title: Matt Cassel

text: In Week 12, Cassel led the Patriots to a 48–28 win over the Miami Dolphins, who in Week 3 had ended the Patriots' NFL record 21-game regular-season win streak. While Cassel threw for just 131 yards in the Week 3 loss, his Week 12 performance topped his performance against the Jets: Cassel completed 30 of 43 passes for 415 yards, three touchdowns to Randy Moss, and one interception, for a passer rating of 114.0; Cassel also had 14 yards on two rushes, including an 8-yard touchdown run. The performance made Cassel the first quarterback in franchise history, and only the fifth quarterback in NFL history, to have consecutive games with 400+ yards passing. His efforts earned him the title of AFC Offensive Player of the Week for the second time. During Week 15 against the Oakland Raiders, Cassel, playing just six days after the death of his father, set a new personal best, throwing for four touchdowns in a 49–26 victory.


title: Matt Cassel

text: In Week 16, against the playoff-bound Arizona Cardinals, Cassel led the Patriots to a 47–7 blowout win through snow, sleet, and rain in the Patriots' last regular-season home game of 2008. Cassel, playing in snow for the first time ever, nevertheless completed 20 of 36 passes for 345 yards, three touchdowns, and no interceptions, while helping the Patriots remain in the hunt for the AFC East title. In a role reversal, Matt Leinart entered the game as the Cardinals' backup quarterback when Kurt Warner was pulled from the game with the Cardinals trailing 44–0; Leinart completed 6 of 14 passes, for 138 yards, a touchdown, and an interception.


title: Matt Cassel

text: In Week 17, Cassel led the Patriots to their fourth consecutive win, 13–0 over the Buffalo Bills in a game marked by winds so severe that they bent the goalposts both before and during the game. Cassel completed 6 passes out of just 8 attempts, the third-lowest attempt total in franchise history (the second-lowest being the 5 attempts of the 1982 Snowplow Game and the lowest being the 3 attempts of their 2021 Week 13 game against the Buffalo Bills). Cassel finished the game with 78 yards; his most notable play, however, was a quick kick punt on third down in the fourth quarter; with the wind at his back, Cassel's kick landed inside the 20, and then rolled towards the Bills' end zone before it was downed, stranding the Bills at their own 2-yard line, struggling against the wind, down two scores with five minutes remaining.


title: Matt Cassel

text: On January 4, 2009, ESPN's Chris Mortensen reported that the Patriots would franchise tag Cassel. The Patriots made it official on February 5, 2009, the first day of the 2009 franchise period, and Cassel agreed to the tender two days later.


title: Matt Cassel

text: By the end of the 2008 season, Cassel had become the first quarterback in NFL history to record at least 10 wins, 325 completions, a 63% completion mark, 3,600 passing yards, 20 touchdown passes, 11 or fewer interceptions, and 250 rushing yards in a single season. As of 2017, only two other quarterbacks have accomplished the feat, Russell Wilson (twice) and Aaron Rodgers (five times).


title: Matt Cassel

text: On February 28, 2009, the Patriots traded both Cassel and outside linebacker Mike Vrabel to the Kansas City Chiefs for the 34th overall selection (Patrick Chung) in the 2009 NFL Draft. NFL Network's Adam Schefter (now with ESPN) described as "one of the wilder and more complex behind-the-scene dramas the NFL has seen in any recent offseason," with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers proposing a three-way trade with the Denver Broncos, in which the Buccaneers would have received Broncos quarterback Jay Cutler, the Broncos would have received Cassel, and New England would have received a first-round draft pick.


title: Matt Cassel

text: Cassel then briefly became teammates with Bernard Pollard, the player whose hit in 2008 caused Brady's injury and subsequently made Cassel the starter that season. In an interview, Cassel said he would "thank" Pollard for the opportunity, but also stated that he believed the hit on Brady was "unintentional" and he never wishes to see anyone get hurt while playing.


title: Matt Cassel

text: Cassel was expected to compete with Tyler Thigpen, who started 11 games for the Chiefs in 2008, for the starting quarterback position. Since Cassel's number 16 from New England is retired in Kansas City in honor of Len Dawson, Cassel decided to wear number 7; he chose 7 because it equals one plus six. Eventually, Thigpen was traded to the Miami Dolphins.


title: Matt Cassel

text: On July 14, 2009, the Chiefs signed Cassel to a six-year, $62.7 million contract that included $28 million in guaranteed money, and $40.5 million in total compensation in the first three seasons.


title: Matt Cassel

text: On August 29, 2009, Cassel suffered an MCL injury during the 1st quarter of a preseason game against the Seattle Seahawks. He was dragged to the ground and grabbed for his knee immediately upon impact. He attempted to continue playing but called a timeout and limped off the field. Brodie Croyle started the final game of the preseason against the St. Louis Rams as well as the regular season opening game against the Baltimore Ravens when Cassel was still unable to play. Cassel, though, started every game thereafter, going 4–11. He threw for 2,924 yards with 16 touchdowns and 16 interceptions and had a quarterback rating of 69.9 in his first season with the Chiefs.


title: Matt Cassel

text: In 2010, Cassel had a resurgent season starting with a 21–14 victory over the San Diego Chargers in Week 1 at home in Arrowhead. Cassel would build off of this start helping guide the Chiefs to a 7–4 record over the first 12 weeks of the year. Due to his form during November, he was named AFC Offensive Player of the Month for November. He completed 90 of 144 passes (62.5%) for 1,111 yards and an NFL-leading 12 touchdowns, with just one interception. He had a 111.2 passer rating for the month. As a result of his performance against the Seattle Seahawks, Cassel won the FedEx Air & Ground NFL Players of the Week award, as voted by the fans.


title: Matt Cassel

text: On December 8, 2010, Cassel underwent an emergency appendectomy. It was unclear at the time whether he would be able to play in that week's game against the Chargers. The Chiefs ended up starting backup Brodie Croyle and lost the game 31–0. Cassel returned for the next two games however and led the Chiefs to landslide wins over both the St. Louis Rams in the Governors Cup and then at home against the Tennessee Titans. The 34–14 win over the Titans, along with a loss by the Chargers to the Bengals, helped the Chiefs clinch the AFC West title. This would be the first Chiefs playoff game in four years and the first home playoff game since 2003, the last time the Chiefs won the AFC West division. In a home playoff 30-7 loss against the Baltimore Ravens, Cassel went 9 of 18 for 70 passing yards and three interceptions.


title: Matt Cassel

text: In 2011, Cassel led the Chiefs to a 4–4 record. During the first two games, he only threw one touchdown. Those first two games were blowout losses. In the second game, Cassel threw three interceptions. Cassel finally had his first good game, throwing two touchdowns in a 17–20 loss against the San Diego Chargers. He led the Chiefs to their first win against the Minnesota Vikings, where he threw for 260 yards and one touchdown. The next week, he led the Chiefs to a comeback victory against the Indianapolis Colts. The Colts jumped to a 17–0 lead, but Cassel threw four touchdowns and 257 yards with no interceptions to lead the Chiefs to a 28–24 win. After the game, Cassel had a 138.9 quarterback rating. In Week 8, Cassel threw one touchdown but also threw two interceptions. In Week 10, Cassel injured his hand against the Denver Broncos. He was replaced by Tyler Palko, and had surgery on the injured hand on November 14. On November 21, he was placed on injured reserve, ending his season.


title: Matt Cassel

text: In Week 1 of the 2012 season, Cassel had a tremendous first half against the Atlanta Falcons but threw two interceptions in the second half. His final stats were two interceptions, one touchdown, one rushing touchdown, and a 72.5 quarterback rating. The final score resulted in a Chiefs loss, 24-40. The Chiefs had to rely on a 91-yard run by Jamaal Charles, a safety, and four field goals to gain their first win against the New Orleans Saints, as even with excellent field position throughout the second half, Cassel could not lead the team to the endzone; he threw one interception and no touchdowns. The final score of that game was a 27-24 overtime win for the Chiefs. The next week, Cassel struggled and threw two touchdowns, but three interceptions in a 20-37 Chiefs loss against the San Diego Chargers. After the game, Cassel's starting job appeared to be in jeopardy, but head coach Romeo Crennel said Cassel would start the next game against the Baltimore Ravens. In that game, Cassel left the game with a head injury. Earlier in the day, a group called Save Our Chiefs rallied fans together and flew a banner over Arrowhead calling for the General Manager Scott Pioli to be fired and for Cassel to be benched.


title: Matt Cassel

text: On October 11, 2012, Crennel announced Cassel had been ruled out of the Week 6 game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and named Brady Quinn the starter for the game. At the time of Cassel's injury, he had accumulated nine interceptions and five fumbles through the first five games of the season. This mark was more than any other team in the NFL, except the Philadelphia Eagles, who also had 14 turnovers in their first five games of the year. On October 22, 2012, Crennel named Quinn as the starting quarterback for the Chiefs following their bye week. Cassel was deemed healthy enough to play, but still given the backup role.


title: Matt Cassel

text: On March 13, 2013, sources close to the Chiefs reported they intended to trade or release Cassel. On March 14, 2013, the Chiefs released Cassel.


title: Matt Cassel

text: On the same day he was released from the Chiefs, Cassel signed with the Minnesota Vikings. On September 27, it was announced that Cassel would get his first start as a Viking in Week 4 against the Pittsburgh Steelers, due to a rib injury to starting quarterback Christian Ponder. The Vikings won the game 34–27. Due to another injury to Ponder, Cassel received his third start of the season Week 14 against the Baltimore Ravens. Despite a two-touchdown, zero interception performance, the Vikings lost by a score of 29-26 during a heavy snow game. He would remain the starting quarterback the rest of the season where the Vikings finished with a 5-10-1 record and Cassel either played the whole game or came in to rally the Vikings from behind in all five victories.


title: Matt Cassel

text: On March 7, 2014, it was reported that Cassel had signed a new two-year deal for $10 million. It was later announced on August 25, 2014, that Cassel would be the starting quarterback over rookie Teddy Bridgewater and Ponder. However, on September 21, 2014, Cassel broke his foot against the New Orleans Saints and was placed on injured reserve. In only three games, he totaled 425 passing yards, three touchdowns, and four interceptions.


