title: 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption

text: The island is monitored by GNS Science with three web cameras, one seismograph, and a microphone to detect volcanic explosions. The organisation also makes regular visits to test water, gas and soil, and to survey surface deformation.


title: 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption

text: Tourists regularly visited the island, primarily through White Island Tours. The organisation posted a statement on their web page before the eruption, which stated:


title: 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption

text: It was initially believed that there were about 100 tourists on or near to the island when the eruption took place; later, this figure was revised to 47 people who were on the island at the time. Of these people, 38 were passengers on a shore excursion from the cruise ship "Ovation of the Seas", which was on a 12-day voyage around New Zealand and had berthed at the Port of Tauranga that morning.


title: 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption

text: Some visitors were waiting for vessels to take them off the island at the time of the eruption. Tour operators and these vessels rescued 23 people from the island before it was officially declared unsafe. A passenger on one of the boats stated that his vessel attempted to first outrun the ash cloud before many on the vessel noticed a crowd of people in need of help on the jetty. Those who were brought onto the boat were aided by the original passengers who used water bottles, jackets and other clothing, inhalers, and eye drops.


title: 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption

text: Another passenger told reporters that the boat he was on, which was about 200 metres offshore at the time of the eruption, launched an emergency inflatable and retrieved 23 people before returning to the mainland. Paramedics from the New Zealand Coastguard boarded the boat before it reached the docks to tend the injured.


title: 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption

text: Noticing the eruption from the mainland shore, three commercial helicopter pilots conducted rescue missions to the island in their helicopters, bringing back twelve survivors. They also saw several bodies in the area, but concentrated on bringing back the survivors. The pilots reportedly attempted to return to the island to collect the bodies they had seen but were stopped by police; however, they were consulted later in order to collect the bodies once the area became more stable.


title: 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption

text: The 47 people on the island at the time of the eruption consisted of 24 Australians, 9 Americans, 5 New Zealanders, 4 Germans, 2 Chinese, 2 Britons and 1 Malaysian. A passenger on a rescue boat stated that many of the injured had severe burns as many of them had worn just T-shirts and shorts for the day.


title: 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption

text: At 18:35 on 9 December, media were told there was one confirmed fatality, with more likely to be dead as several were missing, while many were injured, seven critically. Authorities said it was still too dangerous for the emergency services to get onto the island to rescue people as it is covered in ash and volcanic material. Later the same day, officials declared that forty-seven people were on the island at the moment of the eruption: five were killed, 34 injured and rescued, while eight were missing and presumed dead.


title: 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption

text: Three other people died in hospital the next days, bringing the confirmed death toll to eight. Six more bodies were found during an operation on the island, bringing the death toll to 14. On 14 December, it was announced that the death toll had risen to 15 as another injured person died in hospital. A day later, an Australian citizen who was repatriated died in hospital, bringing the death toll to 16, plus two victims whose bodies had not been recovered. Another victim died from injuries in hospital, pushing the death toll to 19 including two missing people that were presumed dead. A further victim died at a hospital in Australia on 12 January 2020 bringing the total to 20. Authorities were still working to recover two more bodies, but efforts were scaled down from 15 January.


title: 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption

text: Over the days following the initial eruption, the death toll steadily rose as bodies were recovered from the island and as several of the severely burnt victims succumbed to their injuries. On 15 December it was announced that the death toll had risen to 16. Including two people who were missing and later considered fatalities, there were 13 Australian tourists, three Americans and two New Zealand men who worked as guides for White Island Tours. Another victim, an American woman, succumbed to her injuries on 22 December, raising the confirmed death toll to 19 and the number of the American fatalities to four. In January 2020, an Australian man and an American man died of their injuries and the two missing people were officially declared as dead, bringing the death toll to 21. A German man died on 2 July 2020, bringing the death toll to 22.


title: 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption

text: Due to the severe injuries sustained by those on the island, identification of the deceased was carried out by a variety of individuals including a pathologist, a forensic dentist, and a fingerprint officer. This was aided by officers creating profiles of the victims, including descriptions of appearance, clothing, photos, fingerprints, medical and dental records, and DNA samples. The information was then matched to evidence gathered from the deceased individual in the autopsy.


title: 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption

text: All but three of the survivors suffered severe or critical injuries and the vast majority were badly burned. They were initially taken to Whakatāne Hospital, where they were triaged and stabilised before being transferred to other hospitals. Whakatāne Hospital, Tauranga Hospital, and Waikato Hospital in Hamilton all activated their mass casualty plans. On 10 December, the Ministry of Health announced that twenty-five people had been transferred to the country's four burns units in Auckland (Middlemore), Hamilton, Lower Hutt, and Christchurch, all of which were at capacity. On 11 December, it was reported that New Zealand had ordered 1.2 million cm of skin from the United States and Australia to treat patients following the eruption, some of whom had burns on up to 95% of their bodies. Three survivors suffered slight injuries.


title: 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption

text: Thirteen injured Australians were airlifted to Australia from the night of 11 December to receive treatment in hospitals in Sydney and Melbourne. Three Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) planes, a C-130J Super Hercules and two C-17 Globemasters, flew to Christchurch with specialist aircrew and medical equipment on board. Several Australian state governments also supplied aircraft to assist in the airlift. A total of twelve Australians were expected to be airlifted to their homeland.


title: 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption

text: Initially, rescuers focused their efforts on people who were still alive and left corpses on the island. Consequently, many people were listed as missing until their bodies were recovered and formally identified. On 15 December authorities said the bodies of two victims had not been found and may have been swept into the sea. Police believe their bodies were initially near a stream, and were swept down the stream during a "significant weather event" on the night of 9 December. On 23 January, the coroner declared the missing two to be dead.


title: 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption

text: Directly after the eruption, the volcanic alert level for the island was raised to 4, but was decreased by 16:30 on the same day to level 3. No further eruptive activity occurred, and on 12 December the volcanic alert level was lowered to 2, signifying "moderate to heightened volcanic unrest." Volcanic tremor increased in the aftermath of the eruption, with small scale gas jetting and steam bursts observed on 13 December, however, the volcanic tremor level dropped that evening.


title: 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption

text: "Ovation of the Seas" postponed its departure from Tauranga until the morning of 11 December as police collected DNA samples from the cabins of the missing passengers. Māori townspeople and members of the "Ovation of the Seas" passengers and crew held a moment of silence honouring the ship's passengers and other victims. Later a representative of the Māori began a "karakia tau te mauri," a traditional blessing to settle the spirit before the ship left. The ship returned to Sydney on 16 December on an altered itinerary via Wellington and Picton. All passengers received the equivalent of one day's fare in on-board credit as compensation.


title: 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption

text: All those injured and killed in the eruption, regardless of nationality, would be covered by the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC), who administer New Zealand's no-fault accident compensation scheme. The ACC Act generally prevents claims for damages for negligent acts in New Zealand, but it may be possible for the cruise ship passengers to sue in American courts under United States maritime law.


title: 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption

text: On 6 December 2020, Radio New Zealand reported that more than 89,000 people had signed a petition to stop the prosecution of helicopter pilots from Kahu Helicopters, Volcanic Air and Aerius who had saved lives during the eruption. In addition, the Association of Scientists has warned that the prosecution of Crown research institutions like GNS Science could have the effect of muting the scientific community and preventing the sharing of vital information during a crisis.


title: 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption

text: In December 2022, a group of about 20 people which included family members of victims, survivors and first responders returned to the island in order to place a memorial plaque to honour the 22 deceased victims. While the group was photographed without any safety equipment, they reported had worked with authorities and cultural advisors to travel to the island in order to place the plaque. Another ceremony was in New Zealand that month to honour the victims after being unable to in previous years due to Covid-19 restrictions.


title: 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption

text: In December 2019, the New Zealand Police launched an investigation into the disaster in conjunction with WorkSafe New Zealand.


title: 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption

text: On 30 November 2020, it was reported that WorkSafe New Zealand had filed charges against thirteen parties over tours to the island, including its owners, the Buttle family (who own the island through Whakaari Management Ltd), GNS Science, the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), and tour operators Volcanic Air and the Ngāti Awa–owned White Island Tours. Ten parties have been charged under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015; nine under Section 36 for failing to ensure the health and safety of workers and others, with one facing a charge as a person controlling a business. Each of these charges carries a maximum fine of NZ$1.5 million. Three individuals were also charged under Section 44 of the act which requires directors or individuals who have influence over a company to ensure that the company meets health and safety obligations. Each charge carries a maximum fine of NZ$300,000.


title: 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption

text: At a court hearing on 5 March 2021 the names of all the charged were officially revealed. Ten organisations and three individuals were charged under the Health and Safety at Work Act. The ten organisations were seven tourism companies (White Island Tours Limited; Volcanic Air Safaris Limited; Aerius Limited; Kahu NZ Limited; Inflite Charters Limited; I D Tours New Zealand Limited; and Tauranga Tourism Services Limited), GNS Science, the National Emergency Management Agency and Whakaari Management Ltd. The three individuals were Andrew, James and Peter Buttle, directors of Whakaari Management. A number of the charges were for alleged offences between April 2016 and December 2019. None of the charges relate to events following the eruption, when some of the charged parties rescued people from the island. On 26 August 2021, the thirteen defendants pleaded not guilty to charges of health and safety breaches.


