title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: Plans for high-speed rail in the United States date back to the High-Speed Ground Transportation Act of 1965. Various state and federal proposals have followed. Despite being one of the world's first countries to get high-speed trains (the Metroliner service in 1969), it failed to spread. Definitions of what constitutes high-speed rail vary, including a range of speeds over and dedicated rail lines. Inter-city rail with top speeds between is sometimes referred to in the United States as higher-speed rail.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: Amtrak's "Acela", which reaches over of track, is the US's only high-speed rail service. Acela trains will reach top speeds of when new trains enter service, and in coming years. Other services reaching are prevalent in the US, and are officially classified as higher-speed rail.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: , the California High-Speed Rail Authority is working on the California High-Speed Rail project and construction is under way on sections traversing the Central Valley. The Central Valley section is planned to open in 2029 and Phase I is planned for completion in 2033.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: Authorities in the United States maintain various definitions of high-speed rail. The United States Department of Transportation, an entity in the executive branch, defines it as rail service with top speeds ranging from to or higher, while the United States Code, which is the official codification of Federal statutes, defines it as rail service "reasonably expected to reach sustained speeds of more than 125 miles per hour". A legislative branch agency within the Library of Congress, the Congressional Research Service, used different terms to clarify the confusion by defining rail services with top speeds less than to be higher-speed rail. There is no current rail service in the United States which meets all of the domestic criteria for high-speed rail. Amtrak's "Acela" is classified as "higher-speed rail" in the Congressional Research Service report by virtue of being on shared tracks, whereas page 5 of that report also requires dedicated tracks to be classified as "very high-speed rail".


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: In China, high-speed rail is officially defined as "newly-built passenger-dedicated rail lines designed for electrical multiple unit (EMU) train sets traveling at not less than (including lines with reserved capacity for upgrade to the 250 km/h standard), on which initial service operate at not less than ."


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: In Europe the definition of a minimum speed for newly built high-speed railways is ; for upgraded high-speed railways it is . In places where high-speed rail programs are in earlier developmental stages or where substantial speed increases are achieved by upgrading current infrastructure and/or introducing more advanced trains, lower minimum speed definitions of high-speed rail are used. Directive 2008/57/EC defines high-speed rail in terms of speeds of the order of for existing, upgraded lines, and for lines specially built for high-speed travel. This is the case in the United States. For transportation planning purposes focussing on the development of high-speed rail, the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) distinguishes four types of intercity passenger rail corridors:


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: However, state-level departments of transportation and council of governments may also use different definitions for high-speed rail. For examples, the North Central Texas Council of Governments uses the definition of the speeds over , and the Texas Department of Transportation and Oklahoma Department of Transportation use the speeds of or more. These agencies have a separate category for higher-speed rail which can be a wide range of speeds between and .


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: The development of the American rail network during the 19th century created structural impediments to the adoption of high-speed rail in the later half of the 20th that were not present in Europe and Asia. Freight on American railroads had to travel vastly longer distances, so railroads developed longer cars that could be joined into longer trains. In contrast to Europe, these freights traveled past very few older buildings that were at risk of structural damage from vibrations created by heavy passing trains. Even today, American freight cars and their contents may be as heavy as , while their European counterparts are limited to .


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: With such long and heavy freights often sharing the same tracks as passenger trains, it was necessary to require that passenger cars be able to withstand the higher impact forces of a collision. Axial strength standards, first required for the mail cars where clerks worked sorting mail en route and later applied to passenger cars, require that an American passenger car be able to withstand applied to either end, as opposed to the European regulations mandate. This necessarily results in American passenger cars being heavier.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: From 1900 to 1941, most long-distance travel was by rail in the United States. Rail transportation was not high-speed by modern standards but inter-city travel often averaged speeds between . Most of the major railroads had faster than normal trains called "express" or "limited" on their mainline routes (e.g. the "Empire State Express" and the "20th Century Limited") between major towns and cities.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: The development of faster trains, however, faced indirect regulatory hurdles. After a 1921 crash at Porter, Indiana, in which a derail failed to stop one passenger train that had already passed through two red lights from crashing into another at a level junction, killing 37, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) ordered almost a hundred railroads to install automatic train stops by the end of 1925. The railroads opposed the ICC vigorously, noting that stopping longer freights that way might lead to derailments. As a result, the requirement was revised to allow waivers for certain lines, and rarely enforced as the debate continued without any real resolution over the next two decades; in the meantime passenger fatalities began declining as the automobile emerged as a transportation option.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: During the 1930s railroads began to develop lightweight, diesel-powered streamlined trains which provided even faster running times than the previous express trains. Two early streamliners were the Union Pacific "M-10000" (nicknamed "Little Zip" and "The City of Salina") in revenue service between 1934 and 1941/42 and the Burlington Railroad's "Zephyr". The design of the "Zephyr" incorporated a diesel-electric power system; the "M-10000" used a spark-ignition engine running on "petroleum distillate", a fuel similar to kerosene. These trains were much lighter than the common engines and passenger cars of the day, as the "Zephyr" was constructed using stainless steel and the M-10000 chiefly of the aircraft alloy Duralumin.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: On May 26, 1934, the "Zephyr" made a record-breaking "Dawn to Dusk" run from Denver to Chicago. The train covered the distance in 13 hours, reaching a top speed of and running at an average speed of . However the railroad was unable to capitalize on this since the Depression had cut into the demand for intercity rail travel.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: Many steam locomotives were streamlined during this time to attract passengers, and the first steam streamlined locomotive was the New York Central's "Commodore Vanderbilt". Nonetheless, some of these steam locomotives became very fast: some were said to exceed on a regular basis. Examples include the New York Central's "Super Hudsons" as used on the "20th Century Limited"; the Milwaukee Road's purpose-built Atlantics and Hudsons used in "Hiawatha" service; the Pennsylvania Railroad's duplex-drive 4-4-4-4 type T1 locomotives, and two Union Pacific engines, a 4-6-2 and a 4-8-2, used on the "Forty Niner" and other trains.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: The debate over signaling and train control between the railroads and the ICC had never really been settled, just deferred as passenger deaths declined, in part due to more travelers using their automobiles for shorter commutes and an expanding and improving highway network. It ended in 1946, when one express passenger train crashed into another one that had stopped, both operated by the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, in Naperville, Illinois. The conductor of the first train had had it stopped in the town outside Chicago because he thought something was dragging; within two minutes it was struck from behind by another traveling at , killing 45.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: The engineer of the second train survived the crash, and claimed he had not seen the signal in sufficient time to stop his train. Investigation showed that even if he had missed the yellow light going on, warning him to slow down in anticipation of a red, he still had space to stop the train had he applied his full brakes at the red. As a result, the ICC decided the time had come to force the issue of train control.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: For the first time it set national rail speed limits. In 1947 it ordered that automatic block signaling be used where freight traveled at more than and on passenger lines where trains went faster than . This rule remains in force today.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: While the railroads generally complied with this rule, affecting of track, they were not as tolerant of the ICC"s additional requirement for ATS or cab signalling on passenger trains that exceeded . Some railroads complied with the equipment requirement in part, and installed it on about of track. This was what the ICC had hoped for. But on the other where the rule applied, railroads simply ran their trains under the limit. This made intercity passenger rail an even less competitive option, accelerating its decline as not only automobile use was increasing but airlines were beginning to compete on longer routes. By the late 1950s many passenger routes that had existed at the time of the Naperville crash had been discontinued.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: The results of World War II shifted further high-speed rail technological development overseas. While the U.S. had not suffered the infrastructure damage it had inflicted on Europe and Japan, it had also developed its road network, leading to the creation of the Interstate Highway System after the war, giving prosperous citizens an efficient way to use the cars they were buying. Europe and Japan, by contrast, had largely not begun to build highway networks and had seen heavy damage to their rail systems. With their citizens impoverished as they rebuilt their economies, and unable to afford automobiles to the extent Americans could, those countries invested in rail as the primary means of intercity travel.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: Following the creation of Japan's first high-speed Shinkansen, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson asked the U.S. Congress to devise a way to increase speeds on American railroads. The request was part of his Great Society infrastructure building initiatives. Congress delivered the High-Speed Ground Transportation Act of 1965 which passed with overwhelming bi-partisan support. It helped to create regular Metroliner service between New York City and Washington, D.C. inaugurated in 1969. Trains on the line reached speeds of and averaged along the route, faster than even Acela trains operated between the cities of New York and Washington in 2012. The Metroliner was able to travel from New York to Washington in just 2.5 hours because it did not make any intermediate stops.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: U.S. federal and state governments continued to revisit the idea of fast trains. The Passenger Railroad Rebuilding Act of 1980 led to funding of high-speed corridor studies in 1984. Private-sector consortia intending to build high-speed lines were created in Florida, Ohio, Texas, California, and Nevada. Maglev trains became a new field of interest. They were officially added to the definition of "railroad" in 1988, and were studied repeatedly. Five high-speed corridors were officially endorsed in October 1992 following passage of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: TEA-21 and other legislation continued to be passed with mentions of high-speed rail, but lacking funding or real direction. Nevertheless, no new high-speed service was added to the U.S. passenger rail system following the Metroliners.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: In 1993, the U.S. attempted to improve service between Boston and New York by electrifying the Northeast Corridor north of New Haven, Connecticut and purchasing new train sets to replace the by then 30-year-old Metroliners and run on the newly electrified route. Some existing trains (Swedish X 2000 and German ICE 1) were tested, but finally, the "Acela", a new tilting train manufactured by Alstom and Bombardier, was ordered.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: The new service was named "Acela" and ran on the Northeast Corridor, linking Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. The service was inaugurated in December 2000, and was an immediate success, operated at a profit and , it produced about 25% of Amtrak's total service revenue. The Acela lacks a dedicated high-speed rail line which limits its average speed, although it reaches a maximum speed of on small sections of its route through Rhode Island and Massachusetts.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: The travel time between Washington and New York is 2 hours and 53 minutes (compared to 2 hours and 30 minutes for PRR's nonstop Metroliner in 1969), or an average speed of . In September 2019, Amtrak launched a nonstop New York to Washington which completes the trip in 2 hours and 35 minutes for an average speed of . Schedule between New York and Boston is 3 hours 34 minutes, an average speed of only . With a 15-minute layover in New York, the entire end-to-end trip averages .


