title: Rock of Ages (musical)

text: The songs are played in the 80s rock music style by the house band, Arsenal, appearing at the back of the stage rather than in the more traditional pit.


title: Fail Safe (1964 film)

text: Fail Safe is a 1964 Cold War thriller film directed by Sidney Lumet, based on the 1962 novel of the same name by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler. The film follows a crisis caused by a critical error that sends a group of U.S. bombers to destroy Moscow, and the ensuing attempts to stop the bomber group before it can deploy a nuclear first strike. The film features performances by actors Henry Fonda, Dan O'Herlihy, Walter Matthau, Frank Overton, Larry Hagman, Fritz Weaver, Dana Elcar, Dom DeLuise and Sorrell Booke.


title: Fail Safe (1964 film)

text: In 2000, the novel was adapted again as a televised play starring George Clooney, Richard Dreyfuss and Noah Wyle, and broadcast live in black and white on CBS.


title: Fail Safe (1964 film)

text: United States Air Force General Black has been having recurring dreams in which a Spanish matador kills a bull before a cheering crowd. Black flies to Washington, D.C. to attend a conference led by Dr. Groeteschele, a political scientist renowned for his expertise on the politics of nuclear weapons.


title: Fail Safe (1964 film)

text: Groeteschele is a fervent anti-communist. At a dinner party the evening before, he dismisses the fears that such a war would destroy the human race. To Groeteschele, nuclear war, like any other war, must have a victor and a loser, and the millions who might die in such a war are the price to be paid to end the Soviet threat.


title: Fail Safe (1964 film)

text: USAF early warning radar indicates that an unidentified aircraft has intruded into U.S. airspace. Shortly after, the intruder is identified as an off-course civilian airliner. However, a computer error causes one U.S. bomber group, Group 6, to erroneously receive apparently valid orders for a nuclear attack on Moscow. Attempts to rescind this order fail because a new Soviet countermeasure jams U.S. radio communications. Colonel Jack Grady, the group's commander, obeys the order, and Group 6 starts flying their "Vindicator" bombers over the Arctic towards Moscow.


title: Fail Safe (1964 film)

text: The President of the United States attempts to recall the bombers or shoot them down. Groeteschele is called on to advise the President. Though the military — including Black — warns the President that the Soviets will retaliate with everything they have, Groeteschele insists that the Soviets will surrender when Group 6 reaches Moscow. U.S. fighters scramble to intercept the Vindicators but, using their afterburners, they run out of fuel before they can reach Group 6 and plunge into the Arctic waters.


title: Fail Safe (1964 film)

text: Communications are opened with the Soviet Premier. The jamming ceases, but the crew follows their training, dismissing the counter-orders as a Soviet ruse. General Bogan advises the Soviets on how to trigger the Vindicators' defense missiles. The President struggles to find a solution that will avert a nuclear holocaust. He orders a U.S. nuclear bomber to fly towards New York City to bomb it if necessary, trading the largest American city for the largest Soviet city, despite knowing that the First Lady is there.


title: Fail Safe (1964 film)

text: The Soviets destroy most of Group 6, but miss both Grady's plane and a second decoy plane, carrying only defensive weapons. The second plane draws Soviet aircraft away from Grady, despite Bogan's desperate pleas to the Soviets, allowing Grady to evade their defenses.


title: Fail Safe (1964 film)

text: The Soviets, in desperation, fire all their weapons in the path of the remaining Vindicator. As Grady nears Moscow, the Americans are finally able to reach him via radio. Both the President and Grady's own wife desperately urge him to break off the attack. As Grady wavers, a salvo of Soviet missiles targets his plane. Grady decoys them with the last of his defensive missiles, causing them to detonate far above him, though Grady knows that his crew has received a fatal dose of radiation. Grady dismisses the pleas as a trick.


title: Fail Safe (1964 film)

text: The President remains in contact with the U.S. ambassador in Moscow until the telephone line abruptly cuts off with a loud squeal. He then orders General Black, whose wife and children live in New York City, to fly over the city and bomb it, using the Empire State Building as ground zero. After obeying, Black kills himself. As he dies, he calls out to his doomed wife telling her that he has at last learned the meaning of his recurring dream: "The Matador, the Matador ... me ... me."


title: Fail Safe (1964 film)

text: The last moments of the film show images of people in New York going about their daily lives, unaware of the coming disaster, followed by freeze-frames of their faces as the nuclear bomb explodes.


title: Fail Safe (1964 film)

text: The film was shot in black and white, in a dramatic, theatrical style with claustrophobic close-ups, sharp shadows and ponderous silences between several characters. Except for radio background during a scene at an Air Force base in Alaska, there is no original music score (only the electronic sound effects act as the film's main and end title music). With few exceptions, the action takes place largely in the White House underground bunker, the Pentagon war conference room, the SAC war room, and a single bomber cockpit (a "Vindicator bomber"). Shots of normal daily life are seen only after the title opening credits and in the final scene depicting an ordinary New York City day, its residents entirely unsuspecting of their imminent destruction, each scene ending with a freeze-frame shot at the moment of impact.


title: Fail Safe (1964 film)

text: The character of Groeteschele was inspired, according to Lumet's audio commentary on the film, by military strategist Herman Kahn.


title: Fail Safe (1964 film)

text: The "Vindicator" bombers (an invention of the novelists) are sometimes represented in the film with stock footage of Convair B-58 Hustlers. Fighters sent to attack the bombers are illustrated by film clips of the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, Convair F-102 Delta Dagger, Dassault Mirage III and McDonnell F-101 Voodoo. Stock footage was used because the Air Force declined to cooperate in the production, disliking the premise of a lack of control over nuclear strike forces. The scene depicting bombers taking off was stock footage of a single B-58 takeoff edited to look like several bombers taking off in succession. A nightmare quality is imparted to many of the flying sequences by depicting the planes in photographic negative. In several of the negative sequences the "Soviet interceptors" were actually French-built Mirage fighters with Israeli markings.


title: Fail Safe (1964 film)

text: When "Fail Safe" opened in October 1964, it garnered excellent reviews, but its box office performance was poor. Its failure rested with the similarity between it and the nuclear war satire "Dr. Strangelove", which had appeared in theaters first, in January 1964. Still, the film later was applauded as a Cold War thriller. The novel sold through to the 1980s and 1990s, and the film was given high marks for retaining the essence of the novel. Over the years, both the novel and the movie were well received for their depiction of a nuclear crisis, despite many critical reviews rejecting the notion that a breakdown in communication could result in the erroneous go-command depicted in the novel and the movie.


title: Fail Safe (1964 film)

text: "Fail Safe" and "Dr. Strangelove" were both produced in the period after the Cuban Missile Crisis, when people became much more sensitive to the threat of nuclear war. "Fail Safe" so closely resembled Peter George's novel "Red Alert", on which "Dr. Strangelove" was based, that "Dr. Strangelove" screenwriter/director Stanley Kubrick and George filed a copyright infringement lawsuit. The case was settled out of court. The result of the settlement was that Columbia Pictures, which had financed and was distributing "Dr. Strangelove", also bought "Fail Safe", which had been an independently financed production. Kubrick insisted that the studio release his movie first.


title: History of Native Americans in the United States

text: The history of Native Americans in the United States began before the founding of the country, tens of thousands of years ago with the settlement of the Americas by the Paleo-Indians. Anthropologists and archeologists have identified and studied a wide variety of cultures that existed during this era. Their subsequent contact with Europeans had a profound impact on their history afterwards.


text: According to the most generally accepted theory of the settlement of the Americas, migrations of humans from Eurasia to the Americas took place via Beringia, a land bridge which connected the two continents across what is now the Bering Strait. The number and if amin was part


text: of the migrations is still being debated. Falling sea levels associated with an intensive period of Quaternary glaciation created the Bering land bridge that joined Siberia to Alaska about 60–25,000 years ago. The latest this migration could have taken place is 12,000 years ago; the earliest remains undetermined.


text: The archaeological periods used are the classifications of archaeological periods and cultures established in Gordon Willey and Philip Phillips' 1958 book "Method and Theory in American Archaeology" which divided the archaeological record in the Americas into five phases; see Archaeology of the Americas.


text: The Paleo-Indian or Lithic stage lasted from the first arrival of people in the Americas until about (in North America). Three major migrations occurred, as traced by linguistic and genetic data; the early Paleoamericans soon spread throughout the Americas, diversifying into many hundreds of culturally distinct nations and tribes. By the North American climate was very similar to today's. A study published in 2012 gives genetic backing to the 1986 theory put forward by linguist Joseph Greenberg that the Americas must have been populated in three waves, based on language differences.


text: The Clovis culture, a megafauna hunting culture, is primarily identified by use of fluted spear points. Artifacts from this culture were first excavated in 1932 near Clovis, New Mexico. The Clovis culture ranged over much of North America and also appeared in South America. The culture is identified by the distinctive Clovis point, a flaked flint spear-point with a notched flute, by which it was inserted into a shaft. Dating of Clovis materials has been by association with animal bones and by the use of carbon dating methods. Recent reexaminations of Clovis materials using improved carbon-dating methods produced results of 11,050 and 10,800 radiocarbon years BP (roughly 9100 to 8850  BCE).


text: Numerous Paleoindian cultures occupied North America, with some arrayed around the Great Plains and Great Lakes of the modern United States of America and Canada, as well as adjacent areas to the West and Southwest. According to the oral histories of many of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, they have been living on this continent since their genesis, described by a wide range of traditional creation stories. Other tribes have stories that recount migrations across long tracts of land and a great river believed to be the Mississippi River. Genetic and linguistic data connect the indigenous people of this continent with ancient northeast Asians. Archeological and linguistic data has enabled scholars to discover some of the migrations within the Americas.


text: The Folsom tradition was characterized by the use of Folsom points as projectile tips and activities known from kill sites, where slaughter and butchering of bison took place. Folsom tools were left behind between 9000 BCE and 8000 BCE.


