title: Donnie Iris

text: In 1998, the band released their first live album. A collection of tracks played at Nick's Fat City, a popular Pittsburgh nightclub, "Live! At Nick's Fat City" was the first release to feature bass guitarist Paul Goll, who had been touring with the band since 1993, along with drummer Tommy Rich. 1999 saw the release of an Iris collaborative project entitled "Together Alone", featuring contributions from other regionally popular artists like Michael Stanley, Scott Blasey, B. E. Taylor and Joe Grushecky. After "Alone", which featured a softer side of Iris's vocals, the band took a break from releasing new material but continued to perform regularly through the decade.


title: Donnie Iris

text: The first true compilation album from the band was released in 2001 by their former label at MCA: "20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection: The Best of Donnie Iris", featuring material from the band's four MCA-released albums from the early 1980s. In 2004, the band celebrated its 25th anniversary with a new compilation album featuring their rarer material, "25 Years", and performed live at the Chevrolet Amphitheatre in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for 4,000 people. This concert was known for featuring a four drummer lineup of current and previous drummers for the band; Kevin Valentine, Tommy Rich, Brice Foster and Mark Avsec's daughter Danna Avsec, who was the guest drummer. Since then, the band has used a three drummer line-up for several concerts.


title: Donnie Iris

text: The band's 2006 album, "Ellwood City", was a tribute to Iris's hometown, Ellwood City, Pennsylvania. June 17, 2006 was recognized throughout Lawrence County, Pennsylvania as "Donnie Iris Day" by Ellwood City Executive Council President Glenn Jones and Mayor Roy P. Meehan. Iris also received special commendations and awards from United States Congresswoman Melissa Hart and Pennsylvania state representative Frank LaGrotta.


title: Donnie Iris

text: In 2008 and 2009, King Cool Light was developed after Mark Avsec realized that "King Cool" sounded like the name of a refreshing beer. He later approached Iris and Marty Lee Hoenes who both immediately liked the idea, giving birth to King Cool Limited. King Cool Light was unveiled on November 20, 2009, at Club Diesel in Pittsburgh during the band's 30th anniversary concert. Every case was sold out, but 25 more cases were brought in, which were also sold out.


title: Donnie Iris

text: The band's first EP, "You Can't Really Miss Me If I Never Go Away", was released in 2008. It was followed in 2009 with their second live album, "Ah! Live!", recorded at shows in Erie and Kittanning, Pennsylvania.


title: Donnie Iris

text: In an interview with "Cleveland Scene" published on February 3, 2010, Mark Avsec announced that the band's next project would be a Christmas album. "Ah! Leluiah!" was released on November 18, 2010. Additionally, King Cool Light was released in the Youngstown, Ohio market in July of that same year. Also that year, Iris retired from the mortgage banking business and sold SIMCorp.


title: Donnie Iris

text: Avsec announced in a March 2012 interview that the band had begun working on their twelfth studio album, due out in 2013 to commemorate Iris's seventieth birthday. However, this project has turned into a special release to celebrate the thirty-fifth anniversary of the formation of Donnie Iris and the Cruisers, which was expected to be released in 2014. On June 17, 2014, Iris and the Cruisers leaked a new song, "Sing the Songs of Summer (All Night Long)," the first track to be released from the band's intermittent time in the studio in the previous two years. This was followed by "Pittsburgh Made," released on Spotify and for free download in October 2016. On the April 2, 2015 episode of Jim Krenn's "No Restrictions" podcast, Iris mentioned that he and the band hoped to have the often-delayed album out by the end of 2015. As of November 2018, there is still no release date known for the new album.


title: Donnie Iris

text: In February 2015, Iris was nominated for a Pittsburgh Rock 'N Roll Legends Award in the modern era category (artists with 20-plus years in music business). The awards, begun in 2014, honor those who have made significant contributions to the Pittsburgh rock scene. In his category, Iris went up against Joe Grushecky, Billy Price and Rusted Root. On March 19, it was announced that Iris had won the public voting process to be inducted for the Rock 'N Roll Legends in his category, along with Lou Christie (Legacy Legends category, 40-plus years in the business) and Porky Chedwick (non-performer/musical professional category, 20-plus years active). Iris was enshrined with a plaque at Pittsburgh's Hard Rock Cafe on April 23, 2015 and he performed a set with an all-star Pittsburgh band.


title: Donnie Iris

text: In July 2021, Iris's first four studio albums were reissued in remastered CD form by Rock Candy Records. Each album contains one or more live bonus tracks taken from the 1981 "Live at the Paradise, Boston" promotional EP.


title: Rape during the Bangladesh Liberation War

text: During the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, members of the Pakistani military and Razakars raped between 200,000 and 400,000 Bengali women and girls in a systematic campaign of genocidal rape. Most of the rape victims of the Pakistani Army and its allies were Hindu women. Some of these women died in captivity or committed suicide while others moved to India. Imams and Muslim religious leaders declared the women "war booty”. The activists and leaders of Islamic parties are also accused to be involved in the rapes and abduction of women.


text: The Pakistani elite believed that Hindus were behind the revolt and that as soon as there was a solution to the "Hindu problem" the conflict would resolve. For Pakistanis, the violence against Hindus was a strategic policy. Muslim Pakistani men believed the sacrifice of Hindu women was needed to fix the national malaise. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Imams and Mullahs supported the rapes by the Pakistani Army and issued fatwas declaring the women war booty. A fatwa from West Pakistan during the war asserted that women taken from Bengali Hindus could be considered war booty. Those rapes apparently caused thousands of pregnancies, births of war babies, abortions, infanticide, suicide, and Ostracism of the victims. Recognized as one of the major occurrences of war crimes anywhere, the atrocities ended after surrender of the Pakistani military and supporting Razakar militias. Initially India claimed its support for the Mukti Bahini and later intervention was on humanitarian grounds, but after the UN rejected this argument, India claimed intervention was needed to protect its own security, and it is now widely seen as a humanitarian move.


text: During the war, Bengali nationalists also committed mass rape of ethnic Bihari Muslim women, since the Bihari Muslim community supported Pakistan. Indian soldiers as well as Bengali militiamen were also identified as perpetrators of rape by scholar Yasmin Saikia. Yasmin Saikia was informed repeatedly in Bangladesh that Pakistani, Bengali, and Bihari men raped Hindu women during the war.


text: In 2009, almost 40 years after the events of 1971, a report published by the War Crimes Fact Finding Committee of Bangladesh accused 1,597 people of war crimes, including rape. Since 2010 the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) has indicted, tried and sentenced several people to life imprisonment or death for their actions during the conflict. The stories of the rape victims have been told in movies and literature, and depicted in art. The rape victims have been recognized as "Birangona" or "war heroines" by the government of Bangladesh.The term "Biragonga" was first introduced by Sheikh Mujib in 1971, in an attempt to prevent them from being outcast by the society.


text: Following the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan the East and West wings were not only separated geographically, but also culturally. The authorities of the West viewed the Bengali Muslim in the East as "too Bengali" and their application of Islam as "inferior and impure", and this made them unreliable. To this extent the West began a strategy to forcibly assimilate the Bengalis culturally. The Bengalis of East Pakistan were chiefly Muslim, but their numbers were interspersed with a significant Hindu minority. Very few spoke Urdu, which in 1948 had been declared the national language of Pakistan. To express their opposition, activists in East Pakistan founded the Bengali language movement. Earlier, in 1949, other activists had founded the Awami League as an alternative to the ruling Muslim League in West Pakistan. In the next decade and half, Bengalis became gradually disenchanted with the balance of power in Pakistan, which was under military rule during much of this time; eventually some began to call for secession. By the late 1960s, a perception had emerged that the people of East Pakistan were second-class citizens. It did not help that General A. A. K. Niazi, head of Pakistani Forces in East Pakistan, called East Pakistan a "low-lying land of low, lying people".


text: There had been opposition to military rule in West Pakistan as well. Eventually the military relented, and in December 1970 the first ever elections were held. To the surprise of many, East Pakistan's Awami League, headed by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, won a clear majority. The West Pakistani establishment was displeased with the results. In Dacca following the election a general said "Don't worry, we will not allow these black bastards to rule over us". Soon President Yahya Khan banned the Awami League and declared martial law in East Pakistan.


text: With the goal of putting down Bengali nationalism, the Pakistan Army launched Operation Searchlight on 25 March 1971. According to Eric Heinze the Pakistani forces targeted both Bengali Muslims and Hindus In the ensuing 1971 Bangladesh genocide, the army caused the deaths of up to 3 million people, created up to 10 million refugees who fled to India, and displaced a further 30 million within East Pakistan.


text: Rounaq Jahan alleges elements of racism in the Pakistan army, who he says considered the Bengalis "racially inferior—a non-martial and physically weak race", and has accused the army of using organised rape as a weapon of war. According to the political scientist R. J. Rummel, the Pakistani army looked upon the Bengalis as "subhuman" and that the Hindus were "as Jews to the Nazis, scum and vermin that best be exterminated". This racism was then expressed in that the Bengalis, being inferior, must have their gene pool "fixed" through forcible impregnation. Belén Martín Lucas has described the rapes as "ethnically motivated".


text: The attacks were led by General Tikka Khan, who was the architect of Operation Searchlight and was given the name the "butcher of Bengal" by the Bengalis for his actions. Khan said—when reminded on 27 March 1971 that he was in charge of a majority province—"I will reduce this majority to a minority". Bina D'Costa believes an anecdote used by Khan is significant, in that it provides proof of the mass rapes being a deliberate strategy. In Jessore, while speaking with a group of journalists Khan was reported to have said, ""Pehle inko Mussalman karo"" (). D'Costa argues that this shows that in the highest echelons of the armed forces the Bengalis were perceived as being disloyal Muslims and unpatriotic Pakistanis.