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: The largest project for American high-speed rail is the California High-Speed Rail network, which was authorized by voters with Proposition 1A in 2008. In August 2013, Tutor Perini signed a $1-billion contract to begin construction of the first phase in 2014. Construction began in early 2015. In May 2019, President Donald Trump canceled major federal grants which funded the project, worth approximately $929 million US dollars.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: High-speed rail development was a goal of the Obama administration which came into office in January 2009. Higher jet fuel prices, congested airports and highways, and increasing airport security rules have combined to make high-speed rail a more attractive option for passengers. A study conducted by the International Union of Railways indicated that high-speed trains produced one fifth as much CO as automobiles and jet aircraft.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: In 2012, then-Amtrak president Joseph Boardman proposed a plan to build a dedicated high-speed rail line between Washington, D.C. and Boston. He estimated it would cost $151 billion and take more than 25 years to design and build the line. The proposed rail line would allow for top speeds of .


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: Amtrak officials released a concept report for next-generation high-speed rail within the Northeast Corridor (NEC) on October 1, 2010. Amtrak projected planning and construction of the next-generation high-speed Northeast Corridor line to cost approximately $117 billion (2010 dollars) and reduce the travel time from New York to Washington, including a stop in Philadelphia, to 96 minutes, and the travel time from Boston to New York to 84 minutes by 2040. In 2012, Amtrak released the details of the proposal.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: The first of two phases envisions the NEC to be upgraded allowing "Acela" speed improvements. By 2022, Acela trainsets will be replaced with new trainsets, named Avelia Liberty. The new trainsets will be limited to the maximum speed supported by the NEC.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: In 2012, the Federal Railroad Administration began developing a master plan for bringing high-speed rail to the Northeast Corridor titled NEC FUTURE, and released the final environmental impact statement in December 2016. The proposed alignment would closely follow the existing NEC south of New York City; multiple potential alignments north of New York City were studied, including the existing shoreline route, a route through Hartford, Connecticut, and a route out along Long Island which would traverse a new bridge or tunnel across Long Island Sound to Connecticut. On July 12, 2017, the Federal Railroad Administration revealed the record of decision for the project. The proposed upgrades have not been funded.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: In 2013, Japanese officials pitched the country's maglev train technology, the world's fastest, for the Northeast Corridor to regional U.S. politicians. The trains could travel from New York to Washington in an hour. Northeast Maglev, using SCMaglev technology developed by Central Japan Railway Company, is currently working with the FRA and MDOT to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement. The project has received a $27.8 million grant from the FRA.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: New York has been actively discussing high-speed rail service since the 1990s, but thus far little progress has been made. Amtrak Acela service between Washington, D.C. and Boston is available to New York City, but other cities remain isolated from high-speed rail service. Further, destinations outside the New York metropolitan area have been plagued by delayed service for decades. Nonetheless, New York has been quietly endorsing and even implementing rail improvements for years.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: Closer and faster railroad transportation links between New York City and the rest of the state are frequently cited as a partial solution to Upstate's stagnant economic growth.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: Beginning in 2010, a study conducted by the New York State Department of Transportation identified 10 alternatives for improving the Empire Corridor. In early 2014, a Tier 1 Draft Environmental Impact Statement was released for public review and comments. The draft eliminated 5 of the alternatives, including those with top speeds of and . The remaining 5 build alternatives under consideration have top speeds of (the base alternative), (options A and B), , and .


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: The Keystone Corridor is a rail corridor between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, composed of two different rail lines, the Amtrak Philadelphia to Harrisburg Main Line and the Norfolk Southern Pittsburgh Line. Between Philadelphia and Harrisburg the Amtrak line is electrified and grade separation was completed in 2014. Between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh the Norfolk Southern owned line is used for freight transportation. In 1999, the Keystone Corridor was formally recognized as a "designated high-speed corridor" by the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA). The line, over which Amtrak's "Pennsylvanian" and "Keystone Service" routes operate, was upgraded in 2006 with two segments of track. These trains are higher-speed rail services between Philadelphia and Harrisburg, with express service taking 95–100 minutes over .