title: 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption

text: On 31 March 2022, the flight operator Inflite pleaded guilty to the health and safety charges, and was ordered to pay fines of $227,500 and costs of prosecution of $40,000.


title: 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption

text: On 4 May 2022, the National Emergency Management Agency successfully appealed for a dismissal of the charges against it in relation to the Whakaari eruption. NEMA's lawyer Victoria Casey QC claimed that the application of section 36(2) of the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 would lead to "absurd outcomes". Judge Evangelos Thomas of the Auckland District Court ruled in favour of the defendant.


title: 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption

text: On 31 May 2022, the Buttle family, who own Whakaari / White Island, announced that they were applying to the court to have the charges against them dismissed.


title: 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption

text: In April 2020 legal action was commenced in Australia on behalf of relatives and "Ovation" passengers against the cruise-ship operator Royal Caribbean International.


title: 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption

text: Several injured tourists filed lawsuits against the cruise liner Royal Caribbean and the New Zealand–based tour company ID Tours in the United States and Australia. American couple Lauren Barham and Matthew Urey filed a lawsuit against Royal Caribbean, ID Tours, and White Island Tours for negligence at the United States district court of the southern district of Florida, claiming that the defendants had ample warning that the volcano was on the brink of eruption but had failed to warn passengers who had signed up for the crater excursion.


title: 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption

text: The eruption and the experiences of those on the island have been depicted in various media formats, with the majority being filmed interviews and documentaries about tourists' personal experiences. The eruption was also heavily documented by day trippers and other individuals on boats surrounding the island, along with at least one member of the tour groups who took a photo of the start of the eruption with her phone. One survivor, Stephanie Browitt, began using the social media platform TikTok to document her experiences on the island along with her immediate and continued recovery, as well as pay tribute to her father and sister, who died in the eruption. She wore compression garments and took them off in 2022.


title: 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption

text: The scientific response to the eruption and the recovery mission was highlighted in a documentary. A documentary titled "The Eruption; Stories of Survival" was released in December 2020 and documents the eruption through survivors' accounts and interviews with family members of those who died in the eruption. In December 2022, Netflix released "The Volcano: Rescue from Whakaari" and used first person accounts along with footage of the eruption and its aftermath, to document the time leading up to, during and after the eruption.


title: 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption

text: Survivor accounts were also highlighted in an episode of "60 Minutes Australia", in which some survivors made accusations of inaction towards rescue efforts which potentially caused needless deaths. Similar remarks were made in a "Four Corners" documentary. Almost a year since the deadly Whakaari White Island eruption, authorities now say search and rescue teams could have reached the island much sooner. In an interview with 60 Minutes, St John medical director, Dr Tony Smith, said that upon reflection, rescue crews could have flown to the island much earlier than when they did - about two-and-a-half hours after the eruption. "But had we gone to the island sooner, I'm absolutely medically confident ... unfortunately, we were not going to save anymore additional people. "The information we were receiving at that time was that it was unsafe to land on the island."


title: 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption

text: Ray Cas, a professor emeritus from Monash University, and past president of the International Association for Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth's Interior, published comments about the disaster through the Australian Science Media Centre, claiming that the incident was "a disaster waiting to happen". He felt that the island was too dangerous to allow the daily tour groups that visited.


title: 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption

text: Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said that "the scale of this tragedy is devastating". On 10 December, Ardern met emergency services personnel who responded to the incident. The local member of Parliament Anne Tolley stated that the town of Whakatāne was shattered by the disaster and their thoughts were with the victims and their families but did not rule out that the tours would end due to the disaster occurring. Tolley claimed the tours were "iconic" and a "centrepiece of the town's tourism".


title: 2019 Whakaari / White Island eruption

text: Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison stated that "This is a very, very hard day for many families whose loved ones have been caught up in this terrible, terrible tragedy" and announced that an Australian Federal Police forensic team was sent to New Zealand to assist. The Australian Parliament House also lowered its flags at half-mast.


title: Curriculum

text: In education, a curriculum (; : curricula or curriculums) is broadly defined as the totality of student experiences that occur in the educational process. The term often refers specifically to a planned sequence of instruction, or to a view of the student's experiences in terms of the educator's or school's instructional goals. A curriculum may incorporate the planned interaction of pupils with instructional content, materials, resources, and processes for evaluating the attainment of educational objectives. Curricula are split into several categories: the explicit, the implicit (including the hidden), the excluded, and the extracurricular.


title: Curriculum

text: Curricula may be tightly standardized or may include a high level of instructor or learner autonomy. Many countries have national curricula in primary and secondary education, such as the United Kingdom's National Curriculum.


title: Curriculum

text: UNESCO's International Bureau of Education has the primary mission of studying curricula and their implementation worldwide.


title: Curriculum

text: The word "curriculum" began as a Latin word which means "a race" or "the course of a race" (which in turn derives from the verb "currere" meaning "to run/to proceed"). The word is "from a Modern Latin transferred use of classical Latin curriculum "a running, course, career" (also "a fast chariot, racing car"), from currere "to run" (from PIE root *kers- "to run")." The first known use in an educational context is in the "Professio Regia", a work by University of Paris professor Petrus Ramus published posthumously in 1576. The term subsequently appears in University of Leiden records in 1582. The word's origins appear closely linked to the Calvinist desire to bring greater order to education.


title: Curriculum

text: By the seventeenth century, the University of Glasgow also referred to its "course" of study as a "curriculum", producing the first known use of the term in English in 1633. By the nineteenth century, European universities routinely referred to their curriculum to describe both the complete course of study (as for a degree in surgery) and particular courses and their content. By 1824, the word was defined as "a course, especially a fixed course of study at a college, university, or school."


title: Curriculum

text: There is no generally agreed upon definition of curriculum. Some influential definitions combine various elements to describe curriculum as follows:


title: Curriculum

text: Under some definitions, curriculum is prescriptive, and is based on a more general syllabus which merely specifies what topics must be understood and to what level to achieve a particular grade or standard.


title: Curriculum

text: A curriculum may also refer to a defined and prescribed course of studies, which students must fulfill in order to pass a certain level of education. For example, an elementary school might discuss how its curricula is designed to improve national testing scores or help students learn fundamental skills. An individual teacher might also refer to his or her curriculum, meaning all the subjects that will be taught during a school year. The courses are arranged in a sequence to make learning a subject easier. In schools, a curriculum spans several grades.


title: Curriculum

text: On the other hand, a high school might refer to their curricula as the courses required in order to receive one's diploma. They might also refer to it in exactly the same way as an elementary school and use it to mean both individual courses needed to pass as well as the overall offering of courses, which help prepare a student for life after high school.


title: Curriculum

text: A curriculum can be seen from different perspectives. What societies envisage as important teaching and learning constitutes the "intended" curriculum. Since it is usually presented in official documents, it may be also called the "written" or "official" curriculum. However, at a classroom level this intended curriculum may be altered through a range of complex classroom interactions, and what is actually delivered can be considered the "implemented" curriculum. What learners really learn (i.e. what can be assessed and can be demonstrated as learning outcomes or competencies) constitutes the "achieved" or "learned" curriculum. In addition, curriculum theory points to a "hidden" curriculum (i.e. the unintended development of personal values and beliefs of learners, teachers, and communities; the unexpected impact of a curriculum; or the unforeseen aspects of a learning process). Those who develop the intended curriculum should have all these different dimensions of the curriculum in view. While the "written" curriculum does not exhaust the meaning of curriculum, it is important because it represents the vision of the society. The "written" curriculum is usually expressed in comprehensive and user-friendly documents, such as curriculum frameworks or subject curricula/syllabi, and in relevant and helpful learning materials, such as textbooks, teacher guides, and assessment guides.


title: Curriculum

text: In some cases, people see the curriculum entirely in terms of the subjects that are taught, and as set out within the set of textbooks, and forget the wider goals of competencies and personal development. This is why a curriculum framework is important. It sets the subjects within this wider context, and shows how learning experiences within the subjects need to contribute to the attainment of the wider goals.


title: Curriculum

text: Curriculum is almost always defined with relation to schooling. According to some, it is the major division between formal and informal education. However, under some circumstances it may also be applied to informal education or free-choice learning settings. For instance, a science museum may have a "curriculum" of what topics or exhibits it wishes to cover. Many after-school programs in the US have tried to apply the concept; this typically has more success when not rigidly clinging to the definition of curriculum as a product or as a body of knowledge to be transferred. Rather, informal education and free-choice learning settings are more suited to the model of curriculum as practice or praxis.


title: Curriculum

text: In the early years of the 20th century, the traditional concepts held of the "curriculum is that it is a body of subjects or subject matter prepared by the teachers for the students to learn." It was synonymous to the "course of study" and "syllabus".


title: Curriculum

text: In "The Curriculum", the first textbook published on the subject, in 1918, John Franklin Bobbitt said that curriculum, as an idea, has its roots in the Latin word for "race-course", explaining the curriculum as the course of deeds and experiences through which children become the adults they should be to succeed later in life. Furthermore, the curriculum encompasses the entire scope of formative deed and experience occurring in and out of school such as experiences that are unplanned and undirected or those that are intentionally directed for the purposeful formation of adult members of society, not only experiences occurring in school. (cf. image at right.)


title: Curriculum

text: To Bobbitt, the curriculum is a social engineering arena. Per his cultural presumptions and social definitions, his curricular formulation has two notable features: (i) that scientific experts would best be qualified to and justified in designing curricula based upon their expert knowledge of what qualities are desirable in adult members of society, and which experiences would generate said qualities; and (ii) curriculum defined as the deeds-experiences the student "ought to have" to become the adult he or she "ought to become".


