feared she would have bad luck if the construction would stop. This theory eventually grew into stories that she believed she would die if construction stopped.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: In the Historic American Building Survey (HABS), when it added the Winchester home to the National Register of Historic Places in 1981, they incorrectly stated that the construction lasted 38 years, and reiterated that Winchester believed she must continue building or she would die. HABS also incorrectly listed the purchase date as 1884 when county records state the purchase wasn't until 1886.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: There were some articles published against the superstitious slant. In one, an unidentified acquaintance refuted these superstitious accusations, stating that they were nonsense and that Winchester was an unusually sensible woman.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: While Winchester lived at the Atherton house her relatives stayed at the San Jose home for almost a year in 1915 to attend the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, which ran for nine months. No construction happened during this time and the staff closed up the house for a week to attend the fair.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: Ignoffo states that there is no evidence that Winchester was compelled to keep her construction project running and preferred to focus on estate planning.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: The belief that Winchester built her house in its strange, maze-like manner to confuse and keep spirits from harming her and that her sanity was questionable started in the mid-1890s and has grown in scale past her death. The doors and windows that open to nothing, the unusually shallow stairs, the stairs that end in a ceiling, interior barred windows and trap doors in the floor are used to confirm Winchester's spirituality and poor state of mind. According to paranormal investigator Nickell and Ignoffo these house oddities have simple explanations. The barred windows were previously exterior windows that were blocked off as the house additions grew. The doors and windows that opened to nothing were a result of the 1906 earthquake and the severe damage that happened to the house. The small steps were built because of Winchester's declining health. The trap doors were built in a greenhouse room where excess water could run and be piped to an outdoor garden. After the damage from the earthquake, Winchester did not rebuild the house.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: The tower bell was used to call workmen and to serve as a fire alarm on the property. According to Joe Nickell, fanciful claims later arose that it was used to "summon spirits".


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: According to Joe Nickell, claims that local residents heard "ghostly music" coming from the house are explained by the fact that Winchester often played the pump organ in the Grand Ballroom when she was unable to sleep.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: According to Joe Nickell, claims that Winchester held parties for the spirits in her home that featured lavish dishes served on gold plates kept in a safe are fanciful and unsubstantiated. Nickell wrote that after her death when the safe was opened, no gold plates were found, only personal mementos and a lock of her baby's hair.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: At the turn of the twentieth century, the most common belief, that still persists, regarding Winchester's house building was that she felt tremendous guilt resulting from all the deaths caused by Winchester rifles and from inheriting so much money from the arms company. Ignoffo claims that it is unlikely Winchester had any guilt, since in the 1800s the Winchester Repeating Arms Company was seen as a success, and weapons were viewed as a necessity for survival.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: Ignoffo and paranormal investigator Joe Nickell report that as Winchester aged, particularly after 1900 as her health issues grew worse, which included arthritis, missing teeth and neuritis, she became more private and reclusive. This reluctance to appear in public or to socialize with her peers gave her a mysterious reputation feeding the gossip in the community and local newspapers which fuelled the rumor that she was superstitious. Winchester's companion of many years, Miss Henrietta Severs states Winchester had no superstitious beliefs. Winchester's relatives, employees and gardeners never made claims that she was superstitious, guilt-ridden or crazed.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: Twice Winchester declined to host two U.S. presidents. First, in 1901, President William McKinley visited and a committee to arrange accommodations was formed but Winchester did not extend an invitation. The president and his official coaches drove past the mansion without stopping. Second, in 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt visited the area and the legend states that Winchester would not open a locked gate to let the president in. This was not true as the president had no interest in meeting Winchester as stopping at the home could have been used to promote rifle sales. He did not want to be seen endorsing any product. Despite there being plausible reasons for her not hosting the presidents, these instances furthered rumors that she was not of sound mind and was a crank.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: According to the lore, architectural features such as thirteen bedrooms, thirteen bathrooms, and thirteen windows in certain rooms are due to Winchester's apparent fascination with the number thirteen. However according to carpenter James Perkins, these and “the more irregular features, which have made the house a world-famed oddity were built after Mrs. Winchester's death.”