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: California Proposition 1A, passed in November 2008, authorized the state to issue $9.95 billion in bonds to fund the first phase of a planned multi-phase high-speed rail network. Conventional steel-wheel on rail technology is the adopted mode with trains traveling at speeds of up to . Los Angeles to San Francisco via the Central Valley was expected to be the first phase of the network, though the initial operating segments have since become unclear. The California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) is the lead agency charged with planning and implementing the system. The state was awarded $2.55 billion in funding from the federal government in 2010.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: Since the passage of Proposition 1A, cost estimates for the project have risen due to increased planning and disputes over routes. Ridership projections have faced scrutiny by a number of groups including the Reason Foundation. In May 2013, with cost estimates double the original figures approved by the voters in 2008, opponents filed lawsuits intended to invalidate the $10 billion bond measures which were part of the financing of the rail line.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: By December 2018, the Authority had of right-of-way from Madera to near Bakersfield under contract and in construction. However, the estimated cost of a now scaled down system had increased from $33.6 billion to $77.3 billion and, including federal funding, the California High-Speed Rail Authority had only about $12.7 billion - approximately one-eighth of the funding required. Governor Gavin Newsom has still expressed support for the project despite the funding shortfall, reduced scope, and swelling costs.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: XpressWest, a private undertaking begun in 2005 to build a high-speed service to Las Vegas, Nevada, was acquired by Brightline in 2018 and its name changed to Brightline West. In April 2020, The California Infrastructure and Economic Development Bank approved $3.25 billion in tax-exempt private activity bonds for the project and acquired a 50-year lease from Caltrans for use of the Interstate 15 corridor. The line is expected to open from the Victor Valley to a station near the Las Vegas Strip in 2023.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: The Pacific Northwest Corridor or the Pacific Northwest Rail Corridor is one of eleven federally designated high-speed rail corridors in the United States. It was designated a high-speed rail by the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 (ISTEA). Improvements proposed in Washington State's long range plan would have had passenger trains operating at a maximum speed of on line.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: The Cascadia high-speed rail was a proposed dedicated high-speed rail line that would have connected Salem/Portland, Vancouver WA/Olympia/Tacoma/Seattle/Everett, and Bellingham, Washington.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: As of 2012, neither the Washington State Department of Transportation nor Oregon plan to implement speeds higher than due to safety and other freight service concerns voiced by the track owner, Union Pacific Railroad. The plan to provide high-speed and higher-speed rail services on this corridor was thus halted.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: In early 2018, Washington State pledged money to studying ultra-high-speed rail between Vancouver BC, Seattle, and Portland With speed operation. After a preliminary study, the state pledged $300,000 in funding and was shortly backed by British Columbia. The study is estimated to be completed by early 2019. Washington State Governor Jay Inslee has expressed his desire to see a Cascadia innovation corridor, linking together the main economic centers of the Pacific Northwest.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: A High speed line stretching from El Paso, Texas, through New Mexico (following the Rio Grande Valley) with a stop in Albuquerque, to Denver, Colorado has been proposed.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: Development of a high-speed rail system in Florida was mandated by a constitutional referendum in 2000 but taken off the books by another referendum in 2004. Florida resurrected its high-speed rail authority to capitalize on the nationwide effort to build a high-speed rail network. Florida legislature approved SunRail in a special session in late 2009, which along with work already completed on the originally proposed line between Tampa and Orlando, was instrumental in the state winning a significant amount of the total amount allotted to high-speed rail. Only California received more high-speed rail funding than Florida. In February 2011, Florida's newly elected governor Rick Scott cancelled the project. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood then announced he would be redirecting the funds intended for Florida to other states.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: In 2012, a plan for a high-speed rail from Miami to Orlando to be operated by a privately owned developer was announced. The plan, called "All Aboard Florida", included a segment between Cocoa and Orlando with a top speed of . The plan was later renamed "Brightline", and began service between Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach on January 13, 2018, and to Miami on May 19, 2018, although only at speeds up to . By 2023, it plans to begin service to Orlando at , legally classifying it as a high-speed rail service.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: The Southeast High-Speed Rail Corridor is a passenger rail transportation project to extend high-speed passenger rail services from Washington, D.C. south through Richmond and Petersburg in Virginia through Raleigh and Charlotte in North Carolina and connect with the existing high-speed rail corridor from DC to Boston, Massachusetts known as the Northeast Corridor. Since first established in 1992, the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) has since extended the corridor to Atlanta and Macon, Georgia; Greenville, South Carolina; Columbia, South Carolina; Jacksonville, Florida; and Birmingham, Alabama.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: Incremental rail improvements to existing rail lines have been taking place while the environmental impact study required under the National Environmental Policy Act is being completed. The two-tiered EIS began in 1999, and completion is expected in 2011, with passenger service expected by 2015 to 2020, depending upon funding availability.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: Another project has been proposed between Atlanta and Charlotte; it is planned to be in service by 2050. The estimated cost to establish a new high-speed corridor between the two cities was between $6.2 billion to $8.4 billion in 2021 when the preferred route, running from Charlotte Gateway Station to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, was selected.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: In 1991, the Texas High-Speed Rail Authority awarded a 50-year high-speed rail franchise to the Texas TGV Corporation — a consortium of Morrison-Knudsen (USA), Bombardier (Canada), Alstom (France/UK), Crédit Lyonnais (France), Banque IndoSuez (France), Merrill Lynch (USA), and others. Texas TGV won the franchise after more than two years of litigation instigated by a rival consortium backing German ICE technology.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: The plan was to connect the "Texas Triangle" (Houston − Dallas/Fort Worth − San Antonio) with a privately financed high-speed train system which would quickly take passengers from one city to the next at prices designed to compete with or beat other transport options. This was the same model Southwest Airlines used 20 years earlier to break into the Texas market where it served the same three cities.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: Funding for the project was to come entirely from private sources, since Texas did not allow the use of public money. The original estimated cost was $5.6 billion, but the task of securing the necessary private funds proved extremely difficult.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: Southwest Airlines, with the help of lobbyists, created legal barriers to prohibit the consortium from moving forward and the entire project was eventually scuttled in 1994, when the State of Texas withdrew the franchise. Several hotel chains like Days Inn, Best Western, and La Quinta Inn, as well as fast food establishments like McDonald's and Burger King lobbied against the plan, primarily because many of their locations were along Interstates and in several highway-dependent rural towns.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: Another proposal for high-speed rail in Texas was part of a larger proposed, statewide super-infrastructure, the Trans-Texas Corridor. In 2002, Governor Rick Perry proposed the project, but it was eventually canceled by the legislature in 2009.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: In 2002, the Texas High-Speed Rail and Transportation Corporation (THSRTC), a grass roots organization dedicated to bringing high-speed rail to Texas was established. In 2006, American Airlines and Continental Airlines formally joined THSRTC, in an effort to bring high-speed rail to Texas as a passenger collector system for the airlines. The Texas High-Speed Rail and Transportation Corporation developed the Texas T-Bone and Brazos Express corridors to link Central Texas.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: In 2010, Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) received a federal grant to study a high-speed rail corridor linking Oklahoma City with Dallas–Fort Worth. The state also received another grant in 2011 to start engineering and environmental work on a high-speed link between Houston and Dallas. Another study was being conducted in 2012 by TxDOT on a possible link between Houston and Austin.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: While the preliminary work was in progress by TxDOT for the Houston to Dallas line, an unrelated project to build a high-speed railway between the two cities was announced in 2011 by a private company, Lone Star High-Speed Rail. The company was founded in 2009 by U.S. Japan High-Speed Rail to market the use of N700-I bullet train in Texas. In 2012, the company with a new name, Texas Central Railway Company, announced that Central Japan Railway Company signed up to be the primary investor in the project with the total estimated cost of $10 billion to be privately funded. The preliminary engineering, market and financing studies have been started for the service with maximum speed of 205 miles per hour and travel time of 90 minutes. The plan was to seek additional investors in late 2012, start the construction in 2014, and begin the service in 2024.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: On September 21, 2020, a high-speed train from Houston to Dallas received federal approval. The railroad aims to cut travel time between the two cities to 90 minutes. According to the company in charge of the project, Texas Central Railroad, the Federal Railroad Administration approved construction to begin in early 2021. The company estimates that construction could take up to six years and cost roughly $20 billion.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: Engineering and infrastructure development company, AECOM, has emerged as one of the top companies to steer-head the potential project. AECOM recently partnered with technology companies Virgin Hyperloop One and Arrivo to begin consulting with local city and state governments about urban planning. Steven Duong, the head urban planner for AECOM, claimed that cross-state high-speed rail as a system of transportation with both passengers and freight is "reasonable.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: The Midwest Regional Rail Initiative or "Midwest Regional Rail System" ("MRRI", "MWRRI", or "MWRRS") is a plan to implement a to passenger rail network in the Midwestern United States, using Chicago, Illinois as a hub. Primary routes would stretch across Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin, possibly reaching Kentucky. Secondary routes would operate at a slower speed across Missouri and Iowa, just touching Nebraska and nearly reaching Kansas. With some upgrades already completed, trains regularly travel at for a significant distance in Michigan and for a short distance in Illinois.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: Construction to provide higher-speed rail services between Chicago and St. Louis is taking place. Illinois has been one of the most aggressive at pursuing highspeed rail, getting $1.1 billion in 2010. Governor Quinn said that "we want to make this corridor the pre-eminent one in America". The Chicago–St. Louis rail line is being upgraded so passenger trains will be able to reach top speeds of between Carlinville, Illinois and Joliet, Illinois, with work originally scheduled to be completed in 2017. Construction is being carried out from the southern part of the state to the north. The first installment of funds provided for construction between Alton and Lincoln. In March 2011, the next installment of funds ($685 million) provided for another section to go from Lincoln to Dwight. In May 2011, additional funds were allocated for further construction between Dwight and Joliet.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: In June 2011, Illinois commenced a study on implementing a service between Chicago and Champaign-Urbana. Legislation passed in 2013 gives the Illinois Tollway the power to build high-speed rail lines. Plans called for eventually investing in true high-speed travel that would boost train speeds to . Once the United States' entire high-speed rail projects are built and thus connected to one another, Chicago will be the hub of the country's high-speed rail network.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: As a result of upgrades that begin in 2001, trains in Michigan now travel at for between Porter, Indiana and Kalamazoo, Michigan. On May 9, 2011, the state received $196.5 million to extend the higher speed rail upgrades from Kalamazoo an additional to Dearborn, Michigan. The improvements would reduce the travel time from Chicago to Detroit to roughly 5 hours. Michigan had received more than $161 million for high-speed rail and $40 million for Amtrak stations in Troy, Battle Creek and Dearborn.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: About of the Michigan trains' route passes through a congested area of northwestern Indiana along Lake Michigan's south shore, where trains are regularly delayed by freight traffic. In early 2010 the federal government authorized some $71.4 million for this project.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: In Minnesota, there was a proposed high-speed rail service from Rochester to the Twin Cities called Zip Rail. The trains would run on a dedicated track at speeds between and . Zip Rail was proposed to be a public–private partnership with public funding for capital costs and private investment for operations, maintenance and growing ridership. The Zip Rail project was discontinued in 2016.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: In July 2021, after Positive Train Control was installed and tested, Amtrak trains ("Lincoln Service" and "Texas Eagle") were allowed to run at on a large part of the Chicago-St. Louis corridor, between Joliet and Alton. As a result, scheduled travel times between Chicago and St. Louis were reduced by about 15 minutes when Amtrak timetables were adjusted in December 2021. There is no target date for trains yet.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: The cities of Denver, Las Vegas, Reno, Phoenix and Salt Lake City have formed the Western High Speed Rail Alliance, which is slated to spend $11 million over three years to study the feasibility of building railway links between the major cities of the southwestern United States, as well as linking to the California high-speed corridor via Las Vegas.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: In June 2012, the developer of XpressWest, formerly known as DesertXpress, announced that they expanded the planned high-speed rail network to include links to Phoenix, Salt Lake City and Denver. The XpressWest plan was supported by the Western High Speed Rail Alliance.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: In February 2009, as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), Congress allocated $8 billion to be granted to states for intercity rail projects, with "priority to projects that support the development of intercity high-speed rail service."