text: Na-Dené-speaking peoples entered North America starting around , reaching the Pacific Northwest by , and from there migrating along the Pacific Coast and into the interior. Linguists, anthropologists, and archeologists believe their ancestors constituted a separate migration into North America, later than the first Paleo-Indians. They migrated into Alaska and northern Canada, south along the Pacific Coast, into the interior of Canada, and south to the Great Plains and the American Southwest.


text: They were the earliest ancestors of the Athabascan-speaking peoples, including the present-day and historical Navajo and Apache. They constructed large multi-family dwellings in their villages, which were used seasonally. People did not live there year-round, but for the summer to hunt and fish, and to gather food supplies for the winter.


text: The Archaic period lasted until about . A major culture of the Archaic stage was the Mound builders, who stretched from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. Since the 1990s, archeologists have explored and dated eleven Middle Archaic sites in present-day Louisiana and Florida at which early cultures built complexes with multiple earthwork mounds; they were societies of hunter-gatherers rather than the settled agriculturalists believed necessary according to the theory of Neolithic Revolution to sustain such large villages over long periods. Native American cultures are not included in characterizations of advanced Stone Age cultures as "Neolithic," which is a category that more often includes only the cultures in Eurasia, Africa, and other regions.


text: The prime example is Watson Brake in northern Louisiana, whose 11-mound complex is dated to , making it the oldest dated site in the Americas for such complex construction. It is nearly 2,000 years older than the Poverty Point site. Construction of the mounds went on for 500 years until was abandoned about , probably due to changing environmental conditions.


text: Poverty Point culture is a Late Archaic archaeological culture that inhabited the area of the lower Mississippi Valley and surrounding Gulf Coast. The culture thrived from to , during the Late Archaic period. Evidence of this culture has been found at more than 100 sites, from the major complex at Poverty Point, Louisiana (a UNESCO World Heritage site) across a range to the Jaketown Site near Belzoni, Mississippi.


text: Poverty Point is a complex of six major earthwork concentric rings, with additional platform mounds at the site. Artifacts show the people traded with other Native Americans located from Georgia to the Great Lakes region. This is one among numerous mound sites of complex indigenous cultures throughout the Mississippi and Ohio valleys. They were one of several succeeding cultures often referred to as mound builders.


text: The Oshara tradition people lived from to . They were part of the Southwestern Archaic tradition centered in north-central New Mexico, the San Juan Basin, the Rio Grande Valley, southern Colorado, and southeastern Utah.


text: The Post-Archaic stage includes the Formative, Classic and Post-Classic stages in Willey and Phillipp's scheme. The Formative stage lasted from until about , the Classic from about to , while the Post-Classic refers to until the present day. It also includes the Woodland period of North American pre-Columbian, whose culture refers to the time period from roughly to in the eastern part of North America.


text: The term "Woodland" was coined in the 1930s and refers to prehistoric sites dated between the Archaic period and the Mississippian cultures. The Adena culture was a Native American culture that existed from to , in a time known as the Early Woodland period. The Adena culture refers to what was probably a number of related Native American societies sharing a burial complex and ceremonial system.


text: The Hopewell tradition is the term for the common aspects of the Woodland period culture that flourished along rivers in the Eastern Woodlands from to . The Hopewell tradition was not a single culture or society, but a widely dispersed set of related populations, who were connected by a common network of trade routes, known as the Hopewell Exchange System. At its greatest extent, the Hopewell exchange system ran from the Southeastern Woodlands into the northern shores of Lake Ontario. Within this area, societies participated in a high degree of exchange; most activities was conducted along the waterways that served as their major transportation routes. The Hopewell exchange system traded materials from all over North America.


text: The Coles Creek culture was an indigenous development of the Lower Mississippi Valley that took place between the late Woodland period and the later Plaquemine culture period. The period is marked by the increased use of flat-topped platform mounds arranged around central plazas, more complex political institutions, and a subsistence strategy still grounded in the Eastern Agricultural Complex and hunting rather than on the maize plant as would happen in the succeeding Plaquemine Mississippian period. The culture was originally defined by the unique decoration on grog-tempered ceramic ware by James A. Ford after his investigations at the Mazique Archeological Site. He had studied both the Mazique and Coles Creek Sites, and almost went with the "Mazique culture", but decided on the less historically involved sites name. It is ancestral to the Plaquemine culture.


text: The Mississippian culture which extended throughout the Ohio and Mississippi valleys and built sites throughout the Southeast created the largest earthworks in North America north of Mexico, most notably at Cahokia, on a tributary of the Mississippi River in present-day Illinois.


text: The Hohokam culture was centered along American Southwest. The early Hohokam founded a series of small villages along the middle Gila River. They raised corn, squash, and beans. The communities were near good arable land, with dry farming common in the earlier years of this period. They were known for their pottery, using the paddle-and-anvil technique. The Classical period of the culture saw the rise in architecture and ceramics. Buildings were grouped into walled compounds, as well as earthen platform mounds. Platform mounds were built along river as well as irrigation canal systems, suggesting these sites were administrative centers allocating water and coordinating canal labor. Polychrome pottery appeared, and inhumation burial replaced cremation. The trade included that of shells and other exotics. Social and climatic factors led to a decline and abandonment of the area after .


text: The Ancestral Puebloan culture covered present-day Four Corners region of the United States, comprising southern Utah, northern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southwestern Colorado. It is believed that the Ancestral Puebloans developed, at least in part, from the Oshara tradition, who developed from the Picosa culture. They lived in a range of structures that included small family pit houses, larger clan type structures, grand pueblos, and cliff sited dwellings. The Ancestral Puebloans possessed a complex network that stretched across the Colorado Plateau linking hundreds of communities and population centers. The culture is perhaps best known for the stone and earth dwellings built along cliff walls, particularly during the Pueblo II and Pueblo III eras.


text: The Iroquois League of Nations or "People of the Long House", based in present-day upstate and western New York, had a confederacy model from the mid-15th  century. It has been suggested that their culture contributed to political thinking during the development of the later United States government. Their system of affiliation was a kind of federation, different from the strong, centralized European monarchies.


text: After 1492 European exploration and colonization of the Americas revolutionized how the Old and New Worlds perceived themselves. One of the first major contacts, in what would be called the American Deep South, occurred when the conquistador Juan Ponce de León landed in La Florida in April 1513. He was later followed by other Spanish explorers, such as Pánfilo de Narváez in 1528 and Hernando de Soto in 1539. The subsequent European colonists in North America often rationalized their expansion of empire with the assumption that they were saving a barbaric, pagan world by spreading Christian civilization.


text: In the Spanish colonization of the Americas, the policy of Indian Reductions resulted in the forced conversions to Catholicism of the indigenous people in northern "Nueva España." They had long-established spiritual and religious traditions and theological beliefs. What developed during the colonial years and since has been a syncretic Catholicism that absorbed and reflected indigenous beliefs; the religion changed in New Spain.


text: From the 16th through the 19th centuries, the population of Native Americans declined in the following ways: epidemic diseases brought from Europe; violence and warfare at the hands of European explorers and colonists, as well as between tribes; displacement from their lands; internal warfare, enslavement; and a high rate of intermarriage. Most mainstream scholars believe that, among the various contributing factors, epidemic disease was the overwhelming cause of the population decline of the American natives because of their lack of immunity to new diseases brought from Europe. With the rapid declines of some populations and continuing rivalries among their nations, Native Americans sometimes re-organized to form new cultural groups, such as the Seminoles of Florida in the 19th century and the Mission Indians of Alta California. Some scholars characterize the treatment of Native Americans by the US as genocide or genocidal whilst others dispute this characterization.


text: Estimating the number of Native Americans living in what is today the United States of America before the arrival of the European explorers and settlers has been the subject of much debate. While it is difficult to determine exactly how many Natives lived in North America before Columbus, estimates range from a low of 2.1 million (Ubelaker 1976) to 7 million people (Russell Thornton) to a high of 18 million (Dobyns 1983). A low estimate of around 1 million was first posited by the anthropologist James Mooney in the 1890s, by calculating population density of each culture area based on its carrying capacity.


text: In 1965, the American anthropologist Henry F. Dobyns published studies estimating the original population to have been 10 to 12 million. By 1983, he increased his estimates to 18 million. Historian David Henige criticized higher estimates such as those of Dobyns', writing that many population figures are the result of arbitrary formulas selectively applied to numbers from unreliable historical sources. By 1800, the Native population of the present-day United States had declined to approximately 600,000, and only 250,000 Native Americans remained in the 1890s.


text: Chicken pox and measles, endemic but rarely fatal among Europeans (long after being introduced from Asia), often proved deadly to Native Americans. Smallpox epidemics often immediately followed European exploration and sometimes destroyed entire village populations. While precise figures are difficult to determine, some historians estimate that at least 30% (and sometimes 50% to 70%) of some Native populations died after first contact due to Eurasian smallpox. One element of the Columbian exchange suggests explorers from the Christopher Columbus expedition contracted syphilis from indigenous peoples and carried it back to Europe, where it spread widely. Other researchers believe that the disease existed in Europe and Asia before Columbus and his men returned from exposure to indigenous peoples of the Americas, but that they brought back a more virulent form.


text: In the 100 years following the arrival of the Spanish to the Americas, large disease epidemics depopulated large parts of the Eastern Woodlands in the 15th century. In 1618–1619, smallpox killed 90% of the Native Americans in the area of the Massachusetts Bay. Historians believe many Mohawk in present-day New York became infected after contact with children of Dutch traders in Albany in 1634. The disease swept through Mohawk villages, reaching the Onondaga at Lake Ontario by 1636, and the lands of the western Iroquois by 1679, as it was carried by Mohawk and other Native Americans who traveled the trading routes. The high rate of fatalities caused breakdowns in Native American societies and disrupted generational exchange of culture.