title: Curriculum

text: Hence, he defined the curriculum as an ideal, rather than as the concrete reality of the deeds and experiences that form who and what people become.


title: Curriculum

text: Contemporary views of curriculum reject these features of Bobbitt's postulates, but retain the basis of curriculum as the course of experience(s) that form humans into persons. Personal formation via curricula is studied both at the personal and group levels, i.e. cultures and societies (e.g. professional formation, academic discipline via historical experience). The formation of a group is reciprocal, with the formation of its individual participants.


title: Curriculum

text: Although it formally appeared in Bobbitt's definition, curriculum as a course of formative experience also pervades John Dewey's work (who disagreed with Bobbitt on important matters). Although Bobbitt's and Dewey's idealistic understanding of "curriculum" is different from current, restricted uses of the word, writers of curricula and researchers generally share it as common, substantive understanding of curriculum. Development does not mean just getting something out of the mind. It is a development of experience and into experience that is really wanted.


title: Curriculum

text: Robert M. Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, regarded curriculum as "permanent studies" where the rules of grammar, rhetoric, logic, and mathematics for basic education are emphasized. Basic education should emphasize the three Rs and college education should be grounded on liberal education. On the other hand, Arthur Bestor, an essentialist, believes that the mission of the school should be intellectual training. Hence, curriculum should focus on the fundamental intellectual disciplines of grammar, literature, and writing. It should also include mathematics, science, history, and foreign language.


title: Curriculum

text: According to Joseph Schwab, discipline is the sole source of curriculum. In our education system, curriculum is divided into chunks of knowledge called subject areas in basic education including English, mathematics, science, and social studies. In college, discipline may include humanities, sciences, languages, and many more. Curricula should consist entirely of knowledge which comes from various disciplines. Learning the lesson should be more interesting and beneficial than receiving a scolding, being ridiculed, being required to stay after school, among other punishments.


title: Curriculum

text: Thus, curricula can be viewed as a field of study. It is made up of its foundations (philosophical, historical, psychological, and social foundations), domains of knowledge, as well as its research theories and principles. Curricula as an area of study should be scholarly and theoretical. It is concerned with broad, historical, philosophical social issues and academics. Under a starting definition offered by John Kerr and taken up by Vic Kelly in his standard work on the curriculum, it is “all the learning which is planned and guided by the school, whether it is carried on in groups or individually, inside or outside the school."


title: Curriculum

text: In recent years the field of education and curriculum has expanded outside the walls of the classroom and into other settings, such as museums. Within these settings curriculum is an even broader topic, including various teachers, inanimate objects such as audio tour devices, and even the learners themselves. As with the traditional idea of curriculum, curriculum in a free choice learning environment can consist of the explicit stated curriculum and the hidden curriculum; both of which contribute to the learner's experience and lessons from the experience. These elements are further compounded by the setting, cultural influences, and the state of mind of the learner. Museums and other similar settings are most commonly leveraged within traditional classroom settings as enhancements to the curriculum when educators develop curricula that encompass visits to museums, zoos, and aquariums.


title: Curriculum

text: On the other hand, to a progressivist, a listing of school subjects, syllabi, courses of study, and lists of courses of specific discipline do not make a curriculum. These can only be called curriculum if the written materials are actualized by the learner. Broadly speaking, curriculum is defined as the total learning experiences of the individual. This definition is anchored on John Dewey's definition of experience and education. He believed that reflective thinking is a means that unifies curricular elements. Thought is not derived from action but tested by application.


title: Curriculum

text: Caswell and Campbell viewed curricula as "all experiences children have under the guidance of teachers." This definition is shared by Smith, Stanley, and Shores when they defined curriculum as "a sequence of potential experiences set up in schools for the purpose of disciplining children and youth in group ways of thinking and acting."


title: Curriculum

text: Curriculum as a process is when a teacher enters a particular schooling and situation with the ability to think critically, an understanding of their role and the expectations others have of them, and a proposal for action which sets out essential principles and features of the educational encounter. Guided by these, they encourage conversations between, and with, people in the situation out of which may come a course of thinking and action. Plus, the teacher continually evaluates the process and what they can see of outcomes.


title: Curriculum

text: Marsh and Willis view curricula as all the "experiences in the classroom which are planned and enacted by teacher, and also learned by the students."


title: Curriculum

text: Any definition of curriculum, if it is to be practically effective and productive, must offer much more than a statement about knowledge-content or merely the subjects which schooling is to teach, transmit, or deliver. Some would argue of the course that the values implicit in the arrangements made by schools for their pupils are quite clearly in the consciousness of teachers and planners, again especially when the planners are politicians, and are equally clearly accepted by them as part of what pupils should learn in school, even if they are not overtly recognized by the pupils themselves. In other words, those who design curricula deliberately plan the schools’ "expressive culture". If this is the case, then, the curriculum is ‘hidden’ only to or from the pupils, and the values to be learned clearly from a part of what is planned for pupils. They must, therefore, be accepted as fully a part of the curriculum, and especially as an important focus because questions must be asked concerning the legitimacy of such practices.


title: Curriculum

text: Currently, a spiral curriculum is promoted as allowing students to revisit a subject matter's content at the different levels of development of the subject matter being studied. The constructivist approach proposes that children learn best via pro-active engagement with the educational environment, as in learning through discovery.


title: Curriculum

text: A curriculum may be partly or entirely determined by an external, authoritative body (e.g., the National Curriculum for England in English schools, or the International Primary Curriculum for International Schools).


title: Curriculum

text: Crucial to the curriculum is the definition of the course objectives that usually are expressed as learning outcomes and normally include the program's assessment strategy. These outcomes and assessments are grouped as units (or modules), and, therefore, the curriculum comprises a collection of such units, each, in turn, comprising a specialized, specific part of the curriculum. So, a typical curriculum includes communications, numeracy, information technology, and social skills units, with specific, specialized teaching of each.


title: Curriculum

text: Core curricula are often instituted, at the primary and secondary levels, by school boards, Departments of Education, or other administrative agencies charged with overseeing education. A core curriculum is a curriculum, or course of study, which is deemed central and usually made mandatory for all students of a school or school system. However, even when core requirements exist, they do not necessarily involve a requirement for students to engage in one particular class or activity. For example, a school might mandate a music appreciation class, but students may opt out if they take a performing arts class.


title: Curriculum

text: In Australia, the Australian Curriculum took effect nationwide in 2014, after a curriculum development process that began in 2010. Previously, each state's Education Department had traditionally established curricula. The Australian Curriculum consists of one curriculum covering eight subject areas through year 10, and another covering fifteen subjects for the senior secondary years.


title: Curriculum

text: In Canada each province and territory has the authority to create its own curriculum. However, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut both choose to use the Alberta Curriculum for select parts of their curriculum. The territories also use Alberta's standardized tests in some subjects.


title: Curriculum

text: The National Curriculum of Korea covers kindergarten, primary, secondary, and special education. The version currently in place is the 7th National Curriculum, which has been revised in 2007 and 2009. The curriculum provides a framework for a common set of subjects through 9th grade, and elective subjects in grades 10 through 12.


title: Curriculum

text: The curriculum in Japan is determined based on the guidelines for education and the guidelines for learning presented by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). When deciding on the curriculum for each school, the school's organizers will decide on the outline by referring to the manuals and explanations prepared by the Education, Science and Technology Ministry and other public offices, and the schools will decide on additional annual plans. The Courses of Education and Courses of Study are fully revised every 10 years. Before World War II, the curriculum was based on the school regulations corresponding to each school type.


title: Curriculum

text: The Dutch system is based on directives coming from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW). Primary and secondary education use key objectives to create curricula. For primary education the total number of objectives has been reduced from 122 in 1993 to 58 in 2006. Starting in 2009 and 2010 all key objectives are obligatory for primary education. The key objectives are oriented towards subject areas such as language, mathematics, orientation towards self and the world, art, and physical education. All of the objectives have accompanying concrete activities. Also final exams are determined by the OCW and required. Parts of those exams are taken in a national setting, created by the Centrale Examencommissie Vaststelling Opgaven (CEVO). Furthermore, the OCW will determine the number of hours to be spent per subject. Apart from these directives every school can determine its own curriculum.


title: Curriculum

text: In 2005, the Nigerian government adopted a national Basic Education Curriculum for grades 1 through 9. The policy was an outgrowth of the Universal Basic Education program announced in 1999, to provide free, compulsory, continuous public education for these years. In 2014, the government implemented a revised version of the national curriculum, reducing the number of subjects covered from 20 to 10.


title: Curriculum

text: Core curriculum has typically been highly emphasized in Soviet and Russian universities and technical institutes.


title: Curriculum

text: The National Curriculum was introduced into England, Wales and Northern Ireland as a nationwide curriculum for primary and secondary state schools following the Education Reform Act 1988. It does not apply to independent schools, which may set their own curricula, but it ensures that state schools of all local education authorities have a common curriculum. Academy schools have a significant degree of autonomy in deviating from the National Curriculum.


