title: Aegean Sea

text: The Aegean Sea has been historically important, especially in regards to the civilization of Ancient Greece, who inhabited the area around the coast of the Aegean and the Aegean islands. The Aegean islands facilitated contact between the people of the area and between Europe and Asia. Along with the Greeks, Thracians lived among the northern coast. The Romans conquered the area under the Roman Empire, and later the Byzantine Empire held it against advances by the First Bulgarian Empire. The Fourth Crusade weakened Byzantine control of the area, and it was eventually conquered by the Ottoman Empire, with the exception of Crete, which was a Venetian colony until 1669. The Greek War of Independence allowed a Greek state on the coast of the Aegean from 1829 onwards. The Ottoman Empire held a presence over the sea for over 500 years, until it was replaced by modern Turkey.


title: Aegean Sea

text: The rocks making up the floor of the Aegean are mainly limestone, though often greatly altered by volcanic activity that has convulsed the region in relatively recent geologic times. Of particular interest are the richly coloured sediments in the region of the islands of Santorini and Milos, in the south Aegean. Notable cities on the Aegean coastline include Athens, Thessaloniki, Volos, Kavala and Heraklion in Greece, and İzmir and Bodrum in Turkey. The Aegean Sea groundwater itself has a high salinity content leading one to think that the soil would be infertile due to the volcanic region, but actually has an equilibrium with its soil content structure making it able to grow fertile crops on land that would seem infertile.


title: Aegean Sea

text: A number of issues concerning sovereignty within the Aegean Sea are disputed between Greece and Turkey. The Aegean dispute has had a large effect on Greek-Turkish relations since the 1970s. Issues include the delimitation of territorial waters, national airspace, exclusive economic zones and flight information regions.


title: Aegean Sea

text: Late Latin authors referred the name "Aegaeus" to Aegeus, who was said to have jumped into that sea to drown himself (rather than throwing himself from the Athenian acropolis, as told by some Greek authors). He was the father of Theseus, the mythical king and founder-hero of Athens. Aegeus had told Theseus to put up white sails when returning if he was successful in killing the Minotaur. When Theseus returned, he forgot these instructions, and Aegeus thinking his son to have died then drowned himself in the sea.


title: Aegean Sea

text: The sea was known in Latin as "Mare Aegaeum" under the control of the Roman Empire. The Venetians, who ruled many Greek islands in the High and Late Middle Ages, popularized the name "Archipelago" (, meaning "main sea" or "chief sea"), a name that held on in many European countries until the early modern period. In the South Slavic languages, the Aegean is called White Sea (; ; ). The Turkish name for the sea is "Ege Denizi," derived from the Greek name.


title: Aegean Sea

text: The Aegean Sea is an elongated embayment of the Mediterranean Sea and covers about in area, measuring about longitudinally and latitudinal. The sea's maximum depth is , located at a point west of Karpathos. The Aegean Islands are found within its waters, with the following islands delimiting the sea on the south, generally from west to east: Kythera, Antikythera, Crete, Kasos, Karpathos and Rhodes. The Anatolian peninsula marks the eastern boundary of the sea, while the Greek mainland marks the west. Several seas are contained within the Aegean Sea; the Thracian Sea is a section of the Aegean located to the north, the Icarian Sea to the east, the Myrtoan Sea to the west, while the Sea of Crete is the southern section.


title: Aegean Sea

text: The Greek regions that border the sea, in alphabetical order, are Attica, Central Greece, Central Macedonia, Crete, Eastern Macedonia and Thrace, North Aegean, Peloponnese, South Aegean, and Thessaly. The historical region of Macedonia also borders the sea, to the north.


title: Aegean Sea

text: Many of the Aegean islands or island chains, are geographically extensions of the mountains on the mainland. One chain extends across the sea to Chios, another extends across Euboea to Samos, and a third extends across the Peloponnese and Crete to Rhodes, dividing the Aegean from the Mediterranean.


title: Aegean Sea

text: The bays and gulfs of the Aegean beginning at the South and moving clockwise include on Crete, the Mirabello, Almyros, Souda and Chania bays or gulfs, on the mainland the Myrtoan Sea to the west with the Argolic Gulf, the Saronic Gulf northwestward, the Petalies Gulf which connects with the South Euboic Sea, the Pagasetic Gulf which connects with the North Euboic Sea, the Thermian Gulf northwestward, the Chalkidiki Peninsula including the Cassandra and the Singitic Gulfs, northward the Strymonian Gulf and the Gulf of Kavala and the rest are in Turkey; Saros Gulf, Edremit Gulf, Dikili Gulf, Gulf of Çandarlı, Gulf of İzmir, Gulf of Kuşadası, Gulf of Gökova, Güllük Gulf.


title: Aegean Sea

text: The Aegean sea is connected to the Sea of Marmara by the Dardanelles, also known from Classical Antiquity as the Hellespont. The Dardanelles are located to the northeast of the sea. It ultimately connects with the Black Sea through the Bosphoros strait, upon which lies the city of Istanbul. The Dardanelles and the Bosphoros are known as the Turkish Straits.


title: Aegean Sea

text: Aegean surface water circulates in a counterclockwise gyre, with hypersaline Mediterranean water moving northward along the west coast of Turkey, before being displaced by less dense Black Sea outflow. The dense Mediterranean water sinks below the Black Sea inflow to a depth of , then flows through the Dardanelles Strait and into the Sea of Marmara at velocities of . The Black Sea outflow moves westward along the northern Aegean Sea, then flows southwards along the east coast of Greece.


title: Aegean Sea

text: The physical oceanography of the Aegean Sea is controlled mainly by the regional climate, the fresh water discharge from major rivers draining southeastern Europe, and the seasonal variations in the Black Sea surface water outflow through the Dardanelles Strait.


title: Aegean Sea

text: The climate of the Aegean Sea largely reflects the climate of Greece and Western Turkey, which is to say, predominately Mediterranean. According to the Köppen climate classification, most of the Aegean is classified as Hot-summer Mediterranean ("Csa"), with hotter and drier summers along with milder and wetter winters. However, high temperatures during summers are generally not quite as high as those in arid or semiarid climates due to the presence of a large body of water. This is most predominant in the west and east coasts of the Aegean, and within the Aegean islands. In the north of the Aegean Sea, the climate is instead classified as Cold semi-arid "(BSk)", which feature cooler summers than Hot-summer Mediterranean climates.


title: Aegean Sea

text: Numerous Greek and Turkish settlements are located along their mainland coast, as well as on towns on the Aegean islands. The largest cities are Athens and Thessaloniki in Greece and İzmir in Turkey. The most populated of the Aegean islands is Crete, followed by Euboea and Rhodes.


title: Aegean Sea

text: Greece has established several marine protected areas along its coasts. According to the Network of Managers of Marine Protected Areas in the Mediterranean (MedPAN), four Greek MPAs are participating in the Network. These include Alonnisos Marine Park, while the Missolonghi–Aitoliko Lagoons and the island of Zakynthos are not on the Aegean.


title: Aegean Sea

text: The current coastline dates back to about 4000 BC. Before that time, at the peak of the last ice age (about 18,000 years ago) sea levels everywhere were 130 metres lower, and there were large well-watered coastal plains instead of much of the northern Aegean. When they were first occupied, the present-day islands including Milos with its important obsidian production were probably still connected to the mainland. The present coastal arrangement appeared around 9,000 years ago, with post-ice age sea levels continuing to rise for another 3,000 years after that.


title: Aegean Sea

text: The subsequent Bronze Age civilizations of Greece and the Aegean Sea have given rise to the general term "Aegean civilization". In ancient times, the sea was the birthplace of two ancient civilizations – the Minoans of Crete and the Myceneans of the Peloponnese.


title: Aegean Sea

text: The Minoan civilization was a Bronze Age civilization on the island of Crete and other Aegean islands, flourishing from around 3000 to 1450 BC before a period of decline, finally ending at around 1100 BC. It represented the first advanced civilization in Europe, leaving behind massive building complexes, tools, stunning artwork, writing systems, and a massive network of trade. The Minoan period saw extensive trade between Crete, Aegean, and Mediterranean settlements, particularly the Near East. The most notable Minoan palace is that of Knossos, followed by that of Phaistos. The Mycenaean Greeks arose on the mainland, becoming the first advanced civilization in mainland Greece, which lasted from approximately 1600 to 1100 BC. It is believed that the site of Mycenae, which sits close to the Aegean coast, was the center of Mycenaean civilization. The Mycenaeans introduced several innovations in the fields of engineering, architecture and military infrastructure, while trade over vast areas of the Mediterranean, including the Aegean, was essential for the Mycenaean economy. Their syllabic script, the Linear B, offers the first written records of the Greek language and their religion already included several deities that can also be found in the Olympic Pantheon. Mycenaean Greece was dominated by a warrior elite society and consisted of a network of palace-centered states that developed rigid hierarchical, political, social and economic systems. At the head of this society was the king, known as "wanax".


title: Aegean Sea

text: The civilization of Mycenaean Greeks perished with the collapse of Bronze Age culture in the eastern Mediterranean, to be followed by the so-called Greek Dark Ages. It is undetermined what cause the collapse of the Mycenaeans. During the Greek Dark Ages, writing in the Linear B script ceased, vital trade links were lost, and towns and villages were abandoned.


title: Aegean Sea

text: The Archaic period followed the Greek Dark Ages in the 8th century BC. Greece became divided into small self-governing communities, and adopted the Phoenician alphabet, modifying it to create the Greek alphabet. By the 6th century BC several cities had emerged as dominant in Greek affairs: Athens, Sparta, Corinth, and Thebes, of which Athens, Sparta, and Corinth were closest to the Aegean Sea. Each of them had brought the surrounding rural areas and smaller towns under their control, and Athens and Corinth had become major maritime and mercantile powers as well. In the 8th and 7th centuries BC many Greeks emigrated to form colonies in Magna Graecia (Southern Italy and Sicily), Asia Minor and further afield. The Aegean Sea was the setting for one of the most pivotal naval engagements in history, when on September 20, 480 B.C. the Athenian fleet gained a decisive victory over the Persian fleet of the Xerxes II of Persia at the Battle of Salamis. Thus ending any further attempt of western expansion by the Achaemenid Empire.