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: Winchester's staff, who spent every day with her, stated she had no interest in séances and there is no record of them being held in the house. Nevertheless, a false urban legend has arisen claiming she held nightly séances in the blue room or in a closet by herself from midnight until two in the morning, talking to ghosts about what construction should be accomplished the following day. In addition to the lack of records found about seances at Llanada Villa, the closet séances were unlikely given that they were usually social events and not done by individuals and records show that the blue room was the gardener's bedroom.


title: Winchester Mystery House

text: Visitors and tour guides claim to have experienced cold spots, footsteps, cooking smells, odd sounds, whispering, doors and windows slamming, and feelings of being watched. Investigator Joe Nickell explains that these could be the result of confirmation bias and suggestibility due to publicity and rumors that the house is the most haunted house in the United States or even the world, or that over a thousand ghosts reside in the home. Nickell reports one example where a shadowy figure thought to be a ghost turned out to be a staff member at the house. According to Nickell, there is no evidence that the house is haunted, and that alleged whispering sounds can be imagined or due to wind noises. Additionally, it is common for large, rambling, and drafty old houses to have temperature variations, and the house settling and exterior temperature changes can explain odd noises.


title: Star Wars: The Old Republic

text: Star Wars: The Old Republic is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) based in the "Star Wars" universe. Developed by BioWare Austin and a supplemental team at BioWare Edmonton, the game was announced on October 21, 2008. The video game was released for the Microsoft Windows platform on December 20, 2011 in North America and part of Europe. It was released in Oceania and Asia on March 1, 2012.


title: Star Wars: The Old Republic

text: This story takes place in the "Star Wars" universe shortly after the establishment of a tenuous peace between the re-emergent Sith Empire and the Galactic Republic. The game features eight different classes. Each of the eight classes has a three act storyline that progresses as the character levels up. Players join either the Republic or the Sith, but players may possess a morality at any point along the light/dark spectrum. Different classes favor different styles of gameplay, and the game features extensive customization options, fully voiced dialogue, companion characters, and dialogue options similar to BioWare's other role-playing games.


title: Star Wars: The Old Republic

text: Although not officially disclosed, based on estimates, it is one of the most developmentally expensive games made. The game had one million subscribers within three days of its launch, making it the world's "fastest-growing MMO ever", however, in the following months the game lost a fair share of its subscriptions, but has remained profitable. The game has since adopted the hybrid free-to-play business model with remaining subscription option. The game was met with positive reception upon release and has received several updates and expansion packs. Several books and comics based on the game have been released. It is estimated that the game made $139 million in additional revenues on top of the subscription income in 2013. In an earnings call to investors in October 2019, Electronic Arts announced that "Star Wars: The Old Republic" was closing in on a billion dollars in lifetime revenue, making it a huge financial success based on the reported $200 million development budget.


title: Star Wars: The Old Republic

text: This story takes place in the "Star Wars" fictional universe shortly after the establishment of a tenuous peace between the re-emergent Sith Empire and the Galactic Republic, 300 years after the events of the "" games, and more than 3,600 years before the events in the "Star Wars" films.


title: Star Wars: The Old Republic

text: The Jedi are held responsible for the success of the Sith during the devastating 28-year-long Great Galactic War (which led to the Treaty of Coruscant prior to the "cold war"), and thus choose to relocate from Coruscant to Tython, where the Jedi Order had initially been founded, to seek guidance from the Force. The Sith control Korriban, where they have re-established a Sith Academy. The game's "Return" cinematic trailer depicts the events where Korriban is re-conquered by the Sith.


title: Star Wars: The Old Republic

text: During these events, a smuggler named Nico Okarr is led to his prison cell in a jail orbiting Korriban by a Jedi, Satele Shan, and her master, Kao Cen Darach. Suddenly, a Sith named Darth Malgus, and his master Vindican, along with several Sith troops, attack the base. Satele, a trooper named Jace Malcom, and Okarr escape the attack, but Darach is cut down by Malgus. Malgus then kills Vindican, who was wounded by Darach.


title: Star Wars: The Old Republic

text: Ten years later, new conflicts have arisen. In the "Hope" cinematic trailer, Satele and some troops destroy a Sith party that includes Malgus. Malcom, who has become the troop's commander, states that, despite the losses, there is still hope amongst even "a single spark of courage". Later in the "Deceived" cinematic trailer, however, Malgus, having appeared to survive the earlier attack albeit with a mask covering his nose and mouth, leads an army of Sith into the Jedi Temple on Coruscant, killing many Jedi including the Jedi Master Ven Zallow.