title: Matt Cassel

text: On March 10, 2015, the Vikings traded Cassel along with a sixth round 2015 NFL Draft pick to the Buffalo Bills in exchange for a 2015 fifth round pick and a seventh round pick in 2016. Cassel was involved in a three-way quarterback competition between former Bills first round pick EJ Manuel and former Ravens backup Tyrod Taylor. After losing the competition to Taylor, Cassel was released by the Bills on September 5, 2015. However, he was re-signed three days later to back up Taylor. Cassel was credited as the Bills' starting quarterback for the season opener due to him taking the team's first snap on offense in the wildcat formation with Taylor lined up at wide receiver.


title: Matt Cassel

text: On September 22, 2015, the Bills traded Cassel to the Dallas Cowboys after Tony Romo suffered a broken collarbone. In addition to Cassel, the Cowboys also received Buffalo's 2017 seventh round pick (#228-Joey Ivie) in exchange for Dallas' 2017 fifth round pick (#171-Nathan Peterman).


title: Matt Cassel

text: Although Brandon Weeden was expected to start, the Cowboys covered themselves by also trading for Cassel. After Weeden lost the three games he started, Cassel replaced him as the starting quarterback while the injured Romo continued to rehab. He was never able to have any sustained offensive success and was prone to critical errors. On December 19, after a disastrous showing against the New York Jets, Cassel was benched and replaced by Kellen Moore for the game and the rest of the season. In his seven starts and eight appearances, Cassel posted a 1-6 record, 1,276 passing yards, 5 touchdowns, and 7 interceptions.


title: Matt Cassel

text: On Cassel's last play before being benched for Moore, he became the first quarterback in over twelve years to throw an interception that was also flagged for intentional grounding. The play was designed to be a wide receiver bubble screen, but Cassel held onto the ball after a pump-fake, then turned to look at the other side of the field. Forced to scramble to get away from the immediate pressure, thanks largely to most of the Dallas offensive linemen moving to the left side of the field to block for the presumed wide receiver screen, Cassel stumbled and nearly fell over. Trying to salvage the play, Cassel threw the ball towards the right sideline. No Dallas receiver was in the area, and the ball failed to reach the sideline and was intercepted by Darrelle Revis. On top of the intentional grounding call against Cassel, there was also an illegal lineman downfield call against Dallas, as several offensive linemen had run downfield to block for what they assumed was a quick screen pass to a receiver. Both penalties were declined so that the interception would stand.


title: Matt Cassel

text: Cassel signed with the Tennessee Titans on March 10, 2016. In Week 16, on Christmas Eve, against the Jacksonville Jaguars, Cassel entered the game in the third quarter after starter Marcus Mariota suffered a leg injury. Cassel completed 13-of-24 passes for 124 yards, a touchdown, and an interception as the Titans lost by a score of 38–17. Due to Mariota's injury, Cassel started the season finale against the Houston Texans, completing 16-of-26 passes for 150 yards, a touchdown, and an interception as the Titans won 24–17.


title: Matt Cassel

text: On March 2, 2017, Cassel signed a two-year, $5.25 million contract extension with the Titans. On October 1, 2017, against the Houston Texans, Mariota suffered a hamstring injury in the third quarter and was relieved by Cassel. Cassel completed 4 of 10 passes for 21 yards and two interceptions as the Titans lost by a score of 57–14. Due to Mariota's injury, Cassel started the game against the Miami Dolphins on October 8, completing 21 of 32 passes for 141 yards and one touchdown as the Titans lost by a score of 16–10.


title: Matt Cassel

text: On April 4, 2018, Cassel signed a one-year, $1,105,000 contract with the Detroit Lions. In the season opener against the New York Jets, Cassel made his Lions debut coming in relief of Matthew Stafford in the 48–17 blowout loss. He appeared in one other game in the 2018 season, a Week 16 27–9 loss to Cassel's former team, the Minnesota Vikings.


title: Matt Cassel

text: Cassel married his longtime girlfriend Lauren Killian, a former USC volleyball player, in February 2007; Carson Palmer was his best man.


title: Matt Cassel

text: Cassel has three siblings: older brother Jack (who is married to Killian's USC roommate and teammate, Julie Mariani), younger brother Justin, and younger sister Amanda. Jack pitched for the San Diego Padres and Houston Astros. Justin pitched for the Chicago White Sox farm system for six seasons.


title: Matt Cassel

text: Cassel is the son of Emmy-winning set decorator Barbara Cassel and Greg Cassel; they divorced when Cassel was 14. Cassel's father died on December 8, 2008.


title: Matt Cassel

text: On the night of January 26, 2012, a fire broke out in a family's house in the village of Loch Lloyd, Missouri. Cassel, seeing smoke from the fire, ran to their house to alert them. The family was able to make it out of the fire alive.


title: Nana Patekar filmography

text: Nana Patekar (born 1 January 1951) is an actor, writer, and film maker, mainly working in Hindi and Marathi cinema.


title: Nana Patekar filmography

text: As an actor, he is best known for his role in the film "Agni Sakshi", for which he won the National Film Award for Best Supporting Actor. He won another National Film Award for Best Supporting Actor, and the Filmfare Award for Best Supporting Actor, for his role in "Parinda" (1989). He then won the Filmfare Best Villain Award for his role in "Angaar" (1992). In 1995, he won the National Film Award for Best Actor as well as the Filmfare and the Screen awards for Best Actor for his role in "Krantiveer" (1994). He also won his second Filmfare Best Villain Award for his role in "Apaharan" (2005). In 2017 he won the Filmfare Marathi award for best actor for his performance in "Natsamrat".


title: Nana Patekar filmography

text: After making his acting debut in Bollywood with the 1978 drama "Gaman", Patekar acted in a few Marathi films and some Bollywood films. After these roles, he achieved his breakthrough starring as a gangster in "Parinda" (1989), for which he won the National Film Award and the Filmfare Award for Best Supporting Actor. Later, he acted in and made his directorial debut with "" (1994). Patekar subsequently starred in and received critical acclaim for his performance in several commercially successful films of the 1990s, including "Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman" (1992); "Angaar" (1992), for which he won the Filmfare Award for Best Villain; "Tirangaa" (1993); "Krantiveer" (1994), for which he won the National Film Award and the Filmfare Award for Best Actor; "Agni Sakshi" (1996), for which he won his second National Film Award for Best Supporting Actor; and "" (1996). During the early 2000s, he received praise for his performances in "" (2002) and "Apaharan" (2005); the latter earned him a second Best Villain award at Filmfare. Patekar's highest-grossing film releases came when he played a gangster in the comedy "Welcome" (2007) and its sequel "Welcome Back" (2015), and a politician in the political thriller "Raajneeti" (2010). In 2016, he starred in the Marathi film "Natsamrat."


title: Ise Grand Shrine

text: The , located in Ise, Mie Prefecture of Japan, is a Shinto shrine dedicated to the sun goddess Amaterasu. Officially known simply as , Ise Jingū is a shrine complex composed of many Shinto shrines centered on two main shrines, and .


title: Ise Grand Shrine

text: The Inner Shrine, Naikū (also officially known as "Kōtai Jingū"), is located in the town of Uji-tachi, south of central Ise, and is dedicated to the worship of Amaterasu, where she is believed to dwell. The shrine buildings are made of solid cypress wood and use no nails but instead joined wood. The Outer Shrine, "Gekū" (also officially known as "Toyouke Daijingū"), is located about six kilometers from Naikū and dedicated to Toyouke-Ōmikami, the god of agriculture, rice harvest and industry. Besides Naikū and Gekū, there are an additional 123 Shinto shrines in Ise City and the surrounding areas, 91 of them connected to Naikū and 32 to Gekū.


title: Ise Grand Shrine

text: Purportedly the home of the Sacred Mirror, the shrine is one of Shinto's holiest and most important sites. Access to both sites is strictly limited, with the general public not allowed beyond sight of the thatched roofs of the central structures, hidden behind four tall wooden fences. However, tourists are free to roam the forest, including its ornamental walkways which date back to the Meiji period.


title: Ise Grand Shrine

text: During the Edo period, it is estimated that one out of ten Japanese conducted an "Okage Mairi" pilgrimage to the shrine. Accordingly, pilgrimage to the shrine flourished in both commercial and religious frequency. According to historical documents, 3.62 million people visited the shrine in 50 days in 1625, and 1.18 million people visited the shrine in three days in 1829 when the grand festival held every 20 years was held. Because the shrine is considered sanctuary, no security checkpoints were conducted, as it was considered sacrilege by the faithful. The two main shrines of Ise are joined by a pilgrimage road that passes through the old entertainment district of Furuichi.


title: Ise Grand Shrine

text: The chief priest or priestess of Ise Shrine must come from the Imperial House of Japan and is responsible for watching over the Shrine. The current high priestess of the shrine is Emperor Emeritus Akihito's daughter, Sayako Kuroda.


title: Ise Grand Shrine

text: According to the "Nihon Shoki", around 2000 years ago the divine Yamatohime-no-mikoto, daughter of the Emperor Suinin, set out from Mt. Miwa in modern Nara Prefecture in search of a permanent location to worship the goddess Amaterasu, wandering for 20 years through the regions of Omi and Mino. Her search eventually brought her to Ise, in modern Mie Prefecture, where she is said to have established Naikū after hearing the voice of Amaterasu saying "(Ise) is a secluded and pleasant land. In this land I wish to dwell." Before Yamatohime-no-mikoto's journey, Amaterasu had been worshiped at the imperial residence in Yamato, then briefly at Kasanui in the eastern Nara basin. When Princess Yamatohime-no-mikoto arrived at the village of Uji-tachi, she set up fifty bells to designate the area as enshrined for the goddess Amaterasu, which is why the river is called the Isuzu, or "fifty bells".


title: Ise Grand Shrine

text: Besides the traditional establishment date of 4 BC, other dates of the 3rd and 5th centuries have been put forward for the establishment of Naikū and Gekū respectively. The first shrine building at Naikū was erected by Emperor Tenmu (678–686), with the first ceremonial rebuilding being carried out by his wife, Empress Jitō, in 692.