title: Aegean Sea

text: The Aegean Sea would later come to be under the control, albeit briefly, of the Kingdom of Macedonia. Philip II and his son Alexander the Great led a series of conquests that led not only to the unification of the Greek mainland and the control of the Aegean Sea under his rule, but also the destruction of the Achaemenid Empire. After Alexander the Great's death, his empire was divided among his generals. Cassander became king of the Hellenistic kingdom of Macedon, which held territory along the western coast of the Aegean, roughly corresponding to modern-day Greece. The Kingdom of Lysimachus had control over the sea's eastern coast. Greece had entered the Hellenistic period.


title: Aegean Sea

text: The Macedonian Wars were a series of conflicts fought by the Roman Republic and its Greek allies in the eastern Mediterranean against several different major Greek kingdoms. They resulted in Roman control or influence over the eastern Mediterranean basin, including the Aegean, in addition to their hegemony in the western Mediterranean after the Punic Wars. During Roman rule, the land around the Aegean Sea fell under the provinces of Achaea, Macedonia, Thracia, Asia and Creta et Cyrenica (island of Crete)


title: Aegean Sea

text: The Fall of the Western Roman Empire allowed its successor state, the Byzantine Empire, to continue Roman control over the Aegean Sea. However, their territory would later be threatened by the Early Muslim conquests initiated by Muhammad in the 7th century. Although the Rashidun Caliphate did not manage to obtain land along the coast of the Aegean sea, its conquest of the Eastern Anatolian peninsula as well as Egypt, the Levant, and North Africa left the Byzantine Empire weakened. The Umayyad Caliphate expanded the territorial gains of the Rashidun Caliphate, conquering much of North Africa, and threatened the Byzantine Empire's control of Western Anatolia, where it meets the Aegean Sea.


title: Aegean Sea

text: During the 820s, Crete was conquered by a group of Berbers Andalusians exiles led by Abu Hafs Umar al-Iqritishi, and it became an independent Islamic state. The Byzantine Empire launched a campaign that took most of the island back in 842 and 843 under Theoktistos, but the reconquest was not completed and was soon reversed. Later attempts by the Byzantine Empire to recover the island were without success. For the approximately 135 years of its existence, the emirate of Crete was one of the major foes of Byzantium. Crete commanded the sea lanes of the Eastern Mediterranean and functioned as a forward base and haven for Muslim corsair fleets that ravaged the Byzantine-controlled shores of the Aegean Sea. Crete returned to Byzantine rule under Nikephoros Phokas, who launched a huge campaign against the Emirate of Crete in 960 to 961.


title: Aegean Sea

text: Meanwhile, the Bulgarian Empire threatened Byzantine control of Northern Greece and the Aegean coast to the south. Under Presian I and his successor Boris I, the Bulgarian Empire managed to obtain a small portion of the northern Aegean coast. Simeon I of Bulgaria led Bulgaria to its greatest territorial expansion, and managed to conqueror much of the northern and western coasts of the Aegean. The Byzantines later regained control. The Second Bulgarian Empire achieved similar success along, again, the northern and western coasts, under Ivan Asen II of Bulgaria.


title: Aegean Sea

text: The Seljuq Turks, under the Seljuk Empire, invaded the Byzantine Empire in 1068, from which they annexed almost all the territories of Anatolia, including the east coast of the Aegean Sea, during the reign of Alp Arslan, the second Sultan of the Seljuk Empire. After the death of his successor, Malik Shah I, the empire was divided, and Malik Shah was succeeded in Anatolia by Kilij Arslan I, who founded the Sultanate of Rum. The Byzantines yet again recaptured the eastern coast of the Aegean.


title: Aegean Sea

text: After Constantinople was occupied by Western European and Venetian forces during the Fourth Crusade, the area around the Aegean sea was fragmented into multiple entities, including the Latin Empire, the Kingdom of Thessalonica, the Empire of Nicaea, the Principality of Achaea, and the Duchy of Athens. The Venetians created the maritime state of the Duchy of the Archipelago, which included all the Cyclades except Mykonos and Tinos. The Empire of Nicaea, a Byzantine rump state, managed to effect the Recapture of Constantinople from the Latins in 1261 and defeat Epirus. Byzantine successes were not to last; the Ottomans would conquer the area around the Aegean coast, but before their expansion the Byzantine Empire had already been weakened from internal conflict. By the late 14th century the Byzantine Empire had lost all control of the coast of the Aegean Sea and could exercise power around their capital, Constantinople. The Ottoman Empire then gained control of all the Aegean coast with the exception of Crete, which was a Venetian colony until 1669.


title: Aegean Sea

text: The Greek War of Independence allowed a Greek state on the coast of the Aegean from 1829 onward. The Ottoman Empire held a presence over the sea for over 500 years until its dissolution following World War I, when it was replaced by modern Turkey. During the war, Greece gained control over the area around the northern coast of the Aegean. By the 1930s, Greece and Turkey had about resumed their present-day borders.


title: Aegean Sea

text: In the Italo-Turkish War of 1912, Italy captured the Dodecanese islands, and had occupied them since, reneging on the 1919 Venizelos–Tittoni agreement to cede them to Greece. The Greco-Italian War took place from October 1940 to April 1941 as part of the Balkans Campaign of World War II. The Italian war aim was to establish a Greek puppet state, which would permit the Italian annexation of the Sporades and the Cyclades islands in the Aegean Sea, to be administered as a part of the Italian Aegean Islands. The German invasion resulted in the Axis occupation of Greece. The German troops evacuated Athens on 12 October 1944, and by the end of the month, they had withdrawn from mainland Greece. Greece was then liberated by Allied troops.


title: Aegean Sea

text: Many of the islands in the Aegean have safe harbours and bays. In ancient times, navigation through the sea was easier than travelling across the rough terrain of the Greek mainland, and to some extent, the coastal areas of Anatolia. Many of the islands are volcanic, and marble and iron are mined on other islands. The larger islands have some fertile valleys and plains.


title: Aegean Sea

text: The Armenian king dynasty Achaemenids made one of the greatest highways of the Ancient world. Its name was "Royal road," its length was 2400km, and it was situated between Persian Empire and the Aegean sea. A part of the road passed by the southwest of Armenia, which gave an excellent opportunity to participate in international trading.


title: Aegean Sea

text: Of the main islands in the Aegean Sea, two belong to Turkey – Bozcaada (Tenedos) and Gökçeada (Imbros); the rest belong to Greece. Between the two countries, there are political disputes over several aspects of political control over the Aegean space, including the size of territorial waters, air control and the delimitation of economic rights to the continental shelf. These issues are known as the Aegean dispute.


title: Aegean Sea

text: Multiple ports are located along the Greek and Turkish coasts of the Aegean Sea. The port of Piraeus in Athens is the chief port in Greece, the largest passenger port in Europe and the third largest in the world, servicing about 20 million passengers annually. With a throughput of 1.4 million TEUs, Piraeus is placed among the top ten ports in container traffic in Europe and the top container port in the Eastern Mediterranean. Piraeus is also the commercial hub of Greek shipping. Piraeus bi-annually acts as the focus for a major shipping convention, known as Posidonia, which attracts maritime industry professionals from all over the world. Piraeus is currently Greece's third-busiest port in terms of tons of goods transported, behind Aghioi Theodoroi and Thessaloniki. The central port serves ferry routes to almost every island in the eastern portion of Greece, the island of Crete, the Cyclades, the Dodecanese, and much of the northern and the eastern Aegean Sea, while the western part of the port is used for cargo services.


title: Aegean Sea

text: As of 2007, the Port of Thessaloniki was the second-largest container port in Greece after the port of Piraeus, making it one of the busiest ports in Greece. In 2007, the Port of Thessaloniki handled 14,373,245 tonnes of cargo and 222,824 TEU's. Paloukia, on the island of Salamis, is a major passenger port.


title: Aegean Sea

text: Fish are Greece's second-largest agricultural export, and Greece has Europe's largest fishing fleet. Fish captured include sardines, mackerel, grouper, grey mullets, sea bass, and seabream. There is a considerable difference between fish catches between the pelagic and demersal zones; with respect to pelagic fisheries, the catches from the northern, central and southern Aegean area groupings are dominated, respectively, by anchovy, horse mackerels, and boops. For demersal fisheries, the catches from the northern and southern Aegean area groupings are dominated by grey mullets and pickerel ("Spicara smaris") respectively.


title: Aegean Sea

text: The industry has been impacted by the Great Recession. Overfishing and habitat destruction is also a concern, threatening grouper, and seabream populations, resulting in perhaps a 50% decline of fish catch. To address these concerns, Greek fishermen have been offered a compensation by the government. Although some species are defined as protected or threatened under EU legislation, several illegal species such as the molluscs "Pinna nobilis", "Charonia tritonis" and "Lithophaga lithophaga", can be bought in restaurants and fish markets around Greece.


title: Aegean Sea

text: The Aegean islands within the Aegean Sea are significant tourist destinations. Tourism to the Aegean islands contributes a significant portion of tourism in Greece, especially since the second half of the 20th century. A total of five UNESCO World Heritage sites are located the Aegean Islands; these include the Monastery of Saint John the Theologian and the Cave of the Apocalypse on Patmos, the Pythagoreion and Heraion of Samos in Samos, the Nea Moni of Chios, the island of Delos, and the Medieval City of Rhodes.


title: Aegean Sea

text: Greece is one of the most visited countries in Europe and the world with over 33 million visitors in 2018, and the tourism industry around a quarter of Greece's Gross Domestic Product. The islands of Santorini, Crete, Lesbos, Delos, and Mykonos are common tourist destinations. An estimated 2 million tourists visit Santorini annually. However, concerns relating to overtourism have arisen in recent years, such as issues of inadequate infrastructure and overcrowding. Alongside Greece, Turkey has also been successful in developing resort areas and attracting large number of tourists, contributing to tourism in Turkey. The phrase "Blue Cruise" refers to recreational voyages along the Turkish Riviera, including across the Aegean. The ancient city of Troy, a World Heritage Site, is on the Turkish coast of the Aegean.