title: Curriculum

text: Every state school must offer a curriculum which is balanced and broadly based and which promotes the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of pupils at the school and of society, and prepares pupils at the school for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of later life. For each of the statutory curriculum subjects, the Secretary of State for Education is required to set out a Programme of Study which outlines the content and matters which must be taught in those subjects at relevant Key Stages. Teachers should set high expectations for every pupil. They should plan stretching work for pupils whose attainment is significantly above the expected standard. Teachers should use appropriate assessment to set targets which are deliberately ambitious.


title: Curriculum

text: In Scotland, the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) was introduced in August 2010 in all schools. The national qualifications were introduced in 2013 by the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA). The national qualifications include the Life Skills Coursework (SFL), National 3 (NAT3), National 4 (NAT4), National 5 (NAT5), Higher, and Advanced Higher.


title: Curriculum

text: In the U.S., each state, with the individual school districts, establishes the curricula taught. Each state, however, builds its curriculum with great participation of national academic subject groups selected by the United States Department of Education such as the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) for mathematical instruction.


title: Curriculum

text: The Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) promulgates a core set of standards which are specific information and skills a student needs to know at each grade level in order to graduate. States may adopt these standards in part or whole and expand upon them. Schools and states (depending on how much control a state gives to its local schools) then develop their curriculum to meet each of these standards. This coordination is intended to make it possible to use more of the same textbooks across states, and to move toward a more uniform minimum level of education attainment.


title: Curriculum

text: According to the CCSSI, “[d]ecisions on how to implement the standards, including the right supports to put in place, are made at the state and local levels. As such, states and localities are taking different approaches to implementing the standards and providing their teachers with the supports they need to help students successfully reach the standards.”


title: Curriculum

text: Many educational institutions are currently trying to balance two opposing forces. On the one hand, some believe students should have a common knowledge foundation, often in the form of a core curriculum whereas others want students to be able to pursue their own educational interests, often through early specialty in a major or through the free choice of courses. This tension has received a large amount of coverage due to Harvard University's reorganization of its core requirements.


title: Curriculum

text: An essential feature of curriculum design, seen in every college catalog and at every other level of schooling, is the identification of prerequisites for each course. These prerequisites can be satisfied by taking particular courses, and in some cases by examination, or by other means, such as work experience. In general, more advanced courses in any subject require some foundation in basic courses, but some coursework requires study in other departments, as in the sequence of math classes required for a physics major, or the language requirements for students preparing in literature, music, or scientific research. A more detailed curriculum design must deal with prerequisites within a course for each topic taken up. This in turn leads to the problems of course organization and scheduling once the dependencies between topics are known.


title: Curriculum

text: At the undergraduate level, individual college and university administrations and faculties sometimes mandate core curricula, especially in the liberal arts. However, because of increasing specialization and depth in the student's major field of study, a typical core curriculum in higher education mandates a far smaller proportion of a student's course work than a high school or elementary school core curriculum prescribes.


title: Curriculum

text: Among the best known and most expansive core curricula programs at leading American colleges and universities are those of Columbia University and the University of Chicago. Both can take up to two years to complete without advanced standing, and are designed to foster critical skills in a broad range of academic disciplines, including the social sciences, humanities, physical and biological sciences, mathematics, writing and foreign languages.


title: Curriculum

text: In 1999, the University of Chicago announced plans to reduce and modify the content of its core curriculum, including lowering the number of required courses from 21 to 15 and offering a wider range of content. When "The New York Times", "The Economist", and other major news outlets picked up this story, the university became the focal point of a national debate on education. A set of university administrators, notably then-President Hugo F. Sonnenschein, argued that reducing the core curriculum had become both a financial and educational imperative, as the university was struggling to attract a commensurate volume of applicants to its undergraduate division compared to peer schools as a result of what was perceived by the pro-change camp as a reaction by "the average eighteen-year-old" to the expanse of the collegiate core.


title: Curriculum

text: As core curricula began to diminish over the course of the twentieth century at many American schools, some smaller institutions became famous for embracing a core curriculum that covers nearly the student's entire undergraduate education, often utilizing classic texts of the western canon to teach all subjects including science. Five Great Books colleges in the United States follow this approach: St. John's, Shimer, Thomas Aquinas, Gutenberg College and Thomas More.


title: Curriculum

text: Some colleges opt for the middle ground of the continuum between specified and unspecified curricula by using a system of distribution requirements. In such a system, students are required to take courses in particular fields of learning, but are free to choose specific courses within those fields.


title: Curriculum

text: Other institutions have largely done away with core requirements in their entirety. Brown University offers the "Open Curriculum", implemented after a student-led reform movement in 1969, which allows students to take courses without concern for any requirements except those in their chosen concentrations (majors), plus two writing courses. In this vein, it is possible for students to graduate without taking college-level science or math courses, or to take only science or math courses. Amherst College requires that students take one of a list of first-year seminars, but has no required classes or distribution requirements. Similarly, Grinnell College requires students to take a First-Year Tutorial in their first semester, and has no other class or distribution requirements. Others include Evergreen State College, Hamilton College, and Smith College.


title: Curriculum

text: Wesleyan University is another school that has not and does not require any set distribution of courses. However, Wesleyan does make clear "General Education Expectations" such that if a student does not meet these expectations, he/she would not be eligible for academic honors upon graduation.


title: Curriculum

text: Gender inequality in curricula shows how men and women are not treated equally in several types of curricula. More precisely, gender inequality is visible in the curriculum of both schools and Teacher Education Institutes (TEIs). Physical education (PE) is an example where gender equality issues are highlighted because of preconceived stereotyping of boys and girls. The general belief is that boys are better at physical activities than girls, and that girls are better at ‘home’ activities such as sewing and cooking. This is the case in many cultures around the world and is not specific to one culture only.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: Alfred Ernst Rosenberg ( – 16 October 1946) was a Baltic German Nazi theorist and ideologue. Rosenberg was first introduced to Adolf Hitler by Dietrich Eckart and he held several important posts in the Nazi government. He was the head of the NSDAP Office of Foreign Affairs during the entire rule of Nazi Germany (1933–1945), and led Amt Rosenberg ("Rosenberg's bureau"), an official Nazi body for cultural policy and surveillance, between 1934 and 1945. During World War II, Rosenberg was the head of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (1941–1945). After the war, he was convicted of crimes against peace; planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression; war crimes; and crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg trials in 1946. He was sentenced to death and executed on 16 October 1946.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: The author of a seminal work of Nazi ideology, "The Myth of the Twentieth Century" (1930), Rosenberg is considered one of the main authors of key Nazi ideological creeds, including its racial theory, persecution of the Jews, "Lebensraum", abrogation of the Treaty of Versailles, and opposition to what was considered "degenerate" modern art. He is known for his rejection of and hatred for Christianity, having played an important role in the development of German nationalist Positive Christianity.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: Rosenberg was born on 12 January 1893 in Reval, now Tallinn (the capital of modern Estonia), then in the Governorate of Estonia (Russian Empire). His mother Elfriede (née Siré), who had French and German ancestry, was the daughter of Louise Rosalie (née Fabricius), born near Leal (modern Lihula, Estonia) in 1842, and of the railway official Friedrich August Siré, born in Saint-Petersburg (Russian Empire) in 1843. Born in the same city in 1868 and confirmed in Reval at 17 in 1885, Elfriede Siré married Woldemar Wilhelm Rosenberg, a wealthy merchant from Reval, in the Lutheran Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul (St-Petersburg) in 1886. His paternal grandfather, Martin Rosenberg, was a master shoemaker and elder of his guild. Born in Riga in 1820, and probably partly of Latvian descent, he had moved to Reval in the 1850s, where he met Julie Elisabeth Stramm, born in Jörden (Estonia) in 1835. The two married in the German St. Nicholas parish of Reval in 1856. His mother died two months after his birth.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: The Hungarian-Jewish journalist Franz Szell, who was apparently residing in Tilsit, Prussia, Germany, spent a year researching in Latvian and Estonian archives before publishing an open letter in 1936, with copies to Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath and others, accusing Rosenberg of having "no drop of German blood" flowing in his veins. Szell wrote that among Rosenberg's ancestors were only "Latvians, Jews, Mongols, and French." As a result of his open letter, Szell was deported by Lithuanian authorities on 15 September 1936. His claims were repeated in the 15 September 1937 issue of the Vatican newspaper "L'Osservatore Romano". Alfred Rosenberg was indeed of Baltic German, French, and probably also of Estonian and Latvian descent, but no Jewish ancestry has been discovered.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: The young Rosenberg graduated from the Petri-Realschule (currently Tallinna Reaalkool) and went on to study architecture at the Riga Polytechnical Institute and engineering at Moscow's Imperial Higher Technical School (), completing his PhD studies in 1917. During his stays at home in Reval, he attended the art studio of the famed painter Ants Laikmaa - though he showed promise, there are no records that he ever exhibited.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: During the German occupation of Estonia in 1918, Rosenberg served as a drawing teacher at the Gustav Adolf Gymnasium and Linna Reaalkool (current Tallinn Polytechnic School ). He gave his first speech on Jewish Marxism on 30 November, at the House of the Blackheads, after the 28 November 1918 outbreak of the Estonian War of Independence. He emigrated to Germany with the retreating Imperial German army, along with Max Scheubner-Richter, who served as something of a mentor to Rosenberg and to his ideology. Arriving in Munich, he contributed to Dietrich Eckart's publication, the "Völkischer Beobachter" ("Ethnic/Nationalist Observer"). By this time, he was both an antisemite – influenced by Houston Stewart Chamberlain's book "The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century", one of the key proto-Nazi books of racial theory – and an anti-Bolshevik. Rosenberg became one of the earliest members of the German Workers' Party – later renamed the National Socialist German Workers' Party, better known as the Nazi Party – joining in January 1919, eight months before Adolf Hitler joined in September. According to some historians, Rosenberg had also been a member of the Thule Society, along with Eckart, although Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke contends that they were only guests. After the "Völkischer Beobachter" became the Nazi party newspaper in December 1920, Rosenberg became its editor in 1923. Rosenberg was a leading member of Aufbau Vereinigung, Reconstruction Organisation, a conspiratorial organisation of White Russian émigrés which had a critical influence on early Nazi policy.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: Rosenberg sympathized and identified with Talat Pasha and the Committee of Union and Progress that carried out the Armenian genocide, also claiming that there was "a deliberately Jewish policy which had always protected the Armenians" and that "during the world war, the Armenians have led the espionage against the Turks, similar to the Jews against Germany".