text: Jessica Lee Rehman calls rape in 1971 an instance of religious terrorism. She said "The Pakistan Army is an Islamic institution, its soldiers are warriors of God and ...they rape in God's name. Therefore the raping of girls and women, the forced bodily transgressions, and the mutilations are considered to be a triumph for good." Bengalis were dehumanised and Bengali women were perceived as prostitutes inviting sex. They were thought to have Hindu features which deleted any thought for their "Muslim" status that might prevent a perpetrator's savage activities. Faisal, a Pakistani officer who had been in East Pakistan portrays Bengali culture in terms of the differences between East and West Pakistani ladies, pushing the open discrimination against Bengali women: "The women bathe openly so that men walking by can see them, and they wear saris that with one pull fall off their body, like Indians. They are very attached to music, like Hindus, and they have their daughters dance for guests, they take pride in this dancing and music, like prostitutes. My daughter does not dance, neither does my wife. This music and dancing isn't Islamic. Our ladies are not prostitutes like Bengalis." A Bengali Muslim lady Ferdousi Priyabhashini says the soldiers raping her said to her "You are a Hindu! You are a spy" because she wore a sari and bindi.


text: The perpetrators conducted nighttime raids, assaulting women in their villages, often in front of their families, as part of the terror campaign. Victims were also kidnapped and held in special camps where they were repeatedly assaulted. Many of those held in the camps were murdered or committed suicide, with some taking their own lives by using their hair to hang themselves; the soldiers responded to these suicides by cutting the women's hair off. "Time" magazine reported on 563 girls who had been kidnapped and held by the military; all of them were between three and five months pregnant when the military began to release them. Some women were forcibly used as prostitutes. While the Pakistani government estimated the number of rapes in the hundreds, other estimates range between 200,000 and 400,000. The Pakistani government had tried to censor reports coming out of the region, but media reports on the atrocities did reach the public worldwide, and gave rise to widespread international public support for the liberation movement.


text: In what has been described by Jenneke Arens as a deliberate attempt to destroy an ethnic group, many of those assaulted were raped, murdered and then bayoneted in the genitalia. Adam Jones, a political scientist, has said that one of the reasons for the mass rapes was to undermine Bengali society through the "dishonoring" of Bengali women and that some women were raped until they died or were killed following repeated attacks. The International Commission of Jurists concluded that the atrocities carried out by the Pakistan armed forces "were part of a deliberate policy by a disciplined force". The writer Mulk Raj Anand said the rapes were too widespread and systematic to be anything but conscious military policy, "planned by the West Pakistanis in a deliberate effort to create a new race" or to undermine Bengali separatism. Amita Malik, reporting from Bangladesh following the Pakistan armed forces surrender, wrote that one West Pakistani soldier said: "We are going. But we are leaving our seed behind".


text: Not all Pakistani military personnel supported the violence: General Sahabzada Yaqub Khan, who advised the president against military action, and Major Ikram Sehgal both resigned in protest, as did Air Marshal Asghar Khan. Ghaus Bakhsh Bizenjo, a Balochi politician, and Khan Abdul Wali Khan, leader of the National Awami Party, protested over the actions of the armed forces. Those imprisoned for their dissenting views on the violence included Sabihuddin Ghausi and I. A. Rahman, who were both journalists, the Sindhi leader G. M. Syed, the poet Ahmad Salim, Anwar Pirzado, who was a member of the air force, Professor M. R. Hassan, Tahera Mazhar and Imtiaz Ahmed. Malik Ghulam Jilani, who was also arrested, had openly opposed the armed action in the East; a letter he had written to Yahya Khan was widely publicised. Altaf Hussain Gauhar, the editor of the "Dawn" newspaper, was also imprisoned. In 2013 Jilani and Faiz Ahmad Faiz, a poet, were honoured by the Bangladeshi government for their actions.


text: According to Peter Tomsen, a political scientist, Pakistan's secret service the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, in conjunction with the political party Jamaat-e-Islami, formed militias such as Al-Badr ("the moon") and the Al-Shams ("the sun") to conduct operations against the nationalist movement. These militias targeted non-combatants and committed rapes as well as other crimes. Local collaborators known as Razakars also took part in the atrocities. The term has since become a pejorative akin to the western term "Judas".


text: Members of the Muslim League, such as Nizam-e-Islam, Jamaat-e-Islami and Jamiat Ulema Pakistan, who had lost the election, collaborated with the military and acted as an intelligence organisation for them. Members of Jamaat-e-Islami and some of its leaders collaborated with the Pakistani forces in rapes and targeted killings. The atrocities by Al-Badr and the Al-Shams garnered worldwide attention from news agencies; accounts of massacres and rapes were widely reported.


text: The Pakistani elite believed that Hindus were behind the revolt and that as soon as there was a solution to the "Hindu problem" the conflict would resolve. For Pakistanis, the violence against Hindus was a strategic policy. Muslim Pakistani men believed the sacrifice of Hindu women was needed to fix the national malaise. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Imams and Mullahs supported the rapes by the Pakistani Army and issued fatwas declaring the women war booty. A fatwa from West Pakistan during the war asserted that women taken from Bengali Hindus could be considered war booty.


text: The mostly Punjabi soldiers hated anything to do with Hinduism. The extreme hatred Pakistanis felt towards Hindus could be seen in their especially brutal violence against Hindus as the Pakistani Army and its local allies raped and murdered Hindu women. The implication for Bengali women of being connected in any way to a "Hindu" identity was rape by the Army. Women were captured and taken to camps established throughout the country. In these military camps and cantonments the Pakistani soldiers kept the captives as their sex-slaves.


text: Female Hindu captives were raped in Pakistani Army camps. The Pakistani Army committed mass rape of Hindu women because they were Hindus and the Army intended to destroy their faith, social position and self-esteem. The policy of raping Hindu captives intended to change the community's bloodline. The total effect of mass sexual violence against Hindu women demonstrated the existence of the genocidal "actus reas". In the "Akayesu" case the Bangladeshi Tribunal emphasised that the violence against Hindu women was committed not just against them individually but because of their membership of their community.


text: Bina D'Costa spoke with many respondents who especially mentioned the brutality of Pakistan's army in its "handling" of Hindus. The members from the Hindu community with whom she interacted with firmly believed in the persecution of Hindus by the Pakistan army and Razakaar during the war. Hindu women who were kidnapped by Pakistan army were never seen again; mostly they were killed after being raped. Bina D'Costa interacted with families of two Hindu women who were taken by "Punjabi" army men, neither of them returned to their respective homes after the war. Aubrey Menen who was a war correspondent wrote about a 17 year old Hindu bride who was gang raped by six Pakistani soldiers according to her father.


text: Two went into the room that had been built for the bridal couple. The others stayed behind with the family, one of them covering them with his gun. They heard a barked order, and the bridegroom's voice protesting. Then there was silence until the bride screamed...In a few minutes one of the soldiers came out, his uniform in disarray. He grinned to his companions. Another soldier took his place in the extra room. And so on, until all six had raped the belle of the village. Then all six left, hurriedly. The father found his daughter lying on the string unconscious and bleeding. Her husband was crouched on the floor, kneeling over his vomit.


text: In the immediate aftermath of the war, one pressing problem was the very high number of unwanted pregnancies of rape victims. Estimates of the number of pregnancies resulting in births range from 25,000 to the Bangladeshi government's figure of 70,000, while one publication by the Centre for Reproductive Law and Policy gave a total of 250,000. A government-mandated victim relief programme was set up with the support of the World Health Organization and International Planned Parenthood Federation, among whose goals it was to organise abortion facilities to help rape victims terminate unwanted pregnancies. A doctor at a rehabilitation centre in Dhaka reported 170,000 abortions of pregnancies caused by the rapes, and the births of 30,000 war babies during the first three months of 1972. Dr. Geoffrey Davis, an Australian doctor and abortion specialist who worked for the programme, estimated that there had been about 5,000 cases of self-induced abortions. He also said that during his work he heard of numerous infanticides and suicides by victims. His estimate of the total number of rape victims was 400,000, twice as high as the official estimate of 200,000 cited by the Bangladeshi government. Most of the victims also contracted sexual infections. Many suffered from feelings of intense shame and humiliation, and a number were ostracised by their families and communities or committed suicide.


text: The feminist writer Cynthia Enloe has written that some pregnancies were intended by the soldiers and perhaps their officers as well. A report from the International Commission of Jurists said, "Whatever the precise numbers, the teams of American and British surgeons carrying out abortions and the widespread government efforts to persuade people to accept these girls into the community, testify to the scale on which raping occurred". The commission also said that Pakistani officers not only allowed their men to rape, but enslaved women themselves.


text: Following the conflict the rape victims were seen as a symbol of "social pollution" and shame. Few were able to return to families or old homes because of this. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman called the victims "birangona" ("heroine"), but this served as a reminder that these women were now deemed socially unacceptable as they were "dishonored", and the term became associated with "barangona" ("prostitute"). The official strategy of marrying the women off and encouraging them to be seen as war heroines failed as few men came forward, and those who did expected the state to provide a large dowry. Those women who did marry were usually mistreated, and the majority of men, once having received a dowry, abandoned their wives.


text: On 18 February 1972 the state formed the Bangladesh Women's Rehabilitation Board, which was tasked with helping the victims of rape and to help with the adoption programme. Several international agencies took part in the adoption programme, such as Mother Teresa's Sisters of Charity. The majority of the war babies were adopted in the Netherlands and Canada as the state wished to remove the reminders of Pakistan from the newly formed nation. However, not all women wanted their child taken, and some were forcibly removed and sent for adoption, a practice which was encouraged by Rahman, who said, "I do not want those polluted blood [sic] in this country". While many women were glad for the abortion programme, as they did not have to bear a child conceived of rape, others had to go full term, filled with hatred towards the child they carried. Others, who had their children adopted out so as to return to "mainstream life", would not look at their newborn as it was taken from them. In the 1990s many of these children returned to Bangladesh to search for their birth mothers. In 2008, D'Costa attempted to find those who had been adopted, however very few responded, one who did said "I hated being a kid, and I am angry at Bangladesh for not taking care of me when I needed it most. I don’t have any roots and that makes me cry. So that is why I am trying to learn more about where I was born."


text: Forty years after the war, two sisters who had been raped were interviewed by Deutsche Welle. Aleya stated she had been taken by the Pakistani army when she was thirteen, and was gang raped repeatedly for seven months. She states she was tortured and was five months pregnant when she returned to her home. Her sister, Laily, says she was pregnant when she was taken by the armed forces, and lost the child. Later she fought alongside the Mukti Bahini. Both say that the state has failed the "birangona", and that all they received was "humiliation, insults, hatred, and ostracism."