title: Aegean Sea

text: Greece and Turkey both take part in the Blue Flag beach certification programme of the Foundation for Environmental Education. The certification is awarded for beaches and marinas meeting strict quality standards including environmental protection, water quality, safety and services criteria. As of 2015, the Blue Flag has been awarded to 395 beaches and 9 marinas in Greece. Southern Aegean beaches on the Turkish coast include Muğla, with 102 beaches awarded with the blue flag, along with İzmir and Aydın, who have 49 and 30 beaches awarded respectively.


title: Library of Congress

text: The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the "de facto" national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library is housed in three buildings on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.; it also maintains a conservation center in Culpeper, Virginia. The library's functions are overseen by the Librarian of Congress, and its buildings are maintained by the Architect of the Capitol. The Library of Congress is one of the largest libraries in the world. Its "collections are universal, not limited by subject, format, or national boundary, and include research materials from all parts of the world and in more than 470 languages."


title: Library of Congress

text: Congress moved to Washington, D.C., in 1800 after holding sessions for eleven years in the temporary national capitals in New York City and Philadelphia. In both cities, members of the U.S. Congress had access to the sizable collections of the New York Society Library and the Library Company of Philadelphia. The small Congressional Library was housed in the United States Capitol for most of the 19th century until the early 1890s.


title: Library of Congress

text: Most of the original collection was burnt by the British during the War of 1812, with the library beginning efforts to restore its collection in 1815. The library purchased Thomas Jefferson's entire personal collection of 6,487 books, and its collection slowly expanded in the following years, although it suffered another fire in its Capitol chambers in 1851. This destroyed a large amount of the collection, including many of Jefferson's books. After the American Civil War, the importance of the Library of Congress increased with its growth, and there was a campaign to purchase replacement copies for volumes that had been burned. The library received the right of transference of all copyrighted works to deposit two copies of books, maps, illustrations, and diagrams printed in the United States. It also began to build its collections. Its development culminated between 1888 and 1894 with the construction of its own separate, large library, now known as the Thomas Jefferson Building, across the street from the Capitol. Two more adjacent library buildings, the John Adams Building, built in the 1930s, and the James Madison Memorial Building, built in the 1970s, hold expanded parts of the collection and provide space for additional library services.


title: Library of Congress

text: The library's primary mission is to research inquiries made by members of Congress, which is carried out through the Congressional Research Service. It also houses and oversees the United States Copyright Office. The library is open to the public for research, although only high-ranking government officials and library employees may check out (i.e., remove from the premises) books and materials.


title: Library of Congress

text: James Madison of Virginia is credited with the idea of creating a congressional library, first making such a proposition in 1783. The Library of Congress was subsequently established on April 24, 1800, when President John Adams signed an act of Congress also providing for the transfer of the seat of government from Philadelphia to the new capital city of Washington. Part of the legislation appropriated $5,000 "for the purchase of such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress ... and for fitting up a suitable apartment for containing them." Books were ordered from London, and the collection consisted of 740 books and three maps, which were housed in the new United States Capitol.


title: Library of Congress

text: President Thomas Jefferson played an important role in establishing the structure of the Library of Congress. On January 26, 1802, he signed a bill that allowed the president to appoint the librarian of Congress and established a Joint Committee on the Library to regulate and oversee it. The new law also extended borrowing privileges to the president and vice president.


title: Library of Congress

text: In August 1814, after routing an American army at Bladensburg, the British bloodlessly occupied Washington, D.C. In retaliation for the American destruction of Port Dover, the British ordered the destruction of numerous public buildings in the city. British troops burned the Library of Congress, including its collection of 3,000 volumes. These volumes had been held in the Senate wing of the Capitol. One of the few congressional volumes to survive was a government account book of receipts and expenditures for 1810. It was taken as a souvenir by British naval officer Sir George Cockburn, whose family returned it to the United States government in 1940.


title: Library of Congress

text: Within a month, Thomas Jefferson offered to sell his large personal library as a replacement. Congress accepted his offer in January 1815, appropriating $23,950 to purchase his 6,487 books. Some members of the House of Representatives opposed the outright purchase, including New Hampshire representative Daniel Webster. He wanted to return "all books of an atheistical, irreligious, and immoral tendency".


title: Library of Congress

text: Jefferson had spent 50 years accumulating a wide variety of books in several languages, and on subjects such as philosophy, history, law, religion, architecture, travel, natural sciences, mathematics, studies of classical Greece and Rome, modern inventions, hot air balloons, music, submarines, fossils, agriculture, and meteorology. He had also collected books on topics not normally viewed as part of a legislative library, such as cookbooks. But, he believed that all subjects had a place in the Library of Congress. He remarked:


title: Library of Congress

text: I do not know that it contains any branch of science which Congress would wish to exclude from their collection; there is, in fact, no subject to which a Member of Congress may not have occasion to refer.


title: Library of Congress

text: Jefferson's collection was unique in that it was the working collection of a scholar, not a gentleman's collection for display. With the addition of his collection, which doubled the size of the original library, the Library of Congress was transformed from a specialist's library to a more general one. His original collection was organized into a scheme based on Francis Bacon's organization of knowledge. Specifically, Jefferson had grouped his books into Memory, Reason, and Imagination, and broke them into 44 more subdivisions. The library followed Jefferson's organization scheme until the late 19th century, when librarian Herbert Putnam began work on a more flexible Library of Congress Classification structure. This now applies to more than 138 million items.


title: Library of Congress

text: On December 24, 1851, the largest fire in the library's history destroyed 35,000 books, two–thirds of the library's collection, and two-thirds of Jefferson's original transfer. Congress appropriated $168,700 to replace the lost books in 1852 but not to acquire new materials. (By 2008, the librarians of Congress had found replacements for all but 300 of the works that had been documented as being in Jefferson's original collection.) This marked the start of a conservative period in the library's administration by librarian John Silva Meehan and joint committee chairman James A. Pearce, who restricted the library's activities. Meehan and Pearce's views about a restricted scope for the Library of Congress reflected those shared by members of Congress. While Meehan was a librarian, he supported and perpetuated the notion that "the congressional library should play a limited role on the national scene and that its collections, by and large, should emphasize American materials of obvious use to the U.S. Congress." In 1859, Congress transferred the library's public document distribution activities to the Department of the Interior and its international book exchange program to the Department of State.


title: Library of Congress

text: During the 1850s, Smithsonian Institution librarian Charles Coffin Jewett aggressively tried to develop the Smithsonian as the United States national library. His efforts were rejected by Smithsonian secretary Joseph Henry, who advocated a focus on scientific research and publication. To reinforce his intentions for the Smithsonian, Henry established laboratories, developed a robust physical sciences library, and started the "Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge", the first of many publications intended to disseminate research results. For Henry, the Library of Congress was the obvious choice as the national library. Unable to resolve the conflict, Henry dismissed Jewett in July 1854.


title: Library of Congress

text: In 1865 the Smithsonian building, also called the Castle due to its Norman architectural style, was severely damaged by fire. This incident presented Henry with an opportunity related to the Smithsonian's non-scientific library. Around this time, the Library of Congress was planning to build and relocate to the new Thomas Jefferson Building, designed to be fireproof. Authorized by an act of Congress, Henry transferred the Smithsonian's non-scientific library of 40,000 volumes to the Library of Congress in 1866.


title: Library of Congress

text: President Abraham Lincoln appointed John G. Stephenson as librarian of Congress in 1861; the appointment is regarded as the most political to date. Stephenson was a physician and spent equal time serving as librarian and as a physician in the Union Army. He could manage this division of interest because he hired Ainsworth Rand Spofford as his assistant. Despite his new job, Stephenson focused on the war. Three weeks into his term as Librarian of Congress, he left Washington, D.C., to serve as a volunteer aide-de-camp at the battles of Chancellorsville and Gettysburg during the American Civil War. Stephenson's hiring of Spofford, who directed the library in his absence, may have been his most significant achievement.


title: Library of Congress

text: Librarian Ainsworth Rand Spofford, who directed the Library of Congress from 1865 to 1897, built broad bipartisan support to develop it as a national library and a legislative resource. He was aided by expansion of the federal government after the war and a favorable political climate. He began comprehensively collecting Americana and American literature, led the construction of a new building to house the library, and transformed the librarian of Congress position into one of strength and independence. Between 1865 and 1870, Congress appropriated funds for the construction of the Thomas Jefferson Building, placed all copyright registration and deposit activities under the library's control, and restored the international book exchange. The library also acquired the vast libraries of the Smithsonian and of historian Peter Force, strengthening its scientific and Americana collections significantly. By 1876, the Library of Congress had 300,000 volumes; it was tied with the Boston Public Library as the nation's largest library. It moved from the Capitol building to its new headquarters in 1897 with more than 840,000 volumes, 40 percent of which had been acquired through copyright deposit.


title: Library of Congress

text: A year before the library's relocation, the Joint Library Committee held hearings to assess the condition of the library and plan for its future growth and possible reorganization. Spofford and six experts sent by the American Library Association testified that the library should continue its expansion to become a true national library. Based on the hearings, Congress authorized a budget that allowed the library to more than double its staff, from 42 to 108 persons. Senators Justin Morrill of Vermont and Daniel W. Voorhees of Indiana were particularly helpful in gaining this support. The library also established new administrative units for all aspects of the collection. In its bill, Congress strengthened the role of Librarian of Congress: it became responsible for governing the library and make staff appointments. As with presidential Cabinet appointments, the Senate was required to approve presidential appointees to the position.


title: Library of Congress

text: With this support and the 1897 reorganization, the Library of Congress began to grow and develop more rapidly. Spofford's successor John Russell Young overhauled the library's bureaucracy, used his connections as a former diplomat to acquire more materials from around the world, and established the library's first assistance programs for the blind and physically disabled.