title: Star Wars: The Old Republic

text: Master Satele Shan is named the new Jedi Grand Master. The game itself is set in the cold-war soon after these events, with the Jedi Order and Galactic Republic struggling to maintain their control of the core worlds while the Sith plot their downfall and the expansion of the Sith Empire. The conflict opens on many fronts and across many planets, while native factions are engaged in political struggles or civil war.


title: Star Wars: The Old Republic

text: BioWare stated, prior to release, that the game would have a significant focus on the storyline. Each of the eight classes has a three act storyline that progresses as the character levels up. A collaborative effort between BioWare, Lucasfilm Games, EA and Dark Horse Comics has resulted in webcomics entitled "Star Wars: The Old Republic – Threat of Peace" and "Star Wars: The Old Republic – Blood of the Empire", the purpose of which is to establish the backstory as the game opens and closes.


title: Star Wars: The Old Republic

text: Players join as members of either of the two main factions – the Galactic Republic and the Sith Empire. Although each faction is led by a benevolent or malevolent leader, it is emphasized that an individual member may possess a morality at any point along the light/dark spectrum. The project's key focus is to differentiate between the player's faction and morality. For instance, a member with ties to the Sith Empire following the lightside while attempting to achieve their own ends, which may be misaligned or different from a sith's vision.


title: Star Wars: The Old Republic

text: Player advancement occurs by a combination of mission completion, exploration, and defeating enemies. New skills, unlocked by level, are taught by trainers and can be learned in game at a multitude of locations. Heroic missions exist that require the cooperation of multiple players to complete objectives, and can be repeated normally on a daily basis.


title: Star Wars: The Old Republic

text: While each class in "The Old Republic" favors a certain play style (ranged/melee damage, healing or support skills, or tanking), customization combined with companion characters allow for a class to be able to tackle many different situations, with or without the support of other player characters, and without requiring specific other classes in order to move forward.


title: Star Wars: The Old Republic

text: Players' choices permanently open or close storylines and affect players' non-player character (NPC) companions. It is intended that the game should provide more context for characters' missions than any previous MMORPG. Every character in the game, including the player character, features full voice dialog to enhance gameplay, and interactions feature a dialogue system similar to that used in the "Mass Effect" series. Players are able to choose from a variety of NPCs, although spending time with a single companion will help more in developing story and content than dividing time among several, and may even develop a love interest. It is possible for players to "blow it big time" if they fail to meet NPCs' expectations. Players also have access to several planets, including Korriban, Ord Mantell, Nal Hutta, Tython, Coruscant, Balmorra, Alderaan, Tatooine, Dromund Kaas, Taris, Belsavis, Voss, Hoth, Corellia, Ilum and Quesh, and the moon Nar Shaddaa. The planet Makeb was added in Patch 2.0, along with the "" expansion pack.


title: Star Wars: The Old Republic

text: Every player receives their own starship, which was announced at Electronic Entertainment Expo 2010. Footage of space combat was released at Gamescom. The short clip provided by BioWare revealed that space combat would be a "tunnel shooter". A tunnel shooter, otherwise known as a scrolling shooter or rail shooter, is a flying game where the player is on a predetermined track. Game play includes moving right and left on the X axis and up and down on the Y axis; however, players do not have control of the speed of their space craft. Jake Neri, LucasArts Producer, told PC Gamer in their October 2010 issue that their goal was to "capture the most cinematic moments that we can create. We want players to get in and feel like they're in the movies. It's about highly cinematic, controlled combat moments ... very heroic, action-packed, exciting, visceral and dangerous encounters that'll make you pee your pants." With the December 2013 release of the free expansion, Galactic Starfighter (GSF), players now have a free flight PVP space combat experience, with multiple ships and roles independent of other aspects of the game.


title: Star Wars: The Old Republic

text: Like many other MMORPGs, the game features dungeons and raids in the form of Flashpoints and Operations respectively.