text: After the conflict, the Pakistani government decided on a policy of silence regarding the rapes. They set up the Hamoodur Rahman Commission, a judicial commission to prepare an account of the circumstances surrounding the atrocities of the 1971 war and Pakistan's surrender. The commission was highly critical of the army. The chiefs of staff of the army and the Pakistan Air Force were removed from their positions for attempting to interfere with the commission. The Commission based its reports on interviews with politicians, officers and senior commanders. The final reports were submitted in July 1972, but all were subsequently destroyed except for one held by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the Pakistani president. The findings were never made public.


text: In 1974 the commission was reopened and issued a supplementary report, which remained classified for 25 years until published by the magazine "India Today". The report said that 26,000 people were killed, rapes numbered in the hundreds, and that the Mukti Bahini rebels engaged in widespread rape and other human rights abuses. Sumit Ganguly, a political scientist, believes that the Pakistani establishment has yet to come to terms with the atrocities carried out, saying that, in a visit to Bangladesh in 2002, Pervez Musharraf expressed regret for the atrocities rather than accepting responsibility.


text: In 2008, after a 17-year investigation, the War Crimes Fact Finding Committee released documentation identifying 1,597 people who had taken part in the atrocities. The list included members of the Jamaat-e-Islami and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, a political group founded in 1978. In 2010 the government of Bangladesh set up the International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) to investigate the atrocities of that era. While Human Rights Watch has been supportive of the tribunal, it has also been critical of reported harassment of lawyers representing the accused. Brad Adams, director of the Asia branch of Human Rights Watch, has said that those accused must be given the full protection of the law to avoid the risk of the trials not being taken seriously, and Irene Khan, a human rights activist, has expressed doubt about whether the mass rapes and killings of women will be addressed. Khan has said of her government's reaction:


text: The deputy leader of Jamaat-e-Islami, Delwar Hossain Sayeedi, the first person to face charges related to the conflict, was indicted by the ICT on twenty counts of war crimes, which included murder, rape and arson. He denied all charges. On 28 February 2013, Sayeedi was found guilty of genocide, rape and religious persecution, and was sentenced to death by hanging. Four other members of Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh, including Motiur Rahman Nizami, have also been indicted for war crimes. Abul Kalam Azad, a member of the Razakars, was the first person to be sentenced for crimes during the war. He was found guilty of murder and rape in absentia, and was sentenced to death. Muhammad Kamaruzzaman, senior assistant secretary general of Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami, faced seven charges of war crimes, including planning and advising on the rape of women in the village of Shohaghpur on 25 July 1971. The ICT sentenced him to death by hanging on 9 May 2013. In July 2013 Ghulam Azam was given a ninety-year sentence for rape and mass murder during the conflict. Abdul Quader Molla, a member of the Razakar militia during the war was charged with abetting the Pakistani army and actively participating in the 1971 Bangladesh atrocities: rape (including the rape of minors) and mass murder of Bangladeshis in the Mirpur area of Dhaka during the Bangladesh Liberation War. After the government had amended the war crimes law to allow a sentence to be appealed based on leniency of punishment, prosecutors appealed to the Supreme Court of Bangladesh and asked for it to upgrade Molla's sentence from life in prison to death. On 17 September 2013, the Supreme Court accepted the appeal and sentenced Molla to death. Finally he was hanged in Dhaka Central Jail on 12 December 2013 at 22:01.


text: "Orunodoyer Ognishakhi" ("Pledge to a New Dawn"), the first film about the war, was screened in 1972 on the first Bangladeshi Independence Day celebration. It draws on the experiences of an actor called Altaf. While trying to reach safe haven in Calcutta, he encounters women who have been raped. The images of these "birangona", stripped and vacant-eyed from the trauma, are used as testimony to the assault. Other victims Altaf meets are shown committing suicide or having lost their minds.


text: In 1995 Gita Sahgal produced the documentary "War Crimes File", which was screened on Channel 4. In 2011 the film "Meherjaan" was shown at the Guwahati International Film Festival. It explores the war from two perspectives: that of a woman who loved a Pakistani soldier and that of a person born from rape.


text: In 1994, the book Ami Birangana Bolchi ("The Voices of War Heroines") by Nilima Ibrahim was released. It is a collection of eyewitness testimony from seven rape victims, which Ibrahim documented while working in rehabilitation centres. The narratives of the survivors in this work is heavily critical of post-war Bangladeshi society's failure to support the victims of rape.


text: Published in 2012, the book "Rising from the Ashes: Women's Narratives of 1971" includes oral testimonies of women affected by the Liberation War. As well as an account from Taramon Bibi, who fought and was awarded the Bir Protik (Symbol of Valour) for her actions, there are nine interviews with women who were raped. The book's publication in English at the time of the fortieth anniversary of the war was noted in the "New York Times" as an "important oral history".


text: The 2014 film "Children of War" tries to capture this horror. The film by Mrityunjay Devvrat starring Farooq Sheikh, Victor Banerjee, Raima Sen, among others is meant to "send shivers down the viewers' spine. We want to make it so repulsive that no one even entertains the thought of pardoning rapists, let alone commit the crime. The shoot took its toll on all of us."


title: Charles Ives

text: Charles Edward Ives (; October 20, 1874May 19, 1954) was an American modernist composer, one of the first American composers of international renown. His music was largely ignored during his early career, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. Later in life, the quality of his music was publicly recognized through the efforts of contemporaries like Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison, and he came to be regarded as an "American original". He was also among the first composers to engage in a systematic program of experimental music, with musical techniques including polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters, aleatory elements, and quarter tones. His experimentation foreshadowed many musical innovations that were later more widely adopted during the 20th century. Hence, he is often regarded as the leading American composer of art music of the 20th century.


title: Charles Ives

text: Sources of Ives's tonal imagery included hymn tunes and traditional songs; he also incorporated melodies of the town band at holiday parade, the fiddlers at Saturday night dances, patriotic songs, sentimental parlor ballads, and the melodies of Stephen Foster.


title: Charles Ives

text: Ives was born in Danbury, Connecticut, on October 20, 1874, the son of George (Edward) Ives (August 3, 1845 – November 4, 1894), a US Army bandleader in the American Civil War, and his wife, Mary Elizabeth Ives (née Parmelee, January 2, 1849 or 1850 – January 25, 1929). The Iveses were one of Danbury’s leading families, and they were prominent in business and civic improvement. They were similary active in progressive social movements of the last century, including the abolition of slavery.


title: Charles Ives

text: George Ives directed bands, choirs, and orchestras, and taught music theory and a number of instruments. Charles got his influences by sitting in the Danbury town square and listening to his father's marching band and other bands on other sides of the square simultaneously. His father taught him and his brother (Joseph) Moss Ives (February 5, 1876 – April 7, 1939) music, teaching harmony and counterpoint and guided his first compositions; George took an open-minded approach to theory, encouraging him to experiment in bitonal and polytonal harmonizations. It was from him that Ives also learned the music of Stephen Foster. He became a church organist at the age of 14 and wrote various hymns and songs for church services, including his "Variations on "America"", which he wrote for a Fourth of July concert in Brewster, New York. It is considered challenging even by modern concert organists, but he famously spoke of it as being "as much fun as playing baseball", a commentary on his own organ technique at that age.


title: Charles Ives

text: Ives moved to New Haven, Connecticut in 1893, enrolling in the Hopkins School, where he captained the baseball team. In September 1894, Ives entered Yale University, studying under Horatio Parker. Here he composed in a choral style similar to his mentor, writing church music and even an 1896 campaign song for William McKinley. On November 4, 1894, his father died, a crushing blow to him, but to a large degree he continued the musical experimentation he had begun with him. His brother Moss later became a lawyer.


title: Charles Ives

text: At Yale, Ives was a prominent figure; he was a member of HeBoule, Delta Kappa Epsilon (Phi chapter) and Wolf's Head Society, and sat as chairman of the Ivy Committee. He enjoyed sports at Yale and played on the varsity American football team. Michael C. Murphy, his coach, once remarked that it was a "crying shame" that he spent so much time at music as otherwise he could have been a champion sprinter. His works "Calcium Light Night" and "Yale-Princeton Football Game" show the influence of college and sports on Ives's composition. He wrote his Symphony No. 1 as his senior thesis under Parker's supervision.


title: Charles Ives

text: Ives continued his work as a church organist until May 1902. Soon after he graduated from Yale in 1898, he started work in the actuarial department of the Mutual Life Insurance company of New York. In 1899, Ives moved to employment with the insurance agency Charles H. Raymond & Co., where he stayed until 1906. In 1907, upon the failure of Raymond & Co., he and his friend Julian Myrick formed their own insurance agency Ives & Co., which later became Ives & Myrick, where he remained until he retired. During his career as an insurance executive and actuary, Ives devised creative ways to structure life-insurance packages for people of means, which laid the foundation of the modern practice of estate planning. His "Life Insurance with Relation to Inheritance Tax", published in 1918, was well received. As a result of this he achieved considerable fame in the insurance industry of his time, with many of his business peers surprised to learn that he was also a composer. In his spare time he composed music and, until his marriage, worked as an organist in Danbury and New Haven as well as Bloomfield, New Jersey and New York City.


title: Charles Ives

text: In 1907, Ives suffered the first of several "heart attacks" (as he and his family called them) that he had throughout his life. These attacks may have been psychological in origin rather than physical. Following his recovery from the 1907 attack, Ives entered into one of the most creative periods of his life as a composer.


title: Charles Ives

text: In 1908 he married Harmony Twichell, daughter of Congregational minister Joseph Twichell and his wife Julia Harmony Cushman. The young couple moved into their own apartment in New York.


title: Charles Ives

text: Ives had a successful career in insurance. He also continued to be a prolific composer until he suffered another of several heart attacks in 1918, after which he composed very little. He wrote his last piece, the song "Sunrise," in August 1926. In 1922, Ives published his "114 Songs", which represents the breadth of his work as a composer—it includes art songs, songs he wrote as a teenager and young man, and highly dissonant songs such as "The Majority".


title: Charles Ives

text: According to his wife, one day in early 1927 Ives came downstairs with tears in his eyes. He could compose no more, he said; "nothing sounds right". There have been numerous theories advanced to explain the silence of his late years. It seems as mysterious as the last several decades of the life of Jean Sibelius, who stopped composing at almost the same time. While Ives had stopped composing, and was increasingly plagued by health problems, he continued to revise and refine his earlier work, as well as oversee premieres of his music.