title: Library of Congress

text: Young's successor Herbert Putnam held the office for forty years from 1899 to 1939. Two years after he took office, the library became the first in the United States to hold one million volumes. Putnam focused his efforts to make the library more accessible and useful for the public and for other libraries. He instituted the interlibrary loan service, transforming the Library of Congress into what he referred to as a "library of last resort". Putnam also expanded library access to "scientific investigators and duly qualified individuals", and began publishing primary sources for the benefit of scholars.


title: Library of Congress

text: During Putnam's tenure, the library broadened the diversity of its acquisitions. In 1903, Putnam persuaded President Theodore Roosevelt to use an executive order to transfer the papers of the Founding Fathers from the State Department to the Library of Congress.


title: Library of Congress

text: Putnam expanded foreign acquisitions as well, including the 1904 purchase of a four-thousand volume library of Indica, the 1906 purchase of G. V. Yudin's eighty-thousand volume Russian library, the 1908 Schatz collection of early opera librettos, and the early 1930s purchase of the Russian Imperial Collection, consisting of 2,600 volumes from the library of the Romanov family on a variety of topics. Collections of Hebraica, Chinese, and Japanese works were also acquired. On one occasion, Congress initiated an acquisition: in 1929 Congressman Ross Collins (D-Mississippi) gained approval for the library to purchase Otto Vollbehr's collection of incunabula for $1.5 million. This collection included one of three remaining perfect vellum copies of the Gutenberg Bible.


title: Library of Congress

text: Putnam established the Legislative Reference Service (LRS) in 1914 as a separative administrative unit of the library. Based on the Progressive era's philosophy of science to be used to solve problems, and modeled after successful research branches of state legislatures, the LRS would provide informed answers to Congressional research inquiries on almost any topic. Congress passed in 1925 an act allowing the Library of Congress to establish a trust fund board to accept donations and endowments, giving the library a role as a patron of the arts. The library received donations and endowments by such prominent wealthy individuals as John D. Rockefeller, James B. Wilbur, and Archer M. Huntington. Gertrude Clarke Whittall donated five Stradivarius violins to the library. Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge's donations paid for a concert hall to be constructed within the Library of Congress building and an honorarium established for the Music Division to pay live performers for concerts. A number of chairs and consultantships were established from the donations, the most well-known of which is the Poet Laureate Consultant.


title: Library of Congress

text: The library's expansion eventually filled the library's Main Building, although it used shelving expansions in 1910 and 1927. The library needed to expand into a new structure. Congress acquired nearby land in 1928 and approved construction of the Annex Building (later known as the John Adams Building) in 1930. Although delayed during the Depression years, it was completed in 1938 and opened to the public in 1939.


title: Library of Congress

text: After Putnam retired in 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed poet and writer Archibald MacLeish as his successor. Occupying the post from 1939 to 1944 during the height of World War II, MacLeish became the most widely known librarian of Congress in the library's history. MacLeish encouraged librarians to oppose totalitarianism on behalf of democracy; dedicated the South Reading Room of the Adams Building to Thomas Jefferson, and commissioned artist Ezra Winter to paint four themed murals for the room. He established a "democracy alcove" in the Main Reading Room of the Jefferson Building for essential documents such as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and "The Federalist Papers". The Library of Congress assisted during the war effort, ranging from storage of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution in Fort Knox for safekeeping to researching weather data on the Himalayas for Air Force pilots. MacLeish resigned in 1944 when appointed as Assistant Secretary of State.


title: Library of Congress

text: President Harry Truman appointed Luther H. Evans as librarian of Congress. Evans, who served until 1953, expanded the library's acquisitions, cataloging, and bibliographic services. But he is best known for creating Library of Congress Missions worldwide. Missions played a variety of roles in the postwar world: the mission in San Francisco assisted participants in the meeting that established the United Nations, the mission in Europe acquired European publications for the Library of Congress and other American libraries, and the mission in Japan aided in the creation of the National Diet Library.


title: Library of Congress

text: Evans' successor Lawrence Quincy Mumford took over in 1953. During his tenure, lasting until 1974, Mumford directed the initiation of construction of the James Madison Memorial Building, the third Library of Congress building on Capitol Hill. Mumford led the library during the government's increased educational spending. The library was able to establish new acquisition centers abroad, including in Cairo and New Delhi. In 1967, the library began experimenting with book preservation techniques through a Preservation Office. This has developed as the most extensive library research and conservation effort in the United States.


title: Library of Congress

text: During Mumford's administration, the last significant public debate occurred about the Library of Congress's role as both a legislative and national library. Asked by Joint Library Committee chairman Senator Claiborne Pell (D-RI) to assess operations and make recommendations, Douglas Bryant of Harvard University Library proposed several institutional reforms. These included expanding national activities and services and various organizational changes, all of which would emphasize the library's federal role rather than its legislative role. Bryant suggested changing the name of the Library of Congress, a recommendation rebuked by Mumford as "unspeakable violence to tradition." The debate continued within the library community for some time. The Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970 renewed emphasis for the library on its legislative roles, requiring a greater focus on research for Congress and congressional committees, and renaming the Legislative Reference Service as the Congressional Research Service.


title: Library of Congress

text: After Mumford retired in 1974, President Gerald Ford appointed historian Daniel J. Boorstin as a librarian. Boorstin's first challenge was to manage the relocation of some sections to the new Madison Building, which took place between 1980 and 1982. With this accomplished, Boorstin focused on other areas of library administration, such as acquisitions and collections. Taking advantage of steady budgetary growth, from $116 million in 1975 to over $250 million by 1987, Boorstin enhanced institutional and staff ties with scholars, authors, publishers, cultural leaders, and the business community. His activities changed the post of librarian of Congress so that by the time he retired in 1987, "The New York Times" called this office "perhaps the leading intellectual public position in the nation."


title: Library of Congress

text: President Ronald Reagan nominated historian James H. Billington as the 13th librarian of Congress in 1987, and the U.S. Senate unanimously confirmed the appointment.


title: Library of Congress

text: Under Billington's leadership, the library doubled the size of its analog collections from 85.5 million items in 1987 to more than 160 million items in 2014. At the same time, it established new programs and employed new technologies to "get the champagne out of the bottle". These included:


title: Library of Congress

text: Since 1988, the library has administered the National Film Preservation Board. Established by congressional mandate, it selects twenty-five American films annually for preservation and inclusion in the National Film Registry, a collection of American films, for which the Library of Congress accepts nominations each year. There also exists a National Recording Registry administered by the National Recording Preservation Board that serves a similar purpose, albeit for music and sound recordings.


title: Library of Congress

text: The library has made some of these available on the Internet for free streaming and additionally has provided brief essays on the films that have been added to the registry. By 2015, the librarian had named 650 films to the registry. The films in the collection date from the earliest period to ones produced more than ten years ago; they are selected from nominations submitted to the board. Further programs included:


title: Library of Congress

text: During Billington's tenure, the library acquired General Lafayette's papers in 1996 from a castle at La Grange, France; they had previously been inaccessible.


title: Library of Congress

text: It also acquired the only copy of the 1507 Waldseemüller world map ("America's birth certificate") in 2003; it is on permanent display in the library's Thomas Jefferson Building.


title: Library of Congress

text: Using privately raised funds, the Library of Congress has created a reconstruction of Thomas Jefferson's original library. This has been on permanent display in the Jefferson building since 2008.


title: Library of Congress

text: Under Billington, public spaces of the Jefferson Building were enlarged and technologically enhanced to serve as a national exhibition venue. It has hosted more than 100 exhibitions. These included exhibits on the Vatican Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, several on the Civil War and Lincoln, on African-American culture, on Religion and the founding of the American Republic, the Early Americas (the Kislak Collection became a permanent display), on the global celebration commemorating the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta, and on early American printing, featuring the Rubenstein Bay Psalm Book.


title: Library of Congress

text: Onsite access to the Library of Congress has been increased. Billington gained an underground connection between the new U.S. Capitol Visitors Center and the library in 2008 in order to increase both congressional usage and public tours of the library's Thomas Jefferson Building.


title: Library of Congress

text: In 2001, the library began a mass deacidification program, in order to extend the lifespan of almost four million volumes and twelve million manuscript sheets. Since 2002, new collection storage modules at Fort Meade have preserved and made accessible more than four million items from the library's analog collections.


title: Library of Congress

text: Billington established the Library Collections Security Oversight Committee in 1992 to improve protection of the collections, and also the Library of Congress Congressional Caucus in 2008 to draw attention to the library's curators and collections. He created the library's first Young Readers Center in the Jefferson Building in 2009, and the first large-scale summer intern (Junior Fellows) program for university students in 1991.


title: Library of Congress

text: Under Billington, the library sponsored the Gateway to Knowledge in 2010 to 2011, a mobile exhibition to ninety sites, covering all states east of the Mississippi, in a specially designed eighteen-wheel truck. This increased public access to library collections off-site, particularly for rural populations, and helped raise awareness of what was also available online.


title: Library of Congress

text: Billington raised more than half a billion dollars of private support to supplement Congressional appropriations for library collections, programs, and digital outreach. These private funds helped the library to continue its growth and outreach in the face of a 30% decrease in staffing, caused mainly by legislative appropriations cutbacks. He created the library's first development office for private fundraising in 1987. In 1990, he established the James Madison Council, the library's first national


title: Library of Congress

text: private sector donor-support group. In 1987, Billington also asked the GAO to conduct the first library-wide audit. He created the first Office of the Inspector General at the library to provide regular, independent reviews of library operations. This precedent has resulted in regular annual financial audits at the library; it has received unmodified ("clean") opinions from 1995 onward. In April 2010, the library announced plans to archive all public communication on Twitter, including all communication since Twitter's launch in March 2006., the Twitter archive remains unfinished.


title: Library of Congress

text: Before retiring in 2015, after 28 years of service, Billington had come "under pressure" as librarian of Congress. This followed a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report that described a "work environment lacking central oversight" and faulted Billington for "ignoring repeated calls to hire a chief information officer, as required by law."