text: After European explorers reached the West Coast in the 1770s, smallpox rapidly killed at least 30% of Northwest Coast Native Americans. For the next 80 to 100 years, smallpox and other diseases devastated native populations in the region. Puget Sound area populations, once estimated as high as 37,000 people, were reduced to only 9,000 survivors by the time settlers arrived en masse in the mid-19th century. The Spanish missions in California did not have a large effect on the overall population of Native Americans because the small number of missions was concentrated in a small area along the southern and central coast. The numbers of indigenes decreased more rapidly after California ceased to be a Spanish colony, especially during the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th (see chart on the right).


text: Smallpox epidemics in 1780–1782 and 1837–1838 brought devastation and drastic depopulation among the Plains Indians. By 1832, the federal government established a smallpox vaccination program for Native Americans ("The Indian Vaccination Act of 1832"). It was the first federal program created to address a health problem of Native Americans.


text: With the meeting of two worlds, animals, insects, and plants were carried from one to the other, both deliberately and by chance, in what is called the Columbian Exchange. Sheep, pigs, horses, and cattle were all Old World animals that were introduced to contemporary Native Americans who never knew such animals.


text: In the 16th century, Spaniards and other Europeans brought horses to Mexico. Some of the horses escaped and began to breed and increase their numbers in the wild. The early American horse had been game for the earliest humans on the continent. It was hunted to extinction about , just after the end of the last glacial period. Native Americans benefited from the reintroduction of horses, as they adopted the use of the animals, they began to change their cultures in substantial ways, especially by extending their nomadic ranges for hunting.


text: The reintroduction of the horse to North America had a profound impact on Native American culture of the Great Plains. The tribes trained and used horses to ride and to carry packs or pull travois. The people fully incorporated the use of horses into their societies and expanded their territories. They used horses to carry goods for exchange with neighboring tribes, to hunt game, especially bison, and to conduct wars and horse raids.


text: The 16th century saw the first contacts between Native Americans in what was to become the United States and European explorers and settlers.


text: One of the first major contacts, in what would be called the American Deep South, occurred when the conquistador Juan Ponce de León landed in La Florida in April 1513. There he encountered the Timucuan and Ais peoples. De León returned in 1521 in an attempt at colonization, but after fierce resistance from the Calusa people, the attempt was abandoned. He was later followed by other Spanish explorers, such as Pánfilo de Narváez in 1528 and Hernando de Soto in 1539.


text: In 1536 a group of four Spanish explorers and one enslaved black Moorish man, found themselves stranded on the coast of what is now Texas. The group was led by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, and for a time they were held in semi captivity by the coastal natives. The enslaved Moor, whose name was Esterban, later became a scout who had encounters with the Zunis. Rumors of the fabled Seven Cities of Gold being located in the northern area of New Spain began to emerge amongst the Spaniards. And in 1540 Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, using the information gained by the scouting expeditions of Esterban and Fray Marcos, set out to conquer Cíbola. Coronado and his band of over one thousand found no cities of gold. What the conquistadors did encounter was Hawikuh, a Zuni town. There the Zuni people, having never seen horses or a band of this size before, were frightened. Although Coronado had been explicitly instructed not to harm the natives, when the Zuni refused his insistence for food and supplies, Coronado ordered an attack on the town.


text: Through the mid 17th century the Beaver Wars were fought over the fur trade between the Iroquois and the Hurons, the northern Algonquians, and their French allies. During the war the Iroquois destroyed several large tribal confederacies—including the Huron, Neutral, Erie, Susquehannock, and Shawnee, and became dominant in the region and enlarged their territory.


text: King Philip's War, also called Metacom's War or Metacom's Rebellion, was an armed conflict between Native American inhabitants of present-day southern New England and English colonists and their Native American allies from 1675 to 1676. It continued in northern New England (primarily on the Maine frontier) even after King Philip was killed, until a treaty was signed at Casco Bay in April 1678. According to a combined estimate of loss of life in Schultz and Tougias' "King Philip's War, The History and Legacy of America's Forgotten Conflict" (based on sources from the Department of Defense, the Bureau of Census, and the work of Colonial historian Francis Jennings), 800 out of 52,000 English colonists of New England (1 out of every 65) and 3,000 out of 20,000 natives (3 out of every 20) lost their lives due to the war, which makes it proportionately one of the bloodiest and costliest in the history of America. More than half of New England's 90 towns were assaulted by Native American warriors. One in ten soldiers on both sides were wounded or killed.


text: The war is named after the main leader of the Native American side, Metacomet (also known as Metacom or Pometacom) who was known to the English as King Philip. He was the last Massasoit (Great Leader) of the Pokanoket Tribe/Pokanoket Federation and Wampanoag Nation. Upon their loss to the Colonists, many managed to flee to the North to continue their fight against the British (Massachusetts Bay Colony) by joining with the Abenaki Tribes and Wabanaki Federation.


text: Between 1754 and 1763, many Native American tribes were involved in the French and Indian War/Seven Years' War. Those involved in the fur trade in the northern areas tended to ally with French forces against British colonial militias. Native Americans fought on both sides of the conflict. The greater number of tribes fought with the French in the hopes of checking British expansion. The British had made fewer allies, but it was joined by some tribes that wanted to prove assimilation and loyalty in support of treaties to preserve their territories. They were often disappointed when such treaties were later overturned. The tribes had their own purposes, using their alliances with the European powers to battle traditional Native enemies.


text: Native American culture began to have an influence on European thought in this period. Some Europeans considered Native American societies to be representative of a golden age known to them only in folk history. The political theorist Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote that the idea of freedom and democratic ideals was born in the Americas because "it was only in America" that Europeans from 1500 to 1776 knew of societies that were "truly free."


text: In the 20th century, some writers have credited the Iroquois nations' political confederacy and democratic government as being influences for the development of the Articles of Confederation and the United States Constitution. In October 1988, the U.S. Congress passed Concurrent Resolution 331 to recognize the influence of the Iroquois Constitution upon the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.


text: However, leading historians of the period note that historic evidence is lacking to support such an interpretation. Gordon Wood wrote, "The English colonists did not need the Indians to tell them about federalism or self-government. The New England Confederation was organized as early as 1643." The historian Jack Rakove, a specialist in early American history, in 2005 noted that the voluminous documentation of the Constitutional proceedings "contain no significant reference to Iroquois." Secondly, he notes: "All the key political concepts that were the stuff of American political discourse before the Revolution and after, had obvious European antecedents and referents: bicameralism, separation of powers, confederations, and the like."


text: During the American Revolution, the newly proclaimed United States competed with the British for the allegiance of Native American nations east of the Mississippi River. Most Native Americans who joined the struggle sided with the British, based both on their trading relationships and hopes that colonial defeat would result in a halt to further colonial expansion onto Native American land. Many native communities were divided over which side to support in the war and others wanted to remain neutral. Seeking out treaties with the Indigenous inhabitants soon became a very pressing matter. It was during the American Revolution that the newly forming United States would sign its first treaty as a nation with the Indigenous inhabitants. In a bid to gain ground near the British stronghold of Detroit  the Continental Congress reached out to the Leni Lenape, also known as the Delawares, to form an alliance. Understanding a treaty would be the best way to secure this alliance, in 1778 The Treaty with The Delawares was signed by representatives from the Congress and the Lenape. For the Iroquois Confederacy, based in New York, the American Revolution resulted in civil war. The only Iroquois tribes to ally with the colonials were the Oneida and Tuscarora.


text: Frontier warfare during the American Revolution was particularly brutal, with noncombatants suffering greatly. Both sides committed numerous atrocities and destroyed villages and food supplies to reduce the ability of people to fight, as in frequent raids in the Mohawk Valley and western New York. The largest of these expeditions was the Sullivan Expedition of 1779, in which American colonial troops destroyed more than 40 Iroquois villages to neutralize Iroquois raids in upstate New York. The expedition failed to have the desired effect: Native American activity became even more determined.


text: The British made peace with the Americans in the Treaty of Paris (1783), through which they ceded vast Native American territories to the United States without informing or consulting with the Native Americans. Within the Peace Treaty of Paris of 1783, no mention of Indigenous peoples or their rights were made. The United States initially treated the Native Americans who had fought as allies with the British as a conquered people who had lost their lands. Although most members of the Iroquois tribes went to Canada with the Loyalists, others tried to stay in New York and western territories to maintain their lands. The state of New York made a separate treaty with Iroquois nations and put up for sale of land that had previously been their territories. The state established small reservations in western New York for the remnant peoples.


text: The United States was eager to expand, to develop farming and settlements in new areas, and to satisfy land hunger of settlers from New England and new immigrants. The belief and inaccurate presumption was that the land was not settled and existed in a state of nature and therefore was free to be settled by citizens of the newly formed United States. In the years after the American Revolution, the newly formed nation set about acquiring lands in the Northwest Territory through a multitude of treaties with Native nations. The coercive tactics used to obtain these treaties often left the Native Nations with the option to sell the land or face war. The states and settlers were frequently at odds with this policy. Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance in 1787, which was conceived to allow for the United States to sell lands inhabited by the Native nations to settlers willing to move into that area.


text: During this time, what came to be called The Northwest Indian War also began, led by the Native nations of the Ohio country trying to repulse American settlers and halt the seizure of land by the Continental Congress. Leaders such as Little Turtle and Blue Jacket lead the allied tribes of the Miamis and Shawnees, who were among the tribes that had been disregarded during the signing of the Peace Treaty of Paris.


text: European nations sent Native Americans (sometimes against their will) to the Old World as objects of curiosity. They often entertained royalty and were sometimes prey to commercial purposes. Christianization of Native Americans was a charted purpose for some European colonies.