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: In April 2009, as required by ARRA, the FRA released its strategic plan describing the agency's vision for developing high-speed rail in the United States. As potential funding targets, the plan formally identified ten corridors (all previously designated as high-speed rail corridors by several successive Secretaries of Transportation) as well as the Northeast Corridor. The ten designated high-speed corridors, together with the major cities served by each, are:


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: In addition to the $8 billion provided by ARRA, the plan predicted an additional $5 billion over 5 years would be made annually available for projects to "jump-start a potential world-class passenger rail system." On June 17, 2009, the FRA advised grant applicants that evaluation for funding would be based on a proposal's potential to make trips quicker and more convenient, reduce congestion on highways and at airports, and meet other environmental, energy, and safety goals.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: The FRA received grant applications from states for stimulus funds and FY 2009 intercity capital funds in August and October 2009 Over $57 billion in requests were filed from 34 states and on January 28, 2010 31 states and 13 rail corridors received funding.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: The five areas receiving the most funding had originally been designated as high-speed rail corridors in October 1992 following passage of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: Congress allocated $2.5 billion in the FY 2010 budget and these funds were allocated on October 28, 2010. Major allocations are listed below.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: On December 10, 2010, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced $1.2 billion in grants for Wisconsin and Ohio would be removed, and redirected to other states. This was due to opposition from governors-elect in both states, Scott Walker of Wisconsin and John Kasich of Ohio. From the redirected funds, California received $624 million, Florida $342 million, Washington $161 million, and Illinois $42 million.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: On February 16, 2011, Former Florida Governor Rick Scott formally announced that he would be rejecting all federal funds to construct a high-speed railway project in the state, thereby killing the Florida High-Speed Rail project. Governor Scott's reasoning behind canceling the project was that it would be "too costly to taxpayers" and that "the risk far outweigh[ed] the benefits". Those funds were once again redistributed to other states.


title: High-speed rail in the United States

text: In February 2011, Vice President Biden proposed spending $53 billion on improved passenger rail service over six years. The plan drew fire from majority Republicans in the House of Representatives, who preferred private investment rather than government investment. No money was appropriated for passenger rail in either the FY 2011 or FY 2012 budgets.


title: Peter Piot

text: Sir Peter Karel, Baron Piot, (born 17 February 1949) is a Belgian-British microbiologist known for his research into Ebola and AIDS.


title: Peter Piot

text: After helping discover the Ebola virus in 1976 and leading efforts to contain the first-ever recorded Ebola epidemic that same year, Piot became a pioneering researcher into AIDS. He has held key positions in the United Nations and World Health Organization involving AIDS research and management. He has also served as a professor at several universities worldwide. He is the author of 16 books and over 600 scientific articles.


title: Peter Piot

text: Piot was born in Leuven, Belgium. His father was a civil servant who worked with agricultural exports and his mother ran a construction company. Piot is the oldest of two brothers and a sister.


title: Peter Piot

text: After beginning in the school of engineering and physics at Ghent University studying physics, Piot changed to medicine. During medical school, Piot received a Diploma in Tropical Medicine (DTM) from the Institute of Tropical Medicine Antwerp in Antwerp. In 1974, he received an MD degree from Ghent University. In 1980, Piot received a PhD degree in clinical microbiology from the University of Antwerp.


title: Peter Piot

text: In 1976, while working at the Institute of Tropical Medicine, Piot was part of a team that observed a Marburg-like virus in a sample of blood taken from a sick nun working in Zaire. Piot and his colleagues subsequently traveled to Zaire as part of an International Commission set up by the Government of Zaire to help quell the outbreak. The International Commission made key discoveries into how the virus spread, and traveled from village to village, spreading information and putting the ill and those who had come into contact with them into quarantine. The epidemic was already waning when the International Commission arrived, thanks to measures taken by local and national authorities, and it finally stopped in three months, after it had killed almost 300 people. The events were dramatised by Mike Walker on BBC Radio 4 in December 2014 in a production by David Morley. Piot narrated the programme.


title: Peter Piot

text: Piot has received the majority of the credit for discovering Ebola, since in 1976, it was claimed he was the one to receive blood samples while working in a lab at the Institute for Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium. The samples were once claimed to be originally sent by Dr. Jean-Jacques Muyembe-Tamfum, a Congolese doctor who obtained the blood samples from those sickened with a mysterious disease in then-Zaire, later discovered to be Ebola. In 2012, Piot published a memoir entitled "No Time to Lose" which chronicles his professional work, including the discovery of the Ebolavirus; he mentions Muyembe in passing rather than as a co-discoverer. In a 2016 Journal of Infectious Disease article, co-signed by most of the actors from that first outbreak, including Peter Piot and Jean-Jacques Muyembe, the claims by both Piot and Muyembe to have played a significant role in the early discovery of Ebola have been refuted. Piot stated in 2019 that "my book was not an attempt to write the history of Ebola, but more my personal experience".


title: Peter Piot

text: In the 1980s, Piot participated in a series of collaborative projects in Burundi, Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Tanzania, and Zaire. Project SIDA in Kinshasa, Zaire was the first international project on AIDS in Africa and is widely acknowledged as having provided the foundations of science's understanding of HIV infection in Africa. He was a professor of microbiology, and of public health at the Prince Leopold Institute of Tropical Medicine, in Antwerp, and at the University of Nairobi, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Lausanne, and a visiting professor at the London School of Economics. He was also a senior fellow at the University of Washington in Seattle, a scholar in residence at the Ford Foundation, and a senior fellow at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.


title: Peter Piot

text: From 1991 to 1994, Piot was president of the International AIDS Society. In 1992, he became assistant director of the World Health Organization's Global Programme on HIV/AIDS. On 12 December 1994, he was appointed executive director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and Assistant-Secretary-General of the United Nations.


title: Peter Piot

text: From 2009 to 2010, Piot served as director of the Institute for Global Health at Imperial College London.


title: Peter Piot

text: In addition to his work at LSHTM, Piot is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States and the Royal Academy of Medicine of Belgium, a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London, UK and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. In 2011, Amy Gutmann appointed him to serve on the International Research Panel at the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.


title: Peter Piot

text: In 2014, in the face of an unprecedented Ebola epidemic in western Africa, Piot and other scientists called for the emergency release of the experimental ZMapp vaccine for use on humans before it had undergone clinical testing on humans. That year, he was appointed by Director General Margaret Chan to the World Health Organization's Advisory Group on the Ebola Virus Disease Response, co-chaired by Sam Zaramba and David L. Heymann. He also chaired an independent panel convened by Harvard Global Health Institute and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine into the national and international response to the epidemic, which sharply criticised the response of the WHO and put forward ten recommendations for the body's reorganisation. In February 2020, he criticised the delay in declaring the 2019–20 novel coronavirus outbreak focused on Hubei, China, a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, and advocated a five-point scale for outbreaks, rather the current binary (emergency/no emergency) system.


title: Peter Piot

text: In 2020, Piot was appointed to the European Commission’s advisory panel on COVID-19, co-chaired by Ursula von der Leyen and Stella Kyriakides. In the preparations for the Global Health Summit hosted by the European Commission and the G20 in May 2021, Piot co-chaired the event's High Level Scientific Panel.


title: Peter Piot

text: Piot is fluent in English, French, and Dutch. He is married to the American anthropologist Heidi Larson.


title: Situationist International

text: The Situationist International (SI) was an international organization of social revolutionaries made up of avant-garde artists, intellectuals, and political theorists. It was prominent in Europe from its formation in 1957 to its dissolution in 1972. The intellectual foundations of the Situationist International were derived primarily from libertarian Marxism and the avant-garde art movements of the early 20th century, particularly Dada and Surrealism. Overall, situationist theory represented an attempt to synthesize this diverse field of theoretical disciplines into a modern and comprehensive critique of mid-20th century advanced capitalism.


title: Situationist International

text: Essential to situationist theory was the concept of the spectacle, a unified critique of advanced capitalism of which a primary concern was the progressively increasing tendency towards the expression and mediation of social relations through objects. The situationists believed that the shift from individual expression through directly lived experiences, or the first-hand fulfillment of authentic desires, to individual expression by proxy through the exchange or consumption of commodities, or passive second-hand alienation, inflicted significant and far-reaching damage to the quality of human life for both individuals and society. Another important concept of situationist theory was the primary means of counteracting the spectacle; the construction of situations, moments of life deliberately constructed for the purpose of reawakening and pursuing authentic desires, experiencing the feeling of life and adventure, and the liberation of everyday life.


title: Situationist International

text: The situationists recognized that capitalism had changed since Karl Marx's formative writings, but maintained that his analysis of the capitalist mode of production remained fundamentally correct; they rearticulated and expanded upon several classical Marxist concepts, such as his theory of alienation. In their expanded interpretation of Marxist theory, the situationists asserted that the misery of social alienation and commodity fetishism were no longer limited to the fundamental components of capitalist society, but had now in advanced capitalism spread themselves to every aspect of life and culture. They rejected the idea that advanced capitalism's apparent successes—such as technological advancement, increased productive capacity, and a raised general quality of life when compared to previous systems, such as feudalism—could ever outweigh the social dysfunction and degradation of everyday life that it simultaneously inflicted.


title: Situationist International

text: When the Situationist International was first formed, it had a predominantly artistic focus; emphasis was placed on concepts like unitary urbanism and psychogeography. Gradually, however, that focus shifted more towards revolutionary and political theory. The Situationist International reached the apex of its creative output and influence in 1967 and 1968, with the former marking the publication of the two most significant texts of the situationist movement, "The Society of the Spectacle" by Guy Debord and "The Revolution of Everyday Life" by Raoul Vaneigem. The expressed writing and political theory of the two aforementioned texts, along with other situationist publications, proved greatly influential in shaping the ideas behind the May 1968 insurrections in France; quotes, phrases, and slogans from situationist texts and publications were ubiquitous on posters and graffiti throughout France during the uprisings.


title: Situationist International

text: The term "situationist" refers to the construction of situations, one of the early central concepts of the Situationist International; the term also refers to any individuals engaged in the construction of situations, or, more narrowly, to members of the Situationist International. Situationist theory sees the situation as a tool for the liberation of everyday life, a method of negating the pervasive alienation that accompanied the spectacle. The founding manifesto of the Situationist International, "Report on the Construction of Situations" (1957), defined the construction of situations as "the concrete construction of momentary ambiances of life and their transformation into a superior passional quality." "Internationale Situationniste" No. 1 (June 1958) defined the constructed situation as "a moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and a game of events". The situationists argued that advanced capitalism manufactured false desires; literally in the sense of ubiquitous advertising and the glorification of accumulated capital, and more broadly in the abstraction and reification of the more ephemeral experiences of authentic life into commodities. The experimental direction of situationist activity consisted of setting up temporary environments favorable to the fulfillment of true and authentic human desires in response.