title: Star Wars: The Old Republic

text: A range of playable species are available for the player to choose from, some limited to their factions. Both sides can play Human, Cyborg (human-based), Twi'lek or Zabrak (whose appearances are initially different depending on which side the character is from). The Republic-only races are the Miraluka and Mirialan, while the Empire-only races are the Chiss, Rattataki and Sith Pureblood. Humans and Zabrak can pick any class available, while the other species are restricted to limited choices of classes by default.


title: Star Wars: The Old Republic

text: More playable species are said to be available in the future through major updates and the Legacy system with the ability to use other classes' abilities through this system. The Cathar were added to the game during Patch 2.1, and is available to all players who unlock the species through the Cartel Market. The Togruta race was announced in January 2015 as a new playable race and released in the same year with patch 3.3. The Nautolan species was then added with the Onslaught expansion in late 2019.


title: Star Wars: The Old Republic

text: The release of the expanded "Legacy" system in April 2012 allows for species to be able to play all classes (both Empire and Republic) by unlocking that species with an infusion of in-game money or by levelling a character of that race to level 50. Under this system, for example, a player may choose Chiss, which by default can only choose the non-Sith classes on the Empire side, as a new Sith character. Likewise, a Sith Pureblood, which by default can only choose the Force-powered classes, could choose to be a non-Force class. Along the same vein, both species, which are restricted to the Empire, could even choose the option of fighting for the Republic, including training as a Jedi. By the same method, unlocking the Zabrak species allows users to play both appearances regardless from which side the character is from.


title: Star Wars: The Old Republic

text: Each faction contains different classes, each with a distinct backstory and a branching storyline affected by players' moral choices. Classes are exclusive to one faction or the other. However, the classes of one faction mirror the classes of the other (for example, Jedi Knight and Sith Warrior). Eight classes exist: the "Bounty Hunter", "Sith Warrior", "Imperial Agent", and "Sith Inquisitor" for the Sith Empire; and the "Trooper", "Smuggler", "Jedi Knight", and "Jedi Consular" for the Galactic Republic. Although each class has a distinct storyline, they are integrated with the game's overall arc.


title: Star Wars: The Old Republic

text: Each class may also choose from two advanced classes, resulting in a total of 8 advanced classes per faction. Advanced classes share the same storyline as their base class. Lightsaber and blaster colors are not faction or class restricted, but some are restricted based on level and/or Lightside or Darkside alignment. For example, some lightsabers can only be bought if Light or Darkside aligned.


title: Star Wars: The Old Republic

text: As of the Legacy of the Sith expansion, players are now allowed to separate their Class Story from their Advanced Classes, which are now called "Combat Styles". Players can now select any force-based combat style when playing force-based class stories, or any tech-based combat style when playing tech-based class stories. These combat styles are still locked to their respective factions; however, you can swap your combat style through the Dark vs. Light alignment system.


title: Star Wars: The Old Republic

text: Each class has their own starship, which serves as the player's base of operations. Bounty Hunters have the D5-Mantis patrol craft. Sith Warriors and Sith Inquistors have the Fury. Imperial Agents have the X-70B Phantom. Smugglers have the XS Freighter. Troopers have the BT-7 Thunderclap. Jedi Knights and Jedi Consulars have the Defender. Certain pieces of these ships can be upgraded, allowing them to perform better in space combat missions.


title: Star Wars: The Old Republic

text: The game features a passive form of crafting, known as Crew Skills, in which a player's companions carry out gathering and crafting tasks asynchronously to the player's adventures out in the world. Each class gets five companions via their storyline. The player can assign up to five companions to perform up to 3 various skills. Crafting skills allow the player's companions to create items, and the player can reverse engineer many items to possibly learn to make a better version. The item is destroyed in the process, but the player gets some of the materials back. Gathering skills allow the player or their companions to gather resources out in the world. Mission skills allow the player's companions to perform acts on the player's behalf, gaining the player Light or Darkside influence and other rewards, such as medical items or companion gifts.


title: Star Wars: The Old Republic

text: During E3 2011, a video was shown with gameplay footage of the Bounty Hunter, along with a Jawa companion named Blizz. The developers stated during the chat that only the Bounty Hunter would be able to get Blizz and that other classes would have unique companions as well, including some companions that are force users. It was also shown that companions would have a similar character screen as the players and can have gear just like a player character.