text: United States policy toward Native Americans had continued to evolve after the American Revolution. George Washington and Henry Knox believed that Native Americans were equals but that their society was inferior. Washington formulated a policy to encourage the "civilizing" process. Washington had a six-point plan for civilization which included:


text: Robert Remini, a historian, wrote 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." The United States appointed agents, like Benjamin Hawkins, to live among the Native Americans and to teach them how to live like whites.


text: In the late 18th century, reformers starting with Washington and Knox, supported educating native children and adults, in efforts to "civilize" or otherwise assimilate Native Americans to the larger society (as opposed to relegating them to reservations). The Civilization Fund Act of 1819 promoted this civilization policy by providing funding to societies (mostly religious) who worked on Native American improvement.


text: The end of the 18th century also saw the revival of spirituality among the Iroquois society and other nations of the eastern seaboard. After years of war and uncertainty, despair and demoralization led some within these communities to turn to alcohol. In 1799, the Seneca warrior Handsome Lake, who suffered from depression and alcoholism himself, received a spiritual vision. This vision led Handsome Lake to travel among the Seneca as a religious prophet. He preached about a revival of the traditional ceremonies of the Haudenosaunee nations and a renouncement of drinking. This movement, which also carried some elements of Christianity, came to be known as Gaiwiio, or Good Word.


text: As American expansion continued, Native Americans resisted settlers' encroachment in several regions of the new nation (and in unorganized territories), from the Northwest to the Southeast, and then in the West, as settlers encountered the tribes of the Great Plains.


text: East of the Mississippi River, an intertribal army led by Tecumseh, a Shawnee chief and noted orator, fought a number of engagements in the Northwest during the period 1811–12, known as Tecumseh's War. In the latter stages, Tecumseh's group allied with the British forces in the War of 1812 and was instrumental in the conquest of Detroit. Conflicts in the Southeast include the Creek War and Seminole Wars, both before and after the Indian Removals of most members of the Five Civilized Tribes beginning in the 1830s under President Andrew Jackson's policies.


text: Native American nations on the plains in the west engaged in armed conflicts with the United States throughout the 19th century, through what were called generally "Indian Wars." The Battle of Little Bighorn (1876) was one of the greatest Native American victories. Defeats included the Sioux Uprising of 1862, the Sand Creek Massacre (1864) and Wounded Knee in 1890. Indian Wars continued into the early 20th century.


text: According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census (1894), "The Indian wars under the government of the United States have been more than 40 in number. They have cost the lives of about 19,000 white men, women and children, including those killed in individual combats, and the lives of about 30,000 Indians. The actual number of killed and wounded Indians must be very much higher than the given... Fifty percent additional would be a safe estimate..."


text: In July 1845, the New York newspaper editor John L. O’Sullivan coined the phrase, "Manifest Destiny," as the "design of Providence" supporting the territorial expansion of the United States. Manifest Destiny had serious consequences for Native Americans, since continental expansion for the United States took place at the cost of their occupied land. Manifest Destiny was a justification for expansion and westward movement, or, in some interpretations, an ideology or doctrine that helped to promote the progress of civilization. Advocates of Manifest Destiny believed that expansion was not only good, but that it was obvious and certain. The term was first used primarily by Jacksonian Democrats in the 1840s to promote the annexation of much of what is now the Western United States (the Oregon Territory, the Texas Annexation, and the Mexican Cession).


text: In 1851, delegates from the federal government and upwards of ten thousand Indigenous peoples, consisting of various Plains tribes including the Sioux, Cheyenne and Crow among many others, assembled. They gathered for the purpose of signing the Treaty of Fort Laramie which would set the definitive boundaries of the tribal territories, and tribes were to agree to leave travelers through the territory unharmed. In 1853 members of the tribes from the southern Plains such as the Comanches, Kiowas, and Kiowa Apaches signed treaties similar to the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851.


text: In the years following the 1851 treaty, tracks were laid for the Union Pacific Railroad and gold was discovered in Montana and Colorado. These factors amongst others led to increased traffic through tribal land which in turn disrupted the game animals that were necessary for the Plains’ nations survival. Conflicts between  the U.S. Army, settlers and Native Americans continued, however in 1864 after the massacre of a Cheyenne village along the banks of Sand Cheek, war between the U.S and the tribes of the Great Plains was inevitable.


text: After a decade of wars between the U.S and the tribes of the Great Plains, including Red Cloud's War in 1866, the federal government again called for a treaty.  In 1868 the Peace Treaty of Fort Laramie was signed, with one of the terms of the treaty being that the Sioux would settle on the Black hills Reservation in Dakota Territory.


text: In 1874 gold was discovered within the Black Hills, land which is to this day most sacred to the Sioux. The Black Hills were at this time also the center of the Sioux Nation, the federal government  offered six million dollars for the land, however Sioux leaders refused to sell. (In the Hands) By 1877 the Black Hills were confiscated, and the land that had once been the Sioux Nation was further divided into six smaller reservations.


text: The age of Manifest Destiny, which came to be associated with extinguishing American Indian territorial claims and moving them to reservations, gained ground as the United States population explored and settled west of the Mississippi River. Although Indian Removal from the Southeast had been proposed by some as a humanitarian measure to ensure their survival away from Americans, conflicts of the 19th century led some European-Americans to regard the natives as "savages".


text: The period of the Gold Rush was marked by the California Genocide. Under US sovereignty, the indigenous population plunged from approximately 150,000 in 1848 to 30,000 in 1870 and reached its nadir of 16,000 in 1900. Thousands of California Native Americans, including women and children, are documented to have been killed by non-Native Americans in this period. The dispossession and murder of California Native Americans was aided by institutions of the state of California, which encouraged indigenous peoples to be killed with impunity.


text: Many Native Americans served in the military during the Civil War, on both sides. By fighting with the whites, Native Americans hoped to gain favor with the prevailing government by supporting the war effort.


text: General Ely S. Parker, a member of the Seneca tribe, transcribed the terms of the articles of surrender which General Robert E. Lee signed at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. Gen. Parker, who served as Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's military secretary and was a trained attorney, was once rejected for Union military service because of his race. At Appomattox, Lee is said to have remarked to Parker, "I am glad to see one real American here," to which Parker replied, "We are all Americans." General Stand Watie, a leader of the Cherokee Nation and Confederate Indian cavalry commander, was the last Confederate General to surrender his troops.


text: In the 19th century, the incessant westward expansion of the United States incrementally compelled large numbers of Native Americans to resettle further west, often by force, almost always reluctantly. Native Americans believed this forced relocation illegal, given the Hopewell Treaty of 1785. Under President Andrew Jackson, United States Congress passed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which authorized the President to conduct treaties to exchange Native American land east of the Mississippi River for lands west of the river.


text: As many as 100,000 Native Americans relocated to the West as a result of this Indian Removal policy. In theory, relocation was supposed to be voluntary and many Native Americans did remain in the East. In practice, great pressure was put on Native American leaders to sign removal treaties.


text: The most egregious violation of the stated intention of the removal policy took place under the Treaty of New Echota, which was signed by a dissident faction of Cherokees but not the principal chief. The following year, the Cherokee conceded to removal, but Georgia included their land in a lottery for European-American settlement before that. President Jackson used the military to gather and transport the Cherokee to the west, whose timing and lack of adequate supplies led to the deaths of an estimated 4,000 Cherokees on the Trail of Tears. About 17,000 Cherokees, along with approximately 2,000 enslaved blacks held by Cherokees, were taken by force migration to Indian Territory.


text: Tribes were generally located to reservations where they could more easily be separated from traditional life and pushed into European-American society. Some southern states additionally enacted laws in the 19th century forbidding non-Native American settlement on Native American lands, with the intention to prevent sympathetic white missionaries from aiding the scattered Native American resistance.


text: In 1817, the Cherokee became the first Native Americans recognized as U.S. citizens. Under Article 8 of the 1817 Cherokee treaty, "Upwards of 300 Cherokees (Heads of Families) in the honest simplicity of their souls, made an election to become American citizens." The next earliest recorded date of Native Americans' becoming U.S. citizens was in 1831, when some Mississippi Choctaw became citizens after the United States Congress ratified the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek.


text: Article 22 sought to put a Choctaw representative in the U.S. House of Representatives. Under article XIV of that treaty, any Choctaw who elected not to move with the Choctaw Nation could become an American citizen when he registered and if he stayed on designated lands for five years after treaty ratification. Through the years, Native Americans became U.S. citizens by:


text: In 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney expressed the opinion of the court that since Native Americans were "free and independent people," they could become U.S. citizens. Taney asserted that Native Americans could be naturalized and join the "political community" of the United States.


text: After the American Civil War, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 states, "that all persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States". This was affirmed by the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. But the concept of Native Americans as U.S. citizens fell out of favor among politicians at the time. Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan commented, “I am not yet prepared to pass a sweeping act of naturalization by which all the Indian savages, wild or tame, belonging to a tribal relation, are to become my fellow-citizens and go to the polls and vote with me". ("Congressional Globe", 1866, 2895) In a Senate floor debate regarding the Fourteenth Amendment, James Rood Doolittle of Wisconsin stated, " ... all those wild Indians to be citizens of the United States, the Great Republic of the world, whose citizenship should be a title as proud as that of king, and whose danger is that you may degrade that citizenship ("Congressional Globe", 1866, 2892)."


text: In 1871 Congress added a rider to the Indian Appropriations Act ending United States recognition of additional Native American tribes or independent nations, and prohibiting additional treaties.


text: After the Indian wars in the late 19th century, the United States established Native American boarding schools, initially run primarily by or affiliated with Christian missionaries. At this time American society thought that Native American children needed to be acculturated to the general society. The boarding school experience often proved traumatic to Native American children, who were forbidden to speak their native languages, taught Christianity and denied the right to practice their native religions, and in numerous other ways forced to abandon their Native American identities and adopt European-American culture.