title: Situationist International

text: The Situationist International strongly resisted use of the term "situationism", which Debord called a "meaningless term", adding "[t]here is no such thing as situationism, which would mean a doctrine for interpreting existing conditions". The situationists maintained a philosophical opposition to all ideologies, conceiving of them as abstract superstructures ultimately serving only to justify the economic base of a given society; accordingly, they rejected "situationism" as an absurd and self-contradictory concept. In "The Society of the Spectacle", Debord asserted that ideology was "the abstract will to universality and the illusion thereof" which was "legitimated in modern society by universal abstraction and by the effective dictatorship of illusion".


title: Situationist International

text: The situationist movement had its origins as a left wing tendency within Lettrism, an artistic and literary movement led by the Romanian-born French poet and visual artist Isidore Isou, originating in 1940s Paris. The group was heavily influenced by the preceding avant-garde movements of Dadaism and Surrealism, seeking to apply critical theories based on these concepts to all areas of art and culture, most notably in poetry, film, painting and political theory. Among some of the concepts and artistic innovations developed by the Lettrists were the "lettrie", a poem reflecting pure form yet devoid of all semantic content, new syntheses of writing and visual art identified as metagraphics and hypergraphics, as well as new creative techniques in filmmaking. Future situationist Guy Debord, who was at that time a significant figure in the Lettrist movement, helped develop these new film techniques, using them in his Lettrist film "Howlings for Sade" (1952) as well as later in his situationist film "Society of the Spectacle" (1972).


title: Situationist International

text: By 1950, a much younger and more left-wing part of the Lettrist movement began to emerge. This group kept very active in perpetrating public outrages such as the Notre-Dame Affair, where at the Easter High Mass at Notre Dame de Paris, in front of ten thousand people and broadcast on national TV, their member and former Dominican Michel Mourre posed as a monk, "stood in front of the altar and read a pamphlet proclaiming that God was dead". André Breton prominently came out in support of the action in a letter that spawned a large debate in the newspaper "Combat".


title: Situationist International

text: In 1952, this left wing of the Lettrist movement, which included Debord, broke off from Isou's group and formed the Letterist International, a new Paris-based collective of avant-garde artists and political theorists. The schism finally erupted when the future members of the radical Lettrists disrupted a Charlie Chaplin press conference for "Limelight" at the Hôtel Ritz Paris. They distributed a polemic entitled "No More Flat Feet!", which concluded: "The footlights have melted the make-up of the supposedly brilliant mime. All we can see now is a lugubrious and mercenary old man. Go home Mister Chaplin." Isou was upset with this, his own attitude being that Chaplin deserved respect as one of the great creators of the cinematic art. The breakaway group felt that his work was no longer relevant, while having appreciated it "in its own time," and asserted their belief "that the most urgent expression of freedom is the destruction of idols, especially when they claim to represent freedom," in this case, filmmaker Charlie Chaplin.


title: Situationist International

text: During this period of the Letterist International, many of the important concepts and ideas that would later be integral in situationist theory were developed. Individuals in the group collaboratively constructed the new field of psychogeography, which they defined as "the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment (whether consciously organized or not) on the emotions and behavior of individuals." Debord further expanded this concept of psychogeography with his theory of the dérive, an unplanned tour through an urban landscape directed entirely by the feelings evoked in the individual by their surroundings, serving as the primary means for mapping and investigating the psychogeography of these different areas. During this period the Letterist International also developed the situationist tactic of détournement, which by reworking or re-contextualizing an existing work of art or literature sought to radically shift its meaning to one with revolutionary significance.


title: Situationist International

text: In 1956, Guy Debord, a member of the Lettrist International, and Asger Jorn of the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, brought together a group of artistic collectives for the "First World Congress of Free Artists" in Alba, Italy. The meeting established the foundation for the development of the Situationist International, which was officially formed in July 1957 at a meeting in Cosio di Arroscia, Italy. The resulting International was a fusion of these extremely small avant-garde collectives: the Lettrist International, the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus (an offshoot of COBRA), and the London Psychogeographical Association (though, Anselm Jappe has argued that the group pivoted around Jorn and Debord for the first four years). Later, the Situationist International drew ideas from other groups such as "Socialisme ou Barbarie".


title: Situationist International

text: The most prominent member of the group, Guy Debord, generally became considered the organization's de facto leader and most distinguished theorist. Other members included theorist Raoul Vaneigem, the Dutch painter Constant Nieuwenhuys, the Italo-Scottish writer Alexander Trocchi, the English artist Ralph Rumney (sole member of the London Psychogeographical Association, Rumney suffered expulsion relatively soon after the formation), the Danish artist Asger Jorn (who after parting with the SI also founded the Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism), the architect and veteran of the Hungarian Uprising Attila Kotanyi, and the French writer Michele Bernstein. Debord and Bernstein later married.


title: Situationist International

text: In June 1957, Debord wrote the manifesto of the Situationist International, titled "Report on the Construction of Situations". This manifesto plans a rereading of Karl Marx's "Das Kapital" and advocates a cultural revolution in western countries.


title: Situationist International

text: During the first few years of the SI's founding, avant-garde artistic groups began collaborating with the SI and joining the organization. Gruppe SPUR, a German artistic collective, collaborated with the Situationist International on projects beginning in 1959, continuing until the group officially joined the SI in 1961. The role of the artists in the SI was of great significance, particularly Asger Jorn, Constant Nieuwenhuys and Pinot Gallizio.


title: Situationist International

text: Asger Jorn, who invented Situgraphy and Situlogy, had the social role of catalyst and team leader among the members of the SI between 1957 and 1961. Jorn's role in the situationist movement (as in COBRA) was that of a catalyst and team leader. Guy Debord on his own lacked the personal warmth and persuasiveness to draw people of different nationalities and talents into an active working partnership. As a prototype Marxist intellectual Debord needed an ally who could patch up the petty egoisms and squabbles of the members. When Jorn's leadership was withdrawn in 1961, many simmering quarrels among different sections of the SI flared up, leading to multiple exclusions.


title: Situationist International

text: The first major split was the exclusion of Gruppe SPUR, the German section, from the SI on 10 February 1962. Many different disagreements led to the fracture, for example; while at the Fourth SI Conference in London in December 1960, in a discussion about the political nature of the SI, the Gruppe SPUR members disagreed with the core situationist stance of counting on a revolutionary proletariat; the accusation that their activities were based on a "systematic misunderstanding of situationist theses"; the understanding that at least one Gruppe SPUR member, sculptor Lothar Fischer, and possibly the rest of the group, were not actually understanding and/or agreeing with the situationist ideas, but were just using the SI to achieve success in the art market; and the betrayal, in the "Spur #7" issue, of a common agreement on the Gruppe SPUR and SI publications.


title: Situationist International

text: The exclusion was a recognition that Gruppe SPUR's "principles, methods and goals" were significantly in contrast with those of the SI. This split however was not a declaration of hostilities, as in other cases of SI exclusions. A few months after the exclusion, in the context of judicial prosecution against the group by the German state, Debord expressed his esteem to Gruppe SPUR, calling it the only significant artist group in (Germany) since World War II, and regarding it at the level of the avant-gardes in other countries.


title: Situationist International

text: The next significant split was in 1962, wherein the "Nashists," the Scandinavian section of the SI led by Jørgen Nash, were excluded from the organization. Nash created the 2nd Situationist International.


title: Situationist International

text: By this point the Situationist International consisted almost exclusively of the Franco-Belgian section, led by Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem. These members possessed much more of a tendency towards political theory over the more artistic aspects of the SI. The shift in the intellectual priorities within the SI resulted in more focus on the theoretical, such as the theory of the spectacle and Marxist critical analysis, spending much less time on the more artistic and tangible concepts like unitary urbanism, détournement, and situgraphy.


title: Situationist International

text: During this period the SI began having more and more influence on local university students in France. Taking advantage of the apathy of their colleagues, five "Pro-situs", situationist-influenced students, infiltrated the University of Strasbourg's student union in November 1966 and began scandalising the authorities. Their first action was to form an "anarchist appreciation society" called The Society for the Rehabilitation for Karl Marx and Ravachol; next they appropriated union funds to flypost "Return of the Durruti Column", Andre Bertrand's "détourned" comic strip. They then invited the situationists to contribute a critique of the University of Strasbourg, and "On the Poverty of Student Life", written by Tunisian situationist Mustapha/Omar Khayati was the result. The students promptly proceeded to print 10,000 copies of the pamphlet using university funds and distributed them during a ceremony marking the beginning of the academic year. This provoked an immediate outcry in the local, national and international media.


title: Situationist International

text: The Situationists played a preponderant role in the May 1968 uprisings, and to some extent their political perspective and ideas fueled such crisis, providing a central theoretic foundation. While SI's member count had been steadily falling for the preceding several years, the ones that remained were able to fill revolutionary roles for which they had patiently anticipated and prepared. The active ideologists ("enragés" and Situationists) behind the revolutionary events in Strasbourg, Nanterre and Paris, numbered only about one or two dozen persons.