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: In 1923, after the failed Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler, who had been imprisoned for treason, appointed Rosenberg as the leader of the Nazi movement. Hitler remarked privately in later years that his choice of Rosenberg, whom he regarded as weak and lazy, was strategic; Hitler did not want the temporary leader of the Nazis to become too popular or hungry for power, because a person with either of those two qualities might not want to cede the party leadership after Hitler's release. However, at the time of the appointment Hitler had no reason to believe that he would soon be released, and Rosenberg had not appeared weak, so this may have been Hitler reading back into history his dissatisfaction with Rosenberg for the job he did.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: On 1 January 1924, Rosenberg founded the Greater German People's Community, a Nazi front organization. Headquartered in Munich, it was largely limited to Bavaria, the birthplace of National Socialism, had no substantial presence outside that State and became a haven for Nazi Party members from that area. Prominent members included Max Amann, Phillip Bouhler, Hermann Esser, Franz Xaver Schwarz and Julius Streicher. Rosenberg, one of the least charismatic of the Nazi leaders and lacking in leadership qualities, was soon pushed aside by Streicher, a far more ruthless and abrasive personality, who was elected Chairman on 9 July 1924 with Esser, also a coarse, bullying sort, as his Deputy Chairman.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: In 1929 Rosenberg founded the Militant League for German Culture. He later formed the "Institute for Research on the Jewish Question", the first branch of a projected Advanced School of the NSDAP, dedicated to identifying and attacking Jewish influence in German culture and to recording the history of Judaism from a radical nationalist perspective. He was elected as a "Reichstag" Deputy in 1930 and would continue to serve in this capacity until the end of the Nazi regime. First elected as a representative of the electoral list, from 1933 on he represented electoral constituency 33, Hesse. In 1930, he also published his book on racial theory "The Myth of the Twentieth Century" ("Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts") which deals with key issues in the Nazi ideology, such as the "Jewish question." Rosenberg intended his book as a sequel to Houston Stewart Chamberlain's above-cited book. Despite selling more than a million copies by 1945, its influence within Nazism remains doubtful. It is often said to have been a book that was officially venerated within Nazism, but one that few had actually read beyond the first chapter or even found comprehensible. Hitler called it "stuff nobody can understand" and disapproved of its pseudo-religious tone.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: Rosenberg helped convince Hitler, whose early speeches focused on revenge against France and Britain, that communism was a serious threat to Germany. "Jewish-Bolshevism" became an ideological target for Nazism during the early 1920s.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: In Rome during November 1932 Rosenberg participated in the Volta Conference about Europe. British historian Sir Charles Petrie met him there and regarded him with great distaste; Petrie was a Catholic and strongly objected to Rosenberg's anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic sentiments.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: The following year, following the Nazi seizure of power, Rosenberg was named leader of the Nazi Party's Foreign Policy Office in April, and on 2 June 1933 he was named a "Reichsleiter", the second highest political rank in the Nazi Party. In May 1933 Rosenberg visited Britain, to give the impression that the Nazis would not be a threat and to encourage links between the new regime and the British Empire. It was a notable failure. When Rosenberg laid a wreath bearing a swastika at the Cenotaph, a Labour Party candidate slashed it, later threw it in the Thames and was fined 40 shillings for willful damage at Bow Street magistrate's court.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: In October 1933, Rosenberg was named as a member of Hans Frank's Academy for German Law. Then on 27 January 1934, Hitler made Rosenberg the "Führer's Representative for the Supervision of Intellectual and Ideological Education of the NSDAP." This was the origin of the Amt Rosenberg.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: As the Nazi Party's chief racial theorist, Rosenberg oversaw the construction of a human racial "ladder" that justified Hitler's racial and ethnic policies. Rosenberg built on the works of Arthur de Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Madison Grant and the Klansman Lothrop Stoddard as well as on the beliefs of Hitler. Rosenberg placed Blacks and Jews at the very bottom of the ladder, while at the very top stood the "Aryan" race. Rosenberg promoted the Nordic theory which considered the Nordic race the "master race", superior to all others, including to other Aryans (Indo-Europeans). He was also influenced by the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theory promoted by the Catholic counter-revolutionary tradition, such as the book "Le Juif, le judaïsme et la judaïsation des peuples chrétiens" (1869) by Roger Gougenot des Mousseaux, which he translated into German under the title "The Eternal Jew".


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: Rosenberg got the racial term "Untermensch" from the title of Stoddard's 1922 book "The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man", which had been adopted by the Nazis from that book's German version "Der Kulturumsturz: Die Drohung des Untermenschen" (1925).


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: Rosenberg reshaped the Nazi racial policy over the years, but it always consisted of Aryan supremacy, extreme German nationalism and rabid antisemitism. Rosenberg also outspokenly opposed homosexuality – notably in his pamphlet "Der Sumpf" ("The Swamp", 1927). He viewed homosexuality as a hindrance to the expansion of the Nordic population.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: Rosenberg's attitude towards Slavs was flexible because it depended on the particular nation which he referred to. As a result of the ideology of "Drang nach Osten" ("Drive to the East"), Rosenberg saw his mission as the conquest and colonization of the Slavic East. In "Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts" Rosenberg describes Russian Slavs as being overwhelmed by Bolshevism. Regarding Ukrainians, he favoured setting up a buffer state to ease the pressure on the German eastern frontier, while agreeing with the notion that Russia could be exploited for the benefit of Germany. During the war, Rosenberg was in favour of collaboration with the East Slavs against Bolshevism and offering them national independence unlike other Nazis such as Hitler and Himmler who dismissed such ideas.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: Rosenberg was raised as a Protestant, but he rejected Christianity later in his life. Rosenberg argued for a new "religion of the blood", based on the supposed innate promptings of the Nordic soul to defend its noble character against racial and cultural degeneration.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: In his 1920 book "Immorality in the Talmud", Rosenberg identified Jews with the antichrist. He rejected Christianity for its universality, for its doctrine of original sin (at least for Germans who he declared on one occasion were born noble), and for its teachings on the immortality of the soul, saying, "indeed, absorbing Christianity enfeebled a people." Publicly, Rosenberg affected to deplore Christianity's degeneration owing to Jewish influence. Following Houston Stewart Chamberlain's ideas, he condemned what he called "negative Christianity" (the orthodox beliefs of the Protestant and Catholic churches), arguing for a so-called "positive" Christianity based on Chamberlain's argument that Jesus was a member of an Indo-European, Nordic enclave which was resident in ancient Galilee who struggled against Judaism. Significantly, in his work explicating the Nazi intellectual belief system, "The Myth of the Twentieth Century", Rosenberg cryptically alludes to and lauds the early Christian heretic Marcion (who rejected the Old Testament as well as the notion of Christ as the Jewish Messiah) and the Manichaean-inspired, "Aryo-Iranian" Cathari, as being the more authentic interpreters of Christianity versus historically dominant Judaeo-Christianity; moreover these ancient, externally Christian metaphysical forms were more "organically compatible with the Nordic sense of the spiritual and the Nordic 'blood-soul'." For Rosenberg, the anti-intellectual, religious doctrine was inseparable from serving the interests of the Nordic race, connecting the individual to his racial nature. Rosenberg stated that "The general ideas of the Roman and of the Protestant churches are negative Christianity and do not, therefore, accord with our (German) soul." His support for Luther as a great German figure was always ambivalent.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: In January 1934, Hitler appointed Rosenberg cultural and educational leader of the Reich. The "Sanctum Officium" in Rome recommended that Rosenberg's "Myth of the Twentieth Century" be put on the "Index Librorum Prohibitorum" (list of books forbidden by the Catholic Church) for scorning and rejecting "all dogmas of the Catholic Church, indeed the very fundamentals of the Christian religion".