text: Since the late 20th century, investigations have documented cases of sexual, physical and mental abuse occurring at such schools. While problems were documented as early as the 1920s, some of the schools continued into the 1960s. Since the rise of self-determination for Native Americans, they have generally emphasized education of their children at schools near where they live. In addition, many federally recognized tribes have taken over operations of such schools and added programs of language retention and revival to strengthen their cultures. Beginning in the 1970s, tribes have also founded colleges at their reservations, controlled and operated by Native Americans, to educate their young for jobs as well as to pass on their cultures.


text: On August 29, 1911 Ishi, generally considered to have been the last Native American to live most of his life without contact with European-American culture, was discovered near Oroville, California after a forest fire drove him from nearby mountains. He was the last of his tribe, the rest having been massacred by a party of White "Indian fighters" in 1865 when he was a boy. After being jailed in protective custody, Ishi was released to anthropologists led by Alfred L. Kroeber at the University of California. They studied his Southern Yahi language and culture, and provided him a home until his death from tuberculosis five years later.


text: On June 2, 1924 U.S. Republican President Calvin Coolidge signed the Indian Citizenship Act, which made citizens of the United States of all Native Americans born in the United States and its territories and who were not already citizens. Prior to passage of the act, nearly two-thirds of Native Americans were already U.S. citizens.


text: American Indians today have all the rights guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution, can vote in elections, and run for political office. There has been controversy over how much the federal government has jurisdiction over tribal affairs, sovereignty, and cultural practices.


text: Some 44,000 Native Americans served in the United States military during World War II: at the time, one-third of all able-bodied Indian men from 18 to 50 years of age. The entry of young men into the United States military during World War II has been described as the first large-scale exodus of indigenous peoples from the reservations. It involved more people than any migration since the removals from areas east of the Mississippi River of the early 19th century.


text: The men's service with the US military in the international conflict was a turning point in Native American history. The overwhelming majority of Native Americans welcomed the opportunity to serve; they had a voluntary enlistment rate that was 40% higher than those who were drafted. War Department officials said that if the entire population had enlisted in the same proportion as the Native Americans, the response would have rendered the draft unnecessary.


text: Their fellow soldiers often held them in high esteem, in part since the legend of the tough Native American warrior had become a part of the fabric of American historical legend. White servicemen sometimes showed a lighthearted respect toward Native American comrades by calling them "chief". Native American cultures were profoundly changed after their young men returned home, because of their wide contact with the world outside of the reservation system. "The war", said the U.S. Indian Commissioner in 1945, "caused the greatest disruption of Native life since the beginning of the reservation era", affecting the habits, views, and economic well-being of tribal members.


text: The most significant of these changes was the opportunity—as a result of wartime labor shortages—to find well-paying work in cities. After the war many Native Americans relocated to urban areas, particularly on the West Coast with the buildup of the defense industry. In the 1950s the federal government had a relocation policy encouraging them to do so because of economic opportunity in cities. But Native Americans struggled with discrimination and the great cultural changes in leaving their reservations behind.


text: There were also losses as a result of the war. For instance, a total of 1,200 Pueblo men served in World War II; only about half came home alive. In addition many more Navajo served as Code talkers for the military in the Pacific. The code they made, although cryptologically very simple, was never cracked by the Japanese.


text: Military service and urban residency contributed to the rise of American Indian activism, particularly after the 1960s and the occupation of Alcatraz Island (1969–1971) by a student Indian group from San Francisco. In the same period, the American Indian Movement (AIM) was founded in Minneapolis, and chapters were established throughout the country, where American Indians combined spiritual and political activism. Political protests gained national media attention and the sympathy of the American public.


text: Through the mid-1970s, conflicts between governments and Native Americans occasionally erupted into violence. A notable late 20th-century event was the Wounded Knee incident on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Upset with tribal government and the failures of the federal government to enforce treaty rights, about 300 Oglala Lakota and American Indian Movement (AIM) activists took control of Wounded Knee on February 27, 1973.


text: Indian activists from around the country joined them at Pine Ridge, and the occupation became a symbol of rising American Indian identity and power. Federal law enforcement officials and the national guard cordoned off the town, and the two sides had a standoff for 71 days. During much gunfire, one United States Marshal was wounded and paralyzed. In late April a Cherokee and local Lakota man were killed by gunfire; the Lakota elders ended the occupation to ensure no more lives were lost.


text: In June 1975, two FBI agents seeking to make an armed robbery arrest at Pine Ridge Reservation were wounded in a firefight, and killed at close range. The AIM activist Leonard Peltier was sentenced in 1976 to two consecutive terms of life in prison in the FBI deaths.


text: In 1968 the government enacted the Indian Civil Rights Act. This gave tribal members most of the protections against abuses by tribal governments that the Bill of Rights accords to all U.S. citizens with respect to the federal government. In 1975 the U.S. government passed the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, marking the culmination of 15 years of policy changes. It resulted from American Indian activism, the Civil Rights Movement, and community development aspects of President Lyndon Johnson's social programs of the 1960s. The Act recognized the right and need of Native Americans for self-determination. It marked the U.S. government's turn away from the 1950s policy of termination of the relationship between tribes and the government. The U.S. government encouraged Native Americans' efforts at self-government and determining their futures. Tribes have developed organizations to administer their own social, welfare and housing programs, for instance. Tribal self-determination has created tension with respect to the federal government's historic trust obligation to care for Indians, however, the Bureau of Indian Affairs has never lived up to that responsibility.


text: By this time, tribes had already started to establish community schools to replace the BIA boarding schools. Led by the Navajo Nation in 1968, tribes started tribal colleges and universities, to build their own models of education on reservations, preserve and revive their cultures, and develop educated workforces. In 1994 the U.S. Congress passed legislation recognizing the tribal colleges as land-grant colleges, which provided opportunities for funding. Thirty-two tribal colleges in the United States belong to the American Indian Higher Education Consortium. By the early 21st century, tribal nations had also established numerous language revival programs in their schools.


text: In addition, Native American activism has led major universities across the country to establish Native American studies programs and departments, increasing awareness of the strengths of Indian cultures, providing opportunities for academics, and deepening research on history and cultures in the United States. Native Americans have entered academia; journalism and media; politics at local, state and federal levels; and public service, for instance, influencing medical research and policy to identify issues related to American Indians.


text: In 1981, Tim Giago founded the "Lakota Times", an independent Native American newspaper, located at the Pine Ridge Reservation but not controlled by tribal government. He later founded the Native American Journalists Association. Other independent newspapers and media corporations have been developed, so that Native American journalists are contributing perspective on their own affairs and other policies and events.


text: In 2004 Senator Sam Brownback (Republican of Kansas) introduced a joint resolution (Senate Joint Resolution 37) to "offer an apology to all Native Peoples on behalf of the United States" for past "ill-conceived policies" by the U.S. government regarding Indian Tribes. President Barack Obama signed the historic apology into law in 2009, as Section 8113 of the 2010 defense appropriations bill.


text: After years of investigation and independent work by Native American journalists, in 2003 the U.S. government indicted suspects in the December 1975 murder of Anna Mae Aquash at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. A "Mi'kmaq," Aquash was the highest-ranking woman activist in the American Indian Movement (AIM) at the time. She was killed several months after two FBI agents had been killed at the reservation. Many Lakota believe that she was killed by AIM on suspicion of having been an FBI informant, but she never worked for the FBI. Arlo Looking Cloud was convicted in federal court in 2004. In 2007 the United States extradited AIM activist John Graham from Canada to stand trial for her murder. He was also convicted and sentenced to life.


text: The Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 (P.L. 101-644) is a truth-in-advertising law that prohibits misrepresentation in marketing of American Indian or Alaska Native arts and crafts products within the United States, including dreamcatchers. It is illegal to offer or display for sale, or sell any art or craft product in a manner that falsely suggests it is Indian produced.


text: Native American tribes and individuals began to file suits against the federal government over a range of issues, especially land claims and mismanagement of trust lands and fees. A number of longstanding cases were finally settled by the administration of President Barack Obama, who made a commitment to improve relations between the federal government and the tribes. Among these was "Cobell v. Salazar," a class action suit settled in 2009, with Congress appropriating funds in 2010. Another was "Keepseagle v. ", settled in April 2011. The $760 million settlement "designated $680 million for Native American farmers who had faced discrimination from the U.S. Department of Agriculture over a period of several years in the past.


text: By 2012, "the Justice and Interior departments had reached settlements totaling more than $1 billion with 41 tribes for claims of mismanagement." The Navajo Nation gained the largest settlement with a single tribe, of $554 million. It is the largest tribe in the United States.


text: In 2013 under renewal of the Violence Against Women Act, the federal government strengthened protection of Native American women, as it established authority for tribes to prosecute non-Natives who commit crimes on Indian land. Domestic and sexual abuse of Native American women has been a problem in many areas, but previous laws prevented arrest or prosecution by tribal police or courts of non-native abusive partners.


text: Native American migration to urban areas continued to grow: 70% of Native Americans lived in urban areas in 2012, up from 45% in 1970, and 8% in 1940. Urban areas with significant Native American populations include Rapid City, Minneapolis, Oklahoma City, Denver, Phoenix, Tucson, Seattle, Chicago, Houston, and New York City. Many have lived in poverty and struggled with discrimination. Racism, unemployment, drugs and gangs were common problems which Indian social service organizations, such as the Little Earth housing complex in Minneapolis, have attempted to address.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: The tale originates from the legend of Urashimako (Urashima no ko or Ura no Shimako) recorded in various pieces of literature dating to the 8th century, such as the "Fudoki" for Tango Province, "Nihon Shoki", and the "Man'yōshū".