title: Situationist International

text: This has now been widely acknowledged as a fact by studies of the period, what is still wide open to interpretation is the "how and why" that happened. Charles de Gaulle, in the aftermath televised speech of 7 June, acknowledged that "This explosion was provoked by groups in revolt against modern consumer and technical society, whether it be the communism of the East or the capitalism of the West."


title: Situationist International

text: They also made up the majority in the Occupation Committee of the Sorbonne. An important event leading up to May 1968 was the scandal in Strasbourg in December 1966. The Union Nationale des Étudiants de France declared itself in favor of the SI's theses, and managed to use public funds to publish Mustapha Khayati's pamphlet "On the Poverty of Student Life". Thousands of copies of the pamphlet were printed and circulated and helped to make the Situationists well known throughout the nonstalinist left.


title: Situationist International

text: Quotations from two key situationist books, Debord's "The Society of the Spectacle" (1967) and Khayati's "On the Poverty of Student Life" (1966), were written on the walls of Paris and several provincial cities. This was documented in the collection of photographs published in 1968 by Walter Lewino, "L'imagination au pouvoir".


title: Situationist International

text: Though the SI were a very small group, they were expert self-propagandists, and their slogans appeared daubed on walls throughout Paris at the time of the revolt. SI member René Viénet's 1968 book "Enragés and Situationists in the Occupations Movement, France, May '68" gives an account of the involvement of the SI with the student group of Enragés and the occupation of the Sorbonne.


title: Situationist International

text: The occupations of 1968 started at the University of Nanterre and spread to the Sorbonne. The police tried to take back the Sorbonne and a riot ensued. Following this a general strike was declared with up to 10 million workers participating. The SI originally participated in the Sorbonne occupations and defended barricades in the riots. The SI distributed calls for the occupation of factories and the formation of workers' councils, but, disillusioned with the students, left the university to set up The Council for the Maintenance of the Occupations (CMDO) which distributed the SI's demands on a much wider scale. After the end of the movement, the CMDO disbanded.


title: Situationist International

text: By 1972, Gianfranco Sanguinetti and Guy Debord were the only two remaining members of the SI. Working with Debord, in August 1975, Sanguinetti wrote a pamphlet titled "Rapporto veridico sulle ultime opportunità di salvare il capitalismo in Italia" ("The Real Report on the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy"), which (inspired by Bruno Bauer) purported to be the cynical writing of "Censor", a powerful industrialist. The pamphlet argued that the ruling class of Italy supported the Piazza Fontana bombing and other covert, false flag mass slaughter for the higher goal of defending the capitalist status quo from communist influence. The pamphlet was mailed to 520 of Italy's most powerful individuals. It was received as genuine and powerful politicians, industrialists and journalists praised its content. After reprinting the tract as a small book, Sanguinetti revealed himself to be the true author. In the outcry that ensued and under pressure from Italian authorities Sanguinetti left Italy in February 1976, and was denied entry to France.


title: Situationist International

text: After publishing in the last issue of the magazine an analysis of the May 1968 revolts, and the strategies that will need to be adopted in future revolutions, the SI was dissolved in 1972.


title: Situationist International

text: The "Spectacle" is a central notion in situationist theory, developed by Guy Debord in his 1967 book, "The Society of the Spectacle". In its limited sense, "spectacle" means the mass media, which are "its most glaring superficial manifestation." Debord said that the society of the spectacle came to existence in the late 1920s.


title: Situationist International

text: The critique of the "spectacle" is a development and application of Karl Marx's concept of fetishism of commodities, reification and alienation, and the way it was reprised by György Lukács in 1923. In the society of the spectacle, the commodities rule the workers and the consumers instead of being ruled by them. The consumers are passive subjects that contemplate the reified spectacle.


title: Situationist International

text: As early as 1958, in the situationist manifesto, Debord described official culture as a "rigged game", where conservative powers forbid subversive ideas to have direct access to the public discourse. Such ideas get first trivialized and sterilized, and then they are safely incorporated back within mainstream society, where they can be exploited to add new flavors to old dominant ideas. This technique of the spectacle is sometimes called "recuperation", and its counter-technique is the "détournement".


title: Situationist International

text: A "détournement" is a technique developed in the 1950s by the Letterist International, and consist in "turning expressions of the capitalist system against itself," like turning slogans and logos against the advertisers or the political status quo. "Détournement" was prominently used to set up subversive political pranks, an influential tactic called situationist prank that was reprised by the punk movement in the late 1970s and inspired the culture jamming movement in the late 1980s.


title: Situationist International

text: The Situationist International, in the 15 years from its formation in 1957 and its dissolution in 1972, is characterized by a Marxist and surrealist perspective on aesthetics and politics, without separation between the two: art and politics are faced together and in revolutionary terms. The SI analyzed the modern world from the point of view of everyday life. The core arguments of the Situationist International were an attack on the capitalist degradation of the life of people and the fake models advertised by the mass media, to which the Situationist responded with alternative life experiences. The alternative life experiences explored by the Situationists were the construction of situations, unitary urbanism, psychogeography, and the union of play, freedom and critical thinking.


title: Situationist International

text: A major stance of the SI was to count on the force of a revolutionary proletariat. This stance was reaffirmed very clearly in a discussion on "To what extent is the SI a political movement?", during the Fourth SI Conference in London. The SI remarked that this is a core Situationist principle, and that those that don't understand it and agree with it, are not Situationist.


title: Situationist International

text: The SI rejected all art that separated itself from politics, the concept of 20th-century art that is separated from topical political events. The SI believed that the notion of artistic expression being separated from politics and current events is one proliferated by reactionary considerations to render artwork that expresses comprehensive critiques of society impotent. They recognized there was a precise mechanism followed by reactionaries to defuse the role of subversive artists and intellectuals, that is, to reframe them as separated from the most topical events, and divert from them the taste for the new that may dangerously appeal the masses; after such separation, such artworks are sterilized, banalized, degraded, and can be safely integrated into the official culture and the public discourse, where they can add new flavors to old dominant ideas and play the role of a gear wheel in the mechanism of the society of the spectacle.


title: Situationist International

text: According to this theory, artists and intellectuals that accept such compromises are rewarded by the art dealers and praised by the dominant culture. The SI received many offers to sponsor "creations" that would just have a "situationist" label but a diluted political content, that would have brought things back to order and the SI back into the old fold of artistic praxis. The majority of SI continued to refuse such offers and any involvement on the conventional avant-garde artistic plane. This principle was affirmed since the founding of the SI in 1957, but the qualitative step of resolving all the contradictions of having situationists that make concessions to the cultural market, was made with the exclusion of Gruppe SPUR in 1962.


title: Situationist International

text: The SI noted how reactionary forces forbid subversive ideas from artists and intellectuals to reach the public discourse, and how they attack the artworks that express comprehensive critique of society, by saying that art should not involve itself into politics.


title: Situationist International

text: The first edition of "Internationale Situationniste" defines the constructed situation as "a moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and a game of events."


title: Situationist International

text: As the SI embraced dialectical Marxism, the situation came to refer less to a specific avant-garde practice than to the dialectical unification of art and life more generally. Beyond this theoretical definition, the situation as a practical manifestation thus slipped between a series of proposals. The SI thus were first led to distinguish the situation from the mere artistic practice of the happening, and later identified it in historical events such as the Paris Commune in which it exhibited itself as the revolutionary moment. The SI's interest in the Paris Commune was expressed in 1962 in their fourteen "Theses on the Paris Commune".


title: Situationist International

text: The first edition of "Internationale Situationniste" defined psychogeography as "the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment (whether consciously organized or not) on the emotions and behavior of individuals." The term was first recognized in 1955 by Guy Debord while still with the Letterist International:


title: Situationist International

text: By definition, psychogeography combines subjective and objective knowledge and studies. Debord struggled to stipulate the finer points of this theoretical paradox, ultimately producing "Theory of the Dérive" in 1958, a document which essentially serves as an instruction manual for the psychogeographic procedure, executed through the act of dérive ("drift").


title: Situationist International

text: practiced by its predecessor organization, the Lettrist International, the art of wandering through urban space, which they termed dérive, whose unique mood is conveyed in Debord's darkly romantic meaning of palindrome. Two excursions organized by Andre Breton serve as the closest cultural precedents to the dérive. The first in 1921, was an excursion to the Church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre with the Parisian Dadaists; the second excursion was on 1 May 1923, when a small group of Surrealists walked toward the countryside outside of Blois. Debord was cautious however to differentiate between the derive and such precedents. He emphasized its active character as "a mode of experimental behavior" that reached to Romanticism, the Baroque, and the age of chivalry, with its tradition of long adventures voyages. Such urban roaming was characteristic of Left Bank bohemianism in Paris.


title: Situationist International

text: In the SI's 6th issue, Raoul Vaneigem writes in a manifesto of unitary urbanism, "All space is occupied by the enemy. We are living under a permanent curfew. Not just the cops—the geometry". Dérive, as a previously conceptualized tactic in the French military, was "a calculated action determined by the absence of a greater locus", and "a maneuver within the enemy's field of vision". To the SI, whose interest was inhabiting space, the dérive brought appeal in this sense of taking the "fight" to the streets and truly indulging in a determined operation. The dérive was a course of preparation, reconnaissance, a means of shaping situationist psychology among urban explorers for the eventuality of the situationist city.