title: Library of Congress

text: When Billington announced his plans to retire in 2015, commentator George Weigel described the Library of Congress as "one of the last refuges in Washington of serious bipartisanship and calm, considered conversation," and "one of the world's greatest cultural centers."


title: Library of Congress

text: Carla Hayden was sworn in as the 14th librarian of Congress on September 14, 2016, the first woman and the first African American to hold the position.


title: Library of Congress

text: In 2017, the library announced the Librarian-in-Residence program, which aims to support the future generation of librarians by giving them the opportunity to gain work experience in five different areas of librarianship, including: Acquisitions/Collection Development, Cataloging/Metadata, and Collection Preservation.


title: Library of Congress

text: On January 6, 2021, at 1:11 PM EST, the Library's Madison Building and the Cannon House Office Building were the first buildings in the Capitol Complex to be ordered to evacuate as rioters breached security perimeters before storming the Capitol building. Hayden clarified two days later that rioters did not breach any of the Library's buildings or collections and all staff members were safely evacuated.


title: Library of Congress

text: The collections of the Library of Congress include more than 32 million catalogued books and other print materials in 470 languages; more than 61 million manuscripts; the largest rare book collection in North America, including the rough draft of the Declaration of Independence, a Gutenberg Bible (originating from the Saint Blaise Abbey, Black Forest—one of only three perfect vellum copies known to exist); over 1 million U.S. government publications; 1 million issues of world newspapers spanning the past three centuries; 33,000 bound newspaper volumes; 500,000 microfilm reels; U.S. and foreign comic books—over 12,000 titles in all, totaling more than 140,000 issues; 1.9 million moving images (as of 2020); 5.3 million maps; 6 million works of sheet music; 3 million sound recordings; more than 14.7 million prints and photographic images including fine and popular art pieces and architectural drawings; the Betts Stradivarius; and the Cassavetti Stradivarius.


title: Library of Congress

text: The library developed a system of book classification called Library of Congress Classification (LCC), which is used by most U.S. research and university libraries.


title: Library of Congress

text: The library serves as a legal repository for copyright protection and copyright registration, and as the base for the United States Copyright Office. Regardless of whether they register their copyright, all publishers are required to submit two complete copies of their published works to the library—this requirement is known as "mandatory deposit". Nearly 15,000 new items published in the U.S. arrive every business day at the library. Contrary to popular belief, however, the library does not retain all of these works in its permanent collection, although it does add an average of 12,000 items per day. Rejected items are used in trades with other libraries around the world, distributed to federal agencies, or donated to schools, communities, and other organizations within the United States.


title: Library of Congress

text: As is true of many similar libraries, the Library of Congress retains copies of every publication in the English language that is deemed significant.


title: Library of Congress

text: The Library of Congress states that its collection fills about of bookshelves and holds more than 167 million items with over 39 million books and other print materials. A 2000 study by information scientists Peter Lyman and Hal Varian suggested that the amount of uncompressed textual data represented by the 26 million books then in the collection was 10 terabytes.


title: Library of Congress

text: The library's first digitization project was called "American Memory". Launched in 1990, it initially planned to choose 160 million objects from its collection to make digitally available on laserdiscs and CDs that would be distributed to schools and libraries.


title: Library of Congress

text: After realizing that this plan would be too expensive and inefficient, and with the rise of the Internet, the library decided to instead make digitized material available over the Internet. This project was made official in the National Digital Library Program (NDLP), created in October 1994. By 1999, the NDLP had succeeded in digitizing over 5 million objects and had a budget of $12 million. The library has kept the "American Memory" name for its public domain website, which today contains 15 million digital objects, comprising over 7 petabytes of data.


title: Library of Congress

text: American Memory is a source for public domain image resources, as well as audio, video, and archived Web content.


title: Library of Congress

text: Nearly all of the lists of holdings, the "catalogs" of the library, can be consulted directly on its website. Librarians all over the world consult these catalogs, through the Web or through other media better suited to their needs, when they need to catalog for their collection a book published in the United States. They use the Library of Congress Control Number to make sure of the exact identity of the book.


title: Library of Congress

text: The library has a budget of $6–8 million each year for digitization, meaning that not all works can be digitized. It makes determinations about what objects to prioritize based on what is especially important to Congress or potentially interesting for the public. The 15 million digitized items represent less than 10% of the library's total 160-million item collection.


title: Library of Congress

text: The library has chosen not to participate in other digital library projects such as Google Books and the Digital Public Library of America, although it has supported the Internet Archive project.


title: Library of Congress

text: In 1995, the Library of Congress established an online archive of the proceedings of the U.S. Congress, THOMAS. The THOMAS website included the full text of proposed legislation, as well as bill summaries and statuses, Congressional Record text, and the Congressional Record Index. The THOMAS system received major updates in 2005 and 2010. A migration to a more modernized Web system, Congress.gov, began in 2012, and the THOMAS system was retired in 2016. Congress.gov is a joint project of the Library of Congress, the House, the Senate and the Government Publishing Office.


title: Library of Congress

text: The Library of Congress is physically housed in three buildings on Capitol Hill and a conservation center in rural Virginia. The library's Capitol Hill buildings are all connected by underground passageways, so that a library user need pass through security only once in a single visit. The library also has off-site storage facilities for less commonly requested materials.


title: Library of Congress

text: The Thomas Jefferson Building is located between Independence Avenue and East Capitol Street on First Street SE. It first opened in 1897 as the main building of the library and is the oldest of the three buildings. Known originally as the Library of Congress Building or Main Building, it took its present name on June 13, 1980.


title: Library of Congress

text: The John Adams Building is located between Independence Avenue and East Capitol Street on 2nd Street SE, the block adjacent to the Jefferson Building. The building was originally known as The Annex to the Main Building, which had run out of space. It opened its doors to the public on January 3, 1939. Initially, it also housed the U.S. Copyright Office which moved to the Madison building in the 1970s.


title: Library of Congress

text: The James Madison Memorial Building is located between First and Second Streets on Independence Avenue SE. The building was constructed from 1971 to 1976, and serves as the official memorial to President James Madison.


title: Library of Congress

text: The Madison Building is also home to the U.S. Copyright Office and to the Mary Pickford Theater, the "motion picture and television reading room" of the Library of Congress. The theater hosts regular free screenings of classic and contemporary movies and television shows.


title: Library of Congress

text: The Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation is the Library of Congress's newest building, opened in 2007 and located in Culpeper, Virginia. It was constructed out of a former Federal Reserve storage center and Cold War bunker. The campus is designed to act as a single site to store all of the library's movie, television, and sound collections. It is named to honor David Woodley Packard, whose Packard Humanities Institute oversaw the design and construction of the facility. The centerpiece of the complex is a reproduction Art Deco movie theater that presents free movie screenings to the public on a semi-weekly basis.


title: Library of Congress

text: The Library of Congress, through both the librarian of Congress and the register of copyrights, is responsible for authorizing exceptions to Section 1201 of Title 17 of the United States Code as part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This process is done every three years, with the register receiving proposals from the public and acting as an advisor to the librarian, who issues a ruling on what is exempt. After three years have passed, the ruling is no longer valid and a new ruling on exemptions must be made.


title: Library of Congress

text: The library is open for academic research to anyone with a Reader Identification Card. One may not remove library items from the reading rooms or the library buildings. Most of the library's general collection of books and journals are in the closed stacks of the Jefferson and Adams Buildings; specialized collections of books and other materials are in closed stacks in all three main library buildings, or are stored off-site. Access to the closed stacks is not permitted under any circumstances, except to authorized library staff, and occasionally, to dignitaries. Only the reading room reference collections are on open shelves.


title: Library of Congress

text: Since 1902, American libraries have been able to request books and other items through interlibrary loan from the Library of Congress if these items are not readily available elsewhere. Through this system, the Library of Congress has served as a "library of last resort", according to former Librarian of Congress Herbert Putnam. The Library of Congress lends books to other libraries with the stipulation that they be used only inside the borrowing library.


title: Library of Congress

text: In addition to its library services, the Library of Congress is also actively involved in various standard activities in areas related to bibliographical and search and retrieval standards. Areas of work include MARC standards, Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS), Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS), Z39.50 and Search/Retrieve Web Service (SRW), and Search/Retrieve via URL (SRU).


title: Library of Congress

text: The Law Library of Congress seeks to further legal scholarship by providing opportunities for scholars and practitioners to conduct significant legal research. Individuals are invited to apply for projects which would further the multi-faceted mission of the law library in serving the U.S. Congress, other governmental agencies, and the public.


title: Thomas Middleditch

text: Thomas Steven Middleditch (born March 10, 1982) is a Canadian actor, comedian and screenwriter. He is known for his role as Richard Hendricks in the HBO series "Silicon Valley" (2014–2019), earning a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series. He has voiced Penn Zero in the Disney XD animated series "" (2014–2017), Harold Hutchins in "" (2017), Sam Coleman in "" (2019) and Terry in the Hulu adult animated sci-fi series "Solar Opposites". Middleditch also appears in ads for Verizon Wireless.


title: Thomas Middleditch

text: Middleditch was born on March 10, 1982, in Nelson, British Columbia, Canada. His parents are British. He was cast in a play in eighth grade which he said "changed everything" for him. He discovered improv in grade school from performing with Theatresports. His first job was acting in Canadian Heritage Plays for his hometown.


title: Thomas Middleditch

text: He studied theatre at the University of Victoria before moving to Toronto, where he auditioned for and enrolled in George Brown Theatre School, but never began his course. He instead opted to make sketches on his own and worked at a New Balance store for an income. He relocated to Chicago, where he took classes at The Second City and iO Theater, while also performing regularly. He was a founding member in 2005 of The Improvised Shakespeare Company. Due to immigration issues, he worked various cash jobs until Charna Halpern sponsored him to get his work visa. While performing on a Second City cruise, he got an audition for "Saturday Night Live". Though he did not get cast, the routine he used in his audition landed him a network holding deal and he moved to New York City.