title: Urashima Tarō

text: During the Muromachi to Edo periods, versions of "Urashima Tarō" appeared in storybook form called the "Otogizōshi", made into finely painted picture scrolls and picture books or mass-printed copies. These texts vary considerably, and in some, the story ends with Urashima Tarō transforming into a crane.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: Some iconic elements in the modern version are relatively recent. The portrayal of him riding a turtle dates only to the early 18th century, and while he is carried underwater to the Dragon Palace in modern tellings, he rides a boat to the princess's world called Hōrai in older versions.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: The Urashima Tarō tale familiar to most Japanese follows the storyline of children's tale author in the Meiji period. A condensed version of Sazanami's retelling then appeared in , Japan's nationally designated textbook for elementary school, and became widely read by schoolchildren of the populace. Modern versions of Urashima Tarō, which are generally similar, are demonstrably based on the story from this nationally designated textbook series.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: One day a young fisherman named Urashima Tarō is fishing when he notices a group of children torturing a small turtle. Tarō saves it and lets it go back to the sea. The next day, a huge turtle approaches him and tells him that the small turtle he had saved is the daughter of the Emperor of the Sea, Ryūjin, who wants to see him to thank him. The turtle magically gives Tarō gills and brings him to the bottom of the sea, to the Palace of the Dragon God (Ryūgū-jō). There he meets the Emperor and the small turtle, who was now a lovely princess, Otohime. The palace had a view to the four seasons, a different one on each side. Tarō stays there with Otohime for three days, but soon wants to go back to his village and see his aging mother, so he requests permission to leave. The princess says she is sorry to see him go, but wishes him well and gives him a mysterious box called "tamatebako" which will protect him from harm but which she tells him never to open. Tarō grabs the box, jumps on the back of the same turtle that had brought him there, and soon is at the seashore.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: When he goes home, everything has changed. His home is gone, his mother has vanished, and the people he knew are nowhere to be seen. He asks if anybody knows a man called Urashima Tarō. They answer that they had heard someone of that name had vanished at sea long ago. He discovers that 300 years have passed since the day he left for the bottom of the sea. Struck by grief, he absent-mindedly opens the box the princess had given him, from which bursts forth a cloud of white smoke. He is suddenly aged, his beard long and white, and his back bent. From the sea comes the sad, sweet voice of the princess: "I told you not to open that box. In it was your old age ...".


title: Urashima Tarō

text: A summary of the Urashima tale from one of the nationalized textbooks () will be given below. The base text used will be "Urashima Tarō" (うらしま太郎), from the 3rd edition of the or "national language reader", a widely familiar textbook used during the 1918–1932 period. An English translation has been provided in Yoshiko Holmes's thesis.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: The story remained as one of the dozen tales included in the 4th edition of national language reader textbooks also known as used from 1933–ca. 1940, thus continuing to enjoy wide recognition; for this reason "Urashima" could be considered one of the core stories of the so-called Japanese "national fairy tales".


title: Urashima Tarō

text: A number of renditions exist, where they are set to music. Among the most popular is the school song "Urashima Tarō" (浦島太郎) of 1911 which begins with the line ""Mukashi, mukashi Urashima wa, tasuketa kame ni tsurerarete" (Long long ago was Urashima, by the turtle he rescued taken to the sea)", printed in the (1911). This song's author was long relegated to anonymity, but the lyricist is now considered to be .


title: Urashima Tarō

text: Another school song "Urashima Tarō" (うらしまたろう, lyrics by and music by ) appeared in the "Yōnen shōka" (1900). Although written in stilted classical language, Miura considered this version the more familiar.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: Long before the versions in 19th century textbooks, there had been the "otogi-zōshi" versions from the Muromachi period. Conventionally, commentators using the term "otogizōshi" are referring by default to the text found in the "Otogi Bunko" (or "Companion Library"), since it was printed and widely disseminated.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: In the "Otogi Bunko" (or "Companion Library") version, a young fisherman named Urashima Tarō catches a turtle on his fishing line and releases it. The next day, Urashima encounters a boat with a woman on it wishing to be escorted home. She does not identify herself, although she is the transformation of the turtle that was spared. When Urashima rows her boat to her magnificent residence, she proposes that they marry. The residence is the Dragon Palace, and on the four sides of the palace, each gardenscape is in a different season. Urashima decides to return to his home after three years and is given a in parting. He arrives in his hometown to find it desolate, and discovers 700 years have passed since he last left it. He cannot restrain his temptation to open the box which he was cautioned not to open, whereupon three wisps of purple cloud appear and turn him into an old man. It ends with Urashima Tarō transforming into a crane, and his wife reverting to the form of a turtle, the two thereafter revered as "myōjin" (Shinto deities).


title: Urashima Tarō

text: There are over 50 texts of the Urashima Tarō "otogi-zōshi" extant. These variants fall into four broad groups, clustered by their similarity. The "Otogi Bunko" text belongs to Group IV.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: The "Otogi Bunko" version, despite its conventional status as the type text, differs considerably from the typical children's storybook published in the modern day: the protagonist neither purchases the turtle from others to save it, nor rides the turtle.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: Group I texts are more similar to the modern version, as it contains the element of Urashima purchasing the turtle to save it. Additionally, this group explicitly gives the princess's name as Otomime (or "Kame-no-Otohime") whereas she remains unnamed in the "Otogi Bunko" group. And the expression "tamatebako" or "jeweled hand-box" familiar to modern readers is also seen in the main text of Group I, and not the other groups (the interpolated poem excepted).


title: Urashima Tarō

text: The picture scroll in the collection of the Bodleian Library, Oxford University also belongs to Group I.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: Hayashi Kouhei has highlighted the characteristics of the Group I texts as follows: 1) Urashima purchases a turtle caught by others, 2) Boat arrives to convey him to Horai, 3) The four seasons assuage rather than provoke his homesickness, 4) The villagers in recognition of his longevity give him proper cremation, 5) Smoke from "tamatebako" reach Horai and Princess Otohime is grief-stricken.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: The tale of "Urashima Taro" in Keigo Seki's anthology (translated into English 1963), was a version told in Nakatado District, Kagawa. In this variant, Urashima is localized as being from "Kitamae Oshima". It incorporates both the motif of the turtle being caught while fishing, and that of Urashima transforming into a crane at the end, which are found in the "Otogizōshi".


title: Urashima Tarō

text: Here, it was a , that is to say, a stacked box that was given to Urashima. When he opened the lid, the first box (on the top) contained a crane's feather, and the second a puff of white smoke that turned him into an old man, and the third a mirror, which made him see for himself that he had suddenly grown old. The feather from the first box then attached itself to his back, and Urashima flew up to the sky, encircling his mother's grave.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: The story entitled "The Fisher-boy Urashima" (1886) retold by Basil Hall Chamberlain, was number 8 in the "Japanese Fairy Tale Series", printed by Hasegawa Takejirō, the issuer of many such "chirimen-bon" or "crepe-paper books". Although the illustrations are not credited in the publication, they have been attributed to Kobayashi Eitaku.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: There is no single base text in Japanese identifiable, although it has been conjectured that Chamberlain adapted from "a popular version" and not straying far from it except adding explanatory or instructive passages for young readers. Others have determined it must have been a composite consisting of older traditions from the "Nihon Shoki" and "Man'yōshū", combined with the near-modern Otogizōshi storybook plot, Chamberlain preferring to incorporate details from the ancient texts, while eschewing embellishment from the Otogizōshi. Chamberlain has also published a versified version of the tale.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: In Chamberlain's fairytale version, "Urashima" (not "Tarō") catches a tortoise ("sic") while fishing on his boat, and releases it. The tortoise reappears in her true form as the Sea-God's daughter, and invites him to the Dragon Palace.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: There the couple are married and live happily for 3 years, but Urashima misses seeing his parents and his brothers. The Dragon Princess reluctantly allows him to leave, giving him a box he is instructed never to open, for it will cause him never to be able to return to the palace. When he returns to his home village, his absence turns out to have been 400 years. Urashima now wishes to go back to the Dragon Palace but he does not know the means, and opens the box. He turns into a white-haired, wrinkled old man and dies. The ending by death concurs with older tradition, and not the "otogi-zōshi" storybook.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: Lafcadio Hearn, who lived in Japan and translated or adapted many ghost stories from the country, rewrote the Urashima tale under the title "The Dream of a Summer Day" in the late 19th century, working off of a copy of Chamberlain's "Japanese Fairy Tale Series" version.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: There are other versions that add a further epilogue explaining the subsequent fate of Urashima Tarō after he turns into an old man. In one, he falls to dust and dies, in another, he transforms into a crane and flies up to the sky. In another, he grows gills and leaps into the sea, whereby he regains his youth.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: In another version Urashima ate a magic pill that gave him the ability to breathe underwater. In another version, he is swept away by a storm before he can rescue the turtle.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: The full name Urashima Tarō was not given to the character until the 15th century (the Muromachi period), first appearing in a genre of illustrated popular fiction known as "otogizōshi", and in the kyōgen play adaptation.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: The story itself can be found in much older sources, dating to the 8th century (the Nara period), where the protagonist is styled either "Urashima no ko" or "Ura (no) Shimako", attested in earlier sources such as the "Fudoki" for Tango Province () that survived in excerpts, the "Man'yōshū" and the "Nihon Shoki".


title: Urashima Tarō

text: More recent editions of these texts tend to favor the "Ura (no) Shimako" reading, although some consider this debatable.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: It has also been proposed that it was not until the Heian Period that the misreading "Urashima (no) ko" became current, because names with the suffix "-ko" ("child") came to be regarded as female, even though it once applied to either gender. When the texts were written for the kyōgen theatre, the character's name underwent further change to Urashima Tarō, with "-tarō" ("great youth") being a common suffix in male names. Or perhaps the name was borrowed from who is a stock character in kyōgen.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: The "Man'yōshū" ballad mentions not only the woman of the Immortal Land, but her father as the Sea God (Watatsumi). Although this Sea God cannot be automatically equated with the Dragon God or Dragon King, due to the influence of the Chinese mythology of Nine Offspring of the Dragon in the Tang period, it has been speculated that the turtle princess must have been the Dragon King's daughter in even those early versions.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: The otherworld Urashima visited was not the "Dragon Palace" (Ryūgū) until the "otogi-zōshi" versions appeared. The heroine then became Otohime, the younger daughter of the Dragon King.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: As for the relative dating of these texts, an argument has been advanced that places the "Fudoki" version as the oldest. The argument dates the "Tango fudoki" to shortly after 715, but the compilers refer to an earlier record by , which was identical in content. It has even been suggested by Shūichi Katō that this Umakai originally adapted this tale into Japanese from a similar Chinese tale.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: In this version, the protagonist is referred to as "Urashimako of Mizunoe" (or "Urashimako of in Yosa-gun".