title: Situationist International

text: Twelve issues of the main French edition of journal "Internationale Situationniste" were published, each issue edited by a different individual or group, including: Guy Debord, Mohamed Dahoiu, Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, Maurice Wyckaert, Constant Nieuwenhuys, Asger Jorn, Helmut Sturm, Attila Kotanyi, Jørgen Nash, Uwe Lausen, Raoul Vaneigem, Michèle Bernstein, Jeppesen Victor Martin, Jan Strijbosch, Alexander Trocchi, Théo Frey, Mustapha Khayati, Donald Nicholson-Smith, René Riesel, and René Viénet.


title: Situationist International

text: Classic Situationist texts include: "On the Poverty of Student Life", "Society of the Spectacle" by Guy Debord, and "The Revolution of Everyday Life" by Raoul Vaneigem.


title: Situationist International

text: The first English-language collection of SI writings, although poorly and freely translated, was "Leaving The 20th century" edited by Christopher Gray. "The Situationist International Anthology" edited and translated by Ken Knabb, collected numerous SI documents which had previously never been seen in English.


title: Situationist International

text: Rooted firmly in the Marxist tradition, the Situationist International criticized Trotskyism, Marxism–Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism from a position they believed to be further left and more properly Marxist. The situationists possessed a strong anti-authoritarian current, commonly deriding the centralized bureaucracies of China and the Soviet Union in the same breath as capitalism.


title: Situationist International

text: Debord's work "The Society of the Spectacle" (1967) established situationist analysis as Marxist critical theory. "The Society of the Spectacle" is widely recognized as the main and most influential Situationist essay.


title: Situationist International

text: The concept of revolution created by the Situationist International was anti-capitalist, Marxist, Young Hegelian, and from the very beginning in the 50s, remarkably differently from the established Left, anti-Stalinist and against all repressive regimes.


title: Situationist International

text: Debord starts his 1967 work with a revisited version of the first sentence with which Marx began his critique of classical political economy, "Das Kapital". In a later essay, Debord will argue that his work was the most important social critique since Marx's work. Drawing from Marx, which argued that under a capitalist society the "wealth" is degraded to an immense accumulation of commodities, Debord argues that in advanced capitalism, life is reduced to an immense accumulation of spectacles, a triumph of mere appearance where "all that once was directly lived has become mere representation". The spectacle, which according to Debord is the core feature of the advanced capitalist societies, has its "most glaring superficial manifestation" in the advertising-mass media-marketing complex.


title: Situationist International

text: Elaborating on Marx's argument that under capitalism our lives and our environment are continually depleted, Debord adds that the Spectacle is the system by which capitalism tries to hide such depletion. Debord added that, further than the impoverishment in the quality of life, our psychic functions are altered, we get a degradation of mind and also a degradation of knowledge. In the spectacular society, knowledge is not used anymore to question, analyze, or resolve contradictions, but to assuage reality.


title: Situationist International

text: Situationist theorists advocated methods of operation that included democratic workers' councils and workers' self-management, interested in empowering the individual, in contrast to the perceived corrupt bureaucratic states of the Eastern bloc. Their anti-authoritarian interpretation of Marxist theory can be identified with the broader council communist and libertarian Marxist movements, themselves more broadly termed as left communism.


title: Situationist International

text: The last issue (1972) of the "Situationist International" journal, featured an editorial analyzing the events of May 1968. The editorial, written by Guy Debord, was titled "The Beginning of an Era", probably as a detournement reference of "Nachalo" ("The Beginning"), a Russian Marxist monthly magazine.


title: Situationist International

text: Former situationists T. J. Clark (art historian) and Donald Nicholson-Smith (British section), argued that the portion of the moderate Left that is the "established Left", and its "Left opinion-makers", usually addressed contemptuously the SI as "hopelessly young-Hegelian".


title: Situationist International

text: The Situationist International was differentiated from both anarchists and Marxists. In spite of this, they have frequently been associated with anarchism. Debord did a critical assessment of the anarchists in his 1967 "The Society of the Spectacle". In the final, 12th issue of the journal, the situationists rejected spontaneism and the "mystics of nonorganization," labeling them as a form of "sub-anarchism":


title: Situationist International

text: According to situationist Ken Knabb, Debord pointed out the flaws and merits of both Marxism and anarchism. He argued that "the split between Marxism and anarchism crippled both sides. The anarchists rightly criticized the authoritarian and narrowly economistic tendencies in Marxism, but they generally did so in an undialectical, moralistic, ahistorical manner... and leaving Marx and a few of the more radical Marxists with a virtual monopoly on coherent dialectical analysis—until the situationists finally brought the libertarian and dialectical aspects back together again."


title: Situationist International

text: The SI poses a challenge to the model of political action of a portion of the left, the "established Left" and "Left opinion-makers". The first challenging aspect is the fueling role that the SI had in the upheavals of the political and social movements of the 1960s, upheavals for which much is still at stake and which many foresee as recurring in the 21st century. The second challenging aspect, is the comparison between the Situationist Marxist theory of the Society of the Spectacle, which is still very topical 30 years later, and the current status of the theories supported by leftist establishments in the same period, like Althusserianism, Maoism, workerism, Freudo-Marxism and others.


title: Situationist International

text: The response to this challenge has been an attempt to silence and misinterpret, to "turn the SI safely into an art movement, and thereby to minimize its role in the political and social movements of the sixties".


title: Situationist International

text: The core aspect of the revolutionary perspectives, and the political theory, of the Situationist International, has been neglected by some commentators, which either limited themselves to an apolitical reading of the situationist avant-garde art works, or dismissed the Situationist political theory. Examples of this are Simon Sadler's "The Situationist City", and the accounts on the SI published by the "New Left Review".


title: Situationist International

text: The concept of revolution created by the Situationist International was anti-capitalist, Marxist, Young Hegelian, and from the very beginning in the 1950s, remarkably differently from the established Left, anti-Stalinist and against all repressive regimes. The SI called in May 1968 for the formation of Workers councils.


title: Situationist International

text: There was no separation between the artistic and the political perspectives. For instance, Asger Jorn never believed in a conception of the Situationist ideas as exclusively artistic and separated from political involvement. He was at the root and at the core of the Situationist International project, fully sharing the revolutionary intentions with Debord.


title: Situationist International

text: Critics of the Situationists frequently assert that their ideas are not in fact complex and difficult to understand, but are at best simple ideas expressed in deliberately difficult language, and at worst actually nonsensical. For example, anarchist Chaz Bufe asserts in Listen Anarchist! that "obscure situationist jargon" is a major problem in the anarchist movement. Andrea Gibbons argues that the Parisian situationists failed to take on board practically or theoretically the experience of their African members, such as is shown by Abdelhafid Khattib's experience of police harassment while conducting psychogeographic research on Les Halles in 1958. She remarks how little the suppression of Algerians in Paris had impacted their activity and thinking – Bernstein and Debord co-signed the "Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War" in 1961, which led to them being questioned by the police. She cites a letter written by Jacqueline de Jong, Jorgen Nash, and Ansgar Elde protesting the expulsion of the "Spur" group in 1962 which highlights the political repression in Paris at that time. Gibbons also criticises the lack of mention of the Algerian situationists in either Debord's or Vaneigem's memoirs.


title: Situationist International

text: Debord's analysis of the spectacle has been influential among people working on television, particularly in France and Italy; in Italy, TV programs produced by situationist intellectuals, like Antonio Ricci's "Striscia la notizia", or Carlo Freccero's programming schedule for "Italia 1" in the early 1990s.


title: Situationist International

text: In the 1960s and 1970s, anarchists, communists, and other leftists offered various interpretations of Situationist concepts in combination with a variety of other perspectives. Examples of these groups include: in Amsterdam, the Provos; in the UK, King Mob, the producers of "Heatwave" magazine (including Charles Radcliffe who later briefly joined the English Section of the Situationist International), and the Angry Brigade. In the US, groups like Black Mask (later Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers), The Weathermen, and the Rebel Worker group also explicitly employed their ideas.


title: Situationist International

text: Anarchist theorists such as Fredy Perlman, Bob Black, Hakim Bey, and John Zerzan, have developed the SI's ideas in various directions away from Marxism. These theorists were predominantly associated with the magazines "Fifth Estate", "", and "Green Anarchy". During the early 1980s, English anarchist Larry Law produced the "Spectacular Times" pocket-books series, which aimed to make Situationist ideas more easily assimilated into the anarchist movement. Later anarchist theorists such as the CrimethInc. collective also claim Situationist influence.


title: Situationist International

text: Situationist urban theory, defined initially by the members of the Lettrist International as "Unitary Urbanism," was extensively developed through the behavioural and performance structures of The Workshop for Non-Linear Architecture during the 1990s. The re-emergence of the London Psychogeographical Association also inspired many new psychogeographical groups including Manchester Area Psychogeographic. The LPA and the Neoist Alliance along with the Luther Blissett Project came together to form a New Lettrist International with a specifically Communist perspective. Around this time, Unpopular Books and the LPA released some key texts including new translations of Asger Jorn's work.