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: During World War II, Rosenberg outlined the future envisioned by the Hitler government for religion in Germany, with a thirty-point program for the future of the German churches. Among its articles:


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: Rosenberg has been described as an atheist by people, including Henry F. Gerecke, the Lutheran chaplain who communed with some of the Nuremberg prisoners, including Joachim von Ribbentrop and Wilhelm Keitel. However, some historians have claimed that Rosenberg was a neo-pagan.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: In 1940 Rosenberg was made head of the "Hohe Schule" (literally "high school", but the German phrase refers to a college), the Centre of National Socialist Ideological and Educational Research, out of which the "Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg" (Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce) developed for the purpose of looting art and cultural goods. The ERR were especially active in Paris in looting art stolen from famous Jewish families such as the Rothschilds and that of Paul Rosenberg. Hermann Göring used the ERR to collect art for his own personal gratification.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: He created a "Special Task Force for Music" ("Sonderstab Musik") to collect the best musical instruments and scores for use in a university to be built in Hitler's home town of Linz, Austria. The orders given to the "Sonderstab Musik" were to loot all forms of Jewish property in Germany and of those found in any country taken over by the German army, and any musical instruments or scores were to be immediately shipped to Berlin.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: Following the invasion of the USSR, Rosenberg was appointed head of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories ("Reichsministerium für die besetzten Ostgebiete") on 17 July 1941. Alfred Meyer served as his deputy and represented him at the Wannsee Conference. Another official of the Ministry, Georg Leibbrandt, also attended the conference, at Rosenberg's request.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: Rosenberg had presented Hitler with his plan for the organization of the conquered Eastern territories, suggesting the establishment of new administrative districts, to replace the previously Soviet-controlled territories with new Reichskommissariats. These would be:


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: Although Rosenberg believed that all of the peoples of the Soviet Union were subhumans because of their communist beliefs, such suggestions were intended to encourage certain non-Russian forms of nationalism and promote German interests for the benefit of future Aryan generations, in accord with geopolitical "Lebensraum im Osten" plans. They would provide a buffer against Soviet expansion in preparation for the total eradication of Communism and Bolshevism by decisive pre-emptive military action.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: Following these plans, when Wehrmacht forces invaded Soviet-controlled territory, they immediately implemented the first of the proposed Reichskommissariats of Ostland and Ukraine, under the leadership of Hinrich Lohse and Erich Koch, respectively. The organization of these administrative territories led to conflict between Rosenberg and the SS over the treatment of Slavs under German occupation. As Nazi Germany's chief racial theorist, Rosenberg considered Slavs, though lesser than Germans, to be Aryan. Rosenberg often complained to Hitler and Himmler about the treatment of non-Jewish occupied peoples. He proposed the creation of buffer satellite states made out of Greater Finland, Baltica, Ukraine, and Caucasus.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: During an 18 November 1941 press conference, he made the following statements about the Jewish question:


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: At the Nuremberg trials he said he was ignorant of the Holocaust, despite the fact that Leibbrandt and Meyer were present at the Wannsee conference.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: Since the invasion of the Soviet Union intended to impose the New Order, it was essentially a war of conquest. German propaganda efforts designed to win over Russian opinion were, at best, patchy and inconsistent. Alfred Rosenberg was one of the few in the Nazi hierarchy who advocated a policy designed to encourage anti-Communist opinion among the population of the occupied territories. His interest here was mainly in the non-Russian areas such as Ukraine and the Baltic States; however, supporters of the Russian Liberation Army were somewhat able to win him over.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: Amongst other things, Rosenberg issued a series of posters announcing the end of the Soviet collective farms ("kolkhoz"). He also issued an Agrarian Law in February 1942, annulling all Soviet legislation on farming and restoring family farms for those willing to collaborate with the occupiers. But decollectivisation conflicted with the wider demands of wartime food production, and Hermann Göring demanded that the collective farms be retained, save for a change of name. Hitler himself denounced the redistribution of land as "stupid".


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: There were numerous German armed forces ("Wehrmacht") posters asking for assistance in the "Bandenkrieg," the war against the Soviet partisans, though, once again, German policy had the effect of adding to their problems. Posters for "volunteer" labour, with inscriptions such as "Come work with us to shorten the war", hid the appalling realities faced by Russian workers in Germany. Rosenberg noted that many joined the partisans when volunteers for work details declined and the Germans resorted to force to acquire workers from the East.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: Another of Rosenberg's initiatives, the "Free Caucasus" campaign, was rather more successful, attracting various nationalities into the so-called Eastern Legion ("Ostlegionen"), though in the end this made little difference in the outcome of the war on the Eastern Front.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: Rosenberg was captured by Allied troops on 19 May 1945 in Flensburg-Mürwik. He was tried at Nuremberg and found guilty of all four counts: conspiracy to commit crimes against peace; planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression; war crimes; and crimes against humanity. The final judgment against him named him one of the principal planners of the invasion of Norway and the invasion of the Soviet Union. It also held him directly responsible for the systematic plunder of the occupied countries of Europe, as well as the brutal conditions in Eastern Europe. During his trial he wrote his memoirs, which were published posthumously and with analytical commentary by Serge Lang and Ernst von Schenck.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: He was sentenced to death and executed with other condemned co-defendants at Nuremberg Prison on the morning of 16 October 1946. His body, like those of the other nine executed men and that of Hermann Göring, was cremated at Ostfriedhof (Munich) and the ashes were scattered in the river Isar.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: Throughout the trial, it was agreed that Rosenberg had a decisive role in shaping Nazi philosophy and ideology. Examples include: his book "The Myth of the Twentieth Century", which was published in 1930, where he incited hatred against "Liberal Imperialism" and "Bolshevik Marxism"; furthering the influence of the "Lebensraum" idea in Germany during the war; facilitating the persecution of Christian churches and the Jews in particular; and opposition to the Versailles Treaty.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: According to Joseph Kingsbury-Smith, who covered the executions for the International News Service, Rosenberg was the only condemned man who, when asked at the gallows if he had any last statement to make, replied with only one word: "No".


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: Hitler was a leader oriented towards practical politics, whereas, for Rosenberg, religion and philosophy were key and he was the most culturally influential within the party. Several accounts of the time before the Nazi ascension to power speak of Hitler as being a mouthpiece for Rosenberg's views, and he clearly exerted a great deal of intellectual influence.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: The question of Rosenberg's influence in the Nazi Party is controversial. He was perceived as lacking the charisma and political skills of the other Nazi leaders, and was somewhat isolated. In some of his speeches Hitler appeared to be close to Rosenberg's views, rejecting traditional Christianity as a religion based on Jewish culture, preferring an ethnically and culturally pure "Race" whose destiny was supposed to be assigned to the German people by "Providence". But Hitler rejected Rosenberg's spiritual views on race but instead based his views on biology.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: After Hitler's assumption of power he moved to unify the churches into a national church which could be manipulated and controlled. He placed himself in the position of being the man to save Positive Christianity from utter destruction at the hands of the atheistic antitheist Communists of the Soviet Union. This was especially true immediately before and after the elections of 1932; Hitler wanted to appear non-threatening to major Christian faiths and consolidate his power.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: Some Nazi leaders, such as Martin Bormann, were anti-Christian and sympathetic to Rosenberg. Once in power, Hitler and most Nazi leaders sought to unify the Christian denominations in favor of "positive Christianity". Hitler privately condemned mystical and pseudoreligious interests as "nonsense", and maintained that National Socialism was based on science and should avoid mystic and cultic practices. However, he and Joseph Goebbels agreed that after the "Endsieg" (Final Victory) the Reich Church should be pressed into evolving into a German social evolutionist organisation proclaiming the cult of race, blood and battle, instead of Redemption and the Ten Commandments of Moses, which they deemed outdated and Jewish.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: Heinrich Himmler's views were among the closest to Rosenberg's, and their estrangement was perhaps created by Himmler's abilities to put into action what Rosenberg had only written. Also, while Rosenberg thought Christianity should be allowed to die out, Himmler actively set out to create countering pagan rituals.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: Lieutenant Colonel William Harold Dunn (1898–1955) wrote a medical and psychiatric report on him in prison to evaluate him as a suicide risk: He gave the impression of clinging to his own theories in a fanatical and unyielding fashion and to have been little influenced by the unfolding during the trial of the cruelty and crimes of the party.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: Summarizing the unresolved conflict between the personal views of Rosenberg and the pragmatism of the Nazi elite:


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: The ruthless pursuit of Nazi aims turned out to mean not, as Rosenberg had hoped, the permeation of German life with the new ideology; it meant concentration of the combined resources of party and state on total war.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: Rosenberg was married twice. In 1915, he married , an ethnic Estonian; they divorced in 1923. Two years later, in 1925 he married Hedwig Kramer, to whom he remained wed until his execution by the Allies. He and Kramer had two children: a son who died in infancy and a daughter, Irene, who was born in 1930. His wife died in 1947.