title: Charles Ives

text: After continuing health problems, including diabetes, in 1930 he retired from his insurance business. Although he had more time to devote to music, he was unable to write any new music. During the 1940s he revised his "Concord Sonata", publishing it in 1947 (an earlier version of the sonata and the accompanying prose volume, "Essays Before a Sonata" were privately printed in 1920).


title: Charles Ives

text: Ives died of a stroke in 1954 in New York City. His widow, who died in 1969 at age 92, bequeathed the royalties from his music to the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the Charles Ives Prize.


title: Charles Ives

text: Ives's career and dedication to music began when he started playing drums in his father's band at a young age. Ives published a large collection of songs, many of which had piano parts. He composed two string quartets and other works of chamber music, though he is now best known for his orchestral music. His work as an organist led him to write "Variations on "America"" in 1891, which he premiered at a recital celebrating the Fourth of July.


title: Charles Ives

text: In 1906, Ives composed the first radical musical work of the twentieth century, "Central Park in the Dark". He composed four numbered symphonies as well as a number of works with the word 'Symphony' in their titles, as well as "The Unanswered Question" (1908), written for the unusual combination of trumpet, four flutes, and string quartet. "The Unanswered Question" was influenced by the New England writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.


title: Charles Ives

text: Around 1910, Ives began composing his most accomplished works, including the "Holiday Symphony" and "Three Places in New England". "The Piano Sonata No. 2, Concord, Mass.", known as the "Concord Sonata", was one of his most notable pieces. He started work on this in 1911 and completed most of it in 1915. However, it was not until 1920 that the piece was published. His revised version was not released until 1947. This piece contains one of the most striking examples of his experimentation. In the second movement, he instructed the pianist to use a piece of wood to create a massive cluster chord. The piece also amply demonstrates Ives's fondness for musical quotation: the opening bars of Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 are quoted in each movement. Sinclair's catalogue also notes less obvious quotations of Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" Sonata and various other works.


title: Charles Ives

text: Another notable piece of orchestral music Ives completed was his Symphony No. 4. He worked on this from 1910 to 1916. This four-movement symphony is notable for its complexity and vast orchestra. A complete performance of the work was not given until 1965, half a century after it was completed and over a decade after Ives's death.


title: Charles Ives

text: Ives left behind material for an unfinished "Universe Symphony", which he was unable to complete despite two decades of work. This was due to his health problems as well as his shifting ideas of the work.


title: Charles Ives

text: Ives's music was largely ignored during his life, particularly during the years in which he actively composed. Many of his published works went unperformed even many years after his death in 1954. However, his reputation in more recent years has greatly increased. The Juilliard School commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of his death by performing his music over six days in 2004. His musical experiments, including his increasing use of dissonance, were not well received by his contemporaries. The difficulties in performing the rhythmic complexities in his major orchestral works made them daunting challenges even decades after they were composed.


title: Charles Ives

text: Early supporters of Ives's music included Henry Cowell, Elliott Carter, and Aaron Copland. Cowell's periodical "New Music" published a substantial number of Ives's scores (with his approval). But for nearly 40 years, Ives had few performances of his music that he did not personally arrange or financially back. He generally used Nicolas Slonimsky as the conductor. After seeing a copy of Ives's self-published "114 Songs" during the 1930s, Copland published a newspaper article praising the collection.


title: Charles Ives

text: Ives began to acquire some public recognition during the 1930s, with performances of a chamber orchestra version of his "Three Places in New England", both in the US and on tour in Europe by conductor Nicolas Slonimsky. The Town Hall (New York City) premiered his "Concord Sonata" in 1939, featuring pianist John Kirkpatrick. This received favorable commentary in the major New York newspapers. Later, around the time of Ives's death in 1954, Kirkpatrick teamed with soprano Helen Boatwright for the first extended recorded recital of Ives's songs for the obscure Overtone label (Overtone Records catalog number 7). They recorded a new selection of songs for the Ives Centennial Collection that Columbia Records published in 1974.


title: Charles Ives

text: In the 1940s, Ives met Lou Harrison, a fan of his music who began to edit and promote it. Most notably, Harrison conducted the premiere of the Symphony No. 3, "The Camp Meeting" (1904) in 1946. The next year, it won Ives the Pulitzer Prize for Music. He gave the prize money away (half of it to Harrison), saying "prizes are for boys, and I'm all grown up".


title: Charles Ives

text: Ives was a generous financial supporter of twentieth-century music, often financing works that were written by other composers. This he did in secret, telling his beneficiaries that his wife wanted him to do so. Nicolas Slonimsky said in 1971, "He financed my entire career".


title: Charles Ives

text: At this time, Ives was also promoted by Bernard Herrmann, who worked as a conductor at CBS and in 1940 became principal conductor of the CBS Symphony Orchestra. While there, he championed Ives's music. When they met, Herrmann confessed that he had tried his hand at performing the "Concord Sonata". Ives, who avoided the radio and the phonograph, agreed to make a series of piano recordings from 1933 to 1943. One of the more unusual recordings, made in New York City in 1943, features Ives playing the piano and singing the words to his popular World War I song "They Are There!", which he composed in 1917. He revised it in 1942–43 for World War II.


title: Charles Ives

text: Ives's piano recordings were later issued in 1974 by Columbia Records on a special LP set for his centenary. New World Records issued 42 tracks of his recordings on CD on April 1, 2006.


title: Charles Ives

text: In Canada in the 1950s, the expatriate English pianist Lloyd Powell played a series of concerts including all of Ives's piano works, at the University of British Columbia.


title: Charles Ives

text: Recognition of Ives's music steadily increased. He received praise from Arnold Schoenberg, who regarded him as a monument to artistic integrity, and from the New York School of William Schuman. Shortly after Schoenberg's death (three years before Ives died), his widow found a note written by her husband. The note had originally been written in 1944 when Schoenberg was living in Los Angeles and teaching at UCLA. It said:


title: Charles Ives

text: Ives reportedly also won the admiration of Gustav Mahler, who said that he was a true musical revolutionary. Mahler was said to have talked of premiering Ives's third symphony with the New York Philharmonic, but he died in 1911 before conducting this premiere. The source of this account was Ives; since Mahler died, there was no way to verify whether he had seen the score of the symphony or decided to perform it in the 1911–12 season. Ives regularly attended New York Philharmonic concerts and probably heard Mahler conduct the Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall.


title: Charles Ives

text: In 1951, Leonard Bernstein conducted the world premiere of Ives's Symphony No. 2 in a broadcast concert by the New York Philharmonic. The Iveses heard the performance on their cook's radio and were amazed at the audience's warm reception to the music. Bernstein continued to conduct Ives's music and made a number of recordings with the Philharmonic for Columbia Records. He honored Ives on one of his televised youth concerts and in a special disc included with the reissue of the 1960 recording of the second symphony and the "Fourth of July" movement from Ives's .


title: Charles Ives

text: Another pioneering Ives recording, undertaken during the 1950s, was the first complete set of the four violin sonatas, performed by Minneapolis Symphony concertmaster Rafael Druian and John Simms. Leopold Stokowski took on Symphony No. 4 in 1965, regarding the work as "the heart of the Ives problem". The Carnegie Hall world premiere by the American Symphony Orchestra led to the first recording of the music. Another promoter of his was choral conductor Gregg Smith, who made a series of recordings of his shorter works during the 1960s. These included the first stereo recordings of the psalm settings and arrangements of many short pieces for theater orchestra. The Juilliard String Quartet recorded the two string quartets during the 1960s.


title: Charles Ives

text: In the early 21st century, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas is an enthusiastic exponent of Ives's symphonies, as is composer and biographer Jan Swafford. Ives's work is regularly programmed in Europe. He has also inspired pictorial artists, most notably Eduardo Paolozzi, who entitled one of his 1970s sets of prints "Calcium Light Night", each print being named for an Ives piece (including "Central Park in the Dark"). In 1991, Connecticut's legislature designated Ives as that state's official composer.


title: Charles Ives

text: The Scottish baritone Henry Herford began a survey of Ives's songs in 1990, but this remains incomplete. The record company involved (Unicorn-Kanchana) collapsed. Pianist-composer and Wesleyan University professor Neely Bruce has made a life's study of Ives. To date, he has staged seven parts of a concert series devoted to the complete songs of Ives. Musicologist David Gray Porter reconstructed a piano concerto, the "Emerson" Concerto, from Ives's sketches. A recording of the work was released by Naxos Records.


title: Charles Ives

text: American singer and composer Frank Zappa included Charles Ives in a list of influences that he presented in the liner notes of his debut album "Freak Out!" (1966). Ives continues to influence contemporary composers, arrangers and musicians. Planet Arts Records released "." Ives befriended and encouraged a young Elliott Carter. In addition, Phil Lesh, bassist of the Grateful Dead, has described Ives as one of his two musical heroes.


title: Charles Ives

text: Jazz musician Albert Ayler also named Charles Ives as an influence in a 1970 interview with Swing Journal.


title: Charles Ives

text: American microtonal musician and composer Johnny Reinhard reconstructed and performed "Universe symphony" in 1996.


title: Charles Ives

text: "The Unanswered Ives" is an hour-long film documentary directed by Anne-Kathrin Peitz and produced by Accentus Music (Leipzig, Germany). This was released in 2018 and shown on Swedish and German television stations; it features interviews with Jan Swafford, John Adams, James Sinclair and Jack Cooper.


title: Charles Ives

text: In 1965 Ives won a Grammy Award for his composition "Symphony No. 4" and the American Symphony Orchestra won for their recording of the work. Ives had previously been nominated in 1964 for "New England Holidays" and in 1960 for "Symphony # 2".


title: Charles Ives

text: Igor Stravinsky praised Ives. In 1966 he said: "[Ives] was exploring the 1960's during the heyday of Strauss and Debussy. Polytonality; atonality; tone clusters; perspectivistic effects; chance; statistical composition; permutation; add-a-part, practical-joke, and improvisatory music: these were Ives’s discoveries a half-century ago as he quietly set about devouring the contemporary cake before the rest of us even found a seat at the same table."