title: Situationist International

text: Around this time also, groups such as Reclaim the Streets and Adbusters have, respectively, seen themselves as "creating situations" or practicing detournement on advertisements.


title: Situationist International

text: In cultural terms, the SI's influence has arguably been greater, if more diffuse. In the late 1960s, MC5, the Fugs and Hawkwind were radical Situationist bands.


title: Situationist International

text: Situationist ideas exerted a strong influence on the design language of the punk rock phenomenon of the 1970s. To a significant extent this came about due to the adoption of the style and aesthetics and sometimes slogans employed by the SI. These were often second hand, via English pro-Situ groups such as King Mob whose associates included Malcolm McLaren and Jamie Reid. Factory Records owner Tony Wilson was influenced by Situationist urbanism and Factory Records band The Durutti Column took its name from Andre Bertrand's collage "Le Retour de la Colonne Durutti". (Bertrand, in turn, took his title from the eponymous anarchist army during the Spanish Civil War). U.S. punk group The Feederz have been acclaimed as exhibiting a more direct and conscious influence. Formed in the late 1970s, they became known for extensive use of detournement and their intention to provoke their audience through the exposition of Situationist themes. Other musical artists whose lyrics and artwork have referenced Situationist concepts include: The Clash, Pussy Riot, Crass, Tom Robinson Band, Ian Dury, X-Ray Spex, Sham 69, Buzzcocks, The Fall, Patrik Fitzgerald, Conflict, Angelic Upstarts, Chaos UK, Chaotic Dischord, MDC, Dead Kennedys, Reagan Youth, Chumbawamba, Manic Street Preachers. Situationist theory experienced a vogue in the late '90s hardcore punk scene, being referenced by Orchid, His Hero Is Gone, and CrimethInc.


title: Situationist International

text: One can also trace situationist ideas within the development of other avant-garde threads such as Unilalianism and Neoism, as well as artists such as Mark Divo.


title: Situationist International

text: Some hacker related e-zines, which, like samizdat, were distributed via email and FTP over early Internet links and BBS quoted and developed ideas coming from SI. A few of them were N0 Way, N0 Route, UHF, in France; and early Phrack, cDc in the US. More recently, writers such as Thomas de Zengotita have echoed Situationist theories regarding the of contemporary society.


title: Five Civilized Tribes

text: The term Five Civilized Tribes was applied by European Americans in the colonial and early federal period in the history of the United States to the five major Native American nations in the Southeast—the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek (Muscogee), and Seminole. Americans of European descent classified them as "civilized" because they had adopted attributes of the Anglo-American culture. Examples of such colonial attributes adopted by these five tribes included Christianity, centralized governments, literacy, market participation, written constitutions, intermarriage with white Americans, and chattel slavery practices, including purchase of enslaved African Americans. For a period, the Five Civilized Tribes tended to maintain stable political relations with the European Americans, before the United States promoted Indian Removal of these tribes from the Southeast.


title: Five Civilized Tribes

text: In the 21st century, this term has been criticized by some scholars for its ethnocentric assumptions by Anglo-Americans of what they considered civilized, but representatives of these tribes continue to meet regularly on a quarterly basis in their Inter-Tribal Council of the Five Civilized Tribes.


title: Five Civilized Tribes

text: The descendants of these tribes, who primarily live in what is now Oklahoma, are sometimes referred to as the Five Tribes of Oklahoma. Numerous other federally recognized tribes are also located in Oklahoma.


title: Five Civilized Tribes

text: The Five Civilized Tribes is a term used by European Americans for five major indigenous tribes who lived in the Southeastern United States. They coalesced historically in an area that had been strongly influenced by the Mississippian culture. Before European contact, these tribes generally had matrilineal kinship systems, with property and hereditary positions passed through the mother's family. But they were much more egalitarian and decentralized than the Mississippian culture peoples at their height.


title: Five Civilized Tribes

text: Based on the development of surplus foods from cultivation, Mississippian towns had more dense populations, and they developed artisan classes, and hereditary religious and political elites. The Mississippian culture flourished in what is now the Midwestern, Eastern, and Southeastern United States from 800 to 1500 CE. Agriculture was the primary economic pursuit. The bulk of the tribes lived in towns (some covering hundreds of acres and populated with thousands of people). They were known for building large, complex earthwork mounds. These communities regulated their space with planned streets, subdivided into residential and public areas. Their system of government was hereditary. Chiefdoms were of varying size and complexity, with high levels of military organization.


title: Five Civilized Tribes

text: President George Washington and Henry Knox, the first Secretary of War, implemented a policy of cultural transformation in relation to Native Americans. The Cherokee and Choctaw tended, in turn, to adopt and appropriate certain cultural aspects of the federation of colonies. At the time of the Declaration of Independence, the culture of the rebel colonies seeking to form a union was itself, emergent. The Five Tribes generally adopted cultural practices from European Americans that they found useful. Typically the bands who had towns or villages closer to whites, or interacted more with them through trading or intermarriage, took up more of such new practices. Those towns that were more isolated from whites tended to keep to their traditional cultures.


title: Five Civilized Tribes

text: Washington promulgated a doctrine that held that American Indians were biologically equals, but that their society was inferior. He formulated and implemented a policy to encourage the "civilizing" process, which Thomas Jefferson continued. Historian Robert Remini wrote that the American leaders "presumed that once the Indians adopted the practice of private property, built homes, farmed, educated their children, and embraced Christianity, these Native Americans would win acceptance from white Americans. Washington's six-point plan included impartial justice toward Indians; regulated buying of Indian lands; promotion of commerce; promotion of experiments to "civilize" or improve Indian society; presidential authority to give presents; and punishing those who violated Indian rights.


title: Five Civilized Tribes

text: The government appointed Indian agents, such as Benjamin Hawkins in the Southeast, to live among Indians and to encourage them, through example and instruction, to live like whites. The tribes of the Southeast adopted Washington's policy as they established schools, took up yeoman farming practices, converted to Christianity, and built homes similar to those of their colonial neighbors. These five tribes also adopted the practice of chattel slavery: holding enslaved African Americans as forced workers.


title: Five Civilized Tribes

text: In the early Federal period, after the US became independent, white settlers pushed into the interior and into the Deep South, areas that were still largely dominated by Native Americans. They were land-hungry. The invention of the cotton gin had made cultivation of short-staple cotton profitable in the interior, and settlers encroached on Native American lands in the Upper South, western Georgia, and the future states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. They demanded the chance to cultivate these lands for agriculture. Armed conflicts occurred between some of the tribes and the settlers, who kept pushing west. They demanded that state and federal governments let them buy land.


title: Five Civilized Tribes

text: In the early 19th century, under such leaders as Andrew Jackson, elected president in 1828, and others, the U.S. government formally initiated Indian removal, forcing those tribes still living east of the Mississippi River, including the five tribes, to lands west of the river. Congress passed authorizing legislation in 1830, to fund such moves and arrange for new lands in what became known as Indian Territory to the west. Most members of the five tribes were forced to Indian Territory before 1840, many to what later became the states of Kansas and Oklahoma. The Cherokee Nation resisted removal until 1838 and lost thousands of members in removal, along what they called the Cherokee Trail of Tears. President Martin Van Buren had enforced the Treaty of New Echota, although the Senate had not ratified it, and a majority of the tribe said they had not agreed to its cessions of communal land.


title: Five Civilized Tribes

text: Once the tribes had been relocated to Indian Territory, the United States government promised that their lands would be free of white settlement. But settlers soon began to violate that, and enforcement was difficult in the western frontier.


title: Five Civilized Tribes

text: In the late 19th century, under the Dawes Act and related legislation, the US government decided to break up communal tribal lands, allocating 160-acre plots to heads of households of enrolled members of the tribes. It determined that land left over was "surplus" and could be sold, including to non-Native Americans. Allotment was also a means to extinguish Indian title to these lands, and the US government required the dissolution of tribal governments prior to admission of the territories as the US state of Oklahoma.


title: Five Civilized Tribes

text: Later, as European-American settlement increased in the Oklahoma Territory, pressure built to combine the territories and admit Oklahoma as a state. In 1893, the government opened the "Cherokee Strip" to outside settlement in the Oklahoma Land Run. In 1907, the Oklahoma Territory and the Indian Territory were merged to form the state of Oklahoma. Relative to other states, all Five Tribes are represented in significant numbers in the population of Oklahoma today.


title: Five Civilized Tribes

text: The Cherokee, (; ) are people of the Southeastern United States, principally upland Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. They speak an Iroquoian language. In the 19th century, historians and ethnographers recorded their oral tradition that told of the tribe having migrated south in ancient times from the Great Lakes region, the base of most other Iroquoian-speaking peoples.


title: Five Civilized Tribes

text: Of the three federally recognized Cherokee tribes, the Cherokee Nation and the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians (UKB) have headquarters in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. The UKB are mostly descendants of "Old Settlers", Cherokee who migrated to Arkansas and Oklahoma about 1817. They are related to the Cherokee who were forcibly relocated there in the 1830s under the Indian Removal Act. The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians is on the Qualla Boundary in western North Carolina, and are descendants of those who resisted or avoided relocation. Although the Cherokee Nation sponsors some satellite communities, it does not recognize Cherokee heritage groups that are seeking federal recognition. The Cherokee tribe has 729,533 enrolled members.