title: Thomas Middleditch

text: While living in New York City, Middleditch began acting in commercials. In 2007 a sketch video for Chicken McNuggets he made with Fernando Sosa in Chicago was purchased by McDonald's and used as a commercial. He appeared in the 2009 romantic comedy "Splinterheads", portraying the lead role of Justin Frost. On March 25, 2010, he joined a CBS pilot, "Hitched", written by Josh Schwartz and directed by Rob Greenberg. On May 5, 2011, Middleditch made his first appearance in "Jake and Amir", in the episode "Jake and Amir: Doobs".


title: Thomas Middleditch

text: On May 31, 2011, Middleditch joined the cast of the Paramount Pictures' comedy film "Fun Size", directed by Josh Schwartz. On August 8, 2011, he joined "Road to Nardo", a film that would have been Scot Armstrong's directorial debut. On December 12, 2011, he joined Jay Roach's "The Campaign", starring Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis.


title: Thomas Middleditch

text: On July 23, 2012, Middleditch joined the cast of the comedy film "Someone Marry Barry", directed and written by Rob Pearlstein and produced by Barry Josephson. On August 23, 2012, he appeared in "The Office"s final season episode "The Farm". He had a role in the 2013 comedy fantasy film "The Brass Teapot", directed by Ramaa Mosley, and played a police officer in the 2013 CBS Films coming-of-age comedy film "The Kings of Summer".


title: Thomas Middleditch

text: On January 30, 2013, Middleditch joined HBO's comedy pilot "Silicon Valley" playing Richard Hendricks. He has said that the pilot was written with him specifically in mind as the lead (the character was originally named Thomas Pickering; the latter being his mother's maiden name). This was a result of a "random" audio sketch he once made for a stand-up routine which he would later animate himself and pitched to several people, including Mike Judge's production partners John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky, who would later create the show.


title: Thomas Middleditch

text: For his work on the show, Middleditch has garnered four Satellite Awards nominations and a win in 2019, and two Critics' Choice Television Award nominations. In 2016, Middleditch earned his first Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series for his performance in the show.


title: Thomas Middleditch

text: On April 23, 2013, he was added to the cast of the comedy film "Search Party", playing Nardo, who travels to Mexico to win his fiancé back, starring alongside one of his "Silicon Valley" alumni, T.J. Miller. Middleditch made a small cameo appearance in the 2013 film "The Wolf of Wall Street" as a broker who is fired for cleaning his fish bowl during office hours.


title: Thomas Middleditch

text: He has played as a hipster thief in the "You're The Worst" episode "Sunday Funday". On "The Pete Holmes Show", he played Nightcrawler and Gambit from the "X-Men" and Vega and Ken from "Street Fighter II". On October 16, 2013, it was announced that the Disney XD-produced animated series "" would star Middleditch as the titular multiverse-hopping hero. The series premiered in late 2014. In 2015, he co-starred in the films "The Final Girls" and "The Bronze". Also in 2015, he began streaming himself playing video games on the website Twitch.


title: Thomas Middleditch

text: Middleditch voiced Harold Hutchins in DreamWorks Animation's animated feature "" (2017), based on Dav Pilkey's book "Captain Underpants". As of 2017, Middleditch has appeared in Verizon commercials as their spokesperson. In 2019, he appeared in the MonsterVerse film "" and the basketball video game "NBA 2K20".


title: Thomas Middleditch

text: In April 2020, Middleditch and fellow improviser Ben Schwartz starred in Netflix's first long-form improv special, "Middleditch and Schwartz", a series of three-hourlong performances filmed at New York University's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts.


title: Thomas Middleditch

text: In October 2020, Middleditch began playing the lead role of Drew Dunbar in the CBS comedy series "B Positive" which was written by Chuck Lorre. The series was originally supposed to air in March 2020, but production was halted due to the COVID-19 pandemic; however, filming of the pilot had already taken place and so the show was moved to be CBS' only fall debut.


title: Thomas Middleditch

text: Middleditch became engaged to costume designer Mollie Gates in June 2015. They were married on August 22, 2015, in Middleditch's hometown. In a 2019 "Playboy" interview, he revealed that the pair had an open relationship and said that "swinging has saved our marriage." In May 2020, Gates filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences. The divorce was reportedly finalized in April 2021.


title: Thomas Middleditch

text: In March 2021, the "Los Angeles Times" published allegations that Middleditch sexually harassed women at Cloak & Dagger, a Los Angeles-based goth club, including one incident where he groped a woman's breast. The woman revealed several messages she received from Middleditch in which he apologized for the incident.


title: Kevin Durand

text: Kevin Serge Durand (born January 14, 1974) is a Canadian actor. He is best known for portraying Vasiliy Fet in "The Strain", Joshua in "Dark Angel", Martin Keamy in "Lost", Fred J. Dukes / The Blob in "", Barry Burton in "", Gabriel in "Legion", Little John in "Robin Hood", Jeeves Tremor in "Smokin' Aces", and Carlos in "The Butterfly Effect". He received a 2012 Best Supporting Actor Genie nomination for his portrayal of Lenny Jackson in "Citizen Gangster".


title: Kevin Durand

text: Kevin Serge Durand was born in Thunder Bay, Ontario, on February 8, 1974, the son of Reina (née Perreault) and Serge Durand. He is of French-Canadian descent.


title: Kevin Durand

text: Durand's first break came when he was cast in "Mystery, Alaska". He often portrays characters on both sides of law enforcement, such as Booth in "Walking Tall", sidekick Red in "Wild Hogs", the psychotic neo-nazi Jeeves Tremor in "Smokin' Aces", the title role in "Otis E.", Gabriel in "Legion", Little John in "Robin Hood", and the hired thug Tucker in the .


title: Kevin Durand

text: Durand appeared opposite Hugh Jackman in "" as Blob and in "Real Steel". In 2012, he co-starred in "Citizen Gangster" and David Cronenberg's "Cosmopolis", and as video game character Barry Burton in the fifth installment of the "Resident Evil" movie franchise, "". In 2013, he appeared in the film "The Mortal Instruments". He co-starred in Darren Aronofsky's "Noah" and two mid-2010s Atom Egoyan films, "Devil's Knot" and "The Captive".


title: Kevin Durand

text: Durand has played series regulars on shows such as Joshua in "Dark Angel", Vasiliy Fet in "The Strain", Harbard the Wanderer in "Vikings", Agent Jay Swopes in the American remake of "Touching Evil," as well as guest roles on "", "", "ER", "Without a Trace", "Dead Like Me" and others. He also recurred on the television show "Stargate SG-1" as Lord Zipacna and on "Lost" as Martin Keamy.


title: The View (talk show)

text: The View is an American talk show created by broadcast journalist Barbara Walters. Currently in its 26th season, the show has aired on ABC as part of the network's daytime programming block since August 11, 1997. It features a multi-generational panel of women, who discuss the day's "Hot Topics", such as sociopolitical and entertainment news. In addition to the conversation segments, the panel also conducts interviews with prominent figures, such as celebrities and politicians. Production of the show was originally held in ABC Television Studio 23 in New York City. In 2014, it relocated to ABC Broadcast Center, also in New York City.


title: The View (talk show)

text: Throughout its run, "The View" has had 24 permanent co-hosts of varying characteristics and ideologies, with the number of contracted permanent co-hosts ranging between four and eight women per season. The original panel comprised Walters, broadcast journalist Meredith Vieira, lawyer Star Jones, television host Debbie Matenopoulos, and comedian Joy Behar, while the current lineup consists of Behar, entertainer Whoopi Goldberg, lawyer Sunny Hostin, television host Sara Haines, television personality Ana Navarro, and political strategist Alyssa Farah Griffin. In addition, the show often makes use of male and female guest panelists.


title: The View (talk show)

text: "The View" has won 31 Daytime Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Talk Show, Outstanding Informative Talk Show, and Outstanding Talk Show Host. The show has received praise from the Associated Press, "Entertainment Weekly", the "Los Angeles Times", "Slate", as well as "The New York Times", which deemed it "the most important political TV show in America". Beginning in its tenth season, the series became subject to on-air controversies and media criticism involving its panel of co-hosts. It was transferred from the helm of ABC's entertainment division to that of ABC News in 2014 following a decline in ratings. By 2021, "The View" had become the most-viewed news and talk program in daytime television.


title: The View (talk show)

text: The original opening credits for "The View" featured a voice-over from the show's creator and executive producer, broadcast journalist Barbara Walters, explaining the show's premise as well as its co-hosts' credentials:


title: The View (talk show)

text: Walters described it as "a talk show featuring four or five women 'of different backgrounds, different generations, and different opinions,' who would discuss the topics of the day, mixing humor with intelligent debate." The show begins with a segment that features the panel engaging in a discussion pertaining to subjects ranging from politics to social issues as well as pop culture, commonly referred to as "Hot Topics". Every episode features multiple "Hot Topics" segments, which take up to most–if not all–of the day's show. The discussions are frequently followed by interviews with guests. The show also periodically conducts audience giveaways. Every broadcast concludes with the closing remarks: "Have a great day, everyone, and take a little time to enjoy the view."


title: The View (talk show)

text: The 12th season of "The View" heavily focused on the events surrounding the 2008 United States presidential election and featured politicians John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama as guests. Its 13th season saw the introduction of male guest moderators; among them were television personality Tom Bergeron, actor D. L. Hughley, journalist Bryant Gumbel, and television host Joe Scarborough. Male personalities have since begun serving as guest co-hosts more frequently, specifically on Fridays, dubbed "Guy Day Friday". In 2013, the show was speculated to be "trying to become less political." It began refocusing on politics leading to the 2016 United States presidential election and has reincorporated it back into "Hot Topics" discussions since. During the 25th season, the series introduced weekly episodes that each feature a former co-host as a guest co-host, titled "Flashback Fridays".


title: The View (talk show)

text: "The View" premiered with four co-hosts: Meredith Vieira as moderator, Star Jones, Debbie Matenopoulos, and Barbara Walters. Joy Behar, who was originally announced to be occasionally filling in as the fourth co-host when Walters was unavailable, soon became a full-time co-host. The five women were the first group that auditioned for the panel, with Behar describing them as having immediately clicked. Following Matenopoulos's firing in December 1998, broadcast journalist Lisa Ling was brought on as a new co-host in 1999. Ling departed the show in December 2002 to host the series "National Geographic Explorer". Former "" castaway Elisabeth Hasselbeck replaced Ling beginning November 24, 2003, after Hasselbeck, television personality Rachel Campos-Duffy, and actress Erin Hershey Presley each received a week-long on-air tryout.