title: Charles Ives

text: John Cage expressed his admiration for Ives in "Two Statements on Ives," writing "I think that Ives's relevance increases as time goes on" and stating that "his contribution to American music was in every sense 'not only spiritual, by also concretely musical.' Nowadays everything I hear by Ives delights me." Cage recalled that during the 1930s, he was "not interested in Ives because of the inclusion in his music of aspects of American folk and popular material," but that once he began to focus on indeterminacy, he "was able to approach Ives in an entirely different... spirit." Cage noted that Ives "knew that if sound sources came from different points in space that that fact was in itself interesting. Nobody before him had thought about this..." and stated that "the freedom that he gave to a performer saying Do this or do that according to your choice is directly in line with present indeterminate music." Cage also expressed his interest in what he called the "mud of Ives," by which he meant "the part that is not referential..." from which arises a "complex superimposition [of] lines that makes a web in which we cannot clearly perceive anything..." leading to "the possibility of not knowing what's happening..." Cage wrote that "more and more... I think this experience of non-knowledge is more useful and more important to us than the Renaissance notion of knowing A B C D E F..."


title: Charles Ives

text: Cage also praised Ives's "understanding... of inactivity and of silence..." and recalled having read an essay in which Ives "sees someone sitting on a porch in a rocking chair smoking a pipe looking out over the landscape which goes into the distance and imagines that as that person who is anyone is sitting there doing nothing that he is hearing his own symphony. This I think is for all intents and purposes the goal of music. I doubt whether we can find a higher goal namely that art and our involvement in it will somehow introduce us to the very life that we are living and that we will be able without scores without performers and so forth simply to sit still to listen to the sounds which surround us and hear them as music." (Cage refers to the essay as the one "which [Ives] wrote that follows his One Hundred and Thirteen Songs", probably referring to the "Postface to 114 Songs".)


title: Charles Ives

text: Conductor Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic won a Grammy Award for Best Orchestral Performance for "Ives's Complete Symphonies" (Deutsche Grammaphon, recorded in 2020).


title: Charles Ives

text: There is evidence that Ives backdated his scores to sound more modern than he really was. This was first proposed by Maynard Solomon, an advocate of Ives' music This has, in turn generated some controversy and puzzlement.


title: Charles Ives

text: "Note: Because Ives often made several different versions of the same piece, and because his work was generally ignored during his life, it is often difficult to put exact dates on his compositions. The dates given here are sometimes best guesses. There have also been controversial speculations that he purposefully misdated his own pieces earlier or later than actually written."


title: Charles Ives

text: Ives proposed in 1920 that there be a 20th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which would authorize citizens to submit legislative proposals to Congress. Members of Congress would then cull the proposals, selecting 10 each year as referendums for popular vote by the nation's electorate. He even had printed at his own expense several thousand copies of a pamphlet on behalf of his proposed amendment. The pamphlet proclaimed the need to curtail "THE EFFECTS OF TOO MUCH POLITICS IN OUR representative DEMOCRACY". He planned to distribute the pamphlets at the 1920 Republican National Convention, but they arrived from the printer after the convention had ended.


title: Charles Ives

text: It is stated in the biographical film "A Good Dissonance Like a Man" that the first of Ives's crippling heart attacks occurred as a result of a World War I era argument with a young Franklin D. Roosevelt over his idea of issuing of war bonds in amounts as low as $50 each. Roosevelt was chairman of a war bonds committee on which Ives served, and he "scorned the idea of anything so useless as a $50 bond". Roosevelt changed his mind about small contributions as seen many years later when he endorsed the March of Dimes to combat poliomyelitis.


title: Leon Uris

text: Leon Marcus Uris (August 3, 1924 – June 21, 2003) was an American author of historical fiction who wrote many bestselling books including "Exodus" (published in 1958) and "Trinity" (published in 1976).


title: Leon Uris

text: Uris was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of Jewish American parents Wolf William and Anna (née Blumberg) Uris. His father, a Polish-born immigrant, was a paperhanger, then a storekeeper. His mother was first-generation Russian American. William spent a year in Palestine after World War I before entering the United States. He derived his last name from Yerushalmi, meaning "man of Jerusalem". (His brother Aron, Leon's uncle, took the name Yerushalmi.) "He was basically a failure", Uris later said of his father. "I think his personality was formed by the harsh realities of being a Jew in Czarist Russia. I think failure formed his character, made him bitter."


title: Leon Uris

text: At age six, Uris reportedly wrote an operetta inspired by the death of his dog. He attended schools in Norfolk, Virginia, and Baltimore, but never graduated from high school, and failed English three times. When he was 17 and in his senior year of high school, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. He served in the South Pacific with the 2nd Battalion, 6th Marines Regiment, where he was stationed in New Zealand, and fought as a radioman in combat on Guadalcanal and Tarawa from 1942 through 1944. He was sent to the US after suffering from dengue fever, malaria and a recurrence of asthma that made him miss the devastation of his battalion at Saipan, which was featured in "Battle Cry". While recuperating from malaria in San Francisco, he met Betty Beck, a Marine sergeant; they married in 1945.


title: Leon Uris

text: Released from service he worked for a newspaper, and wrote in his spare time. "Esquire" magazine bought an article in 1950, and he began to devote himself to writing more seriously. Drawing on his experiences in Guadalcanal and Tarawa, he produced the best-selling "Battle Cry", a novel depicting the toughness and courage of U.S. Marines in the Pacific. He then went to Warner Brothers in Hollywood helping to write the eponymous movie which was extremely popular with the public, but not the critics. He went on to write "The Angry Hills", a novel set in war-time Greece.


title: Leon Uris

text: His best-known work may be "Exodus", which was published in 1958. Most sources indicate that Uris, motivated by an intense interest in Israel, financed his research for the novel by selling the film rights in advance to MGM and by writing newspaper articles about the Sinai campaign, which is said to have involved two years of research, and thousands of interviews. It was a worldwide best-seller, translated into a dozen languages, and was made into a feature film in 1960, starring Paul Newman, directed by Otto Preminger, as well as into a short-lived Broadway musical, "Ari", in 1971, for which Uris wrote the book and lyrics.


title: Leon Uris

text: "Exodus" illustrated the history of Palestine from the late 19th century through the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. "Exodus" was also extraordinarily influential among Russian Refuseniks. Two typewritten Russian translations were circulated as samizdat – illegal, hand-copied works that were passed secretly from hand to hand – and the story was retold orally in the prison camps, with the oral version eventually being written in a notebook which was passed from one generation of prisoners to the next.


title: Leon Uris

text: Uris's 1967 novel "Topaz" was adapted for the screen and directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1969. His subsequent works included "Mila 18", about the Warsaw ghetto uprising; "", a chronicle which ends with the lifting of the Berlin Blockade in 1949; "Trinity", about Irish nationalism, and the sequel, "Redemption", covering the early 20th century and World War I.


title: Leon Uris

text: "QB VII", about the role of a Polish doctor in a German concentration camp, is a dramatic four-part courtroom novel published in 1970, highlighting the events leading to a libel trial in the United Kingdom. It is loosely based on a court case for defamation ("Dering v Uris") that arose from Uris's earlier best-selling novel "Exodus", and was Uris's second consecutive #1 "New York Times" Best Seller. "The Haj" was set in the history of the Middle East. He also wrote the screenplays for "Battle Cry" and "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral".


title: Leon Uris

text: Uris was married three times. His first wife was Betty Beck, whom he married in 1945. They had three children before divorcing in 1968. He then married Marjorie Edwards in 1968, who committed suicide by gunshot the following year.


title: Leon Uris

text: His third and last wife was photographer Jill Peabody, daughter of Frances Gleason and Alfred Peabody of Boston. They had two children, Rachel and Conor. They married in 1970, when she was 22 years old and he was 45. He and wife Jill worked together on his book "Ireland: A Terrible Beauty", for which she provided illustrations and on "Jerusalem: A Song of Songs". They divorced in 1988, and soon after Uris settled in New York City.


title: Leon Uris

text: Leon Uris died of kidney failure at his Long Island home on Shelter Island in 2003, aged 78. His papers can be found at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas in Austin, where the University of Texas Press published a literary biography about him. The collection includes all of Uris's novels, with the exception of "The Haj" and "Mitla Pass", as well as manuscripts for the screenplay, "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral". He was survived by his five children and two grandchildren.


title: J. B. Straubel

text: Jeffrey Brian ("JB") Straubel (born December 20, 1975) is an American businessman. He spent 15 years at Tesla, as chief technical officer until moving to an advisory role in July 2019.


title: J. B. Straubel

text: In 2017, Straubel founded and became the CEO of Redwood Materials, Inc., working on creating battery materials and products for lithium-ion batteries out of recycled batteries.


title: J. B. Straubel

text: Straubel holds a Bachelor of Science in energy systems engineering and a Master of Science in energy engineering from Stanford University.


title: J. B. Straubel

text: Straubel joined Tesla as its fifth employee in 2004, and is named as a co-founder. He was its inaugural chief technical officer until moving to an advisory role in July 2019.


title: J. B. Straubel

text: At Tesla, Straubel led battery cell design, supply chain and led the first Gigafactory concept through the production ramp of the Model 3. He had a direct role in research and development, team building, and operational expansion from prototype cars through to mass production and expanding battery production to gigawatt-hour scale. Straubel also had responsibility for new technology evaluation, technical due diligence review of key vendors and partners, intellectual property, and systems validation testing. In addition to his work at Tesla, Straubel was also on the board of directors at SolarCity. As the result of a court settlement, Straubel is legally considered to be a co-founder of Tesla.


title: J. B. Straubel

text: He was also a lecturer at Stanford University for the 2015-2016 academic year, where he taught the energy storage integration classes (CEE 176C & CEE 276C) in the Atmosphere and Energy Program.


title: J. B. Straubel

text: In 2017, Straubel established Redwood Materials, working on the recycling of lithium-ion batteries and e-waste.


title: J. B. Straubel

text: Prior to Tesla, Straubel was the CTO and co-founder of Volacom along with Harold Rosen. Volacom worked closely with Burt Rutan at Scaled Composites to design a specialized high-altitude aircraft platform using a novel hydrogen-powered electric power plant. At Volacom, Straubel co-invented and patented a new long-endurance hybrid propulsion concept that was later licensed to Boeing.


title: J. B. Straubel

text: In the area of technical expertise, Straubel has consulted with venture capital firms Taproot Ventures and Kleiner Perkins, in addition to several other private equity investors, to conduct technical due diligence reviews for many start-ups in the energy and clean energy technologies category. Straubel is on the board of QuantumScape and also consults with Amory Lovins at the Rocky Mountain Institute.