title: Urashima Tarō

text: Urashimako catches a five-coloured turtle and keeps it in his boat, and during his sleep, the creature transforms into a beautiful woman. She identifies herself as someone from the household of immortals, and proposes to take him to the place of immortals, which may be Horaisan (Mount Penglai) or "Tokoyo-no-kuni" ("Timeless Land" or "Land of Eternity").


title: Urashima Tarō

text: They are greeted by first seven, then eight children, who represent the constellations of Pleiades and Taurus (or more precisely the Hyades cluster) who address him as the "husband of Kame Hime (Princess Turtle)". The remainder is mostly the same as the typical tale.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: After three years, the man develops a longing for his parents and homeland. The princess is saddened, but imparts him with a , forbidding him to open it if he wished ever to return to her. He returns and finds no trace of his home or family, except that he is remembered as a man who disappeared long ago, and would be over three hundred years old if still alive. Forgetting the promise, he opens the box, whereupon a beautiful figure like a fragrant orchid is carried away to the heavens with the clouds, and he realizes he can never meet the princess again. Still, the couple are somehow (supernaturally) able to exchange poems. These poems are recorded in phonetic "man'yōgana".


title: Urashima Tarō

text: In the "Nihon Shoki", Urashimako of Mizunoe is mentioned in the entry for Autumn, 7th month the 22nd year of reign of Emperor Yūryaku. Aston's translation assigns this the year 478 A.D. The entry states that Urashimako (child Urashima, child of Urashima, etc.) of Mizunoe while fishing on a boat, caught a turtle which transformed into a woman. They went into the sea, and reached Mount Hōrai (glossed in "kana" as Tokoyo), where they saw .


title: Urashima Tarō

text: As to the phrase that they go "into the sea" implies, the Mount Hōrai as conceived here may be a submarine island, a suggestion made by Japanese literature professor .


title: Urashima Tarō

text: A poem reflecting upon the legend of Urashima of Mizunoe occurs in the "Man'yōshū". The piece is ascribed to Takahashi no Mushimaro. Early translations include the prose rendition by Aston, and the ballad-form by Chamberlain.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: In this version, the woman of the Immortal Land (Tokoyo) appears as the daughter of the Sea God (Watatsumi no kami).


title: Urashima Tarō

text: Basil Hall Chamberlain (1880) indicated the presence of a temple dedicated to Urashima at Kanagawa-ku, Yokohama, which housed several relics such as Urashima's fishing-line, and the casket (tamatebako). But when Ernest Satow went there with Chamberlain on 2 May 1880, there was nothing left to see except the statue of Kannon (Kanzeon), the goddess of mercy.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: Neither recorded the name to the temple, but Japanese sources write that the so-called Urashima-dera (Urashima Temple) used to be , until it burned down in 1868, and the temple, including the Kannon goddess statue got translated to in 1872.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: The old Urashima-dera sat on a mountain top. There is a circulating pamphlet which shows the view of the harbor from this vantage point, depicting the fleet of Black Ships led by Commodore Perry's fleet in 1852–1854.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: Local legend also claims native ties to Urashima Tarō, claiming that his father Urashima Tayū was originally from somewhere not far from Yokohama, in Miura District, Kanagawa in Sagami Province. But the father moved to


title: Urashima Tarō

text: Tango Province. This legend adds that when Urashima Tarō returned from the Dragon Place, he was guided to seek his parents' grave in "Shirahata, Musashi Province" (in today's Yokohama).


title: Urashima Tarō

text: He finally found the grave, thanks to Princess Oto-hime who lit up an illuminating light on a pine branch. Tarō built a hut to live here, housing the goddess statue from the Dragon Palace. The hut later became Kampuku-ji temple.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: Chamberlain noted the theory that the Dragon Palace might be a romanticized notion of Okinawa, since "Ryūgū" (Dragon Palace) and Ryūkyū (Okinawa) are near homophones.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: Recorded in of the 18th century, Tale 103 "A person of Yonaha village visits the Dragon Palace" is considered analogous to Urashima Tarō. In it, a certain man of Yonaha village in Haebaru finds a lock of black hair and returns it to a beautiful maiden. She leads him to the Dragon Palace. Three months pass and the man wishes to return, but the goddess reveals 33 generations have already passed in his absence. The man receives a folded-up piece of paper he is forbidden from unwrapping, but he opens this packet and a piece of white hair clings to him, turning him into an old man, and he dies. He was enshrined at the place which was named Usani-daki, because the man had "sat and reposed" ("usani") in his despair.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: Similar tales are found on Miyako-jima and other places. Yanagita Kunio felt that the notion of the Dragon Palace shared its origin with the concept of Niruya () in the southerly islands of Japan.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: "Irō setsuden" also records a similar tale, number 42, about , which describes a man who, bidden by a mysterious woman appeared before him, carried a large turtle to his home, which bit and gave him a terrible wound so that he was buried. But he turned out not to have died a mortals death, and lived on.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: Local legend has it that Urashima Tarō once dwelled in the mountains of Kiso, Nagano. This legend originated in near-modern times, from the late Muromachi to Edo periods.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: Although a contrived piece of fiction, the old-style "jōruri" situates its story in the vicinity of this local legend, namely Agematsu-juku. Urashima Tarō appears here as a child born after a local couple prays to Togakushi Myōjin. He and Tamayori-hime fall in love. She is very much a mortal, but after she commits suicide in Ina River (tributary of Kiso River), she becomes transformed into a supernatural being serving the Dragon Palace. A scale cloak lets her transform into a turtle, in which guise, she is reunited with Urashima Tarō who is fishing in Ina River. Note the "catching of the turtle" scene is transposed from ocean to a river in the mountains.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: The story bears varying degrees of similarity to folktales from other cultures. "Rip Van Winkle" is the foremost familiar example, although strictly speaking this cannot be called a "folktale", since it is a fictional work by Washington Irving loosely based on folklore. Nevertheless, Urashima has been labeled the "Japanese Rip van Winkle", even in academic folkloristic literature. "Urashima" is also a Japanese metaphor similar to "Rip Van Winkle" for someone who feels lost in a world that has changed in their absence.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: This pair of tales may not be the closest matching among the motif group. Writing in the 19th century, Lafcadio Hearn suggested that Irving wrote another piece called "The Adelantado of the Seven Cities", based on Portuguese tradition, which bore an even stronger resemblance to Urashima. Japanese art collector William Anderson also wrote that a certain Chinese tale was closer to "Rip Van Winkle" than Urashima was.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: That Chinese analogue is the anecdote of the woodcutter Wang Zhi, who after watching immortals playing a board game discovers many years have passed. The piece is a selection in the or "Accounts of Strange Things", and is also known as the legend of Lankeshan or "Rotten Axe Handle Mountain". Sometimes this Chinese tale is conjectured as a possible actual source for Urashima, but there is lack of consensus among folklorists regarding their interrelationship.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: Other cognate tales include the Irish legend of Oisín who met Niamh and spent his life with her in Tír na nÓg, and the Vietnamese legend of Từ Thức, who aids a goddess arrested for plucking a peony flower during a festival. In both these cases, the hero is united with a goddess who dwells in a land beyond the sea. Từ Thức's story is collected in "Truyền kỳ mạn lục" by Nguyễn Dữ.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: The tale of Urashima Taro holds many similarities with tales of the international catalogue Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index, grouped under type ATU 681, "The Relativity of Time". A similar story is "The Marsh King's Daughter", a literary fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen. However, Hiroko Ikeda's Japanese index of folktales lists "Urashima Taro" as type 470*, "The Dragon Palace" or "Urashima Taroo".


title: Urashima Tarō

text: A shrine on the western coast of the Tango Peninsula in northern Kyoto Prefecture, named Urashima Jinja, contains an old document describing a man, Urashimako, who left his land in 478 A.D. and visited a land where people never die. He returned in 825 A.D. with a Tamatebako. Ten days later he opened the box, and a cloud of white smoke was released, turning Urashimako into an old man. Later that year, after hearing the story, Emperor Junna ordered Ono no Takamura to build a shrine to commemorate Urashimako's strange voyage, and to house the Tamatebako and the spirit of Urashimako.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: The animated adaptation "Urashima Tarō" of the tale, premiered in 1918, is among some of the oldest anime created in Japan, the same year that Oz author Ruth Plumly Thompson adapted it as "Urashima and the Princess of the Sea" for The Philadelphia Public Ledger.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: The story influenced various works of fiction and a number of films. In 1945, Japanese writer Osamu Dazai published "Otogizōshi" ("fairytale book"), which includes a much expanded version of the story. Urashima's tale, as the other three included in the "Otogizōshi", is used mostly as a platform for Dazai's own thoughts and musings. Ursula K. Le Guin's short story "A Fisherman of the Inland Sea" (or "Another Story", 1994) is a reconcoction of the Urashima story set in the Ekumen or Hainish universe.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: The story was adapted in Brazil in the 1960s for use in an advertising campaign by airline Varig to promote the first direct flights between Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo. The campaign was produced by Lynxfilm and created by Ruy Perotti. The theme, sung by Rosa Miyake, became famous throughout the country.


title: Urashima Tarō

text: The Ultra Q episode title "Grow Up! Little Turtle" is largely based on Urashima Tarō's tale, along with elements of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" and the original "Gamera" film. In it, Tarō is a schoolboy given to making up stories who is trying to grow a turtle to 99cm, at which point he believes it will take him to the Dragon Palace.