title: The View (talk show)

text: In April 2006, Vieira announced that she was leaving the show to become co-anchor of the NBC morning program "Today"; her final episode aired on June 9. That same month, Jones announced her departure on air but stated that she would remain on the show through July. Despite this, Walters stated the following day that Jones would no longer appear, publicly claiming feeling "betrayed" by Jones for unexpectedly making the announcement two days ahead of schedule. She also said ABC executives had decided not to renew Jones' contract due to diminished approval for Jones through their market research. Jones later claimed the decision to leave was not hers and that producers informed her that they would not be renewing her contract in April.


title: The View (talk show)

text: During the 33rd Daytime Emmy Awards in April 2006, it was announced that entertainer Rosie O'Donnell would be co-hosting the show for its tenth season; she made her debut as the new moderator on September 5. In April 2007, O'Donnell announced she would be leaving the show when her contract expires due to failed renewal negotiations. The following month, ABC stated that O'Donnell had asked to be let out of her contract three weeks before its expiration and that she had been granted permission to depart immediately.


title: The View (talk show)

text: In August 2007, Walters announced that entertainer Whoopi Goldberg would be replacing O'Donnell as moderator for season 11. Goldberg debuted during the season premiere on September 4. Actress Sherri Shepherd joined as a permanent co-host beginning September 10. Hasselbeck went on maternity leave from October 2007 to January 2008 and again from August to October 2009, with rotating guest co-hosts filling in during the latter. In August 2009, Walters, Behar, Hasselbeck, Goldberg, and Shepherd won the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Talk Show Host. Walters took a hiatus after undergoing open-heart surgery in May 2010 and returned on September 7 during the season 14 premiere broadcast.


title: The View (talk show)

text: In March 2013, Behar announced that she was leaving the series at the end of season 16. That same month, Hasselbeck was reported to be departing alongside Behar due to market research finding both of their views too "polarizing", which Walters denied. Walters announced in May that she would be retiring in May 2014. Despite Walters' earlier denial, Hasselbeck announced on July 10 that she was indeed departing to join the Fox News morning program "Fox & Friends" and that it was her last day on the show. Behar's final episode, a "This Is Your Life"-style tribute to her, aired on August 9. Actress Jenny McCarthy became a co-host the following season and debuted on its premiere broadcast on September 9. Walters made her final appearance as co-host on May 16, 2014. Shepherd and McCarthy announced their departures the following month and made their final appearances on August 11.


title: The View (talk show)

text: After making guest appearances during the previous season, actress Rosie Perez as well as former White House Communications Director Nicolle Wallace permanently joined the series in its 18th season, establishing Perez as the series' first Latina co-host; the two debuted as co-hosts alongside O'Donnell, who permanently returned, and Goldberg during the season premiere on September 15, 2014. Perez took a hiatus at the end of the year to rehearse for her role in the play "Fish in the Dark" and returned on February 3, 2015. That same month, representatives for O'Donnell confirmed that she would once again exit the panel due to "personal reasons"; her final appearance aired on February 12. Actress Raven-Symoné joined the series full-time in June after frequently guest co-hosting, and the following month, comedian Michelle Collins, who had also frequently guest co-hosted, was announced as a permanent addition for the following season. Perez and Wallace exited at the conclusion of the 18th season in August.


title: The View (talk show)

text: The 19th season saw the return of Behar as well as the addition of actress Candace Cameron Bure and broadcast journalist Paula Faris as co-hosts alongside Goldberg, Raven-Symoné, and Collins, the lattermost of whom departed in June 2016. The following season began with eight rotating co-hosts: Behar, Goldberg, Raven-Symoné, Bure, Faris, television host Sara Haines, lawyer Sunny Hostin, and television personality Jedediah Bila. Additionally, Behar began moderating on Fridays in Goldberg's place. On October 27, Raven-Symoné announced her exit from the series to star in a spin-off of the sitcom "That's So Raven". On December 8, Bure announced that she was leaving the program, citing the commute between coasts and her commitments to other television projects as reasons; her final episode as co-host aired the following day.


title: The View (talk show)

text: While Goldberg initially considered leaving after season 20, she remained as moderator for season 21, with Behar, Faris, Haines, Hostin, and Bila all returning as co-hosts. On September 18, 2017, Bila announced her exit from the show on air. Television personality Meghan McCain subsequently joined the show after leaving her position at Fox News, debuting as co-host on October 9. After giving birth to a daughter in December 2017, Haines returned from maternity leave in March 2018. Faris departed in July. In the same month, Haines announced on air that she would be exiting to co-host ABC's new third hour of its morning program "Good Morning America"; she made her final appearance during the season's penultimate broadcast on August 2.


title: The View (talk show)

text: Broadcast journalist Abby Huntsman joined the panel in season 22, making her debut during the season premiere on September 4, 2018. Following an absence due to the death of her father, McCain returned on October 8. Television personality Ana Navarro joined the show as a weekly guest co-host the following month. Goldberg began a hiatus from co-hosting on February 7, 2019, due to pneumonia and sepsis, and returned on March 14. Huntsman took maternity leave beginning in May. Behar, Goldberg, Hostin, McCain, and Huntsman all returned for the 23rd season, which premiered on September 3. In January 2020, Huntsman announced her departure to become a senior advisor to her father's 2020 Utah gubernatorial election campaign; she made her final appearance as co-host on January 17.


title: The View (talk show)

text: Haines returned as a guest co-host beginning in March 2020 and permanently rejoined the panel for the 24th season. McCain gave birth to a daughter in September 2020 and returned in January 2021 after a three-month maternity leave. After four years on the series, McCain departed at the end of the 24th season. She attributed her decision to her desire to raise her daughter in Washington D.C., to which she had relocated. McCain later cited the "toxic, direct and purposeful hostility" she experienced at the show as the reason for her exit. In April 2022, Goldberg took an extended hiatus from co-hosting to film the Amazon Prime Video series "Anansi Boys". Starting in season 26, Navarro, who has been a weekly guest co-host since 2018, and political strategist Alyssa Farah Griffin joined the show permanently. With the additions, the panel comprises six co-hosts.


title: The View (talk show)

text: During its first 17 seasons, "The View" was filmed in ABC Television Studio 23 in New York City. The original set for the first four seasons was a leftover set from canceled soap opera "The City". The panelists conduct discussions around a table or on a sofa and wear IFB earpieces through which producers communicate with them. Bill Geddie, Barbara Walters' longtime producing partner, and Mark Gentile respectively served as showrunner and director for 17 years. Walters has remained an executive producer following her retirement in May 2014.


title: The View (talk show)

text: "The View"s 18th season brought significant changes in a "creative overhaul" as well as a "new direction" for the show. In August 2014, ABC announced Geddie's exit and named Bill Wolff, who had served as vice president of primetime programming at MSNBC and as executive producer of the news and opinion program "The Rachel Maddow Show", the new executive producer. Production of the show relocated to the ABC Broadcast Center on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. During the season premiere on September 15, 2014, the series unveiled its new studio featuring a coffee table-style desk with low-arm chairs, a large video wall, in-the-round audience seating, and an on-camera social media station. Subsequent tweaks included a glass desk and high stools at center stage, as well as color adjustments in backgrounds and graphics.


title: The View (talk show)

text: In October 2014, ABC announced that responsibilities for production oversight on "The View" would shift from ABC's daytime entertainment division to Lincoln Square Productions, an ABC News subsidiary, where the show will be grouped under the division's non-fiction programming umbrella. The move allowed the show to leverage ABC News' resources toward news-related segments. In August 2015, former late-night talk show "Late Show with David Letterman" producer Brian Teta joined the show as co-executive producer. Later in the month, executive producer Wolff departed the show. In February 2016, along with the show's 20th season renewal, Candi Carter was promoted to executive producer after serving as interim showrunner for season 19, becoming the first African-American executive producer in the show's history.


title: The View (talk show)

text: During the 20th-season premiere on September 6, 2016, the show debuted an updated set design with muted colors, retooled opening titles with footage of the co-hosts in a loft-like space, as well as a new theme song entitled "World's Gone Crazy", written by Diane Warren and performed by Mary J. Blige. Hilary Estey McLoughlin was named senior executive producer in January 2017 after she was brought on as a consultant for season 19. In September, Teta was promoted to executive producer ahead of the 21st-season premiere. Sarah de la O serves as director as of September 2019. In March 2020, the series began airing without a live studio audience as a precaution in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Carter departed that same month to become the showrunner of the daytime talk show "Tamron Hall". During the pandemic, the co-hosts broadcast from different locations, with Joy Behar, Whoopi Goldberg, Sunny Hostin, Meghan McCain, and Ana Navarro filming remotely, while Sara Haines remained in the studio, where Teta also still produced. McLoughlin exited in February 2021.


title: The View (talk show)

text: For the series' 25th season, which began in September 2021, the co-hosts returned to filming in front of a live studio audience for the first time since March 2020. The show also presented a new theme song entitled "For My Girls", written by Warren and performed by Brandy Norwood and Nicole Scherzinger.


title: The View (talk show)

text: In 2010, U.S. President Barack Obama appeared as a guest on the show during the July 29 broadcast, marking the first appearance on a daytime talk show by a sitting U.S. president. The episode also saw the return of Barbara Walters following her open heart surgery in May before she resumed her hiatus. On February 22, 2012, Star Jones came on as a guest and discussed her contentious exit from the show, marking her first appearance since said exit in 2006. On February 7, 2014, Rosie O'Donnell returned as a guest for the first time since quitting the show in 2007. All eleven co-hosts in the show's history appeared during Walters' penultimate episode as co-host on May 15 to celebrate her retirement. Walters' final appearance as co-host aired the following day; it featured several guests, including Hillary Clinton and television host Oprah Winfrey.