title: J. B. Straubel

text: Although he did not originally intend to work in the automobile industry, Straubel has long had a passion for electric vehicles. He built an electric Porsche 944 that earned the /B world electric vehicle racing record in 2000.


title: J. B. Straubel

text: On August 3, 2013, Straubel married Boryana Dineva and lived in Woodside, California. In 2015 she gave birth to twins. When Straubel left as CTO at Tesla in July 2019, they moved to Nevada where Redwood Materials was located.


title: J. B. Straubel

text: On June 19, 2021, Boryana was killed while cycling in a designated bike lane in a rural area when a car crossed a double yellow line on Old Highway 395 in Washoe County, Nevada and hit her head-on. The driver was unlicensed. She had worked as a manager in human resources at Tesla and was a vice president of human resources at the Wikimedia Foundation for one year.


title: J. B. Straubel

text: His photograph was taken in July 2006 driving Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Tesla Roadster at its unveiling in Santa Monica, California.


title: J. B. Straubel

text: In September 2007, Straubel spoke on an energy panel titled "Clean, Secure, and Efficient Energy" at Stanford University along with former Secretary of State, George P. Shultz, where he emphasized the importance of education about climate change, and decreasing the intensity of our current energy production methods.


title: J. B. Straubel

text: In early 2008, "Stanford Magazine" featured Straubel's role in growing the Stanford presence at Tesla.


title: J. B. Straubel

text: Straubel was honored to keynote the Stanford Alumni EDAY in July 2008. Also in July 2008, Straubel spoke on a transportation panel "Progression Toward EVs" at Plug In 2008.


title: J. B. Straubel

text: In 2008, Straubel was named "Innovator of the Year" by MIT's Technology Review in their annual TR35 innovators in the world under the age of 35. He spoke at MIT's Emtech conference on a panel on green transportation in Boston, MA in September 2008.


title: J. B. Straubel

text: In March 2012, Straubel spoke at the DESIGN West conference, produced by UBM Electronics, at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, CA.


title: J. B. Straubel

text: Redwood Materials is a company established in Nevada by Straubel in 2017, to recycle lithium-ion automotive battery packs on a large scale. , the company had been operating in stealth mode as the technologies and processes were developed to enable the company to begin operation in the early 2020s.


title: J. B. Straubel

text: On August 29, 2020, Straubel was interviewed by The Wall Street Journal and revealed additional details:


title: J. B. Straubel

text: In June 2021, Redwood announced plans to expand its Carson City, Nevada facility to 550,000 square feet. Plans were also revealed to build another facility at the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center and to recruit 500 more employees.


title: J. B. Straubel

text: In July 2021, Redwood raised $775 million from investors and venture firms. Investment management group T. Rowe Price Associates led a Series C round of funding that included Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Baillie Gifford, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Fidelity, Valor Equity Partners, Emerson Collective and Franklin Templeton. Capricorn’s Technology Impact Fund, Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund also returned to invest additional capital.


title: Glamorgan

text: Glamorgan (), or sometimes Glamorganshire ( or ), is one of the thirteen historic counties of Wales and a former administrative county of Wales. Originally an early medieval petty kingdom of varying boundaries known in Welsh as the Kingdom of Morgannwg (or Glywysing), which was then invaded and taken over by the Normans as the Lordship of Glamorgan. The area that became known as Glamorgan was both a rural, pastoral area, and a conflict point between the Norman lords and the Welsh princes. It was defined by a large concentration of castles.


title: Glamorgan

text: After falling under English rule in the 16th century, Glamorgan became a more stable county, and exploited its natural resources to become an important part of the Industrial Revolution. Glamorgan was the most populous and industrialised county in Wales, and was once called the "crucible of the Industrial Revolution", as it contained the world centres of three metallurgical industries and its rich resources of coal.


title: Glamorgan

text: Under the Local Government Act 1972, the county boroughs and administrative county of Glamorgan were abolished on 1 April 1974, with three new counties being established, each containing a former county borough: West Glamorgan, Mid Glamorgan, South Glamorgan. The name also survives in that of Vale of Glamorgan, a county borough.


title: Glamorgan

text: Glamorgan comprises distinct regions: the industrial valleys, the agricultural vale and the scenic Gower Peninsula. The county has boundaries with Brecknockshire (north), Monmouthshire (east), Carmarthenshire (west), and to the south is the Bristol Channel. The total area is , and the total population of the three preserved counties of Glamorgan in 1991 was 1,288,309. Glamorgan contains two cities, Cardiff, the county town and from 1955 the capital city of Wales, and Swansea. The highest point in the county is Craig y Llyn () which is situated near the village of Rhigos in the Cynon Valley.


title: Glamorgan

text: Glamorgan's terrain has been inhabited by humankind for over 200,000 years. Climate fluctuation caused the formation, disappearance, and reformation of glaciers which, in turn, caused sea levels to rise and fall. At various times life has flourished, at others the area is likely to have been completely uninhabitable. Evidence of the presence of Neanderthals has been discovered on the Gower Peninsula. Whether they remained in the area during periods of extreme cold is unclear. Sea levels have been lower and higher than at present, resulting in significant changes to the coastline during this period.


title: Glamorgan

text: Archaeological evidence shows that humans settled in the area during an interstadial period. The oldest known human burial in Great Britain – the "Red Lady of Paviland" – was discovered in a coastal cave between Port Eynon and Rhossili, on the Gower Peninsula. The 'lady' has been radiocarbon dated to c. 29,000 years before present (BP) – during the Late Pleistocene – at which time the cave overlooked an area of plain, some miles from the sea.


title: Glamorgan

text: From the end of the last ice age (between 12,000 and 10,000 BP) Mesolithic hunter-gatherers began to migrate to the British Peninsula – through Doggerland – from the European mainland. Archaeologist Stephen Aldhouse-Green notes that while Wales has a "multitude" of Mesolithic sites, their settlements were "focused on the coastal plains", the uplands were "exploited only by specialist hunting groups".


title: Glamorgan

text: Human lifestyles in North-West Europe changed around 6000 BP; from the Mesolithic nomadic lives of hunting and gathering, to the Neolithic agrarian life of agriculture and settlement. They cleared the forests to establish pasture and to cultivate the land and developed new technologies such as ceramics and textile production. A tradition of long barrow construction began in continental Europe during the 7th millennium BP – the free standing megalithic structures supporting a sloping capstone (known as "dolmens)"; common over Atlantic Europe. Nineteen Neolithic chambered tombs (or "long barrows") and five possible henges have been identified in Glamorgan. These megalithic burial chambers, or "cromlechi", were built between 6000 and 5000 BP, during the early Neolithic period, the first of them about 1500 years before either Stonehenge or the Egyptian Great Pyramid of Giza was completed. Two major groups of Neolithic architectural traditions are represented in the area: portal dolmens (e.g. St Lythans burial chamber (Vale of Glamorgan), and Cae'rarfau (near Creigiau)); and Severn-Cotswold chamber tombs (e.g. "Parc Cwm" long cairn, ("Parc le Breos Cwm", Gower Peninsula), and Tinkinswood burial chamber (Vale of Glamorgan)), as well as tombs that do not fall easily into either group. Such massive constructions would have needed a large labour force – up to 200 men – suggestive of large communities nearby. Archaeological evidence from some Neolithic sites (e.g. Tinkinswood) has shown the continued use of cromlechi in the Bronze Age.


title: Glamorgan

text: The Bronze Age – defined by the use of metal – has made a lasting impression on the area. Over six hundred Bronze Age barrows and cairns, of various types, have been identified all over Glamorgan. Other technological innovations – including the wheel; harnessing oxen; weaving textiles; brewing alcohol; and skillful metalworking (producing new weapons and tools, and fine gold decoration and jewellery, such as brooches and torcs) – changed people's everyday lives during this period. Deforestation continued to the more remote areas as a warmer climate allowed the cultivation even of upland areas.


title: Glamorgan

text: By 4000 BP people had begun to bury, or cremate their dead in individual cists, beneath a mound of earth known as a round barrow; sometimes with a distinctive style of finely decorated pottery – like those at Llanharry (discovered 1929) and at Llandaff (1991) – that gave rise to the Early Bronze Age being described as "Beaker culture". From c. 3350 BP, a worsening climate began to make agriculture unsustainable in upland areas. The resulting population pressures appear to have led to conflict. Hill forts began to be built from the Late Bronze Age (and throughout the Iron Age (3150–1900 BP)) and the amount and quality of weapons increased noticeably – along the regionally distinctive tribal lines of the Iron Age.


title: Glamorgan

text: Archaeological evidence from two sites in Glamorgan shows Bronze Age practices and settlements continued into the Iron Age. Finds from "Llyn Fawr", thought to be votive offerings, include weapons and tools from the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age. The hoard, described as "one of the most significant prehistoric metalwork hoards in Wales" has given its name to the Llyn Fawr Phase, the last Bronze Age phase in Britain. Excavations at Llanmaes, Vale of Glamorgan, indicate a settlement and "feasting site" occupied from the Late Bronze Age until the Roman occupation. Until the Roman conquest of Britain, the area that would become known as Glamorgan was part of the territory of the Silures – a Celtic British tribe that flourished in the Iron Age – whose territory also included the areas that would become known as Breconshire and Monmouthshire. The Silures had hill forts throughout the area – e.g., Caerau (Cardiff), Caerau hill fort, Rhiwsaeson (Llantrisant), and Y Bwlwarcau [Mynydd Margam, south west of Maesteg – and cliff castles along the Glamorgan coast – e.g., Burry Holms (Gower Peninsula). Excavations at one – Dunraven hill fort (Southerndown, Vale of Glamorgan) – revealed the remains of twenty-one roundhouses.


title: Glamorgan

text: Many other settlements of the Silures were neither hill forts nor castles. For example, the fort established by the Romans near the estuary of the River Taff in 75  AD, in what would become Cardiff, was built over an extensive settlement established by the Silures in the 50s AD.