title: Lee Rodriguez

text: LaRhonza Lee Rodriguez is an American actress. Rodriguez is known for her regular role as Fabiola Torres on the Netflix comedy "Never Have I Ever."


title: Lee Rodriguez

text: LaRhonza Lee Rodriguez was born in Fresno, California to a Mexican-American father and an African American mother. When she was a child, her family moved to Hesperia, California. When she was in the 8th grade, she started performing roles in the school theatre at Encore Jr./Sr. High School, a school specializing in the arts, helping her develop an interest in acting. She listed herself in a talent agency and later got a role in the year 2018.


title: Lee Rodriguez

text: Rodriguez' first TV acting role was her portrayal of Bea in the series "Class of Lies" in 2018. In the same year Rodriguez portrayed Naomi on Grown-ish in 2018. In 2020, Rodriguez joined the cast of Mindy Kaling's Netflix series "Never Have I Ever" as Fabiola, a gay teenager who is captain of the robotics team at her high school. To prepare for the role, she tried her hand at building a robot that she named "Tinzel Washington".


title: Lee Rodriguez

text: Rodriguez has spoken about colorism and the lack of representation of dark-skinned actresses of colour in the entertainment industry. Rodriguez has future goals of releasing music albums and touring. Rodriguez identifies as queer, first coming out on National Coming Out Day in 2020.


title: 2022–23 Paris Saint-Germain F.C. season

text: The 2022–23 season is the 53rd season in the existence of Paris Saint-Germain F.C. and the club's 49th consecutive season in the top flight of French football. In addition to the domestic league, they are participating in this season's editions of the Coupe de France and the UEFA Champions League, having secured the 11th Trophée des Champions at the start of the season.


title: 2022–23 Paris Saint-Germain F.C. season

text: Ahead of the 2022–23 season, it was announced that Leonardo Araújo, sporting director, had been dismissed, and that star forward Kylian Mbappé had signed a contract extension, choosing to remain at the club. The season is the first without the services of Ángel Di María at Paris Saint-Germain since the 2014–15 season. On 31 May, PSG completed the permanent transfer Portuguese left-back Nuno Mendes, who signed with the club until 30 June 2026. On 10 June 2022, Luís Campos joined the club as Football Advisor, being responsible for recruitment of new players. Campos's first signing of the summer was Portuguese midfielder Vitinha, in a transfer worth €41.5 million. On 5 July 2022, Christophe Galtier replaced Mauricio Pochettino as the club's head coach. The signing of which lended a lot of credibility to the club/s new policy of no "bling-bling". This was stated by the club's president at a presentation for the new head coach.


title: 2022–23 Paris Saint-Germain F.C. season

text: On 17th July the club confirmed the signing of Hugo Ekitike initially on a loan deal, which included a clause for a permanent transfer to the club. The signing was quickly followed by reports that club were now free to pursue alternative targets in a focused manner, specifically reaching out for players from the Paris region. Though initial reports were skeptical, the club quickly proved this to be true by signing Nordi Mukiele from RB Leipzig. In continuation of the club's new transfer policy, the club then launched a bid for Renato Sanches who played for Lille. After a few weeks of negotiations the player was then signed on the 4 August.


title: 2022–23 Paris Saint-Germain F.C. season

text: PSG started the pre-season on 4 July. The club returned to training on 7 December, with the participation of players who were not at the 2022 FIFA World Cup.


title: Prambanan

text: Prambanan (, ) is a 9th-century Hindu temple compound in Special Region of Yogyakarta, Indonesia, dedicated to the Trimūrti, the expression of God as the Creator (Brahma), the Preserver (Vishnu) and the Destroyer (Shiva). The temple compound is located approximately northeast of the city of Yogyakarta on the boundary between Central Java and Yogyakarta provinces.


title: Prambanan

text: The temple compound, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is the largest Hindu temple site in Indonesia and the second-largest in Southeast Asia after Angkor Wat. It is characterized by its tall and pointed architecture, typical of Hindu architecture, and by the towering central building inside a large complex of individual temples. Prambanan temple compounds originally consists of 240 temple structures; which represents the grandeur of ancient Java's Hindu art and architecture, also considered as a masterpiece of the classical period in Indonesia. Prambanan attracts many visitors from around the world.


title: Prambanan

text: The Prambanan temple is the largest Hindu temple of ancient Java, and the first building was completed in the mid-9th century. It was likely started by Rakai Pikatan and inaugurated by his successor King Lokapala. Some historians that adhere to dual dynasty theory; suggest that the construction of Prambanan probably was meant as the Hindu Sanjaya Dynasty's answer to the Buddhist Sailendra Dynasty's Borobudur and Sewu temples nearby. Which means to mark the return of the Hindu Sanjaya Dynasty to power in Central Java after almost a century of Buddhist Sailendra Dynasty domination. Nevertheless, the construction of this massive Hindu temple did signifies a shift of the Mataram court's patronage; from Mahayana Buddhism to Shaivite Hinduism.


title: Prambanan

text: A temple was first built at the site around 850 CE by Rakai Pikatan and expanded extensively by King Lokapala and Balitung Maha Sambu the Sanjaya king of the Mataram Kingdom. A short red-paint script bearing the name "pikatan" was found on one of the finials on top of the balustrade of Shiva temple, which confirms that King Pikatan was responsible for the initiation of the temple construction.


title: Prambanan

text: The temple complex is linked to the Shivagrha inscription of 856 CE, issued by King Lokapala, which described a Shiva temple compound that resembles Prambanan. According to this inscription the Shiva temple was inaugurated on 12 November 856. According to this inscription, the temple was built to honor Lord Shiva, and its original name was "Shiva-grha" (the House of Shiva) or "Shiva-laya" (the Realm of Shiva).


title: Prambanan

text: According to the Shivagrha inscription, a public water project to change the course of a river near Shivagrha temple was undertaken during the construction of the temple. The river, identified as the Opak River, now runs north to south on the western side of the Prambanan temple compound. Historians suggest that originally the river was curved further to east and was deemed too near to the main temple. Experts suggest that the shift of the river was meant to secure the temple complex from the overflowing of lahar volcanic materials from Merapi volcano. The project was done by cutting the river along a north to south axis along the outer wall of the Shivagrha Temple compound. The former river course was filled in and made level to create a wider space for the temple expansion, the space for rows of "pervara" (complementary) temples.


title: Prambanan

text: Some archaeologists propose that the statue of Shiva in the garbhagriha (central chamber) of the main temple was modelled after King Balitung, serving as a depiction of his deified self after death. The temple compound was expanded by successive Mataram kings, such as Daksa and Tulodong, with the addition of hundreds of "perwara" temples around the chief temple.


title: Prambanan

text: With main "prasada" tower soaring up to 47 metres high, a vast walled temple complex consists of 240 structures, Shivagrha Trimurti temple was the tallest and the grandest of its time. Indeed, the temple complex is the largest Hindu temple in ancient Java, with no other Javanese temples ever surpassed its scale. Prambanan served as the royal temple of the Kingdom of Mataram, with most of the state's religious ceremonies and sacrifices being conducted there. At the height of the kingdom, scholars estimate that hundreds of brahmins with their disciples lived within the outer wall of the temple compound. The urban center and the court of Mataram were located nearby, somewhere in the Prambanan Plain.


title: Prambanan

text: After being used and expanded for about 80 years, the temples were mysteriously abandoned near the half of the 10th century. In the 930s, the Javanese court was shifted to East Java by Mpu Sindok, who established the Isyana Dynasty. It was not clear however, the true reason behind the abandonment of Central Java realm by this Javanese Mataram kingdom. A devastating eruption of Mount Merapi volcano, located around 25 kilometres north of Prambanan in Central Java, or a power struggle probably caused the shift. That event marked the beginning of the decline of the temple, as it was soon abandoned and began to deteriorate.


title: Prambanan

text: The temples collapsed during a major earthquake in the 16th century. Although the temple ceased to be an important center of worship, the ruins scattered around the area were still recognizable and known to the local Javanese people in later times. The statues and the ruins became the theme and the inspiration for the Rara Jonggrang folktale.


title: Prambanan

text: The Javanese locals in the surrounding villages knew about the temple ruins before formal rediscovery, but they did not know about its historical background: which kingdoms ruled or which king commissioned the construction of the monuments. As a result, the locals developed tales and legends to explain the origin of temples, infused with myths of giants, and a cursed princess. They gave Prambanan and Sewu a wondrous origin; these were said in the Rara Jonggrang legend to have been created by a multitude of demons under the order of Bandung Bondowoso.


title: Prambanan

text: In 1733, Cornelis Antonie Lons, a VOC employee, provided a first report on Prambanan temple in his journal. Lons was escorting Julius Frederick Coyett, a VOC commissioner of northeast Java coast, to Kartasura, then the capital of Mataram, a powerful local Javanese kingdom. During his sojourn in Central Java, he had the opportunity to visit the ruins of Prambanan temple, which he described as "Brahmin temples" that resembles a mountain of stones.


title: Prambanan

text: After the division of Mataram Sultanate in 1755, the temple ruins and the Opak River were used to demarcate the boundary between Yogyakarta and Surakarta Sultanates, which was adopted as the current border between Yogyakarta and the province of Central Java.


title: Prambanan

text: The temple attracted international attention early in the 19th century. In 1803, Nicolaus Engelhard, the Governor of the northeast coast of Java, made a stop in Prambanan during his official visits to the kings of Java; Pakubuwana IV of Surakarta and Hamengkubuwana II of Yogyakarta. Impressed by the temple ruins, in 1805 Engelhard commissioned H.C. Cornelius, an engineer stationed in Klaten, to clear the site from earth and vegetation, measuring the area, and made drawings of the temple. This was the first effort to study and restore Prambanan temple.