title: The View (talk show)

text: On March 27, 2015, the show celebrated its 4,000th broadcast, with Walters and Joy Behar returning for the celebration. On September 5, 2016, prior to the premiere of season 20, ABC aired a documentary entitled "The View: 20 Years in the Making", which featured notable moments from the show and several personalities involved in its history, hosted by Behar. On November 8, Behar, Jedediah Bila, Candace Cameron Bure, Sara Haines, and Sunny Hostin hosted a primetime Election Night special of the show, which aired on Lifetime. On November 11, the series aired a "Flashback Friday" episode, which featured the original panel of co-hosts comprising Behar, Jones, Meredith Vieira, and Debbie Matenopoulos as well as a Veteran's Day tribute.


title: The View (talk show)

text: In March 2017, the show had its first remote broadcast from Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. Five episodes were filmed in front of the Tree of Life at Disney's Animal Kingdom, featuring pre-recorded segments with Behar, Bila, Haines, Hostin, Paula Faris, and Whoopi Goldberg exploring Epcot, Magic Kingdom, and Disney's Hollywood Studios. Film director James Cameron came on as a guest on March 9, giving a preview of the themed area Pandora – The World of "Avatar". Other guests included Sherri Shepherd, Tom Bergeron, actresses Ariel Winter, Audra McDonald, and Mandy Moore, actors John Stamos and Eric Stonestreet, and chefs Masaharu Morimoto and Art Smith, with musical performances by singer Andy Grammer and rock band Train.


title: The View (talk show)

text: On August 11, 2017, ABC re-aired the first episode of "The View", which originally aired on the same date 20 years prior. On November 7, 2019, the series celebrated the airing of its 5,000th episode, with Bill Geddie, businessman Donald Trump Jr., and television personality Kimberly Guilfoyle appearing as guests. The following month, singer Darlene Love performed her song "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" alongside singer Jason Derulo on the December 20 broadcast, which Love has done annually since 2015. On March 11, 2020, the series aired its first broadcast without a live studio audience since its debut due to the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: The View (talk show)

text: On September 24, 2021, Hostin and Ana Navarro were removed from the show mid-broadcast due to testing positive for COVID-19 before a planned in-person interview with U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris. The rest of the episode saw Behar and Haines answering audience questions and Harris appearing from a separate room in the studio building via a video stream during the last ten minutes. Hostin and Navarro returned the following week and said further testing indicated the two had received false positive results.


title: The View (talk show)

text: On June 2, 2022, the show aired a taped segment of Behar, Matenopoulos, Jones, and Vieira reuniting to reminisce at Essex Hall, where the original auditions for co-hosts took place.


title: The View (talk show)

text: The show's tenth season was embroiled in controversies, such as O'Donnell "speaking in mock Chinese" as well as her public feud with businessman and later U.S. president Donald Trump. On May 17, 2007, O'Donnell sparked accusations of "equating American soldiers with terrorists" in relation to the Iraq War by asking, "655,000 Iraqi civilians are dead. Who are the terrorists?" Following frequent debates involving O'Donnell and Elisabeth Hasselbeck, a confrontation ensued between the two on May 23 due to O'Donnell's issue with Hasselbeck's lack of willingness to defend her right to criticize the war. O'Donnell also stated that the media would portray her as "big, fat, lesbian, loud Rosie attacking innocent, pure, Christian Elisabeth" and that Republican pundits were mischaracterizing her statements; Hasselbeck responded by telling O'Donnell to defend her own insinuations. O'Donnell exited the series two days later, three weeks earlier than scheduled. She later attributed her early exit to the use of a split screen during the confrontation.


title: The View (talk show)

text: During a discussion about the 89th Miss America pageant on September 14, 2015, Michelle Collins called contestant Kelley Johnson's monologue about her occupation as a registered nurse "hilarious", stating that Johnson "read her emails out loud", while Behar referenced Johnson's attire and questioned why she had on "a doctor's stethoscope". The remarks resulted in an immediate social media backlash from the nursing profession, including the hashtag #NursesUnite. Two days later, Collins and Behar addressed the controversy on air. Consequently, pharmaceutical corporation Johnson & Johnson and egg company Eggland's Best pulled their sponsorships from the series, later followed by food company McCormick & Company, laundry brand Snuggle, and party store chain Party City.


title: The View (talk show)

text: On February 13, 2018, while analyzing television personality Omarosa's comments in regards to U.S. Vice President Mike Pence's religiosity, Behar stated: "It's one thing to talk to Jesus, it's another thing when Jesus talks to you. That's called mental illness, if I'm not correct, hearing voices." Content analysis organization Media Research Center subsequently launched a campaign demanding an apology from Behar and urging viewers to do the same, resulting in 40,000 calls to ABC as well as 6,000 complaints to the show's advertisers. Pence himself responded and accused the show of expressing "religious intolerance". The Walt Disney Company CEO Bob Iger later stated that Behar has directly apologized to Pence. On March 13, Behar issued an apology on air and said: "I think Vice President Pence is right; I was raised to respect everyone’s religious faith, and I fell short of that. I sincerely apologize for what I said."


title: The View (talk show)

text: In February 2022, president of ABC News Kim Godwin suspended Goldberg from the show for two weeks after she stated during an episode that the Holocaust was "not about race".


title: The View (talk show)

text: In 2016, VH1 picked up "Daytime Divas", a television series adaptation of Star Jones' book "Satan's Sisters", which revolves around a fictional daytime talk show named "The Lunch Hour" featuring five female co-hosts. Jones, who was also one of the series' executive producers, and then-"View" co-hosts Joy Behar, Jedediah Bila, Sara Haines, and Sunny Hostin all made guest appearances on the series. It was canceled in 2017 after one season.


title: The View (talk show)

text: In September 2018, "The View" began a podcast that saw the release each episode of the show after its original televised broadcast. In September 2021, the series launched a podcast titled "Behind the Table", which features conversations between former and current co-hosts.


title: The View (talk show)

text: In April 2019, Thomas Dunne Books published a non-fiction book entitled "Ladies Who Punch" by journalist Ramin Setoodeh, which chronicles the entire history of the show. It features interviews with various current and former "View" co-hosts. The book is set to be adapted into a television miniseries.


title: The View (talk show)

text: A "New York Times" review, published ten days after the show premiered, describes what critic Caryn James thought was distinctive about the show:


title: The View (talk show)

text: In a 2001 profile of Barbara Walters for "Vanity Fair", James Wolcott called "The View" a "genius bit of television." The following year, Virginia Heffernan of "Slate" complimented the chemistry between Walters, Meredith Vieira, Star Jones, and Joy Behar, writing that the women "have eased completely into the stock sensibility of middle-aged talk shows, embracing the imperatives that one be healthy, careful, temperate, charitable, and moderately cutesy while at the same time skeptical, ribald, and world-weary." Ken Tucker of "Entertainment Weekly" praised the show in 2007, writing that it "does for daytime what "The Daily Show" does for nighttime: It reflects the pent-up frustrations, pleasures, and hostilities its audience has toward pop and political culture."


title: The View (talk show)

text: Despite being credited for helping the show achieve higher ratings, Rosie O'Donnell received criticism from "viewers and interest groups" that disagreed with her viewpoints. "The Atlantic"s Kevin O'Keefe deemed O'Donnell's hiring as moderator "somewhat curious" due to her being "such an outspoken individual". Conversely, Helena Andrews of "Politico" praised O'Donnell for making the show "actually watchable—something no longer relegated to the ether of TiVo or sneaked through head phones at work when we should be watching CNN." In 2014, Michael Schulman of "The New Yorker" highlighted O'Donnell's first tenure, elaborating that she "pushed the limits of what cheery daytime chatter could sustain, and "The View" became more heated and more interesting as a result."


title: The View (talk show)

text: The appointment of Jenny McCarthy as a co-host attracted backlash due to her anti-vaccination views. David Freeman, then-senior science editor for "HuffPost", wrote about science communicator Bill Nye's concern that McCarthy would "encourage parents to prevent their kids from getting vaccinated" as well has his hope that her views would be "discredited." Alex Pareene of "Salon" criticized the decision, writing that McCarthy "isn't just quirky—she spreads lies that hurt people." Writing for "The Guardian", Jill Filipovic remarked that McCarthy "has no record of political activism or even serious engagement with the world" other than her anti-vaccination stance. Michael Specter of "The New Yorker" asserted that ABC executives "should be ashamed of themselves for offering McCarthy a regular platform on which she can peddle denialism and fear to the parents of young children who may have legitimate questions about vaccine safety" and that her hiring was a "strike against reason and progress and hope."


title: The View (talk show)

text: Following Walters' retirement, the show became known for constant changes in its lineup of co-hosts, including the brief tenures of O'Donnell, McCarthy, Rosie Perez, Nicolle Wallace, and Michelle Collins. In July 2015, Daniel D'Addario of "Time" suggested that it was time for ABC to end "The View", citing the show's inability to maintain a consistent panel as a factor. The following year, "Deadline Hollywood"s Lisa de Moraes wrote that the series was "gaining a reputation as one of the riskier gigs for on-air talent."


title: The View (talk show)

text: In 2017, David Bauder of the Associated Press attributed the show's resurgence in viewership to its political discussions. "HuffPost"s David Hinckley opined that the show has been successful in consistently implementing its original premise and maintaining "a balance in areas like ethnicity and ideology" in regards to its co-hosts. Writing for the "New York Times" in May 2019, Amanda FitzSimons noted that what sets "The View" apart from other entertainment and news programs is the fascination with the show's hosts and that it "remains one of the few places on TV where audiences can watch authentic human drama." Lorraine Ali of the "Los Angeles Times" praised the series for being "one of the few places left on TV where liberal, conservative and moderate voices pose questions that real folks might ask" and for generating "raw moments that are as authentic as they are viral." In July 2021, "Variety" columnist Daniel D'Addario found that the show had lost its "crackling electricity" and that the co-hosts had "veered into a place that wasn't even good TV" due to the limitations of taping remotely in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.