title: Glamorgan

text: The region originated as an independent petty kingdom named "Glywysing", believed to be named after a 5th-century Welsh king called Glywys, who is said to have been descended from a Roman Governor in the region. Saint Paul Aurelian was born in Glamorgan in the 6th century. The names ' (' + territorial suffix ', 'territory of Morgan') and ' (' + ', 'land of Morgan') reputedly derive from the 8th-century king Morgan ab Athrwys, otherwise known as "Morgan Mwynfawr" ('great in riches') who united "Glywysing" with the neighbouring kingdoms of Gwent and Ergyng, although some have argued for the similar 10th-century ruler Morgan Hen. It is possible it was only the union of Gwent and Glywysing that was referred to as Morgannwg. By virtue of its location and geography, Morgannwg or Glywysing was the second part of Wales, after Gwent, to fall under the control of the Normans and was frequently the scene of fighting between the Marcher Lords and Welsh princes.


title: Glamorgan

text: The earliest buildings of note included earthwork dykes and rudimentary motte-and-bailey hillside defences. All that remains of these fortifications are foundations that leave archaeological evidence of their existence, though many were built upon to create more permanent defensive structures. The earliest surviving structures within the region are early stone monuments, waypoints and grave markers dating between the 5th and 7th century, with many being moved from their original position to sheltered locations for protection. The most notable of the early stone markers still in its original place is on a high mountain ridge at Gelligaer. Of the later plaitwork patterned standing crosses the finest and best preserved is the 9th century 'Houelt' stone at Llantwit Major.


title: Glamorgan

text: The Lordship of Glamorgan was established by Robert Fitzhamon following the defeat of Iestyn ap Gwrgant, . The Lordship of Morgannwg was split after it was conquered; the kingdom of Glamorgan had as its caput the town of Cardiff and took in the lands from the River Tawe to the River Rhymney. The Lordship took in four of the Welsh cantrefi, Gorfynydd, Penychen, Senghenydd and Gwynllwg. The area later known as the Gower Peninsula was not under the Lordship of Glamorgan, and became the Gower Lordship which had previously been the cantref of Gŵyr. The lowlands of the Lordship of Glamorgan were manorialized, while much of the sparsely populated uplands were left under Welsh control until the late 13th century. Upon the death of William, Lord of Glamorgan, his extensive holdings were eventually granted to Gilbert de Clare in 1217. The subjugation of Glamorgan, begun by Fitzhamon, was finally completed by the powerful De Clare family, and in 1486 the kingdom was granted to Jasper Tudor.


title: Glamorgan

text: The legacy of the Marcher Lords left the area scattered with historic buildings including Norman castles, Cistercian Abbeys, churches and medieval monuments.


title: Glamorgan

text: The kingdom of Glamorgan was also notable for the number of castles built during the time of the Marcher Lords, many surviving to the present day though many are now ruinous. Of the castles built during the medieval period, those still standing above foundation level include, Caerphilly Castle, Cardiff Castle, Ogmore Castle, St Donat's Castle, St Quintins Castle, Coity Castle, Neath Castle, and Oystermouth Castle. Many of the castles within Morgannwg were attacked by forces led by Owain Glyndŵr during the Welsh Revolt of 1400–1415. Some were captured, and several were damaged to such an extent they were never maintained as defences again.


title: Glamorgan

text: When the Diocese of Llandaff became incorporated into the Province of Canterbury, the Bishop of Llandaff rebuilt over the small church with the beginnings of Llandaff Cathedral in 1120. In the western region of Morgannwg two monastic foundations were sited, a Savigniac house in Neath in 1130 and the Cistercian Margam Abbey in 1147. In the Vale a Benedictine monastery was founded in 1141, Ewenny Priory, a community under the patronage of St. Peter's Gloucester. The building of parish churches also began in the 12th century, densely in the Vale, but very sparsely in the upland and northern areas.


title: Glamorgan

text: The Laws in Wales Acts of 1535 established the County of Glamorgan through the amalgamation of the Lordship of Glamorgan with the lordships of Gower and Kilvey; the area that had previously been the cantref of Gwynllwg was lost to Monmouthshire. With Wales finally incorporated with the English dominions, the administration of justice passed into the hands of the crown. The Lordship became a shire and was awarded its first Parliamentary representative with the creation of the Glamorganshire constituency in 1536. The Reformation, which was closely followed by the Dissolution of the Monasteries, led to vast social changes across Britain. These events, along with the Act of Union, allowed the leading Welsh families to gain in wealth and prosperity, allowing equal footing to those families of English extraction. Old monasteries, with their lands, were acquired by the wealthy and turned into country houses; their notable residents preferring to live in gentry houses rather than the fortified castles of the past. Major families in Glamorgan included the Carnes at Ewenny, the Mansels at Margam, Williams of Neath, the Herberts at Cardiff and Swansea, Sir David Ap Mathew of Llandaff, and the Stradlings of St Donats.


title: Glamorgan

text: The main industry of Glamorgan during this period was agriculture. In the upland, or "Blaenau" area, the hilly terrain along with many areas being densely wooded, made arable farming unprofitable, so the local farming concentrated on the rearing of horses, cattle and sheep. The lowland, or "Bro" was devoted to more general branches of farming, cereal, grass for pasture, hay and stock raising. Non-agricultural industries were generally small scale, with some shallow coal pits, fulling mills, weaving and pottery-making. The main heavy industry of note during this period was copper smelting, and this was centred on the towns of Swansea and Neath. Although copper had been mined in Wales since the Bronze Age, it was not until non-ferrous metalworking became a major industry in the late 17th century that Glamorgan saw a concentration of works appearing in a belt between Kidwelly and Port Talbot. Smelting of copper started around Neath under the Mines Royal Society c. 1584 but the scale of the works increased dramatically from the early 18th century when Swansea displaced Bristol as Britain's copper smelting capital. Easy access to Cornish ores and a local outcropping of coal near the surface, gave Swansea economic advantages in the smelting industry.


title: Glamorgan

text: Early iron smelting within Glamorgan was a localised and minor industry, with historical evidence pointing to scattered ironworks throughout the county. John Leland mentions a works at Llantrisant in 1539, an operation in Aberdare existed during the reign of Edward VI and two iron furnaces were recorded as being set up by Sir W. Mathew in Radyr during the Elizabethan era. By 1666 a furnace was in operation in Hirwaun and in 1680 a smelting hearth was established in Caerphilly. Despite the existence of these industries, the scale of production was small, and in 1740 the total output of iron from Glamorgan was reported at 400 tons per year.


title: Glamorgan

text: Glamorgan, now falling under the protection of the crown, was also involved in the conflicts of the crown. With the start of the First English Civil War, there was little support from the Welsh for the Parliamentarians. Glamorgan sent troops to join Charles I at the Battle of Edgehill, and their Member of Parliament Sir Edward Stradling was captured in the conflict. In the Second English Civil War, the war came to Glamorgan at the Battle of St Fagans (1648), where the New Model Army overcame a larger Royalist to prevent a siege of Cardiff.


title: Glamorgan

text: The period between the Laws in Wales Acts and the industrialisation of Glamorgan saw two distinct periods architecturally. From the 1530s throughout to 1650, the newly empowered gentry attempted to show their status by building stately homes to show their wealth; but the period from 1650 through to the mid-1750s was a fallow time for architectural grandeur, with few new wealthy families moving to the area. Of the eight major gentry houses of the time only St Fagans Castle survives with its interior intact; five, Neath Abbey, Old Beaupre Castle, Oxwich Castle, Llantrithyd and Ruperra Castle are ruinous. Of the remaining two manors, The Van at Caerphilly was reconstructed in 1990 while Cefnmabli was gutted by a fire in 1994. The old castles became abandoned throughout this period due to the new security brought by Glamorgan coming under the protection of the crown, with only the Stradlings of St Donat's Castle electing to remain in their old ancestral home.


title: Glamorgan

text: By the 17th century, the availability of fine building stone permitted the construction of high-quality lime-washed rural cottages and farmhouses in the Vale of Glamorgan, which drew favourable remarks from travellers. A Glamorgan yeoman of the time generally lived in greater comfort than his contemporaries of the more westerly or upland parts of Wales such as Cardiganshire or north Carmarthenshire.


title: Glamorgan

text: From the mid-18th century onwards, Glamorgan's uplands underwent large-scale industrialisation and several coastal towns, in particular Swansea and later Cardiff, became significant ports. From the late 18th century until the early 20th century Glamorgan produced 70 per cent of the British output of copper. The industry was developed by English entrepreneurs and investors such as John Henry Vivian and largely based in the west of the county, where coal could be purchased cheaply and ores imported from Cornwall, Devon and later much further afield. The industry was of immense importance to Swansea in particular; in 1823 the smelting works on the River Tawe, and the collieries and shipping dependent on them, supported between 8,000 and 10,000 people. Imports of copper ores reached a peak in the 1880s, after which there was a steep fall until the virtual end of the trade in the 1920s. The cost of shipping ores from distant countries, and the growth of foreign competitors, ended Glamorgan's dominance of the industry. Some of the works converted to the production of zinc and the Tawe valley also became a location for the manufacture of nickel after Ludwig Mond established a works at Clydach in 1902.


title: Glamorgan

text: Even at its peak, copper smelting was never as significant as iron smelting, which was the major industrial employer of men and capital in south Wales before the rise of the sale-coal industry. Ironmaking developed in locations where ironstone, coal and limestone were found in close proximity – primarily the northern and south-western parts of the South Wales coalfield. In the second half of the 18th century four ironworks were built in Merthyr Tydfil. In 1759 the Dowlais Ironworks were established by a partnership of nine men. This was followed by the Plymouth Ironworks in 1763, which was formed by Isaac Wilkinson and John Guest, then in 1765 Anthony Bacon established the Cyfarthfa Ironworks. The fourth of the great ironworks, Penydarren Ironworks was built in 1784. These works made Merthyr Tydfil the main centre of the industry in Wales.


title: Glamorgan

text: As well as copper and iron, Glamorgan became an important centre for the tinplate industry. Although not as famous as the Llanelli or Pontypool works, a concentrated number of works emerged around Swansea, Aberavon and Neath towards the late 19th century. Glamorgan became the most populous and industrialised county in Wales and was known as the 'crucible of the Industrial Revolution'.


title: Glamorgan

text: Other areas to house heavy industries include ironworks in Maesteg (1826), tinplate works in Llwydarth and Pontyclun and an iron ore mine in Llanharry.


title: Glamorgan

text: Alongside the metalworks, industries appeared throughout Glamorgan that made use of the works' output. Pontypridd was well known for the Brown Lenox Chainworks, which during the 19th century was the town's main industrial employer.