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: During the Nuremberg trials, Rosenberg's handwritten diary was translated by Harry Fiss, Chief of Documentation for the American prosecution. After its use in evidence during the Nuremberg trials, the diary went missing, along with other material which had been given to the prosecutor Robert Kempner (1899–1993). It was recovered in Lewiston, N.Y., on 13 June 2013. Written on 425 loose-leaf pages, with entries dating from 1936 through 1944, it is now the property of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington. Henry Mayer, the museum's senior archivist, and the son of a Holocaust survivor, was able to access the material and while "not given enough time to read [the] diary entry from beginning to end," he "could see that Rosenberg focused on certain subjects, including brutality against Jews and other ethnic groups and forcing the civilian population of occupied Russia to serve Germany." Meyer also noted Rosenberg's "hostile comments about Nazi leaders," which he described as "unvarnished." While some parts of the manuscript had been previously published, the majority had been lost for decades. Former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Robert King Wittman, who helped track down the diary, said, "there is no place in the diary where we have Rosenberg or Hitler saying the Jews should be exterminated, all it said was 'move them out of Europe'". "The New York Times" said of the search for the missing manuscript that "the tangled journey of the diary could itself be the subject of a television mini-series."


title: Alfred Rosenberg

text: Since the end of 2013, the USHMM has shown the 425-page document (photos and transcripts) on its homepage.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960) was an American author, anthropologist, and filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-1900s American South and published research on hoodoo. The most popular of her four novels is "Their Eyes Were Watching God", published in 1937. She also wrote more than 50 short stories, plays, and essays.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, and moved with her family to Eatonville, Florida, in 1894. She later used Eatonville as the setting for many of her stories.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: In her early career, Hurston conducted anthropological and ethnographic research while a student at Barnard College and Columbia University. She had an interest in African-American and Caribbean folklore, and how these contributed to the community's identity.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: She also wrote fiction about contemporary issues in the Black community and became a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Her short satires, drawing from the African-American experience and racial division, were published in anthologies such as "" and "Fire!!" After moving back to Florida, Hurston wrote and published her literary anthology on African-American folklore in North Florida, "Mules and Men" (1935), and her first three novels: "Jonah's Gourd Vine" (1934); "Their Eyes Were Watching God" (1937); and "Moses, Man of the Mountain" (1939). Also published during this time was "Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica" (1938), documenting her research on rituals in Jamaica and Haiti.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: Hurston's works concerned both the African-American experience and her struggles as an African-American woman. Her novels went relatively unrecognized by the literary world for decades. Interest was revived in 1975 after author Alice Walker published an article, "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" (later retitled “Looking for Zora”), in the March issue of "Ms." magazine that year.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: Hurston's manuscript "Every Tongue Got to Confess", a collection of folktales gathered in the 1920s, was published posthumously in 2001 after being discovered in the Smithsonian archives. Her nonfiction book "", about the life of Cudjoe Lewis (Kossola), was published posthumously in 2018.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: Hurston was the fifth of eight children of John Hurston and Lucy Ann Hurston ("née" Potts). All of her four grandparents had been born into slavery. Her father was a Baptist preacher and sharecropper, who later became a carpenter, and her mother was a school teacher. She was born in Notasulga, Alabama, on January 7, 1891, where her father grew up and her paternal grandfather was the preacher of a Baptist church.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: When she was three, her family moved to Eatonville, Florida. In 1887, it was one of the first all-Black towns incorporated in the United States. Hurston said that Eatonville was "home" to her, as she was so young when she moved there. Sometimes she claimed it as her birthplace. A few years later, her father was elected as mayor of the town in 1897. In 1902 he was called to serve as minister of its largest church, Macedonia Missionary Baptist.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: As an adult, Hurston often used Eatonville as a setting in her stories—it was a place where African Americans could live as they desired, independent of white society. In 1901, some northern schoolteachers had visited Eatonville and given Hurston several books that opened her mind to literature. She later described this personal literary awakening as a kind of "birth". Hurston lived for the rest of her childhood in Eatonville and described the experience of growing up there in her 1928 essay, "How It Feels To Be Colored Me".


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: Hurston's mother died in 1904, and her father subsequently married Mattie Moge in 1905. This was considered scandalous, as it was rumored that he had had sexual relations with Moge before his first wife's death. Hurston's father and stepmother sent her to a Baptist boarding school in Jacksonville, Florida. They eventually stopped paying her tuition and she was dismissed.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: In 1916, Hurston was employed as a maid by the lead singer of the Gilbert & Sullivan theatrical company.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: In 1917, she resumed her formal education, attending Morgan College, the high school division of Morgan State University, a historically black college in Baltimore, Maryland. At this time, apparently to qualify for a free high-school education, the 26-year-old Hurston began claiming 1901 as her year of birth. She graduated from the high school of Morgan State University in 1918.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: When she was in college, she was introduced to viewing life through an anthropological lens away from Eatonville. One of her main goals was to prove similarities between ethnicities. In 1918, Hurston began her studies at Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, DC. She was one of the earliest initiates of Zeta Phi Beta sorority, founded by and for black women, and co-founded "The Hilltop", the university's student newspaper. She took courses in Spanish, English, Greek, and public speaking and earned an associate degree in 1920. In 1921, she wrote a short story, "John Redding Goes to Sea", which qualified her to become a member of Alain Locke's literary club, The Stylus.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: Hurston left Howard in 1924, and in 1925 was offered a scholarship by Barnard trustee Annie Nathan Meyer to Barnard College of Columbia University, a women's college, where she was the sole black student. While she was at Barnard, she conducted ethnographic research with noted anthropologist Franz Boas of Columbia University, and later studied with him as a graduate student. She also worked with Ruth Benedict and fellow anthropology student Margaret Mead. Hurston received her B.A. in anthropology in 1928, when she was 37.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: Hurston had met Charlotte Osgood Mason, a philanthropist and literary patron, who became interested in her work and career. She had supported other African-American authors, such as Langston Hughes and Alain Locke, who had recommended Hurston to her. But she also tried to direct their work. Mason supported Hurston's travel to the South for research from 1927 to 1932, with a stipend of $200 per month. In return, she wanted Hurston to give her all the material she collected about Negro music, folklore, literature, hoodoo, and other forms of culture. At the same time, Hurston had to try to satisfy Boas as her academic adviser. Boas was a cultural relativist and wanted to overturn ideas ranking cultures in a hierarchy of values.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: After graduating from Barnard, Hurston studied for two years as a graduate student in anthropology at Columbia University, working further with Boas during this period. Living in Harlem in the 1920s, Hurston had befriended poets Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, among several other writers. Her apartment, according to some accounts, was a popular spot for social gatherings. Around this time, Hurston also had a few early literary successes, including placing in short-story and playwriting contests in "," published by the National Urban League.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: In 1927, Hurston married Herbert Sheen, a jazz musician and a former teacher at Howard; he later became a physician. Their marriage ended in 1931. In 1935, Hurston was involved with Percy Punter, a graduate student at Columbia University. He inspired the character of Tea Cake in "Their Eyes Were Watching God".


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: In 1939, while Hurston was working for the WPA in Florida, she married Albert Price. The marriage ended after a few months, but they did not divorce until 1943. The following year, Hurston married James Howell Pitts of Cleveland. That marriage, too, lasted less than a year.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: When foundation grants ended during the Great Depression, Hurston and her friend Langston Hughes both relied on the patronage of philanthropist Charlotte Osgood Mason, a white literary patron. During the 1930s, Hurston was a resident of Westfield, New Jersey, a suburb of New York, where her friend Hughes was among her neighbors.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: In 1934, Hurston established a school of dramatic arts "based on pure Negro expression" at Bethune-Cookman University (at the time, Bethune-Cookman College), a historically black college in Daytona Beach, Florida. In 1956 Hurston received the Bethune-Cookman College Award for Education and Human Relations in recognition of her achievements. The English Department at Bethune-Cookman College remains dedicated to preserving her cultural legacy.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: In later life, in addition to continuing her literary career, Hurston served on the faculty of North Carolina College for Negroes (now North Carolina Central University) in Durham.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: Hurston traveled extensively in the Caribbean and the American South and immersed herself in local cultural practices to conduct her anthropological research. Based on her work in the South, sponsored from 1928 to 1932 by Charlotte Osgood Mason, a wealthy philanthropist, Hurston wrote "Mules and Men" in 1935. She was researching lumber camps in north Florida and commented on the practice of white men in power taking black women as concubines, including having them bear children. This practice later was referred to as "paramour rights", based on the men's power under racial segregation and related to practices during slavery times. The book also includes much folklore. Hurston drew from this material as well in the fictional treatment she developed for her novels such as "Jonah's Gourd Vine" (1934).


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: In 1935, Hurston traveled to Georgia and Florida with Alan Lomax and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle for research on African American song traditions and their relationship to slave and African antecedent music. She was tasked with selecting the geographic areas and contacting the research subjects.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: In 1936 and 1937, Hurston traveled to Jamaica and Haiti for research, with support from the Guggenheim Foundation. She drew from this research for "Tell My Horse" (1938), a genre-defying book that mixes anthropology, folklore, and personal narrative.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: In 1938 and 1939, Hurston worked for the Federal Writer's Project (FWP), part of the Works Progress Administration. Hired for her experience as a writer and folklorist, she gathered information to add to Florida's historical and cultural collection.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: From October 1947 to February 1948, Hurston lived in Honduras, in the north coastal town of Puerto Cortés. She had some hopes of locating either Mayan ruins or vestiges of an as yet undiscovered civilization. While in Puerto Cortés, she wrote much of "Seraph on the Suwanee", set in Florida. Hurston expressed interest in the polyethnic nature of the population in the region (many, such as the Miskito Zambu and Garifuna, were of partial African ancestry and had developed creole cultures).


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: During her last decade, Hurston worked as a freelance writer for magazines and newspapers. In the fall of 1952, she was contacted by Sam Nunn, editor of the "Pittsburgh Courier," to go to Florida to cover the murder trial of Ruby McCollum. McCollum was charged with murdering the white Dr. C. Leroy Adams, who was also a politician. McCollum said he had forced her to have sex and bear his child. Hurston recalled what she had seen of white male sexual dominance in the lumber camps in North Florida, and discussed it with Nunn. They both thought the case might be about such "paramour rights", and wanted to "expose it to a national audience".