title: Ise Grand Shrine

text: The shrine was foremost among a group of shrines which became objects of imperial patronage in the early Heian period. In 965, Emperor Murakami ordered imperial messengers to be sent to report important events to the guardian kami of Japan. These "heihaku" were initially presented to 16 shrines including the Ise Shrine.


title: Ise Grand Shrine

text: From the late 7th century until the 14th century, the role of chief priestess of Ise Shrine was carried out by a female member of the Imperial House of Japan known as a saiō. According to the "Man'yōshū", the first saiō to serve at the shrine was Princess Ōku, daughter of Emperor Tenmu, during the Asuka period. Mention of Ise Shrine's saiō is also made in the Aoi, Sakaki and Yugao chapters of "The Tale of Genji" as well as in the 69th chapter of "The Tales of Ise". The saiō system ended during the turmoil of the Nanboku-chō period.


title: Ise Grand Shrine

text: During the Empire of Japan and the establishment of State Shinto, the position of chief priest of the Ise Shrine was fulfilled by the reigning emperor and the Meiji, Taisho and Shōwa Emperors all played the role of chief priest during their reigns.


title: Ise Grand Shrine

text: Since the disestablishment of State Shinto during the Occupation of Japan, the offices of chief priest and most sacred priestess have been held by former members of the imperial family or their descendants. The current chief priest of the shrine is , adoptive son of Takatsukasa Kazuko. He succeeded Kitashirakawa Michihisa, a great-grandson of Emperor Meiji, in 2007. Takatsukasa Kazuko was succeeded by her younger sister, Ikeda Atsuko. In 2012, Ikeda was joined by her niece Sayako Kuroda, sole daughter of Emperor Akihito, to serve as a high priestess under her. On 19 June 2017, Sayako officially replaced her aunt as supreme priestess.


title: Ise Grand Shrine

text: The architectural style of the Ise shrine is known as shinmei-zukuri, characterized by extreme simplicity and antiquity; its basic principles date back to the Kofun period (250–538 C.E.). The shrine buildings use a special variant of this style called , which may not be used in the construction of any other shrine. Yuitsu-shinmei-zukuri style replicates the architectural features of early rice granaries. The old shrines are dismantled and new ones built on an adjacent site to exacting specifications every 20 years at exorbitant expense, so that the buildings will be forever new and forever ancient and original. The present buildings, dating from 2013, are the 62nd iteration to date and are scheduled for rebuilding in 2033.


title: Ise Grand Shrine

text: The shrine at Naikū is constructed of Japanese cypress. Built on pillars set directly in the ground, the shrine building measures 10.9 by 5.5 meters and includes a raised floor, verandas all the way around the building and a staircase leading to a single central doorway. The Naikū does not have any windows. The roof is made of thatched reed with ten billets (katsuogi) located on the ridge of the roof, the bargeboards of which project beyond the roof to form the distinctive forked finials (chigi) at the ends of the ridge. The chigi on the roof of the Naikū are flat on top, rather than pointed, which serves as a distinction for the gender of the deity being represented. In the case of Ise, Amaterasu, a female deity, is represented at the shrine, which is why the chigi are flat. The roof ridge is supported by two free-standing columns called the munamochi-bashira. The katsuogi, chigi and munamochi-bashira are stylised forms of older storehouse building techniques that pre-date the introduction of Buddhist architecture in Japan.


title: Ise Grand Shrine

text: The empty site beside the shrine building, the site where the previous shrine once stood and where the next will be built, is called the kodenchi. This area is strewn with large white pebbles and is left totally empty apart from the oi-ya, a small wooden hut containing a wooden pole a little over 2 metres in height called the shin-no-mihashira (new sacred central pole). When a new shrine is built, it is built around the sacred central pole before the removal of the oi-ya, so that the central pole is never seen. The central pole of the old shrine will then have a new oi-ya erected so that the shin-no-mihashira also remains unseen.


title: Ise Grand Shrine

text: The shrine buildings at Naikū and Gekū, as well as the Uji Bridge, are rebuilt every 20 years as a part of the Shinto belief in "tokowaka" (常若), which means renewing objects to maintain a strong sense of divine prestige in pursuit of eternity, and as a way of passing building techniques from one generation to the next. The twenty-year renewal process is called the Shikinen Sengū. Although the goal of Sengū is to get the shrine built within the 20-year period, there have been some instances, especially because of war, where the shrine building process is postponed or delayed. The original physical purpose of the Sengu process is unknown. However, it is believed that it serves to maintain the longevity of the shrine, or possibly as a gesture to the deity enclosed within the shrine. Historically, this cyclical reconstruction has been practiced for many years in various shrines throughout Japan, meaning that it is not a process exclusive to Ise. The entire reconstruction process takes more or less 17 years, with the initial years focusing on project organization and general planning, and the last 8 years focusing on the physical construction of the shrine.


title: Ise Grand Shrine

text: The shrine has evolved throughout the years in its reconstruction, while maintaining some of its key features. The shrine was not originally constructed with gold copper adornments; however, because of advancements in technology as well as Buddhist influence, it gained them over the years. Another example of Buddhist influence on the shrine is the use of "Suedama", which are Buddhist orbs seen on various religious structures. It symbolizes a sacred jewel, and is comparable to "nyoi-shu", orbs which many Buddhist figures are displayed holding. Initially, the shrine was constructed of locally sourced Hinoki wood, which served as an ideal building material due to its physical properties. The abundance of local Hinoki wood was short lived, and the shrine currently obtains the wood through other domestic producers, who ensure that only the best wood is being used for the construction. Before the wood is usable in building the shrine, it must be put through a lengthy seasoning and drying process where it is in a pond for several years and then dried.


title: Ise Grand Shrine

text: The team which builds the shrine is typically formed around a few factors. Since many of the building techniques haven't changed since the creation of the Ise Shrine, the workers who are hired to build the shrine must be skilled in specific techniques. Power tools are not allowed within the area of the shrine, which means that skilled artisans and carpenters known as "miyadaiku" are necessary in the construction process. The unit of workers is also organized around relative skill levels, and less experienced workers will work on smaller tasks than more experienced workers. The importance of hiring specifically local artisans has decreased throughout time, for the pool of available miyadaiku has thinned out. Specialized work and the specific materials come with a cost; in 2013, the shrine was built from private donations alone, totaling 57 billion Japanese Yen (US$550 million).


title: Ise Grand Shrine

text: In August, in a long-standing tradition, the people who live in Ise are allowed to enter the area around the Inner Sanctum of the Naiku as well as the Geku. Some villages drag a wooden carriage laden with white stones up the Isuzu River onto the grounds of the Naiku. Each participant gets two white stones in a white handkerchief and these allow them to place the stones in the area around the Inner Sanctum. Other villages drag a huge wooden cart or Noburi Kuruma laden with white stones to the Uji bridge at the entrance of the grounds of the Naiku. Participants receive two white stones which are also placed in the sacred space around the Inner Sanctum. The entire tradition is called Shiraisshiki and it is very colourful with every participant wearing a 'happi' coat representing a particular village. The rebuilding of the main shrine takes place on a site adjacent to the old, and each rebuilding alternates between the two sites. The next scheduled rebuilding of Naikū is due in 2033 on the lower, northern site. Various other religious ceremonies are held with the completion of the shrine, each serving different purposes.


title: Ise Grand Shrine

text: In the lead-up to the rebuilding of the shrines, a number of festivals are held to mark special events. The Okihiki Festival is held in the spring over two consecutive years and involves people from surrounding towns dragging huge wooden logs through the streets of Ise to Naikū and Gekū. In the lead-up to the 2013 rebuilding, the Okihiki festival was held in 2006 and 2007. A year after the completion of the Okihiki festival, carpenters begin preparing the wood for its eventual use in the Shrine.


title: Ise Grand Shrine

text: From the late seventh century, when the festivals and offerings of Ise Shrine became more formalised, a number of annual events have been performed at both Naikū and Gekū. The Tsukinamisai, which was held in June and December, as well as the Kannamesai Festival in September, were the only three offerings performed by the Saiō, an imperial princess who served as high priestess of the shrine until the 14th century. These offerings are based on the cycle of the agricultural year and are still performed today.


title: Ise Grand Shrine

text: The first important ceremony of the modern calendar year is the Kinensai, where prayers are offered for a bountiful harvest. Kannamesai, where prayers for fair weather and sufficient rains are made, is held twice a year in May and August at both Naikū and Gekū.


title: Ise Grand Shrine

text: The most important annual festival held at Ise Shrine is the . Held in October each year, this ritual makes offerings of the first harvest of crops for the season to Amaterasu. An imperial envoy carries the offering of rice harvested by the Emperor himself to Ise, as well as five-coloured silk cloth and other materials, called "heihaku."


title: Ise Grand Shrine

text: Besides the agricultural ceremonies already mentioned, ceremonies and festivals are held throughout the year at both Naikū and Gekū to celebrate things such as the new year, the foundation of Japan, the past emperors, purification rituals for priests and court musicians, good sake fermentation and the Emperor's birthday. There are also daily food offerings to the shrine kami held both in the mornings and evenings.


title: Ise Grand Shrine

text: The official name of the main shrine of Naikū is Kotaijingu and is the place of worship of the goddess Amaterasu. The grounds of Naikū contain a number of structures, including the following:


title: Ise Grand Shrine

text: This 100 meter wooden bridge, built in a traditional Japanese style, stretches across the Isuzu River at the entrance of Naikū. Like the shrine buildings of Naikū, it is rebuilt every 20 years as a part of the Shikinen Sengū ceremony. The bridge is typically built by carpenters with less experience to gain more skills before moving on to take on the task of working on the main shrine. On crossing the bridge, the path turns to the right along the banks of the Isuzu river and passes through large landscaped gardens.


title: Ise Grand Shrine

text: After crossing a short, wide bridge, pilgrims to the shrine encounter the Temizusha, a small, roofed structure containing a pool of water for use in ritual purification. Visitors are encouraged to wash their hands and rinse their mouths at Temizusha as a symbolic act to clean the mind and body of impurity. The first of two large torii gates stands just beyond the Temizusha.


title: Ise Grand Shrine

text: After passing the first large torii gate, the Purification Hall (Saikan), and the hall for visitors from the imperial household (Anzaisho) is located to the left. The Saikan is used by shrine priests to purify themselves before performing ceremonies at the shrine. They are required to spend one or two nights to free their minds of worldly issues, partaking in baths and eating meals cooked with the sacred fire.


title: Ise Grand Shrine

text: This hall for special prayer, located just after the second large torii gate, is open to the public for the offering of individual prayers to the kami, the giving of donations and the purchase of special talisman of protection, amulets and hanging scrolls of Amaterasu Omikami.


title: Ise Grand Shrine

text: This hall contains the sacred fire used to cook all of the food offerings to the kami of Ise Shrine. Rice and other offerings cooked on the sacred fire are stored in a box made of Japanese cypress, then purified at the Haraedo immediately in front of the Imibiyaden before being offered to the kami.


title: Ise Grand Shrine

text: The pilgrimage path then approaches the fence of the inner sanctum (昇殿, shōden) of Naikū by a set of large stone steps. Within another set of fencing inside the gate is the main shrine (正宮, seigū) itself. Visitors are supposed to keep to the sides of the path as the middle is set aside for the goddess Amaterasu. Etiquette is the same as for most Shinto shrines. Though the actual shrine is hidden behind a large fence, pilgrims can approach the gate to offer their prayers. Photographs in this area are prohibited and this restriction is strictly policed.


title: Ise Grand Shrine

text: Kotai Jingū is said to hold the Sacred Mirror, one of three Imperial Regalia of Japan said to have been given to the first Emperor by the gods. From a path that follows the line of the outer wall, the distinctive roof of the shrine building can be seen through the trees. In front of the walled shrine compound can be seen an open area which was the location of the rebuilding of the shrine in 2013.


title: Ise Grand Shrine

text: The pilgrimage to the Ise shrine, also known as "Sangū", gained immense popularity during the Edo Period, where hundreds of thousands of pilgrims would travel there every year. The growth was exponential, 5 million pilgrims visiting the shrine in the year 1830 alone. By the late 19th century, tourists from abroad began to visit and document Ise. The popularity of making a trip to Ise resulted in vast networks and groups of travelers, which ultimately led to businesses working to benefit from this influx of interest for the shrine. Travel guidebooks were made to aid travelers in their navigation, as well to let them know of specific important places to visit while at Ise. They also included woodblock prints of the shrine that were very appealing to those who had made the long trek to the shrine. Additionally, people wanted souvenirs, which resulted in a variety of vendors at Ise selling general goods and specialty items. There were also various post stations which had specific gifts, many of which were woodblock prints. The pilgrimage had multiple purposes and appeals. It was seen as a purification process, and by visiting Ise, pilgrims were purified and aided in receiving a good afterlife. It also was seen as a vacation, the journey to the shrine itself being almost as important as actually getting there. In the 21st century, Ise is still an important destination both to foreign tourists and especially to the Japanese community; 9 million Japanese tourists visited the shrine in 2013.


title: Assassination of Juvénal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira

text: On the evening of 6 April 1994, the aircraft carrying Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira, both Hutu, was shot down with surface-to-air missiles as their jet prepared to land in Kigali, Rwanda. The assassination set in motion the Rwandan genocide, one of the bloodiest events of the late 20th century.


text: Responsibility for the attack is disputed, with most theories proposing as suspects either the Tutsi rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) or government-aligned Hutu Power followers opposed to negotiation with the RPF.


text: In 1990, the Rwandan Civil War began when the Rwandan Patriotic Front, dominated by the Tutsi ethnic group, invaded northern Rwanda from Uganda. Most of the RPF fighters were either refugees or the sons of refugees who had fled ethnic purges by the Hutu government during the Rwandan revolution. The attempt to overthrow the government failed, though the RPF was able to maintain control of a border region. As it became clear that the war had reached a stalemate, the sides began peace negotiations in May 1992, which resulted in the signing in August 1993 of the Arusha Accords to create a power-sharing government.


text: The war radicalized the internal opposition. The RPF's show of force intensified support for the so-called "Hutu Power" ideology. Hutu Power portrayed the RPF as an alien force intent on reinstating the Tutsi monarchy and enslaving the Hutus, a prospect which must be resisted at all costs. This ideology was embraced most wholeheartedly by the Coalition for the Defense of the Republic (CDR) who advocated racist principles known as the Hutu Ten Commandments. This political force led to the collapse of the first Habyarimana government in July 1993, when Prime Minister Dismas Nsengiyaremye criticized the president in writing for delaying a peace agreement. Habyarimana, a member of the MRND political party, dismissed Nsengiyarmye and appointed Agathe Uwilingiyimana, who was perceived to be less sympathetic to the RPF, in his stead. The main opposition parties refused to support Madame Agathe's appointment, each splitting into two factions: one calling for the unwavering defense of Hutu Power and the other, labeled "moderate", that sought a negotiated settlement to the war. As Prime Minister Uwilingiyimana was unable to form a coalition government, ratification of the Arusha Accords was impossible. The most extreme of the Hutu parties, the CDR, which openly called for ethnic cleansing of the Tutsi, was entirely unrepresented in the Accords.


text: The security situation deteriorated throughout 1993. Armed Hutu militias attacked Tutsis throughout the country, while high-ranking adherents of Hutu Power began to consider how the security forces might be turned to genocide. In February 1994, Roméo Dallaire, the head of the military force attached to the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), which had been sent to observe the implementation of the Arusha Accords, informed his superiors, "Time does seem to be running out for political discussions, as any spark on the security side could have catastrophic consequences."


text: In the United Nations Security Council, early April 1994 saw a sharp disagreement between the United States and the non-permanent members of the council over UNAMIR. Despite a classified February Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analysis predicting half a million deaths if the Arusha process failed, the U.S. was attempting to reduce its international commitments in the wake of the Somalia debacle and lobbied to end the mission. A compromise extending UNAMIR's mandate for three more months was finally reached on the evening of Tuesday, the fifth of April. Meanwhile, Habyarimana was finishing regional travel. On 4 April, he had flown to Zaire to meet with president Mobutu Sese Seko and on 6 April flew to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania for a one-day regional summit for heads of state convened by Tanzanian President Ali Hassan Mwinyi. For the return trip, Habyarimana offered to take Saleh Tambwe, Tanzania's Ambassador to Rwanda, with him back to Rwanda. He then extended the offer to President of Burundi Cyprien Ntaryamira. Ntaryamira accepted, preferring Habyarimana's faster Dassault Falcon 50 to his own transport. Several Burundian ministers joined the president on the flight. As a result of this new arrangement, Tambwe was not brought onboard to make room for the Burundian entourage.


text: According to interim Prime Minister Jean Kambanda's testimony to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), President Mobutu Sese Seko of neighboring Zaire (now DRC) had warned Habyarimana not to go to Dar es Salaam on 6 April. Mobutu reportedly said this warning had come from a very senior official in the Élysée Palace in Paris. There was a link between this warning, said Mobutu, and the subsequent suicide in the Élysée of François de Grossouvre, a senior high-ranking official who was working for President François Mitterrand and who killed himself on 7 April after learning about the downing of the Falcon.


text: Shortly before 8:20 pm local time (18:20 UTC), the presidential jet circled once around Kigali International Airport before coming in for final approach in clear skies. A weekly flight by a Belgian C-130 Hercules carrying UNAMIR troops returning from leave had been scheduled to land before the presidential jet, but was waved off to give the president priority.


text: A surface-to-air missile struck one of the wings of the Dassault Falcon, then a second missile hit its tail. The plane erupted into flames in mid-air before crashing into the garden of the presidential palace, exploding on impact. The plane carried three French crew and nine passengers.


text: The attack was witnessed by numerous people. One of two Belgian officers in the garden of a house in Kanombe, the district in which the airport is located, saw and heard the first missile climb into the sky, saw a red flash in the sky and heard an aircraft engine stopping, followed by another missile. He immediately called Major de Saint-Quentin, part of the French team attached to the Rwandan para-commando battalion Commandos de recherche et d'action en profondeur, who advised him to organize protection for his Belgian comrades. Similarly, another Belgian officer stationed in an unused airport control tower saw the lights of an approaching aircraft, a light traveling upward from the ground and the aircraft lights going out. This was followed by a second light rising from the same place as the first and the plane turning into a falling ball of fire. This officer immediately radioed his company commander, who confirmed with the operational control tower that the plane was the presidential aircraft.


text: "You know, its engine sound was different from other planes; that is, the president's engine's sound ... We were looking towards where the plane was coming from, and we saw a projectile and we saw a ball of flame or flash and we saw the plane go down; and I saw it. I was the leader of the bloc so I asked the soldiers to get up and I told them 'Get up because Kinani [a Kinyarwanda nickname for Habyarimana meaning 'famous' or 'invincible'] has been shot down.' They told me, 'You are lying.' I said, 'It's true.' So I opened my wardrobe, I put on my uniform and I heard the bugle sound."


text: A Rwandan officer cadet at the airport who was listening to the Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines heard the announcer state that the presidential jet was coming in to land. The spoken broadcast stopped suddenly in favor of a selection of classical music.


text: Chaos ensued on the ground. Presidential Guards, who had been waiting to escort the president home from the airport, threatened people with their weapons. Twenty Belgian peacekeepers who had been stationed along the perimeter of the airport were surrounded by the Presidential Guard and some were disarmed. The airport was closed and the circling Belgian Hercules was diverted to Nairobi.


text: In Camp Kanombe the bugle call immediately after the crash was taken by soldiers to mean that the Rwandan Patriotic Front had attacked the camp. The soldiers rushed to their units' armories to equip themselves. Soldiers of the paracommando brigade Commandos de recherche et d'action en profondeur assembled on the parade ground at around 9:00 pm while members of other units gathered elsewhere in the camp. At least one witness stated that about an hour after the crash there was the sound of gunfire in Kanombe. Munitions explosions at Camp Kanombe were also initially reported.


text: The senior officer for the Kigali operational zone called the Ministry of Defence with the news. Defence Minister Augustin Bizimana was out of the country, and the officer who took the call failed to reach Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, the director of the office of the minister of defence, who was apparently at a reception given by UNAMIR's Bangladeshi officers.


text: The news of the crash, initially reported as an explosion of UNAMIR's ammunition dump, was quickly relayed to UNAMIR Force Commander Dallaire. He ordered UNAMIR Kigali sector commander Luc Marchal to send a patrol to the crash site. Numerous people began calling UNAMIR seeking information, including Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana and Lando Ndasingwa. Uwilingiyimana informed Dallaire that she was trying to gather her cabinet but many ministers were afraid to leave their families. She also reported that all of the hardline ministers had disappeared. Dallaire asked the prime minister if she could confirm that it was the president's plane that had crashed, and called UNAMIR political head Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh to inform him of developments. Uwilingiyimana called back to confirm that it was the president's jet and he was presumed to be on board. She also asked for UNAMIR help in regaining control of the political situation, as she was legally next in the line of succession, but some moderate ministers allied to her had already begun fleeing their homes, fearing for their safety.


text: At 9:18 pm, Presidential Guards whom a UNAMIR report described as "nervous and dangerous" established a roadblock near the Hotel Méridien. Several other roadblocks had been set up prior to the attack as part of security preparations for Habyarimana's arrival. The patrol of UNAMIR Belgian soldiers sent to investigate the crash site was stopped at a Presidential Guards roadblock at 9:35 pm, disarmed and sent to the airport.


text: The para-commando brigade was ordered to collect bodies from the crash site and UN peacekeepers were prevented from accessing the site. Akingeneye was quickly recovered, but most of the corpses were damaged beyond immediate recognition. Habyarimana was identified lying in a flowerbed at about 21:30 on 6 April, while Ntaryamira was recognised at about 03:00 on 7 April. One Rwandan advisor was identified after his wife told the search party what clothes he had been wearing. The last to be identified were those of the French aircrew, discovered at dawn outside of the palace gardens. The bodies were taken into the Presidential Palace living room. Plans were initially made to take them to the hospital, but the renewal of conflict made this difficult and instead the two presidents' bodies were stored in a freezer at a nearby army barracks. Two French soldiers arrived at the crash and asked to be given the flight data recorder once it was recovered. The whereabouts of the flight data recorder were later unknown. The French military contacted Dallaire and offered to investigate the crash, which Dallaire refused immediately.


text: A Rwandan colonel who called the army command about 40 minutes after the crash was told that there was no confirmation that the president was dead. About half an hour later, roughly 9:30, the situation was still confused at army command, though it appeared clear that the presidential aircraft had exploded and that it had probably been hit by a missile. News arrived that Major-General Déogratias Nsabimana, the army chief of staff, had been on the plane. The officers present realized that they would have to appoint a new chief of staff in order to clarify the chain of command and began a meeting to decide whom to appoint. Col. Bagosora joined them soon afterward. At about 10:00 pm, Ephrem Rwabalinda, the government liaison officer to UNAMIR, called Dallaire to inform him that a crisis committee was about to meet. After informing his superiors in New York City of the situation, Dallaire went to attend the meeting, where he found Bagosora in charge.


text: Observers feared that President Ntaryamira's death would lead to widespread violence in Burundi, as had happened when his predecessor, Melchior Ndadaye, was assassinated during a coup attempt in October 1993. However, unlike in Rwanda, the situation in Burundi remained peaceful after word was received of its president's death. The Burundian government declared that the plane crash was caused by an accident and President of the National Assembly Sylvestre Ntibantunganya made a broadcast on television, flanked by the minister of defence and the army chief of staff, appealing for calm. Several hundred Tutsis marched through the capital to celebrate the deaths of the presidents. Diplomats reported that most Burundians believed that the assassination was meant to target Habyarimana, not Ntaryamira. On 16 April a requiem mass was held for Ntaryamira at the Regina Mundi Cathedral in Bujumbura, attended by thousands of people, and he and his two ministers were subsequently buried in a state funeral. Ntibantunganya succeeded Ntaryamira as President of Burundi. He believed that Ntaryamira's death was "by the facts of circumstance" and that he was not targeted.


text: In response to the assassination, President Mwinyi declared three days of national mourning in Tanzania and sent messages of condolence to the Rwandan government, Burundian government, and the deceased presidents' families. He wrote in his memoirs that the Tanzanian government was "shocked" by the downing of the plane. A group of about 70 Rwandans and Burundians at the New Mwanza Hotel celebrated the assassination, leading Prime Minister John Malecela to order their arrest. This action was countermanded by the attorney general, who stated that their actions were not illegal.


text: President of the UN Security Council Colin Keating appealed for peace in Rwanda and Burundi and sent condolences to the families of the late presidents.


text: At some point following the 6 April assassination, Juvenal Habyarimana's remains were obtained by Zairian President Mobutu Sese Seko and stored in a private mausoleum in Gbadolite, Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo). Mobutu promised Habyarimana's family that his body would eventually be given a proper burial in Rwanda. On 12 May 1997, as Laurent-Désiré Kabila's ADFL rebels were advancing on Gbadolite, Mobutu had the remains flown by cargo plane to Kinshasa where they waited on the tarmac of N'djili Airport for three days. On 16 May, the day before Mobutu fled Zaire, Habyarimana's remains were cremated under the supervision of an Indian Hindu leader.


text: Two prominent investigations, which have been internationally recognized, have identified the Kanombe barracks as the likely source of the missile. In 2010, the "Mutsinzi Report" carried out by Rwandan officials in collaboration with British ballistics experts from the Royal Military Academy, identified a small area, which included a portion of the airport, the Kanombe camp, and a small area near the presidential residence, as the launch site. In January 2012, a French report was made public with similar findings.


text: Despite these reports, some have continued to cast doubt on this conclusion. These uncertainties stem from immediate assessments of the situation. French Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière had led an inquiry in 2004 which accused the RPF of shooting down the plane from Masaka Hill, but it was found to be based on the testimonies of witnesses who were not regarded as credible. A Belgian inquiry in 1994 concluded that the missile had been fired from Masaka Hill, but that "it would have been virtually impossible for a rebel soldier to have reached Masaka carrying missiles." The base was controlled by FAR forces, including the Presidential Guard and the para-commando battalion, and the AntiAircraft Battalion (LAA) were also based there. This report was widely reported to exonerate the RPF, although it did not actually do that, according to Filip Reyntjens.


text: While initial suspicion fell upon the Hutu extremists who carried out the subsequent genocide, there have been several reports since 2000 stating that the attack was carried out by the RPF on the orders of Paul Kagame, who went on to become president of Rwanda. All such evidence is heavily disputed and many academics, as well as the United Nations, have refrained from issuing a definitive finding. Mark Doyle, a BBC News correspondent who reported from Kigali through the 1994 genocide, noted in 2006 that the identities of the assassins "could turn out to be one of the great mysteries of the late 20th century."


text: A now-declassified US Department of State intelligence report from 7 April reports an unidentified source telling the US ambassador in Rwanda that "rogue Hutu elements of the military—possibly the elite presidential guard—were responsible for shooting down the plane." This conclusion was supported by other U.S. agencies, including the Defense Intelligence Agency, which reported on 9 May that "It is believed that the plane crash [...] was actually an assassination conducted by Hutu military hardliners.". Philip Gourevitch, in his 1998 book on the genocide, framed the thinking of the time:


text: Although Habyarimana's assassins have never been positively identified, suspicion has focused on the extremists in his entourage—notably the semiretired Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, an intimate of Madame Habyarimana, and a charter member of the "akazu" and its death squads, who said in January 1993 that he was preparing an apocalypse.


text: The 1997 report of the Belgian Senate stated that there was not enough information to determine specifics about the assassination. A 1998 report by the National Assembly of France posited two probable explanations. One is that the attack was carried out by groups of Hutu extremists, distressed by the advancement of negotiations with the RPF, the political and military adversary of the current regime, while the other is that it was the responsibility of the RPF, frustrated at the lack of progress in the Arusha Accords. Among the other hypotheses that were examined is one that implicates the French military, although there is no clear motive for a French attack on the Rwandan government. The 1998 French report made no determination between the two dominant theories. A 2000 report by the Organisation of African Unity does not attempt to determine responsibility.


text: A January 2000 article in the Canadian "National Post" reported that Louise Arbour, the chief prosecutor for the ICTR, had terminated an investigation into the shootdown after three Tutsi informants came forward in 1997 with detailed accusations against Paul Kagame and the RPF, claiming that they had been members of an "elite strike team" responsible for the downing. One of the three whistleblowers was Jean-Pierre Mugabe, who issued a declaration on the shootdown in April 2000. Following the "National Post"s article, a three-page memorandum written by investigator Michael Hourigan was sent to the ICTR where defense attorneys had requested it. Hourigan later stated that investigation into the shootdown had been clearly within his mandate and that he was "astounded" when Arbour made an about-face and told him it was not. This sequence of events was confirmed by Hourigan's boss, Jim Lyons, a former FBI agent who headed the so-called National Investigative Team. Lyons believes Arbour was acting on orders to shut down the investigation. An investigation by Luc Reydams concluded that there was no evidence of such orders. Reydams argued that the decision to shut down the investigation was "based on an assessment of the concrete conditions at the time" and that "any responsible Prosecutor would have concluded that pursuing the investigation would be futile and dangerous."


text: Arbour later stated that "It was my decision and my decision alone". According to Arbour, the OTP in Kigali was in a very difficult situation at the time:


text: In 1998, the French anti-terrorist magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguière opened an investigation into the shootdown on behalf of the families of the French aircraft crew. On the basis of hundreds of interviews, Bruguière concluded that the assassination had been carried out on the orders of Paul Kagame, and issued arrest warrants against nine of Kagame's aides in 2006. In protest, Rwanda broke diplomatic relations with France. In November 2008 the German government implemented the first of these European warrants by arresting Rose Kabuye, Kagame's chief of protocol, upon her arrival in Frankfurt.


text: One of Bruguière's witnesses was Abdul Ruzibiza, a former lieutenant in the RPF who claimed that he was part of a cell that carried out the assassination with shoulder-fired SA-16 missiles. Days after the substance of Bruguière's report was leaked in 2004, Ruzibaza published his testimony in a press release, detailing his account and further accusing the RPF of starting the conflict, prolonging the genocide, carrying out widespread atrocities during the genocide and political repression. The former RPF officer published a book in 2005 with his account ("Rwanda. L’histoire secrete"), and testified under oath before the ICTR in 2006. The scholar René Lemarchand wrote about the book that "The careful marshalling of the evidence, the remarkably precise information concerning who did what, where, and when, the author's familiarity with the operational code of the RPF, leave few doubts in the reader's mind about Kagame's responsibility in triggering the event that led to the bloodshed." In November 2008 Ruzibiza suddenly claimed he had invented everything, but some months before his death in 2010, Ruzibiza explained that his retraction "is linked to my personal security and that of other witnesses". Yet Ruzubiza now changed his story by saying that he did not personally participate in the downing of the plane, but rather knew someone who did.


text: Linda Melvern wrote that Bruguière's evidence "was very sparse, and that some of it, concerning the alleged anti-aircraft missiles used to down the presidential jet, had already been rejected by a French Parliamentary enquiry." A 2007 article by Colette Braeckman in "Le Monde Diplomatique" strongly questions the reliability of Judge Bruguière's report and suggests the direct involvement of French military personnel acting for or with the Presidential Guard of the Rwanda governmental forces in the missile attack on the aircraft. In a 2007 interview with the BBC, Kagame said he would co-operate with an impartial inquiry "carried out by a judge who had nothing to do with Rwanda or France". The BBC concluded, "Whether any judge would want to take on such a task is quite another matter."


text: Paul Rusesabagina, a Rwandan of mixed Hutu and Tutsi origin whose life-saving efforts was the basis of the 2004 film "Hotel Rwanda", has supported the allegation that Kagame and the RPF were behind the plane downing, and wrote in November 2006 that it "defies logic" that the UN Security Council had not ordered an investigation, as it had done following the far less consequential assassination of Rafic Hariri in 2005.


text: In February 2008, a 182-page indictment and international arrest warrants were issued against 40 current or former high-ranking Rwandan military officials of the Rwandan Patriotic Army/Rwandan Defence Forces by the Spanish Investigative Judge Fernando Andreu of the "Audiencia Nacional". They were charged with a number of serious crimes between 1990 and 2002, including the shootdown of Habyarimana's plane. Unlike the French judicial enquiry, Andreu's indictment was in part based on the principle of universal jurisdiction.


text: Kagame also ordered the formation of a commission of Rwandans that was "charged with assembling proof of the involvement of France in the genocide". The commission issued its report to Kagame in November 2007 and its head, Jean de Dieu Mucyo, stated that the commission would now "wait for President Kagame to declare whether the inquiry was valid".


text: In January 2010, the Rwandan government released the "Report of the Investigation into the Causes and Circumstances of and Responsibility for the Attack of 06/04/1994 Against The Falcon 50 Rwandan Presidential Aeroplane Registration Number 9XR-NN," known as the Mutsinzi Report. The multivolume report implicates proponents of Hutu Power in the attack and Philip Gourevitch states, "two months ago, on the day after Rwanda's admission to the Commonwealth, France and Rwanda reestablished normal diplomatic relations. Before that happened, of course, the Rwandans had shared the about-to-be-released Mutsinzi report with the French. The normalization of relations amounts to France's acceptance of the report's conclusions."


text: Ntaryamira's death is commemorated by the Burundian government on 6 April of each year. The death of the Burundian president and two of his ministers in the plane shootdown has generally been overshadowed in public memory by Habyarimana's death and the subsequent Rwandan genocide.


title: History of feminism

text: The history of feminism comprises the narratives (chronological or thematic) of the movements and ideologies which have aimed at equal rights for women. While feminists around the world have differed in causes, goals, and intentions depending on time, culture, and country, most Western feminist historians assert that all movements that work to obtain women's rights should be considered feminist movements, even when they did not (or do not) apply the term to themselves. Some other historians limit the term "feminist" to the modern feminist movement and its progeny, and use the label "protofeminist" to describe earlier movements.


title: History of feminism

text: Modern Western feminist history is conventionally split into three time periods, or "waves", each with slightly different aims based on prior progress:


title: History of feminism

text: Although the "waves" construct has been commonly used to describe the history of feminism, the concept has also been criticized by non-White feminists for ignoring and erasing the history between the "waves", by choosing to focus solely on a few famous figures, on the perspective of a white bourgeois woman and on popular events, and for being "racist" and "colonialist."


title: History of feminism

text: People and activists who discuss or advance women's equality prior to the existence of the feminist movement are sometimes labeled as "protofeminist". Some scholars criticize this term because they believe it diminishes the importance of earlier contributions or that feminism does not have a single begin or linear history as implied by terms such as "protofeminist" or "postfeminist".


title: History of feminism

text: Around 24 centuries ago, Plato, according to Elaine Hoffman Baruch, "[argued] for the total political and sexual equality of women, advocating that they be members of his highest class, ... those who rule and fight".


title: History of feminism

text: Andal, a female Tamil saint, lived around the 7th or 8th century. She is well known for writing Tiruppavai. Andal has inspired women's groups such as Goda Mandali. Her divine marriage to Vishnu is viewed by some as a feminist act, as it allowed her to avoid the regular duties of being a wife and gain autonomy.


title: History of feminism

text: Italian-French writer Christine de Pizan (1364 – c. 1430), the author of "The Book of the City of Ladies" and "Epître au Dieu d'Amour" ("Epistle to the God of Love") is cited by Simone de Beauvoir as the first woman to denounce misogyny and write about the relation of the sexes. Christine de Pizan also wrote one of the early fictional accounts of gender transition in "Le Livre de la mutation de fortune". Other early feminist writers include the 16th-century writers Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Modesta di Pozzo di Forzi, and Jane Anger, and the 17th-century writers Hannah Woolley in England, Juana Inés de la Cruz in Mexico, Marie Le Jars de Gournay, Anne Bradstreet, Anna Maria van Schurman and François Poullain de la Barre. The emergence of women as true intellectuals effected change also in Italian humanism. Cassandra Fedele was the first women to join a humanist group and achieved much despite greater constraints on women.


title: History of feminism

text: Renaissance defenses of women are present in a variety of literary genre and across Europe with a central claim of equality. Feminists appealed to principles that progressively lead to discourse of economic property injustice themes. Feminizing society was a way for women at this time to use literature to create interdependent and non-hierarchical systems that provided opportunities for both women and men.


title: History of feminism

text: Men have also played an important role in the history of defending that women are capable and able to compete equally with men, including Antonio Cornazzano, Vespasiano de Bisticci, and Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti. Castiglione continues this trend of defending woman's moral character and that traditions are at fault for the appearance of women's inferiority. However, the critique is that there is no advocacy for social change, leaving her out of the political sphere, and abandoning her to traditional domestic roles. Although, many of them would encourage that if women were to be included in the political sphere it would be a natural consequence of their education. In addition, some of these men state that men are at fault for the lack of knowledge of intellectual women by leaving them out of historical records.


title: History of feminism

text: One of the most important 17th-century feminist writers in the English language was Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Her knowledge was recognized by some, such as proto-feminist Bathsua Makin, who wrote that "The present Dutchess of New-Castle, by her own Genius, rather than any timely Instruction, over-tops many grave Grown-Men," and considered her a prime example of what women could become through education.


title: History of feminism

text: Margaret Fell's most famous work is "Women's Speaking Justified", a scripture-based argument for women's ministry, and one of the major texts on women's religious leadership in the 17th century. In this short pamphlet, Fell based her argument for equality of the sexes on one of the basic premises of Quakerism, namely spiritual equality. Her belief was that God created all human beings, therefore both men and women were capable of not only possessing the Inner Light but also the ability to be a prophet. Fell has been described as a "feminist pioneer".


title: History of feminism

text: The Age of Enlightenment was characterized by secular intellectual reasoning and a flowering of philosophical writing. Many Enlightenment philosophers defended the rights of women, including Jeremy Bentham (1781), Marquis de Condorcet (1790), and Mary Wollstonecraft (1792). Other important writers of the time that expressed feminist views included Abigail Adams, Catharine Macaulay, and Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht.


title: History of feminism

text: The English utilitarian and classical liberal philosopher Jeremy Bentham said that it was the placing of women in a legally inferior position that made him choose the career of a reformist at the age of eleven, though American critic John Neal claimed to have convinced him to take up women's rights issues during their association between 1825 and 1827. Bentham spoke for complete equality between sexes including the rights to vote and to participate in government. He opposed the asymmetrical sexual moral standards between men and women.


title: History of feminism

text: In his "Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation" (1781), Bentham strongly condemned many countries' common practice to deny women's rights due to allegedly inferior minds. Bentham gave many examples of able female regents.


title: History of feminism

text: Nicolas de Condorcet was a mathematician, classical liberal politician, leading French Revolutionary, republican, and Voltairean anti-clericalist. He was also a fierce defender of human rights, including the equality of women and the abolition of slavery, unusual for the 1780s. He advocated for women's suffrage in the new government in 1790 with "De l'admission des femmes au droit de cité" ("For the Admission to the Rights of Citizenship For Women") and an article for "Journal de la Société de 1789".


title: History of feminism

text: Following de Condorcet's repeated, yet failed, appeals to the National Assembly in 1789 and 1790, Olympe de Gouges (in association with the Society of the Friends of Truth) authored and published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen in 1791. This was another plea for the French Revolutionary government to recognize the natural and political rights of women. De Gouges wrote the Declaration in the prose of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, almost mimicking the failure of men to include more than a half of the French population in "egalité". Even though the Declaration did not immediately accomplish its goals, it did set a precedent for a manner in which feminists could satirize their governments for their failures in equality, seen in documents such as "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" and "A Declaration of Sentiments".


title: History of feminism

text: Perhaps the most cited feminist writer of the time was Mary Wollstonecraft, She identified the education and upbringing of women as creating their limited expectations based on a self-image dictated by the typically male perspective. Despite her perceived inconsistencies (Miriam Brody referred to the "Two Wollstonecrafts") reflective of problems that had no easy answers, this book remains a foundation stone of feminist thought.


title: History of feminism

text: Wollstonecraft believed that both genders contributed to inequality. She took women's considerable power over men for granted, and determined that both would require education to ensure the necessary changes in social attitudes. Given her humble origins and scant education, her personal achievements speak to her own determination. Wollstonecraft attracted the mockery of Samuel Johnson, who described her and her ilk as "Amazons of the pen". Based on his relationship with Hester Thrale, he complained of women's encroachment onto a male territory of writing, and not their intelligence or education. For many commentators, Wollstonecraft represents the first codification of equality feminism, or a refusal of the feminine role in society.


title: History of feminism

text: 19th-century feminists reacted to cultural inequities including the pernicious, widespread acceptance of the Victorian image of women's "proper" role and "sphere". The Victorian ideal created a dichotomy of "separate spheres" for men and women that was very clearly defined in theory, though not always in reality. In this ideology, men were to occupy the public sphere (the space of wage labor and politics) and women the private sphere (the space of home and children.) This "feminine ideal", also called "The Cult of Domesticity", was typified in Victorian conduct books such as "Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management" and Sarah Stickney Ellis's books. "The Angel in the House" (1854) and "El ángel del hogar", bestsellers by Coventry Patmore and Maria del Pilar Sinués de Marco, came to symbolize the Victorian feminine ideal. Queen Victoria herself disparaged the concept of feminism, which she described in private letters as the "mad, wicked folly of 'Woman's Rights'".


title: History of feminism

text: As Jane Austen addressed women's restricted lives in the early part of the century, Charlotte Brontë, Anne Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot depicted women's misery and frustration. In her autobiographical novel "" (1854), American journalist Fanny Fern describes her own struggle to support her children as a newspaper columnist after her husband's untimely death. Louisa May Alcott penned a strongly feminist novel, "A Long Fatal Love Chase" (1866), about a young woman's attempts to flee her bigamist husband and become independent.


title: History of feminism

text: Male authors also recognized injustices against women. The novels of George Meredith, George Gissing, and Thomas Hardy, and the plays of Henrik Ibsen outlined the contemporary plight of women. Meredith's "Diana of the Crossways" (1885) is an account of Caroline Norton's life. One critic later called Ibsen's plays "feministic propaganda".


title: History of feminism

text: John Neal is remembered as America's first women's rights lecturer. Starting in 1823 and continuing at least as late as 1869, he used magazine articles, short stories, novels, public speaking, political organizing, and personal relationships to advance feminist issues in the United States and Great Britain, reaching the height of his influence in this field circa 1843. He declared intellectual equality between men and women, fought coverture, and demanded suffrage, equal pay, and better education and working conditions for women. Neal's early feminist essays in the 1820s fill an intellectual gap between Mary Wollstonecraft, Catharine Macaulay, and Judith Sargent Murray and Seneca Falls Convention-era successors like Sarah Moore Grimké, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Margaret Fuller. As a male writer insulated from many common forms of attack against female feminist thinkers, Neal's advocacy was crucial in bringing the field back into the mainstream in England and the US.


title: History of feminism

text: In his essays for "Blackwood's Magazine" (1824-1825), Neal called for women's suffrage and "maintain[ed] that women are not "inferior" to men, but only "unlike" men, in their intellectual properties" and "would have women treated like men, of common sense." In "The Yankee" magazine (1828–1829), he demanded economic opportunities for women, saying "We hope to see the day... when our women of all ages... will be able to maintain herself, without being obliged to marry for bread." At his most well-attended lecture titled "Rights of Women," Neal spoke before a crowd of around 3,000 people in 1843 at New York City's largest auditorium at the time, the Broadway Tabernacle. Neal became even more prominently involved with the women's suffrage movement in his old age following the Civil War, both in Maine and nationally in the US by supporting Elizabeth Cady Stanton's and Susan B. Anthony's National Woman Suffrage Association and writing for its journal, "The Revolution". Stanton and Anthony recognized his work after his death in their "History of Woman Suffrage."


title: History of feminism

text: At the outset of the 19th century, the dissenting feminist voices had little to no social influence. There was little sign of change in the political or social order, nor any evidence of a recognizable women's movement. Collective concerns began to coalesce by the end of the century, paralleling the emergence of a stiffer social model and code of conduct that Marion Reid described as confining and repressive for women. While the increased emphasis on feminine virtue partly stirred the call for a woman's movement, the tensions that this role caused for women plagued many early-19th-century feminists with doubt and worry, and fueled opposing views.


title: History of feminism

text: In Scotland, Reid published her influential "A Plea for Woman" in 1843, which proposed a transatlantic Western agenda for women's rights, including voting rights for women.


title: History of feminism

text: Caroline Norton advocated for changes in British law. She discovered a lack of legal rights for women upon entering an abusive marriage. The publicity generated from her appeal to Queen Victoria and related activism helped change English laws to recognize and accommodate married women and child custody issues.


title: History of feminism

text: While many women including Norton were wary of organized movements, their actions and words often motivated and inspired such movements. Among these was Florence Nightingale, whose conviction that women had all the potential of men but none of the opportunities impelled her storied nursing career. At the time, her feminine virtues were emphasized over her ingenuity, an example of the bias against acknowledging female accomplishment in the mid-1800s.


title: History of feminism

text: Due to varying ideologies, feminists were not always supportive of each other's efforts. Harriet Martineau and others dismissed Wollstonecraft's contributions as dangerous, and deplored Norton's candidness, but seized on the abolitionist campaign that Martineau had witnessed in the United States as one that should logically be applied to women. Her "Society in America" was pivotal: it caught the imagination of women who urged her to take up their cause.


title: History of feminism

text: Anna Wheeler was influenced by Saint Simonian socialists while working in France. She advocated for suffrage and attracted the attention of Benjamin Disraeli, the Conservative leader, as a dangerous radical on a par with Jeremy Bentham. She would later inspire early socialist and feminist advocate William Thompson, who wrote the first work published in English to advocate full equality of rights for women, the 1825 "Appeal of One Half of the Human Race".


title: History of feminism

text: Feminists of previous centuries charged women's exclusion from education as the central cause for their domestic relegation and denial of social advancement, and women's 19th-century education was no better. Frances Power Cobbe, among others, called for education reform, an issue that gained attention alongside marital and property rights, and domestic violence.


title: History of feminism

text: Female journalists like Martineau and Cobbe in Britain, and Margaret Fuller in America, were achieving journalistic employment, which placed them in a position to influence other women. Cobbe would refer to "Woman's Rights" not just in the abstract, but as an identifiable cause.


title: History of feminism

text: Barbara Leigh Smith and her friends met regularly during the 1850s in London's Langham Place to discuss the united women's voice necessary for achieving reform. These "Ladies of Langham Place" included Bessie Rayner Parkes and Anna Jameson. They focused on education, employment, and marital law. One of their causes became the Married Women's Property Committee of 1855. They collected thousands of signatures for legislative reform petitions, some of which were successful. Smith had also attended the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention in America.


title: History of feminism

text: Smith and Parkes, together and apart, wrote many articles on education and employment opportunities. In the same year as Norton, Smith summarized the legal framework for injustice in her 1854 "A Brief Summary of the Laws of England concerning Women". She was able to reach large numbers of women via her role in the "English Women's Journal". The response to this journal led to their creation of the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women (SPEW). Smith's Married Women's Property committee collected 26,000 signatures to change the law for all women, including those unmarried.


title: History of feminism

text: Harriet Taylor published her "Enfranchisement" in 1851, and wrote about the inequities of family law. In 1853, she married John Stuart Mill, and provided him with much of the subject material for "The Subjection of Women".


title: History of feminism

text: Emily Davies also encountered the Langham group, and with Elizabeth Garrett created SPEW branches outside London.


title: History of feminism

text: The interrelated barriers to education and employment formed the backbone of 19th-century feminist reform efforts, for instance, as described by Harriet Martineau in her 1859 "Edinburgh Journal" article, "Female Industry". These barriers did not change in conjunction with the economy. Martineau, however, remained a moderate, for practical reasons, and unlike Cobbe, did not support the emerging call for the vote.


title: History of feminism

text: The education reform efforts of women like Davies and the Langham group slowly made inroads. Queen's College (1848) and Bedford College (1849) in London began to offer some education to women from 1848. By 1862, Davies established a committee to persuade the universities to allow women to sit for the recently established Local Examinations, and achieved partial success in 1865. She published "The Higher Education of Women" a year later. Davies and Leigh Smith founded the first higher educational institution for women and enrolled five students. The school later became Girton College, Cambridge in 1869, Newnham College, Cambridge in 1871, and Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford in 1879. Bedford began to award degrees the previous year. Despite these measurable advances, few could take advantage of them and life for female students was still difficult.


title: History of feminism

text: In the 1883 Ilbert Bill controversy, a British India bill that proposed Indian judicial jurisdiction to try British criminals, Bengali women in support of the bill responded by claiming that they were more educated than the English women opposed to the bill, and noted that more Indian women had degrees than British women at the time.


title: History of feminism

text: As part of the continuing dialogue between British and American feminists, Elizabeth Blackwell, one of the first American women to graduate in medicine (1849), lectured in Britain with Langham support. She eventually took her degree in France. Garrett's very successful 1870 campaign to run for London School Board office is another example of a how a small band of very determined women were beginning to reach positions of influence at the local government level.


title: History of feminism

text: Campaigns gave women opportunities to test their new political skills and to conjoin disparate social reform groups. Their successes include the campaign for the Married Women's Property Act (passed in 1882) and the campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866, and 1869, which united women's groups and utilitarian liberals like John Stuart Mill.


title: History of feminism

text: Generally, women were outraged by the inherent inequity and misogyny of the legislation. For the first time, women in large numbers took up the rights of prostitutes. Prominent critics included Blackwell, Nightingale, Martineau, and Elizabeth Wolstenholme. Elizabeth Garrett, unlike her sister, Millicent, did not support the campaign, though she later admitted that the campaign had done well.


title: History of feminism

text: Josephine Butler, already experienced in prostitution issues, a charismatic leader, and a seasoned campaigner, emerged as the natural leader of what became the Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts in 1869. Her work demonstrated the potential power of an organized lobby group. The association successfully argued that the Acts not only demeaned prostitutes, but all women and men by promoting a blatant sexual double standard. Butler's activities resulted in the radicalization of many moderate women. The Acts were repealed in 1886.


title: History of feminism

text: On a smaller scale, Annie Besant campaigned for the rights of matchgirls (female factory workers) and against the appalling conditions under which they worked in London. Her work of publicizing the difficult conditions of the workers through interviews in bi-weekly periodicals like The Link became a method for raising public concern over social issues.


title: History of feminism

text: Feminists did not recognize separate waves of feminism until the second wave was so named by journalist Martha Weinman Lear in a 1968 "New York Times Magazine" article "The Second Feminist Wave", according to Alice Echols. Jennifer Baumgardner reports criticism by professor Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz of the division into waves and the difficulty of categorizing some feminists into specific waves, argues that the main critics of a wave are likely to be members of the prior wave who remain vital, and that waves are coming faster. The "waves debate" has influenced how historians and other scholars have established the chronologies of women's political activism.


title: History of feminism

text: The 19th- and early 20th-century feminist activity in the English-speaking world that sought to win women's suffrage, female education rights, better working conditions, and abolition of gender double standards is known as first-wave feminism. The term "first-wave" was coined retrospectively when the term "second-wave feminism" was used to describe a newer feminist movement that fought social and cultural inequalities beyond basic political inequalities.


title: History of feminism

text: In the United States, feminist movement leaders campaigned for the national abolition of slavery and Temperance before championing women's rights. American first-wave feminism involved a wide range of women, some belonging to conservative Christian groups (such as Frances Willard and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union), others resembling the diversity and radicalism of much of second-wave feminism (such as Stanton, Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and the National Woman Suffrage Association, of which Stanton was president). First-wave feminism in the United States is considered to have ended with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (1920), which granted women the right to vote in the United States.


title: History of feminism

text: Activism for the equality of women was not limited to the United States. In mid-nineteenth century Persia, Táhirih, an early member of the Bábí Faith, was active as a poet and religious reformer. At a time when it was considered taboo for women to speak openly with men in Persia, and for non-clerics to speak about religion, she challenged the intellectuals of the age in public discourse on social and theological matters. In 1848 she appeared before an assemblage of men without a veil and gave a speech on the rights of women, signaling a radical break with the prevailing moral order and the start of a new religious and social dispensation. After this episode she was put under house arrest by the Persian Government until her execution by strangling at the age of 35 in August 1852. At her execution she is reported as proclaiming "You can kill me as soon as you like, but you cannot stop the emancipation of women." The story of her life rapidly spread to European circles and she would inspire later generations of Iranian feminists. Members of the Bahá'í Faith recognize her as the first women's suffrage martyr and an example of fearlessness and courage in the advancement of the equality of women and men.


title: History of feminism

text: Louise Dittmar campaigned for women's rights, in Germany, in the 1840s. Although slightly later in time, Fusae Ichikawa was in the first wave of women's activists in her own country of Japan, campaigning for women's suffrage. Mary Lee was active in the suffrage movement in South Australia, the first Australian colony to grant women the vote in 1894. In New Zealand, Kate Sheppard and Mary Ann Müller worked to achieve the vote for women by 1893.


title: History of feminism

text: In the United States, the antislavery campaign of the 1830s served as both a cause ideologically compatible with feminism and a blueprint for later feminist political organizing. Attempts to exclude women only strengthened their convictions. Sarah and Angelina Grimké moved rapidly from the emancipation of slaves to the emancipation of women. The most influential feminist writer of the time was the colourful journalist Margaret Fuller, whose "Woman in the Nineteenth Century" was published in 1845. Her dispatches from Europe for the "New York Tribune" helped create to synchronize the women's rights movement.


title: History of feminism

text: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott met in 1840 while en route to London where they were shunned as women by the male leadership of the first World's Anti-Slavery Convention. In 1848, Mott and Stanton held a woman's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, where a declaration of independence for women was drafted. Lucy Stone helped to organize the first National Women's Rights Convention in 1850, a much larger event at which Sojourner Truth, Abby Kelley Foster, and others spoke sparked Susan B. Anthony to take up the cause of women's rights. In December 1851, Sojourner Truth contributed to the feminist movement when she spoke at the Women's Convention in Akron, Ohio. She delivered her powerful "Ain't I a Woman" speech in an effort to promote women's rights by demonstrating their ability to accomplish tasks that have been traditionally associated with men. Barbara Leigh Smith met with Mott in 1858, strengthening the link between the transatlantic feminist movements.


title: History of feminism

text: Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage saw the Church as a major obstacle to women's rights, and welcomed the emerging literature on matriarchy. Both Gage and Stanton produced works on this topic, and collaborated on "The Woman's Bible". Stanton wrote "The Matriarchate or Mother-Age" and Gage wrote "Woman, Church and State", neatly inverting Johann Jakob Bachofen's thesis and adding a unique epistemological perspective, the critique of objectivity and the perception of the subjective.


title: History of feminism

text: Stanton once observed regarding assumptions of female inferiority, "The worst feature of these assumptions is that women themselves believe them". However this attempt to replace androcentric (male-centered) theological tradition with a gynocentric (female-centered) view made little headway in a women's movement dominated by religious elements; thus she and Gage were largely ignored by subsequent generations.


title: History of feminism

text: By 1913, Feminism (originally capitalized) was a household term in the United States. Major issues in the 1910s and 1920s included suffrage, women's partisan activism, economics and employment, sexualities and families, war and peace, and a Constitutional amendment for equality. Both equality and difference were seen as routes to women's empowerment. Organizations at the time included the National Woman's Party, suffrage advocacy groups such as the National American Woman Suffrage Association and the National League of Women Voters, career associations such as the American Association of University Women, the National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs, and the National Women's Trade Union League, war and peace groups such as the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and the International Council of Women, alcohol-focused groups like the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform, and race- and gender-centered organizations like the National Association of Colored Women. Leaders and theoreticians included Jane Addams, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Alice Paul, Carrie Chapman Catt, Margaret Sanger, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.


title: History of feminism

text: The women's right to vote, with its legislative representation, represented a paradigm shift where women would no longer be treated as second-class citizens without a voice. The women's suffrage campaign is the most deeply embedded campaign of the past 250 years.


title: History of feminism

text: At first, suffrage was treated as a lower priority. The French Revolution accelerated this, with the assertions of Condorcet and de Gouges, and the women who led the 1789 march on Versailles. In 1793, the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women was founded, and originally included suffrage on its agenda before it was suppressed at the end of the year. As a gesture, this showed that issue was now part of the European political agenda.


title: History of feminism

text: German women were involved in the Vormärz, a prelude to the 1848 revolution. In Italy, Clara Maffei, Cristina Trivulzio Belgiojoso, and Ester Martini Currica were politically active in the events leading up to 1848. In Britain, interest in suffrage emerged from the writings of Wheeler and Thompson in the 1820s, and from Reid, Taylor, and Anne Knight in the 1840s. While New Zealand was the first sovereign state where women won the right to vote (1893), they did not win the right to stand in elections until later. The Australian State of South Australia was the first sovereign state in the world to officially grant full suffrage to women (in 1894).


title: History of feminism

text: The Langham Place ladies set up a suffrage committee at an 1866 meeting at Elizabeth Garrett's home, renamed the London Society for Women's Suffrage in 1867. Soon similar committees had spread across the country, raising petitions, and working closely with John Stuart Mill. When denied outlets by establishment periodicals, feminists started their own, such as Lydia Becker's "Women's Suffrage Journal" in 1870.


title: History of feminism

text: Other publications included Richard Pankhurst's "Englishwoman's Review" (1866). Tactical disputes were the biggest problem, and the groups' memberships fluctuated. Women considered whether men (like Mill) should be involved. As it went, Mill withdrew as the movement became more aggressive with each disappointment. The political pressure ensured debate, but year after year the movement was defeated in Parliament.


title: History of feminism

text: Despite this, the women accrued political experience, which translated into slow progress at the local government level. But after years of frustration, many women became increasingly radicalized. Some refused to pay taxes, and the Pankhurst family emerged as the dominant movement influence, having also founded the Women's Franchise League in 1889, which sought local election suffrage for women.


title: History of feminism

text: The Isle of Man, a UK dependency, was the first free standing jurisdiction to grant women the vote (1881), followed by the right to vote (but not to stand) in New Zealand in 1893, where Kate Sheppard had pioneered reform. Some Australian states had also granted women the vote. This included Victoria for a brief period (1863–5), South Australia (1894), and Western Australia (1899). Australian women received the vote at the Federal level in 1902, Finland in 1906, and Norway initially in 1907 (completed in 1913).


title: History of feminism

text: In the early part of the 20th century, also known as the Edwardian era, there was a change in the way women dressed from the Victorian rigidity and complacency. Women, especially women who married a wealthy man, would often wear what we consider today, practical.


title: History of feminism

text: Books, articles, speeches, pictures, and papers from the period show a diverse range of themes other than political reform and suffrage discussed publicly. In the Netherlands, for instance, the main feminist issues were educational rights, rights to medical care, improved working conditions, peace, and dismantled gender double standards. Feminists identified as such with little fanfare.


title: History of feminism

text: Emmeline Pankhurst formed the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1903. As she put it, they viewed votes for women no longer as "a right, but as a desperate necessity". At the state level, Australia and the United States had already granted suffrage to some women. American feminists such as Susan B. Anthony (1902) visited Britain. While WSPU was the best-known suffrage group, it was only one of many, such as the Women's Freedom League and the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) led by Millicent Garrett Fawcett. WSPU was largely a family affair, although externally financed. Christabel Pankhurst became the dominant figure and gathered friends such as Annie Kenney, Flora Drummond, Teresa Billington, Ethel Smyth, Grace Roe, and Norah Dacre Fox (later known as Norah Elam) around her. Veterans such as Elizabeth Garrett also joined.