title: Glamorgan

text: The largest change to industrial Glamorgan was the opening up of the South Wales coalfield, the largest continuous coalfield in Britain, which occupied the greater part of Glamorgan, mostly north of the Vale. The coalfield provided a vast range in quality and type, but prior to 1750 the only real access to the seams was through bell pits or digging horizontally into a level where the seam was exposed at a river bank or mountainside. Although initially excavated for export, coal was soon also needed for the smelting process in Britain's expanding metallurgical industries. Developments in coal mining began in the north-eastern rim of Glamorgan around the ironworks of Merthyr and in the south-west around the copper plants of Swansea. In 1828 the South Wales coalfield was producing an estimated 3 million tons of coal, by 1840 that had risen to 4.5 million, with about 70 percent consumed by local commercial and domestic usage.


title: Glamorgan

text: The 1840s saw the start of a dramatic increase in the amount of coal excavated within Glamorgan. Several events took place to precipitate the growth in coal mining, including the discovery of steam coal in the Cynon Valley, the building of a large masonry dock at Cardiff and the construction of the Taff Vale Railway. In 1845, after trials by the British Admiralty, Welsh steam coal replaced coal from Newcastle-upon-Tyne as the preferred fuel for the ships of the Royal Navy. Glamorgan steam coal quickly became a sought-after commodity for navies all over the world and its production increased to meet the demand.


title: Glamorgan

text: The richest source for steam coal was the Rhondda Valleys, and by 1856 the Taff Vale Railway had reached the heads of both valleys. Over the next fifty years the Rhondda would grow to become the largest producer of coal of the age. In 1874, the Rhondda produced 2.13 million tons of coal, which rose to 5.8 million tons by 1884. The coal now produced in Glamorgan far exceeded the interior demand, and in the later half of the 19th century the area became a mass exporter for its product. In the 1890s the docks of South Wales accounted for 38 percent of British coal exports and a quarter of global trade.


title: Glamorgan

text: Along with the increase in coal production came a very large increase in the population, as people emigrated to the area to seek employment. In Aberdare the population grew from 6,471 in 1841 to 32,299 in 1851 while the Rhondda grew from 3,035 in 1861 to 55,632 in 1881, peaking in 1921 at 162,729. Much of this population growth was driven by immigration. In the ten years from 1881 to 1891, net migration to Glamorgan was over 76,000, 63 percent of which was from the non-border counties of England – a proportion that increased in the following decade.


title: Glamorgan

text: Until the beginning of the 18th century, Glamorgan was almost entirely agriculture based. With the industrialisation of the county, farming became of far less importance, with industrial areas encroaching into farming lands. In Glamorgan, from the late 19th century, there was a significant reduction away from arable land towards pasture land. There were two main factors behind this trend; firstly the increase in the population of the county required more milk and other dairy produce, in an age before refrigeration. Secondly there was an employment shortage in farming due to the call of better paid industrial work, and pastoral land was less work intensive. Stock rearing became prominent with breeds such as Hereford, Devon and Shorthorn cattle being bred in the Vale of Glamorgan, while the unenclosed wilds of the Gower saw Welsh Ponies bred on the commons.


title: Glamorgan

text: The industrial period of Glamorgan saw a massive building program throughout the uplands and in the coastal regions, reflecting the increasing population and the need for new cheap housing to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of workers coming into the area. As the towns urbanised and the hamlets became villages, the trappings of modern life were reflected in the buildings required to sustain new and growing communities. The period saw the appearance, not only of the works and pits themselves, but of the terrace house or miners cottage, railway stations, hospitals, churches, chapels, bridges, viaducts, stadiums, schools, universities, museums and workingmen's halls.


title: Glamorgan

text: As well as the architecture of Glamorgan entering modernity, there was also a reflection to the past, with some individuals who made the most from the booming industrial economy restoring symbols of the past, building follies and commissioning Gothic-style additions to ancient churches. Robert Lugar's Cyfarthfa Castle in Merthyr (1825) and the late 19th century additions to Cardiff Castle, designed by William Burges, exemplify how Gothic was the favoured style for rich industrialists and entrepreneurs. Greek Revival architecture, popularised in France and Germany in the late 18th century, was used for a number of public and educational buildings in Wales including the Royal Institution of South Wales in Swansea (1841) and Bridgend Town Hall (1843).


title: Glamorgan

text: In 1897, Cardiff Corporation acquired land from the Marquess of Bute with the intention of erecting buildings to meet the administrative, legal and educational needs of Glamorgan's county town. From 1901 onwards, Cathays Park was developed into "possibly the finest... civic centre in Britain" with a range of public buildings including the Baroque City Hall and the rococo-style University College.


title: Glamorgan

text: The majority of Nonconformist chapels were built in the 19th century. They progressed from simple, single-storey designs to larger and more elaborate structures, most built in the classical style. Perhaps the most ambitious chapel was John Humphrey's Morriston Tabernacle (1872), incorporating Classical, Romanesque and Gothic elements, which has been called the 'Noncomformist Cathedral of Wales'.


title: Glamorgan

text: Industrial architecture tended to be functional, although some structures, such as the four-storey engine house at Cyfarthfa Ironworks (1836), were built to impress. Coal mining eventually became the dominant industry in Glamorgan and tall winding towers – originally made of timber or cast iron, later steel – became symbolic icons.


title: Glamorgan

text: After the First World War, there was an initial drop in coal and iron production, there was still enough demand to push the coalfields to their limits, helped by events such as the American coal miners' strike. Cardiff Docks reached an exporting peak in 1923, but soon production fell and unemployment in the upland valleys began to increase at a dramatic rate. Between April 1924 and August 1925 the unemployment rate amongst South Wales miners jumped from 1.8% to 28.5%. Several factors came together to cause this collapse, including the over-valuation of sterling, the end of the coal subsidy, the growth of electric power, the adoption of oil as the fuel of choice for many industries, and over-expansion of the mines in the late nineteenth century. The Welsh coal owners had failed to invest mechanisation during the good years, and by the 1930s the South Wales Coalfield had the lowest productivity, highest production costs and smallest profits of all Britain's coal-producing regions.


title: Glamorgan

text: These structural problems were followed by the General Strike of 1926 and then most disastrously the interwar depression of 1929–1931, which changed the face of industrial Glamorgan forever. In 1932, Glamorgan had an unemployment rate of more than 40 per cent, and one of the highest proportions of people receiving poor relief in the United Kingdom. This was a contrast with relatively recent prosperity: for example, in 1913 unemployment in Merthyr was below 2 per cent and the borough had 24,000 miners. By 1921, the number of employed miners had fallen to 16,000, and in 1934, it was down to 8,000.


title: Glamorgan

text: Steel production was no less depressed than the coal industry. The inter-war years saw the closure of the old Cyfarthfa and Dowlais works, as steel-making became increasingly concentrated in the coastal belt. Both the coal and steel industries were increasingly dominated by large amalgamations, such as Powell Duffryn and Guest, Keen and Nettlefolds. The smaller companies progressively disappeared.


title: Glamorgan

text: Glamorgan suffered disproportionately during the Great Depression because of the high proportion of its workforce employed in primary production rather than the manufacture of finished products. Other parts of Britain began to recover as domestic demand for consumer products picked up, but unemployment in the South Wales Valleys continued to rise: the jobless rate in Merthyr reached 47.5 per cent in June 1935. However, the coastal ports, Cardiff and Swansea, managed to sustain a "reasonable" level of economic activity, and the anthracite coalfield in western Glamorgan (and eastern Carmarthenshire) also managed to maintain production and exports above pre-war levels.


title: Glamorgan

text: With the outbreak of World War II the coalfields of Glamorgan saw a sharp rise in trade and employment. Despite the demand the want for the youth to conscript in the war effort in the valley areas meant that there was a shortage of workers to run the mines; this in turn saw the introduction of the Bevin Boys, workers conscripted to work in the mines. During the war both Cardiff and Swansea were targets for German air attacks due to their important docks.


title: Glamorgan

text: After the First World War, Glamorgan, as was typical for Britain as a whole, entered a period of modernity, which saw buildings built and designed for functionality rather than splendour with period features watered down. As the century progressed, symbols of the past industrial period were torn down and replaced with industrial estates populated by unadorned geometric factories. With concrete becoming the favourite post-war building material, larger office blocks began appearing within the cities, though few were of any architectural significance.


title: Glamorgan

text: Despite entering a fallow period of architectural design, several structures of note did emerge. Although work began in 1911, The National Museum of Wales (Smith and Brewer) was not completed until 1927 due to the First World War. Designed to reflect sympathetically in dimensions with its neighbouring city hall, the dome-topped museum combines many architectural motifs with Doric columns at its facade, while internally a large entrance hall with stairs, landings and balconies. Percy Thomas' Guildhall in Swansea, an example of the 'stripped modernist' style completed in 1936, was described as "Wales' finest interwar building".


title: Glamorgan

text: Although functionality often deprived a building of interest, Sully Hospital (Pite, Son & Fairweather) is an example of a building which gained from its functional requirements. Initially built for tubercular patients, whose cure required the maximum amount of light and air, the functional architecture left a striking glass-fronted building, completed in 1936.


title: Glamorgan

text: Another hospital to which functionalism was applied was the University Hospital of Wales (S.W. Milburn & Partners). Begun in the 1960s, and completed in 1971, the building is the third largest hospital in the United Kingdom and the largest in Wales. It was designed to bring the care of patients, research and medical teaching together under one roof.


title: Glamorgan

text: The demands of modern living saw the growth of housing estates throughout Glamorgan, moving away from the Victorian terrace of Cardiff or the ribbon cottages of the valleys. Several of these projects were failures architecturally and socially. Of note were the Billybanks estate in Penarth and Penrhys Estate (Alex Robertson, Peter Francis & Partners) in the Rhondda, both described by Malcolm Parry, the former Head of the School of Architecture at Cardiff University, as "...the worst examples of architecture and planning in Wales."


title: Glamorgan

text: Glamorgan divides into three distinct and contrasting geographical areas. To the south east is a gently undulating limestone plateau, virtually coterminous with the modern county borough of Vale of Glamorgan, mainly comprising farmland and small villages stretching from Porthcawl to Cardiff. The lowlands are geographically the best environment for agriculture of the three areas. Settlements in the area included Cardiff, Barry, Bridgend, Cowbridge, Penarth and Porthcawl.