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: Upon reaching Live Oak, Hurston was surprised not only by the gag order the judge in the trial placed on the defense but by her inability to get residents in town to talk about the case; both blacks and whites were silent. She believed that might have been related to Dr. Adams' alleged involvement in the gambling operation of Ruby's husband Sam McCollum. Her articles were published by the newspaper during the trial. Ruby McCollum was convicted by an all-male, all-white jury, and sentenced to death. Hurston had a special assignment to write a serialized account, "The Life Story of Ruby McCollum", over three months in 1953 in the newspaper. Her part was ended abruptly when she and Nunn disagreed about her pay, and she left.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: Unable to pay independently to return for the appeal and second trial, Hurston contacted journalist William Bradford Huie, with whom she had worked at "The American Mercury", to try to interest him in the case. He covered the appeal and second trial, and also developed material from a background investigation. Hurston shared her material with him from the first trial, but he acknowledged her only briefly in his book, "Ruby McCollum: Woman in the Suwannee Jail" (1956), which became a bestseller. Hurston celebrated that


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: "McCollum's testimony in her own defense marked the first time that a woman of African-American descent was allowed to testify as to the paternity of her child by a white man. Hurston firmly believed that Ruby McCollum's testimony sounded the death toll of 'paramour rights' in the Segregationist South."


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: Among other positions, Hurston later worked at the Pan American World Airways Technical Library at Patrick Air Force Base in 1957. She was fired for being "too well-educated" for her job.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: She moved to Fort Pierce, Florida. Taking jobs where she could find them, Hurston worked occasionally as a substitute teacher. At age 60, Hurston had to fight "to make ends meet" with the help of public assistance. At one point she worked as a maid on Miami Beach's Rivo Alto Island.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: During a period of financial and medical difficulties, Hurston was forced to enter St. Lucie County Welfare Home, where she suffered a stroke. She died of hypertensive heart disease on January 28, 1960, and was buried at the Garden of Heavenly Rest in Fort Pierce, Florida. Her remains were in an unmarked grave until 1973. Novelist Alice Walker and fellow Hurston scholar Charlotte D. Hunt found an unmarked grave in the general area where Hurston had been buried; they decided to mark it as hers. Walker commissioned a gray marker inscribed with "ZORA NEALE HURSTON / "A GENIUS OF THE SOUTH" / NOVELIST FOLKLORIST / ANTHROPOLOGIST / 1901–1960." The line "a genius of the south" is from Jean Toomer's poem, "Georgia Dusk," which appears in his book "Cane". Hurston was born in 1891, not 1901.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: After Hurston died, her papers were ordered to be burned. A law officer and friend, Patrick DuVal, passing by the house where she had lived, stopped and put out the fire, thus saving an invaluable collection of literary documents for posterity. The nucleus of this collection was given to the University of Florida libraries in 1961 by Mrs. Marjorie Silver, a friend, and neighbor of Hurston. Other materials were donated in 1970 and 1971 by Frances Grover, daughter of E. O. Grover, a Rollins College professor and long-time friend of Hurston's. In 1979, Stetson Kennedy of Jacksonville, who knew Hurston through his work with the Federal Writers Project, added additional papers (Zora Neale Hurston Papers, University of Florida Smathers Libraries, August 2008).


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: When Hurston arrived in New York City in 1925, the Harlem Renaissance was at its zenith, and she soon became one of the writers at its center. Shortly before she entered Barnard, Hurston's short story "Spunk" was selected for "The New Negro", a landmark anthology of fiction, poetry, and essays focusing on African and African-American art and literature. In 1926, a group of young black writers including Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Wallace Thurman, calling themselves the Niggerati, produced a literary magazine called "Fire!!" that featured many of the young artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: In 1927, Hurston traveled to the Deep South to collect African-American folk tales. She also interviewed Cudjoe Kazzola Lewis, of Africatown, Alabama, who was the last known survivor of the enslaved Africans carried aboard "Clotilda", an illegal slave ship that had entered the US in 1860, and thus the last known person to have been transported in the Transatlantic slave trade. The next year she published the article "Cudjoe's Own Story of the Last African Slaver" (1928). According to her biographer Robert E. Hemenway, this piece largely plagiarized the work of Emma Langdon Roche, an Alabama writer who wrote about Lewis in a 1914 book. Hurston did add new information about daily life in Lewis' home village of Bantè.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: Hurston intended to publish a collection of several hundred folk tales from her field studies in the South. She wanted to have them be as close to the original as possible but struggled to balance the expectations of her academic adviser, Franz Boas, and her patron, Charlotte Osgood Mason. This manuscript was not published at the time. A copy was later found at the Smithsonian archives among the papers of anthropologist William Duncan Strong, a friend of Boas. Hurston's "Negro Folk-tales from the Gulf States" was published posthumously in 2001 as "Every Tongue Got to Confess."


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: In 1928, Hurston returned to Alabama with additional resources; she conducted more interviews with Lewis, took photographs of him and others in the community, and recorded the only known film footage of him – an African who had been trafficked to the United States through the slave trade. Based on this material, she wrote a manuscript, "", completing it in 1931. Hemenway described it as "a highly dramatic, semifictionalized narrative intended for the popular reader." It has also been described as a "testimonial text", more in the style of other anthropological studies since the late 20th century.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: After this round of interviews, Hurston's literary patron, philanthropist Charlotte Osgood Mason, learned of Lewis and began to send him money for his support. Lewis was also interviewed by journalists for local and national publications. Hurston's manuscript "Barracoon" was eventually published posthumously on May 8, 2018. "Barracoon", or barracks in Spanish, is where captured Africans were temporarily imprisoned before being shipped abroad.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: In 1929, Hurston moved to Eau Gallie, Florida, where she wrote "Mules and Men." It was published in 1935.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: By the mid-1930s, Hurston had published several short stories and the critically acclaimed "Mules and Men" (1935), a groundbreaking work of "literary anthropology" documenting African-American folklore from timber camps in North Florida. In 1930, she collaborated with Langston Hughes on "Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life", a play that they never staged. Their collaboration caused their friendship to fall apart. The play was first staged in 1991.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: Hurston adapted her anthropological work for the performing arts. Her folk revue, "The Great Day," featured authentic African song and dance, and premiered at the John Golden Theatre in New York in January 1932. Despite positive reviews, it had only one performance. The Broadway debut left Hurston in $600 worth of debt. No producers wanted to move forward with a full run of the show.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: During the 1930s, Zora Neale Hurston produced two other musical revues, "From Sun to Sun," which was a revised adaptation of "The Great Day," and "Singing Steel." Hurston had a strong belief that folklore should be dramatized.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: Hurston's first three novels were published in the 1930s: "Jonah's Gourd Vine" (1934); "Their Eyes Were Watching God" (1937), written during her fieldwork in Haiti and considered her masterwork; and "Moses, Man of the Mountain" (1939).


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: In 1937, Hurston was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to conduct ethnographic research in Jamaica and Haiti. "Tell My Horse" (1938) documents her account of her fieldwork studying spiritual and cultural rituals in Jamaica and vodoun in Haiti.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: In the 1940s, Hurston's work was published in such periodicals as "The American Mercury" and "The Saturday Evening Post". Her last published novel, "Seraph on the Suwanee", notable principally for its focus on white characters, was published in 1948. It explores images of "white trash" women. Jackson (2000) argues that Hurston's meditation on abjection, waste, and the construction of class and gender identities among poor whites reflects the eugenics discourses of the 1920s.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: In 1952, Hurston was assigned by the "Pittsburgh Courier" to cover the small-town murder trial of Ruby McCollum, the prosperous black wife of the local bolita racketeer, who had killed a racist white doctor. She also contributed to "Ruby McCollum: Woman in the Suwannee Jail" (1956), a book by journalist and civil rights advocate William Bradford Huie.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: Hurston's manuscript "Every Tongue Got to Confess" (2001), a collection of folktales gathered in the 1920s, was published posthumously after being discovered in Smithsonian archives.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: In 2008, The Library of America selected excerpts from "Ruby McCollum: Woman in the Suwannee Jail" (1956), to which Hurston had contributed, for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American true crime writing.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: Hurston's nonfiction book "" was published in 2018. A barracoon is a type of barracks where slaves were imprisoned before being taken overseas.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: In Chapter XV of "Dust Tracks on a Road", entitled "Religion", Hurston expressed disbelief in and disdain for both theism and religious belief. She states:Prayer seems to me a cry of weakness, and an attempt to avoid, by trickery, the rules of the game as laid down. I do not choose to admit weakness. I accept the challenge of responsibility. Life, as it is, does not frighten me, since I have made my peace with the universe as I find it, and bow to its laws.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: However, though clearly rejecting the Baptist beliefs of her preacher father, her spirituality is a little more complex than mere atheism. She investigates voodoo, going so far as to participate in such rituals, and again in her original uncensored notes for her autobiography shares her admiration for Biblical characters like King David:


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: "He was a man after God's own heart, and was quite servicable in helping God get rid of no-count rascals who were cluttering up the place."


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: Hurston's work slid into obscurity for decades, for both cultural and political reasons. The use of African-American dialect, as featured in Hurston's novels, became less popular. Younger writers felt that it was demeaning to use such dialect, given the racially charged history of dialect fiction in American literature. Also, Hurston had made stylistic choices in dialogue influenced by her academic studies. Thinking like a folklorist, Hurston strove to represent speech patterns of the period, which she had documented through ethnographic research.


title: Zora Neale Hurston

text: Several of Hurston's literary contemporaries criticized her use of dialect, saying that it was a caricature of African-American culture and was rooted in a post-Civil War, white racist tradition. These writers, associated with the Harlem Renaissance, criticized Hurston's later work as not advancing the movement. Richard Wright, in his review of "Their Eyes Were Watching God," said: