title: J. William Fulbright

text: On 4 August 1964, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara accused North Vietnam of attacking an American destroyer, the USS "Maddox" in international waters in what came to be known as the Gulf of Tonkin incident. The same day, President Johnson went on national television to denounce North Vietnam for "aggression" and to announce that he had ordered retaliatory air raids on North Vietnam. In the same speech, Johnson asked Congress to a resolution to prove to North Vietnam and its ally China that United States was united "in support of freedom and in defense of peace in southeast Asia." On 5 August 1964, Fulbright arrived at the White House to meet Johnson, where Johnson asked his old friend to use all his influence to get the resolution passed by the widest possible margin. Fulbright was one of the senators whom Johnson was most anxious and keen to have support the resolution. Fulbright was too much an individualist and intellectual to belong to the "Club" of the Senate, but he was widely respected as a thinker on foreign policy and was known to be a defender of Congress's prerogatives. From Johnson's viewpoint, having him support the resolution would bring many of the waverers around to voting for the resolution, as indeed proved to be the case.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: Johnson insisted quite vehemently to Fulbright that the alleged attack on the "Maddox" had taken place, and it was only later that Fulbright became skeptical about whether the alleged attack had really taken place. Furthermore, Johnson insisted that the resolution, which was a "functional equivalent to a declaration of war," was not intended to be used for going to war in Vietnam. In the 1964 presidential election, the Republicans had nominated Goldwater as their candidate, who ran on a platform accusing Johnson of being "soft on communism" and by contrast promised a "total victory" over communism. Johnson argued to Fulbright that the resolution was an election-year stunt that would prove to the voters that he was really "tough on communism" and so dent the appeal of Goldwater by denying him of his main avenue of attack. Besides for the internal political reason that Johnson gave for the resolution, he also gave a foreign policy reason that argued that such a resolution would intimidate North Vietnam into ceasing to try to overthrow the government of South Vietnam and so Congress passage of the resolution would make American involvement in Vietnam less likely, rather than more likely. Fulbright's longstanding friendship with Johnson made it difficult for him to go against the President, who cunningly exploited Fulbright's vulnerability, his desire to have greater influence over foreign policy. Johnson gave Fulbright the impression that he would be one of his unofficial advisers on foreign policy and that he was very interested in turning his ideas into policies if he voted for the resolution, which was a test of their friendship. Johnson also hinted that he was thinking about sacking Rusk if he won the 1964 election and would consider nominating Fulbright to be the next Secretary of State. Finally, for Fulbright in 1964, it was inconceivable that Johnson would lie to him, and Fulbright believed the resolution "was not going to be used for anything other than the Tonkin Gulf incident itself," as Johnson had told him.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: On 6 August 1964, Fulbright gave a speech on the Senate floor that called for the resolution to be passed as he accused North Vietnam of "aggression" and praised Johnson for his "great restraint... in response to the provocation of a small power." He also declared his support for the Johnson administration's "noble" Vietnam policy, which he called a policy of seeking "to establish viable, independent states in Indochina and elsewhere which will be free and secure from the combination of Communist China and Communist North Vietnam." Fulbright concluded that the policy could be accomplished via diplomatic means and, echoing Johnson's argument, argued that it was necessary to pass the resolution as a way to intimidate North Vietnam, which would presumably change its policies towards South Vietnam once Congress passed the resolution. Several senators, such as Allen J. Ellender, Jacob Javits, John Sherman Cooper, Daniel Brewster, George McGovern, and Gaylord Nelson, were very reluctant to vote for a resolution that would be a blank check for a war in Southeast Asia, and in a meeting, Fulbright sought to assure them by saying that passing such a resolution would make fighting a war less likely and claimed that the whole purpose of the resolution was intimidation. Nelson wanted to insert an amendment to bar the president from sending troops to fight in Vietnam unless he obtained the permission of Congress first and said that he did not like the open-ended nature of this resolution. Fulbright persuaded him not to do so by arguing the resolution was "harmless" and saying that the real purpose of the resolution was "to pull the rug out from under Goldwater." He went on to ask Nelson whether he preferred Johnson or Goldwater to win the election. Fulbright dismissed Nelson's fears of giving Johnson a blank check by saying that he had Johnson's word that "the last thing we want to do is become involved in a land war in Asia."


title: J. William Fulbright

text: On August 7, 1964, a unanimous House of Representatives and all but two members of the Senate voted to approve the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which led to a dramatic escalation of the Vietnam War. Fulbright, who sponsored the resolution, would later write:


title: J. William Fulbright

text: Many Senators who accepted the Gulf of Tonkin resolution without question might well not have done so had they foreseen that it would subsequently be interpreted as a sweeping Congressional endorsement for the conduct of a large-scale war in Asia.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: By his own admission, Fulbright knew almost nothing about Vietnam until he met, in 1965, Bernard B. Fall, a French journalist who often wrote about Vietnam. Speaking to Fall radically changed Fulbright's thinking about Vietnam, as Fall asserted that it simply not true that Ho Chi Minh was a Sino-Soviet "puppet" who wanted to overthrow the government of South Vietnam because his masters in Moscow and Beijing had presumably told him to do so. Fall's influence served as the catalyst for the change in Fulbright's thinking, as Fall introduced him to the writings of Philippe Devillers and Jean Lacouture. Fulbright made it his mission to learn as much as possible about Vietnam and indeed he had learned so much that at a meeting with the Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Fulbright was able to correct several mistakes made by the former about Vietnamese history, much to Rusk's discomfort.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: Although President Lyndon Johnson cajoled Fulbright into sponsoring the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in August 1964, his relationship with the President soured after the 1965 U.S. bombing of Pleiku in central Vietnam — which Fulbright consider a breach of Johnson’s commitment to not escalate the war. Fulbright’s opposition to the war in Vietnam took root, and beginning in 1966, he chaired public Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on the conduct of the war.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: Fulbright invited President Johnson to appear before the Committee in January 1966 to explain why America was fighting in Vietnam, an offer that the President refused.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: On 4 February 1966, Fulbright held the first hearings about the Vietnam War, where George F. Kennan and General James M. Gavin appeared as expert witnesses. The hearings had been prompted by Johnson's request for additional $400 million to pay for the war, which gave Fulbright an excuse to hold them. Kennan testified that the Vietnam War was a grotesque distortion of the containment policy that he had outlined in 1946 and 1947. The World War II hero Gavin testified that it was his opinion as a soldier that the war could not be won as it being fought. On 4 February 1966, in an attempt to upstage the hearings Fulbright was holding in Washington, Johnson called an impromptu summit in Honolulu in the hope that the media would play more attention to the summit that he had called than to the hearings Fulbright was holding. Johnson's two rebuttal witnesses at the hearings were General Maxwell Taylor and Secretary of State Dean Rusk.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: As chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Fulbright held a series of hearings on the Vietnam War from 1966 to 1971, many of which were televised to the nation in their entirety, a rarity until C-SPAN.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: Fulbright's reputation as a well-informed expert on foreign policy and his folksy Southern drawl, which made him sound "authentic" to ordinary Americans, made a formidable opponent for Johnson. During his exchanges with Taylor, Fulbright equated the firebombing of Japanese cities in World War II with the Operation Rolling Thunder bombings of North Vietnam and the use of napalm in South Vietnam, much to Taylor's discomfort. Fulbright condemned the bombing of North Vietnam and asked Taylor to think of the "millions of little children, sweet little children, innocent pure babies who love their mothers, and mothers who love their children, just like you love your son, thousands of little children, who never did us any harm, being slowly burned to death." A visibly uncomfortable Taylor stated that the United States was not targeting civilians in either Vietnam. Johnson called the hearings "a very, very disastrous break."


title: J. William Fulbright

text: As Fulbright had once been Johnson's friend, his criticism of the war was seen as a personal betrayal and Johnson lashed out in especially vitriolic terms against him. Johnson took the view that at least Senator Wayne Morse had always been opposed to the Vietnam War, but Fulbright had promised him to support his Vietnam policy in 1964, causing him to see Fulbright as a "Judas" figure. Johnson liked to mock Fulbright as "Senator Halfbright" and sneered it was astonishing that someone as "stupid" as Fulbright had been awarded a degree at Oxford.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: In April 1966, Fulbright delivered a speech at Johns Hopkins University, where Johnson had delivered a forthright defense of the war just a year earlier. Fulbright was sharply critical of the war. In his speech delivered in his usual folksy Southern drawl, Fulbright stated that the United States was "in danger of losing its perspective on what exactly is within the realm of its power and what is beyond it." Warning of what he called "the arrogance of power," Fulbright declared "we are not living up to our capacity and promise as a civilized power for the world." He called the war a betrayal of American values. Johnson was furious with the speech, which he saw a personal attack from a man who had once been his friend and believed the remark about the "arrogance of power" to be about him. Johnson lashed out in a speech in which he called Fulbright and other critics of the war "nervous Nellies," who knew the war in Vietnam could and would be won but were just too cowardly to fight on to the final victory.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: In 1966, Fulbright published "The Arrogance of Power", which attacked the justification of the Vietnam War, Congress's failure to set limits on it, and the impulses that had given rise to it. Fulbright's scathing critique undermined the elite consensus that the military intervention in Indochina was necessitated by Cold War geopolitics.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: By 1967, the Senate was divided into three blocs. There was an antiwar "dove" bloc, led by Fulbright; a pro-war "hawk" bloc, led by the conservative Southern Democrat Senator John C. Stennis, and a third bloc consisting of waverers, who tended to shift their positions about war in tune with public opinion and moved variously closer to doves and hawks as they followed the public opinion polls. In contrast to his hostile attitudes towards Fulbright, Johnson was afraid of being labeled as soft on communism and so tended to try to appease Stennis and the hawks, who kept pressuring for more-and-more aggressive measures in Vietnam. In criticizing the war, Fulbright was careful to draw a distinction between condemning the war and condemning the ordinary soldiers fighting the war. After General William Westmoreland gave a speech in 1967 before a joint session of Congress, Fulbright stated, "From the military standpoint, it was fine. The point is the policy that put our boys there." On 25 July 1967, Fulbright was invited with all of the other chairmen of the Senate committees to the White House to hear Johnson say that the war was being won. Fulbright told Johnson: "Mr. President, what you really need to do is stop the war. That will solve all your problems. Vietnam is ruining our domestic and our foreign policy. I will not support it anymore." To prove that he was serious, Fulbright threatened to block a foreign aid bill before his committee and said that it was the only way to make Johnson pay attention to his concerns. Johnson accused Fulbright of wanting to ruin America's reputation around the world. Using his favorite tactic of seeking to divide his opponents, Johnson told the other senators: "I understand all of you feel you under the gun when you are down here, at least according to Bill Fulbright." Fulbright replied: "Well, my position is that Vietnam is central to the whole problem. We need a new look. The effects of Vietnam are hurting the budget and foreign relations generally." Johnson exploded in fury: "Bill, everybody doesn't have a blind spot like you do. You say, 'Don't bomb North Vietnam', on just about everything. I don't have simple solution you have... I am not going to tell our men in the field to put their right hands behind their backs and fight only with their lefts. If you want me to get out of Vietnam, then you have the prerogative of taking the resolution which we are out there now. You can repeal it tomorrow. You can tell the troops to come home. You can tell General Westmoreland that he doesn't know what is doing." As Johnson's face was red, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield decided to calm matters down by changing the subject.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: In early 1968, Fulbright was deeply depressed as he stated: "The President, unfortunately, seems to have closed his mind to the consideration of any alternative, and his Rasputin-W.W. Rostow-seems able to isolate him from other views, and the Secretary [of State] happens to agree. I regret that I am unable to break this crust of immunity." However, after Robert McNamara was fired as Defense Secretary, Fulbright saw a "ray of light" as the man who replaced McNamara, Clark Clifford, was a longstanding "close personal friend." Johnson had appointed Clifford Defense Secretary because he was a hawk, but Fulbright sought to change his mind about Vietnam. Fulbright invited Clifford to a secret meeting in which he introduced the newly appointed Defense Secretary to two World War II heroes, General James M. Gavin and General Matthew Ridgway. Both Gavin and Ridgway were emphatic that the United States could not win the war in Vietnam, and their opposition to the war helped to change Clifford's mind. Despite his success with Clifford, Fulbright was close to despair as he wrote in a letter to Erich Fromm that this "literally a miasma of madness in the city, enveloping everyone in the administration and most of those in Congress. I am at a loss of words to describe the idiocy of what we are doing."


title: J. William Fulbright

text: Seeing that the Johnson administration was reeling in the wake of the Tet Offensive, Fulbright in February 1968 called for hearings by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee into the Gulf of Tonkin incident, as Fulbright noted that there were several aspects of the claim that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had attacked American destroyers in international waters that seemed dubious and questionable. McNamara was subpoenaed, and the televised hearings led to "fireworks" as Fulbright repeatedly asked difficult answers about De Soto raids on North Vietnam and Operation 34A. On 11 March 1968, Secretary of State Dean Rusk appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Fulbright made his sympathies clear by wearing a tie decorated with doves carrying olive branches. Through Rusk was scheduled to testify about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the previous day in "The New York Times" had appeared a leaked story that Westmoreland had requested for Johnson to send 206,000 more troops to Vietnam. During Rusk's two days of testimony, the main issue turned out to be the troop request with Fulbright insisting for Johnson to seek congressional approval first. In response to Fulbright's questions, Rusk stated that if more troops were sent to Vietnam, the president would consult "appropriate members of Congress." Most notably, several senators who had voted with Stennis and the other hawks now aligned themselves with Fulbright, which indicated that Congress was turning against the war.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: In late October 1968, after Johnson announced a halt in bombing in North Vietnam in accordance with peace talks, Fulbright stated that his hopefulness that the announcement would lead to a general ceasefire.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: In March 1969, Secretary of State William P. Rogers testified at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the Nixon administration's foreign policy, Fulbright telling Rogers that the appearance was both useful and promising. In April 1969, Fublright received a letter from a former soldier who served in Vietnam, Ron Ridenhour, containing the results of Ridenhour's investigation into the My Lai massacre, said that he had heard so many stories from other soldiers about a massacre that had happened in March 1968 at a village that the soldiers knew only as "Pinkville." In May 1969, Fulbright delivered a speech at National War College that advocated for a U.S. withdraw from Vietnam in spite of possibly having to settle for something less than a standoff against the communists. He spoke for overhauling foreign policy to concentrate it less on the power of the executive branch. On 15 October 1969, Fulbright spoke at one of the rallies held by the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam. As all of the rallies held on 15 October were peaceful, Fulbright taunted a reporter who was hoping there would be violence: "I am sorry that you thought the demonstrations of 15 October were 'subversive and hysterical'. They seemed to me to be extremely well-behaved and a very serious demonstration of disapproval of the tragic mistake... in Vietnam." In response to the Moratorium protests, President Nixon went on national television on 3 November 1969 to give his speech asking for the support of the "silent majority" towards his Vietnam policy. On 4 November, Fulbright told a journalist that Nixon had "fully and truthfully taken upon himself Johnson's war." Fulbright called for the second round of the Moratorium protests scheduled for 15 November to be canceled for fear that Nixon was planning to start a riot to discredit the antiwar movement. The protests in the 15th went ahead and were peaceful, but the success of Nixon's "silent majority speech" left Fulbright depressed as he wrote at the time that "it is very distressing, indeed, to think that we eliminated LBJ only to end up with this, which is almost more than the human spirit can endure." However, on 12 November 1969 appeared in "The New York Times" an article by Seymour Hersh revealing the My Lai Massacre on 16 March 1968. Fulbright was deeply shocked when he learned about what happened at May Lai: "it is a matter of the greatest importance and emphasizes in the most dramatic manner the brutalization of our society."


title: J. William Fulbright

text: In 1970, Daniel Ellsberg offered Fulbright his copy of the Pentagon Papers to ask him to insert them into the "Congressional Record", which would allow the media to cite them without fear of prosecution for publishing secret documents. Fulbright declined and instead sent a letter to Defense Secretary Melvin Laird asking him to declassify the Pentagon Papers. In 1971, Fulbright held another set of hearing about the Vietnam. The Fulbright Hearings included the notable testimony of Vietnam veteran and future Senator and Secretary of State John Kerry.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: In February 1970, South Dakota Senator George McGovern accused the former Viet Cong detainee James N. Rowe of being dispatched by the Pentagon to criticize him, Fulbright, and Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, who had indicated their opposition to continued American involvement in Vietnam. On March 11, Fulbright introduced a resolution regarding the commitment of American troops or air forces for combat in Laos by Nixon, who, under the guidelines of the resolution, would not be able to combat forces in or over Laos without congressional affirmative action. In his address introducing the resolution, Fulbright said, "The Senate must not remain silent now while the President uses the armed forces of the United States to, fight an undeclared and undisclosed war in Laos." The following month, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted to repeal the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Fulbright admitted the repeal would now have little to no legal impact and described the action as one intended to be part of an ongoing process of clearing out legislation that was now out of date. On August 22, Fulbright stated his support for a bilateral treaty to grant the United States authority to use military force to guarantee both "territory and independence of Israel within the borders of 1967" and that the proposed measure would obligate Israel not to violate those frontiers, which had been created prior to the Six-Day War. In October, Defense Department officials disclosed publication of testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee showing the United States entered a 1960 agreement supporting a 40,000-man Ethiopian army in addition to beginning Ethiopia's opposition to threats against its territorial integrity. Fulbright responded to the disclosure by saying the wording seemed to go "much further than saying a good word in the United Nations" and suggested the U.S. had agreed to aid the Ethiopian Emperor if the possibility of facing an internal insurrection arose.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: On February 28, 1971, Fulbright announced his intent to submit a bill compelling the Secretary of State and other Nixon administration officials to appear before Congress to explain their position on Vietnam. Fulbright said that the measure would be warranted by the refusal of William P. Rogers, Henry A. Kissinger, and other officials to appear before Congress. He reasoned that they would not appear because "they know there are a number of people who don't agree with them, and it makes it embarrassing and they don't like it; they especially don't like to have it in front of television." On October 31, Fulbright pledged his support to less-controversial aspects of foreign aid such as refugee relief and military aid to Israel and predicted the Nixon administration would be met with defeat or contention in the event of proposed aid for Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and Greece. Fulbright said a meeting between the Foreign Relations Committee the following day would see "that some kind of interim program will probably be devised" and expressed his disdain for "the continuing resolution approach."


title: J. William Fulbright

text: In March 1972, Fulbright sent a letter to Acting Attorney General Richard G. Kleindienst to request to the Justice Department not to use the Information Agency documentary "Czechoslovakia 1968" for use in New York. He stated that it appeared to violate the 1948 law that created the agency, which he stated "was created for the purpose of the dissemination abroad of information about the United States, its people, and policies." In April, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee announced the end of an inquiry into a drinking incident involving United States Ambassador to France Arthur K. Watson. Fulbright said that he did not expect the committee to pursue the matter and published a letter on the subject from Rogers. On August 3, the Senate approved the treaty limiting defense missiles for the United States and the Soviet Union. The following day, Fulbright held a closed meeting with members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to form a strategy against the Nixon administration's attempts to attach additional reservations to the intercontinental missile agreement signed by Nixon the previous May.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: On July 11, 1973, during a speech at an American Bankers Association meeting, Fulbright criticized Capitol Hill attempts to block trade concessions to the Soviet Union until it allowed the emigration of Jews and other groups: "Learning to live together in peace is the most important issue for the Soviet Union and the United States, too important to be compromised by meddling — even idealistic meddling — in each other's affairs." In August, Nixon announced his choice of Kissinger to replace the retiring Rogers as Secretary of State. Ahead of the hearings, Kissinger was expected to have the advantage of cultivating relationships with members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Vermont Senator George Aiken noting that Kissinger "met with us at Senator Fulbright's house for breakfast at least twice a year."


title: J. William Fulbright

text: In November 1973, Fulbright endorsed the Middle East policy of Secretary of State Kissinger in a Senate speech, arguing for the central requirement of a peace requirement prior to "another military truce hardens into another untenable and illusory status quo" and added that both sides would need to make concessions. Fulbright stated that Washington, Moscow, and the United Nations were responsible for spearheading the peace settlement.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: He also led the charge against confirming Nixon's conservative Supreme Court nominees Clement Haynsworth and Harold Carswell.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: In May 1974, Fulbright disclosed the existence of a weapon stockpile for South Korea, South Vietnam, and Thailand, and the Defense Department released a statement three days later that confirmed Fulbright's admission. Throughout 1974, Kissinger was investigated for his possible role in initiating wiretaps of 13 government officials and four newsmen from 1969 to 1971. In July, Fulbright stated that nothing significant had emerged from the Kissinger testimony during his nomination for Secretary of State the previous fall, and Fulbright indicated his belief that opponents of détente with the Soviet Union were hoping to unseat Kissinger from the investigation into his role in the wiretapping.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: In 1974, Fulbright was defeated in the Democratic primary in Arkansas by then-Governor Dale Bumpers. His well-documented stances on Vietnam, the Middle East, and Watergate were out of step with the Arkansan majority, and his campaign powers had atrophied. Bumpers won by a landslide. Speaking to congressmen in the weeks after Fulbright's primary loss, Nixon mocked the defeat.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: At the time that he formally resigned the Senate in December 1974, Fulbright had spent his entire 30 years in the Senate as the junior senator from Arkansas, behind John L. McClellan who entered the Senate two years before him. Only Tom Harkin, who served as junior Senator from Iowa from 1985–2015 (to senior Senator Chuck Grassley), was a junior Senator for longer.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: Throughout our history two strands have coexisted uneasily; a dominant strand of democratic humanism and a lesser but durable strand of intolerant Puritanism. There has been a tendency through the years for reason and moderation to prevail as long as things are going tolerably well or as long as our problems seem clear and finite and manageable. But... when some event or leader of opinion has aroused the people to a state of high emotion, our puritan spirit has tended to break through, leading us to look at the world through the distorting prism of a harsh and angry moralism.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: Fulbright also related his opposition to any American tendencies to intervene in the affairs of other nations:


title: J. William Fulbright

text: Power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is particularly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God's favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations—to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake them, that is, in its own shining image. Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence. Once imbued with the idea of a mission, a great nation easily assumes that it has the means as well as the duty to do God's work.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: Law is the essential foundation of stability and order both within societies and in international relations. As a conservative power, the United States has a vital interest in upholding and expanding the reign of law in international relations. Insofar as international law is observed, it provides us with stability and order and with a means of predicting the behavior of those with whom we have reciprocal legal obligations. When we violate the law ourselves, whatever short-term advantage may be gained, we are obviously encouraging others to violate the law; we thus encourage disorder and instability and thereby do incalculable damage to our own long-term interests.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: Fulbright viewed the Cold War as a struggle between the United States and a new imperialist Russia. To that end, he advocated vigorous aid and armament for Europe as opposed to a global anti-communist policy, which would include opposition to the People's Republic of China.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: Fulbright additionally believed that conflict with the Soviet Union would almost certainly lead to nuclear war and potentially global annihilation. He initially favored the policy of containment of the Soviet Union, instead of the more aggressive rollback policy. Fulbright saw the Cold War as more of a political struggle than a military struggle and criticized excessive military spending as a means of victory. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, he further modified his position toward the Soviets to détente.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: In 1950, Fulbright cosponsored an amendment, which, if enacted, would allow soldiers to choose whether or not to serve in a racially integrated unit. In 1952, Fulbright assisted with blocking an Alaska statehood bill entirely because of his view that legislators from the state would support civil rights bills.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: According to biographer Randall Bennett Woods, Fulbright believed the South was not yet ready for integration but that education would eventually eradicate prejudice and allow blacks to "take their rightful place in American society." In 1954, Fulbright signed Strom Thurmond's Southern Manifesto in opposition to the "Brown v. Board of Education" decision. In a letter to a constituent at the time, he compared the Manifesto favorably to the alternative of secession. Privately, he assured aides that signing the Manifesto was his only means of maintaining influence with the Southern delegation. He, along with John Sparkman, Lister Hill, and Price Daniel, submitted a version that acknowledged theirs was a minority position and pledged to fight the "Brown" ruling through legal means. In later years, he insisted his intervention had led to a more moderate version of the Manifesto than Thurmond originally proposed, and his claims were generally accepted by Arkansan black leadership.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: Fulbright was one of only two Southern members of Congress to condemn the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963 by white supremacists that killed four girls and injured between 14 and 22 other people.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: With other southern Democrats, Fulbright participated in the filibuster of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and opposed the 1965 Voting Rights Act. However, in 1970, Fulbright voted for a five-year extension of the Voting Rights Act.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: In 1963, Fulbright claimed that $5 million tax-deductible from philanthropic Americans was sent to Israel and then recycled back to the U.S. for distribution to organizations seeking to influence public opinion in favor of Israel.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: On April 15, 1973, Fulbright said on "Face the Nation", "Israel controls the U.S. Senate. The Senate is subservient to Israel, in my opinion much too much. We should be more concerned about the United States interest rather than doing the bidding of Israel. This is a most unusual development."


title: J. William Fulbright

text: After his retirement, Fulbright practiced international law at the Washington, D.C. office of the law firm Hogan & Hartson from 1975–1993.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: On May 5, 1993, President Bill Clinton presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Fulbright at his eighty-eighth birthday celebration from the Fulbright Association.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: Fulbright died of a stroke in 1995 at the age of 89 in Washington, DC. A year later, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary dinner of the Fulbright Program held June 5, 1996 at the White House, President Bill Clinton said, "Hillary and I have looked forward for some time to celebrating this 50th anniversary of the Fulbright Program, to honor the dream and legacy of a great American, a citizen of the world, a native of my home state and my mentor and friend, Senator Fulbright."


title: J. William Fulbright

text: Fulbright's ashes were interred at the Fulbright family plot in Evergreen Cemetery in Fayetteville, Arkansas.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: In 1996, The George Washington University renamed a residence hall in his honor. The J. William Fulbright Hall is located 2223 H Street, N.W., at the corner of 23rd and H Streets. It received historic designations as a District of Columbia historic site on January 28, 2010 and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on June 18, 2010.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: On October 21, 2002, in a speech at the dedication of the Fulbright Sculpture at the University of Arkansas, fellow Arkansan Bill Clinton said,


title: J. William Fulbright

text: I admired him. I liked him. On the occasions when we disagreed, I loved arguing with him. I never loved getting in an argument with anybody as much in my entire life as I loved fighting with Bill Fulbright. I'm quite sure I always lost, and yet he managed to make me think I might have won.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: During the removal of monuments during the George Floyd protests, Fulbright's legacy was examined by the University of Arkansas community with respect to an on-campus statue and the name of the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. Fulbright was a 1925 alumnus, professor, and university president from 1939-41. A spirited debate discussed his reputation as a racist who defended segregation and signed the Southern Manifesto. Defenders noted his record on international affairs and education, especially the Fulbright Program. One Fulbright biographer who knew Fulbright claimed he was not a racist, but supported segregationist policies expected of a Southern senator at the time, while another biographer summarized Fulbright's legacy as "a political giant in Arkansas, in both good and awful ways". A university panel voted to remove the statue and rename the college, but the University of Arkansas System Board of Trustees (which Fulbright once chaired as UA president) voted to keep both due to a state law requiring Arkansas General Assembly approval to remove monuments.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: The Fulbright Program was established in 1946 under legislation introduced by then-Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas. The Fulbright Program is sponsored by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the United States Department of State.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: Approximately 294,000 "Fulbrighters", 111,000 from the United States and 183,000 from other countries, have participated in the Program since its inception over sixty years ago. The Fulbright Program awards approximately 6,000 new grants annually.


title: J. William Fulbright

text: The Thank You Fulbright project was created in April 2012 to provide an annual opportunity for alumni and friends of the Fulbright program to celebrate Fulbright's legacy.


title: Elasmobranchii

text: Elasmobranchii () is a subclass of Chondrichthyes or cartilaginous fish, including sharks (superorder Selachii), rays, skates, and sawfish (superorder Batoidea). Members of this subclass are characterised by having five to seven pairs of gill clefts opening individually to the exterior, rigid dorsal fins and small placoid scales on the skin. The teeth are in several series; the upper jaw is not fused to the cranium, and the lower jaw is articulated with the upper. The details of this jaw anatomy vary between species, and help distinguish the different elasmobranch clades. The pelvic fins in males are modified to create claspers for the transfer of sperm. There is no swim bladder; instead, these fish maintain buoyancy with large livers rich in oil.


title: Elasmobranchii

text: The definition of the clade is unclear with respect to fossil chondrichthyans. It has been used by different authors as equivalent to Neoselachii (the clade including modern sharks and rays and their last common ancestor) or for all chondrichthyans more closely related to modern sharks and rays than to Holocephali (the clade containing chimaeras and their extinct relatives).


title: Elasmobranchii

text: The earliest elasmobranch fossils came from the Devonian and many surviving orders date back to the Cretaceous, or even earlier. Many species became extinct during the Permian and there was a burst of adaptive radiation during the Jurassic.


title: Elasmobranchii

text: The name Elasmobranchii comes from the Ancient Greek words "elasmo-" ("plate") and "bránchia" ("gill"), referring to the broad, flattened gills which are characteristic of these fishes.


title: Elasmobranchii

text: Elasmobranchii is one of the two subclasses of cartilaginous fish in the class Chondrichthyes, the other being Holocephali (chimaeras).


title: Elasmobranchii

text: Members of the elasmobranchii subclass have no swim bladders, five to seven pairs of gill clefts opening individually to the exterior, rigid dorsal fins, and small placoid scales. The teeth are in several series; the upper jaw is not fused to the cranium, and the lower jaw is articulated with the upper.


title: Elasmobranchii

text: Extant elasmobranchs exhibit several archetypal jaw suspensions: amphistyly, orbitostyly, hyostyly, and euhyostyly. In amphistyly, the palatoquadrate has a postorbital articulation with the chondrocranium from which ligaments primarily suspend it anteriorly. The hyoid articulates with the mandibular arch posteriorly, but it appears to provide little support to the upper and lower jaws. In orbitostyly, the orbital process hinges with the orbital wall and the hyoid provides the majority of suspensory support.


title: Elasmobranchii

text: In contrast, hyostyly involves an ethmoid articulation between the upper jaw and the cranium, while the hyoid most likely provides vastly more jaw support compared to the anterior ligaments. Finally, in euhyostyly, also known as true hyostyly, the mandibular cartilages lack a ligamentous connection to the cranium. Instead, the hyomandibular cartilages provide the only means of jaw support, while the ceratohyal and basihyal elements articulate with the lower jaw, but are disconnected from the rest of the hyoid. The eyes have a tapetum lucidum. The inner margin of each pelvic fin in the male fish is grooved to constitute a clasper for the transmission of sperm. These fish are widely distributed in tropical and temperate waters.


title: Elasmobranchii

text: Many fish maintain buoyancy with swim bladders. However elasmobranchs lack swim bladders, and maintain buoyancy instead with large livers that are full of oil. This stored oil may also function as a nutrient when food is scarce. Deep sea sharks are usually targeted for their oil, because the livers of these species can weigh up to 20% of their total weight.


title: Elasmobranchii

text: Fossilised shark teeth are known from the early Devonian, around 400 million years ago. During the following Carboniferous period, the sharks underwent a period of diversification, with many new forms evolving. Many of these became extinct during the Permian, but the remaining sharks underwent a second burst of adaptive radiation during the Jurassic, around which time the skates and rays first appeared. Many surviving orders of elasmobranch date back to the Cretaceous, or earlier.


title: Elasmobranchii

text: Elasmobranchs are mostly a marine taxon, but we know several species that live in freshwater environment (approximately 60 species which represent only 5% of the 1154 described species). They can be divided into two groups.


title: Elasmobranchii

text: The euryhaline elasmobranchs, which are marine species that may survive and reproduce in freshwater environment, and the obligated freshwater elasmobranchs. The second group contains elasmobranchs that only lives in freshwater environment their entire life. This group contains only one clade: the subfamily "Potamotrygoninae". This clade is endemic to one specific region (which means that they can only be seen in those regions): tropical, subtropical water and wetland of South America.


title: Elasmobranchii

text: Recent researches in Paraná river have shown that obligated freshwater elasmobranchs were more susceptible to anthropogenic threats as overfishing and destruction of habitats due to the very small place they live in compared to the marine species.


title: Elasmobranchii

text: New research has highlighted the importance of coastal wetlands, like mangroves and seagrasses, as habitats for many species of elasmobranch


title: Elasmobranchii

text: Recent molecular studies suggest the Batoidea are not derived selachians as previously thought. Instead, skates and rays are a monophyletic superorder within Elasmobranchii that shares a common ancestor with the selachians.


title: Miki Berenyi

text: Miki Eleonora Berenyi (born 18 March 1967) is an English singer, songwriter, and guitarist best known as a member of the alternative rock band Lush and currently a member of Piroshka.


title: Miki Berenyi

text: Berenyi was born in Chelsea, London to a Japanese mother, actress Yasuko Nagazumi, and Hungarian father, Ivan Berenyi. She is also a second cousin of the Japanese singer-songwriter Cornelius.


title: Miki Berenyi

text: At the age of 14, Berenyi met friend and future bandmate Emma Anderson while both were students at Queen's College. They became interested in music and together published a music fanzine, "Alphabet Soup" (which lasted for five issues). Berenyi first played bass with the band the Bugs. In 1987, Berenyi studied English literature at North London Polytechnic, where she met drummer Chris Acland and singer Meriel Barham. Along with Anderson, they decided to form their own band, originally called the Baby Machines. Bassist Steve Rippon joined and they changed their name to Lush. When Barham left, "the remaining members of Lush placed ads in local papers looking for Barham's replacement, but they couldn't find the singer they wanted and Berenyi took over the vocals".


title: Miki Berenyi

text: From 1987 until 1996, she played with Lush, releasing several albums, singles and music videos and toured extensively through the UK, North America, Japan, Australia and other countries. She and Acland also collaborated with members of Cocteau Twins and Moose, releasing one song in 1991 under the name Lillies.


title: Miki Berenyi

text: Lush officially announced their breakup in February 1998, following Acland's death by suicide in October 1996.


title: Miki Berenyi

text: After Lush split, Berenyi appeared on The Rentals' album "Seven More Minutes" (1999). She also contributed vocals to a remix of a Flat 7 track by Robin Guthrie (who also produced Lush's early work) and appeared on Seinking Ships' debut album, "Museum Quality Capture", released in 2010.


title: Miki Berenyi

text: When asked if she missed anything about her time in Lush, Berenyi stated, "I miss the excitement and energy of playing live and the camaraderie of touring—being with the band and crew in a foreign country is like going on holiday with your mates but even more fun because it’s free." She also said, "I enjoyed being in the band immensely, I’m glad I did it".


title: Miki Berenyi

text: Berenyi later worked for a magazine as a sub-editor and did not perform for many years. She explained: "I was never a proper guitarist—only in the context of Lush. I played the guitar to write songs on and to play live".


title: Miki Berenyi

text: Lush, including Berenyi, announced a reunion on 28 September 2015, with former Elastica drummer Justin Welch taking over for Acland. They toured extensively throughout 2016 and released an EP of new material; "Blind Spot" in April of that year. Bassist Phil King left the band in October 2016 and as a consequence Lush played their final farewell gig, with Michael Conroy of Modern English on bass at Manchester Academy on 25 November 2016.


title: Miki Berenyi

text: In September 2018, Berenyi announced that she had formed a new band, Piroshka, with Welch, Conroy and former Moose member K.J. "Moose" McKillop. Berenyi and partner McKillop have two children. Their debut album, "Brickbat", was released by Bella Union on 15 February 2019.


title: Miki Berenyi

text: In April 2022, Berenyi announced the release of her memoir "Fingers Crossed", due out in September. Berenyi is set to do a series of live Q&As to coincide with the release of the book from October 2022, including at Rough Trade Records London, at Lincoln Drill Hall in conversation with Guy Mankowski,and at IINSIDE, Manchester in conversation with John Robb (musician) of Louder Than War.


title: Miki Berenyi

text: In 2020, Berenyi cited The Shangri-Las as an influence for their harmonies and lyrics. She also has cited ABBA and The Smiths as influences as well.


title: Sigma-class design

text: The SIGMA class is a Dutch-built family of modular naval vessels, of either corvette or frigate size, designed by Damen Group.


title: Sigma-class design

text: SIGMA stands for Ship Integrated Geometrical Modularity Approach. The basic design of the SIGMA Patrol Series can vary as the hull segments are designed as components. Ships can vary in the number of hull segments and in the order in which they are placed. The ship's dimensions of length and beam lead to the individual SIGMA type names: the SIGMA 9113 is long with a beam of , the SIGMA 10513 is in length again with a beam of


title: Sigma-class design

text: The design was derived from the earlier High Speed Displacement hull form by Marin Teknikk AS in the 1970s.


title: Sigma-class design

text: They are likely to be part of the "Compact SIGMA" series, a new series small sized combatants with shorter range and up to 2 weeks mission endurance with the same combat systems as the larger version.


title: Sigma-class design

text: The Indonesian variant is based on the SIGMA 9113 design. Work on the first of the class, KRI "Diponegoro", began with the first steel cutting conducted in October 2004. The ship was christened on 16 September 2006 and commissioned on 2 July 2007 by Admiral Slamet Soebijanto, Indonesian Navy Chief of Staff.


title: Sigma-class design

text: Options for two other units were exercised in January 2006 with the first steel cut commenced on 3 April 2006 in Damen's Schelde Naval Shipbuilding yard, Vlissingen-Oost yard and not in Surabaya as stated earlier.


title: Sigma-class design

text: On 28 August 2007, Jane's Missiles and Rockets reported that Indonesia was having problems securing the export license for the MM40 Exocet block II and was considering Chinese made C-802 anti-ship missiles as alternatives. However, the ships have already been delivered with the Exocet missiles.


title: Sigma-class design

text: In 2018 Thales has upgraded the Indonesian Navy's "Diponegoro"-class corvette through the installation and refurbishment of the Kingklip hull-mounted sonar system.


title: Sigma-class design

text: On 31 August 2021, Terma announced that they have been awarded a contract for the upgrade of existing C-Guard systems with Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) capabilities for the Sigma-Class Corvettes of the Indonesian Navy.


title: Sigma-class design

text: On 4 November 2022, Thales has signed a contract with to undertake the refurbishment of the integrated mission systems for "Diponegoro"-class ships. The corvettes will be updated with Thales TACTICOS Baseline 2 combat management system (CMS) and the Naval Smarter (NS) NS50 radar system.


title: Sigma-class design

text: On the 16 August 2010, Indonesian Defense Ministry, signed a deal with PT PAL Indonesia and Damen Schelde to build a 105-meter frigate in Indonesia based on Damen Schelde SIGMA 10514 design. For the first ship, five modules for the ship will be built in Indonesia and the Dutch manufacturer Damen Schelde will build 2 modules while for the second ship the Indonesians will build six modules and Damen Schelde will build one module.


title: Sigma-class design

text: On 1 February 2013 it was announced that a second unit will be built by Damen Schelde Naval Shipbuilding and PT PAL Surabaya, the second contract includes torpedo tubes, combat control room and a couple of surface weapons.


title: Sigma-class design

text: They were built without several of their main system and equipment, namely VL-MICA, MM40 Exocet block III, Rheinmetall Millennium CIWS, Electronic warfare system and were planned to be installed later on (FFBNW).


title: Sigma-class design

text: As of December 2015, the first ship, KRI "Raden Eddy Martadinata" (331), was 85% complete and the ship was launched on 18 January 2016. On 7 April 2017 the first ship, KRI "Raden Eddy Martadinata" (331), was commissioned at Tanjung Priok. The second ship, KRI "I Gusti Ngurah Rai" (332), was commissioned on 10 January 2018.


title: Sigma-class design

text: The class finally received their full complement of FFBNW system and equipment in December 2019 for KRI "Raden Eddy Martadinata" (331) and March 2020 for KRI "I Gusti Ngurah Rai" (332).


title: Sigma-class design

text: On 6 February 2008, Morocco signed a USD$1.2 billion contract with Schelde Naval Shipbuilding for two light frigate SIGMA 9813 and one light frigate SIGMA 10513, which are modified versions of the existing SIGMA-class design.


title: Sigma-class design

text: A subsequent contract was signed on 1 April 2008 with Thales Nederland for the supply and installation of the command and control and sensor package for the ships. The package included TACTICOS combat management system, SMART-S Mk2 surveillance radar, LIROD Mk2 tracking radar, Thales KINGKLIP sonar system, IFF system, Integrated communication system comprising external communication system and FOCON internal communication system, two Target Designation Sights, VIGILE ESM system, SCORPION ECM system, and the integrated navigation system.


title: Sigma-class design

text: The first frigate for Morocco, "Tarik ben Ziyad", was launched in July 2010, began sea trials on 6 May 2011 and was delivered on 12 September 2011. The second ship was launched on 2 February 2011, with sea trials planned for late in the year. The third ship was planned to be launched in September 2011.


title: Sigma-class design

text: On 18 August 2017, Damen announced the keel laying for one SIGMA 10514 Long Range Ocean Patrol Vessel (SIGMA 10514 LROPV/ SIGMA 10514 POLA) at Damen Schelde Naval Shipyard in Vlissingen for the Mexican Navy. The vessel was constructed modularly in six modules, two modules were constructed in Vlissingen and the other four modules in Mexico.


title: Sigma-class design

text: According to the Defense Security Cooperation Agency Major Arms Sale notification on 5 January 2018, the primary weapon systems for the SIGMA class will include RGM-84L Harpoon Block II, RIM-162 ESSM with eight cell MK 56 VLS launcher, MK 54 Mod 0 lightweight torpedoes with two MK 32 Surface Vessel Torpedo Tubes (SVTT) triple tube launchers, Block II Rolling Airframe Missile (RAM) missiles and Bofors 57 mm gun.


title: Sigma-class design

text: In April 2018 Damen Group contracted Spanish defense technology company Indra to equip the Mexican Navy's new long-range offshore patrol vessel (POLA) with its RIGEL electronic defense system.


title: Kaguya-sama: Love Is War (film)

text: In the senior high school division of Shuchiin Academy, student council president Miyuki Shirogane and vice president Kaguya Shinomiya appear to be a perfect match. Kaguya is the daughter of a wealthy conglomerate family, and Miyuki is the top student at the school and well-known across the prefecture. Although they like each other, they are too proud to confess their love, as they believe whoever does so first would lose. The story follows their many schemes to make the other one confess or at least show signs of affection.


title: Whidbey Island-class dock landing ship

text: The "Whidbey Island"-class dock landing ship is a dock landing ship of the United States Navy. Introduced to fleet service in 1985, this class of ship features a large well deck for transporting United States Marine Corps (USMC) vehicles and a large flight deck for landing helicopters or V-22 Ospreys. The well deck was designed to hold four LCAC hovercraft, five if the vehicle ramp is raised, for landing Marines. Recent deployments have used a combination of LCU(s), AAVs, tanks, LARCs and other USMC vehicles. The "Whidbey Island" class of ship also uniquely benefits from multiple cranes and a shallow draft that further make it ideal for participating in amphibious operations.


title: Whidbey Island-class dock landing ship

text: As of 2009, all ships of the class are scheduled to undergo a midlife upgrade over the next five years to ensure that they remain in service through 2038. The ships will be upgraded annually through 2013, and the last ship will be modernized in 2014. Ships homeported on the East Coast will undergo upgrades at Metro Machine Corp., while those on the West Coast will receive upgrades at General Dynamics National Steel and Shipbuilding Company in San Diego.


title: Whidbey Island-class dock landing ship

text: Major elements of the upgrade package include diesel engine improvements, fuel and maintenance savings systems, engineering control systems, increased air conditioning and chill water capacity, and replacement of air compressors. The ships also replaced steam systems with all-electric functionality that will decrease maintenance effort and expense.


title: Whidbey Island-class dock landing ship

text: "Whidbey Island" and "Tortuga" were scheduled to be decommissioned during the FYDP 2013-2018, and the remaining ships of the class were scheduled to be retired before the end of their service lives. However, the Navy reversed its plan to decommission "Whidbey Island", and in 2015 Assistant Secretary of the Navy Sean Stackley informed Congress of the Navy's plans to modernize "Whidbey Island", "Tortuga", and "Germantown" to extend them each to a 44-year total service life. As of March 2015, the first "Whidbey Island"-class LSD to be retired will be "Fort McHenry" in FY 2027.


title: Polyp (zoology)

text: A polyp in zoology is one of two forms found in the phylum Cnidaria, the other being the medusa. Polyps are roughly cylindrical in shape and elongated at the axis of the vase-shaped body. In solitary polyps, the aboral (opposite to oral) end is attached to the substrate by means of a disc-like holdfast called a pedal disc, while in colonies of polyps it is connected to other polyps, either directly or indirectly. The oral end contains the mouth, and is surrounded by a circlet of tentacles.


title: Polyp (zoology)

text: In the class Anthozoa, comprising the sea anemones and corals, the individual is always a polyp; in the class Hydrozoa, however, the individual may be either a polyp or a medusa, with most species undergoing a life cycle with both a polyp stage and a medusa stage. In class Scyphozoa, the medusa stage is dominant, and the polyp stage may or may not be present, depending on the family. In those scyphozoans that have the larval planula metamorphose into a polyp, the polyp, also called a "scyphistoma," grows until it develops a stack of plate-like medusae that pinch off and swim away in a process known as strobilation. Once strobilation is complete, the polyp may die, or regenerate itself to repeat the process again later. With Cubozoans, the planula settles onto a suitable surface, and develops into a polyp. The cubozoan polyp then eventually metamorphoses directly into a Medusa.


title: Polyp (zoology)

text: The body of the polyp may be roughly compared in a structure to a sac, the wall of which is composed of two layers of cells. The outer layer is known technically as the ectoderm, the inner layer as the endoderm (or gastroderm). Between ectoderm and endoderm is a supporting layer of structureless gelatinous substance termed mesoglea, secreted by the cell layers of the body wall. The mesoglea can be thinner than the endoderm or ectoderm or comprise the bulk of the body as in larger jellyfish. The mesoglea can contain skeletal elements derived from cells migrated from ectoderm.


title: Polyp (zoology)

text: The sac-like body built up in this way is attached usually to some firm object by its blind end, and bears at the upper end the mouth which is surrounded by a circle of tentacles which resemble glove fingers. The tentacles are organs which serve both for the tactile sense and for the capture of food. Polyps extend their tentacles, particularly at night, containing coiled stinging nettle-like cells or nematocysts which pierce and poison and firmly hold living prey paralysing or killing them. Polyp prey includes copepods and fish larvae. Longitudinal muscular fibrils formed from the cells of the ectoderm allow tentacles to contract when conveying the food to the mouth. Similarly, circularly disposed muscular fibrils formed from the endoderm permit tentacles to be protract or thrust out once they are contracted. These muscle fibres belong to the same two systems, thus allows the whole body to retract or protrude outwards.


title: Polyp (zoology)

text: We can distinguish therefore in the body of a polyp the column, circular or oval in section, forming the trunk, resting on a base or foot and surmounted by the crown of tentacles, which enclose an area termed the peristome, in the centre of which again is the mouth. As a rule there is no other opening to the body except the mouth, but in some cases excretory pores are known to occur in the foot, and pores may occur at the tips of the tentacles. Thus it is seen that a polyp is an animal of very simple structure, a living fossil that has not changed significantly for about half a billion years (per generally accepted dating of Cambrian sedimentary rock).


title: Polyp (zoology)

text: The external form of the polyp varies greatly in different cases. The column may be long and slender, or may be so short in the vertical direction that the body becomes disk-like. The tentacles may number many hundreds or may be very few, in rare cases only one or two. They may be long and filamentous, or short and reduced to mere knobs or warts. They may be simple and unbranched, or they may be feathery in pattern. The mouth may be level with the surface of the peristome, or may be projecting and trumpet-shaped. As regards internal structure, polyps exhibit two well-marked types of organization, each characteristic of one of the two classes, Hydrozoa and Anthozoa.


title: Polyp (zoology)

text: In the class Hydrozoa, the polyps are indeed often very simple, like the common little fresh water species of the genus "Hydra". Anthozoan polyps, including the corals and sea anemones, are much more complex due to the development of a tubular stomodaeum leading inward from the mouth and a series of radial partitions called mesenteries. Many of the mesenteries project into the enteric cavity but some extend from the body wall to the central stomodaeum.


title: Polyp (zoology)

text: It is an almost universal attribute of polyps to reproduce asexually by the method of budding. This mode of reproduction may be combined with sexual reproduction, or may be the sole method by which the polyp produces offspring, in which case the polyp is entirely without sexual organs.


title: Polyp (zoology)

text: In many cases the buds formed do not separate from the parent but remain in continuity with it, thus forming colonies or stocks, which may reach a great size and contain a vast number of individuals. Slight differences in the method of budding produce great variations in the form of the colonies. The reef-building corals are polyp-colonies, strengthened by the formation of a firm skeleton.


title: Polyp (zoology)

text: Among sea anemones, sexual plasticity may occur. That is, asexually produced clones derived from a single founder individual can contain both male and female individuals (ramets). When eggs and sperm (gametes) are formed, they can produce zygotes derived from "selfing" (within the founding clone) or out-crossing, that then develop into swimming planula larvae.


title: Polyp (zoology)

text: The overwhelming majority of stony coral ("Scleractinia") taxa are hermaphroditic in their adult colonies. In these species, there is ordinarily synchronized release of eggs and sperm into the water during brief spawning events. Although some species are capable of self-fertilization to varying extents, cross-fertilization appears to be the dominant mating pattern.


title: Polyp (zoology)

text: The name polyp was given by René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur to these organisms from their superficial resemblance to an octopus (, ultimately from Ancient Greek adverb (, "much") + noun (, "foot")), with its circle of writhing arms round the mouth. This comparison contrasts to the common name "coral-insects" applied to the polyps which form coral.


title: Polyp (zoology)

text: 75% of the world's corals are threatened due to overfishing, destructive fishing, coastal development, pollution, thermal stress, ocean acidification, crown-of-thorns starfish, and introduced invasive species.


title: Polyp (zoology)

text: In recent decades the conditions that corals and polyps have found themselves in have been changing, leading to new diseases being observed in corals in many parts of the world, posing even greater risk to an already pressured animal. Aquatic life has been put under a substantial amount of stress because of the pollutants caused by land-based agriculture. Particularly, exposure to the insecticide profenofos and the fungicide MEMC have played a major part in polyp retraction and biomass decrease.


title: Polyp (zoology)

text: There have been many experiments resulting supporting hypothesis that heat stress in "Acropora tenuis" juvenile polyp provoke an up-regulation of protein in the endoplasmic reticulum. The results vary based on the polyp characteristics such as age, type, and growth stage.


title: The Button (Reddit)

text: The Button was an online meta-game and social experiment that featured an online button and 60-second countdown timer that would reset each time the button was pressed. The experiment was created by Josh Wardle, also known as "powerlanguage". The experiment was hosted on the social networking website Reddit beginning on April 1st, 2015 (April Fools' Day) and was active until June 5th, 2015, the first time that no user pressed the button before the timer reached zero. The game was started by a Reddit administrator.


title: The Button (Reddit)

text: The Button garnered enthusiasm from Reddit users worldwide, attracting clicks from over one million user accounts. Various websites, browser extensions, and mobile applications were created for tracking the live statistics of the Button and enabling users to visit the Button when the timer dropped below a certain threshold.


title: The Button (Reddit)

text: The Button's countdown timer reached zero several times due to technical issues, but was reset since button press attempts were still being made. On 5 June 2015, the countdown timer reached zero with no button press attempts, ending the experiment.


title: The Button (Reddit)

text: The specific Reddit community (subreddit) for the Button had the standard Reddit appearance but with a molly-guarded button next to a 60-second countdown timer at the top of the page. When the button was clicked by any user, the countdown would reset for every user. The button could only be pressed once by each unique Reddit account created before the event started on 1 April. There was also a cumulative count of all unique users who had clicked the button since its launch. The Button was a light blue color.


title: The Button (Reddit)

text: All users received a small dot called a "flair" next to their username. Users who had not pressed the button had a grey dot, and users who had pressed it had a dot colored based on the state of the timer when the button was pressed. When hovering the cursor over this colored dot, the time in seconds on the counter when the user clicked the button would be displayed. On the subreddit, users' times and the subsequent flair colors became status symbols.


title: The Button (Reddit)

text: On 5 June 2015, at 21:49:53 UTC, a person with Reddit username "BigGoron" became the last user to press the button (dubbed "The Pressiah" by the community). Sixty seconds later, the countdown timer reached zero and ended 2 months and 4 days after it had begun. The button was deactivated, and overlaid with the text "the experiment is over". Six minutes later, Wardle announced that the forum would be archived within ten minutes.


title: The Button (Reddit)

text: The Button experienced technical issues which caused it to reach zero despite users pressing it in time. This occurred multiple times and was attributed to database errors by Reddit's administrators. The outages caused community discontentment and some speculation that the subreddit was being gamed by the administrators. Although The Button was revived within a day of the outages, the administrators of Reddit considered closing The Button experiment early.


title: The Button (Reddit)

text: The inherent segregation on this specific Reddit community (subreddit) led to the development of cult-like groups surrounding specific flairs or beliefs towards the button itself. Each individual cult could be easily identified by the color of its flair, represented by the short time frame in which any user pressed the button. Of the cults, the most basic was the division between those that would press the button, "the pressers", and those that would abstain, "the non-pressers". Others formed around each of the six other colored flairs.


title: The Button (Reddit)

text: Each cult developed its own beliefs surrounding what would happen when the clock reached zero, and its own public image. Some cults, such as the "grey" flair given to those who would not press the button, or the "red" flair given to those that pressed it when the timer showed 0–11 seconds, were regarded as pretentious and arrogant about their beliefs, and hostile towards newcomers. Others, like the "purple" flair given to those that pressed the button between 52 and 60 seconds, were seen as compassionate and welcoming to new members. Regardless, each cult maintained a public image through the use of dressed and color-coded mascots. In addition, names arose to represent each of the cults, such as "The Emerald Council" for the green flair, or "The Violet Hand" for the purple flair. Eventually the community built around the button referred to the colored flairs not by their color, but by the name given to the cults representing them.


title: The Button (Reddit)

text: Within the larger group of the grey flair, those who would not press the button, smaller cults formed with unique beliefs to others that also held the grey flair. Of these, the most prominent was the "Knights of The Button". Members of this cult attempted to prevent the button from ever reaching zero by pressing it before the clock could fully descend. The 'Knights' went so far as to create an algorithm associated with a large pool of thousands of "dummy" accounts to press the button automatically before it could reach zero. However, of these accounts, one was not verified to have been created prior to April 1, 2015, and therefore was unable to press the button, permitting it to finally reach zero.


title: Annabelle Dexter-Jones

text: Annabelle Dexter-Jones (born 25 October 1986) is a British-American actress and director known for her roles in "Succession" and "Under the Silver Lake". Jones is the daughter of jewellery designer Ann Dexter-Jones and Foreigner guitarist Mick Jones. Through her mother, she is the half-sister of Charlotte Ronson, Samantha Ronson and Mark Ronson. She was born in London, England.


title: Sadaharu Oh

text: Sadaharu Oh (Japanese: , "Ō Sadaharu"; born May 20, 1940), also known as Wang Chen-chih (), is a Japanese-born former baseball player and manager who is currently the chairman of the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks of Nippon Professional Baseball. Oh holds the world lifetime home run record, having hit 868 home runs during his professional career. He established many NPB batting records, including runs batted in (RBI) (2,170), slugging percentage (.634), bases on balls (2,390), and on-base plus slugging percentage (OPS) (1.080). In 1977, Oh became the first recipient of the People's Honour Award. He was inducted into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame in 1994.


title: Sadaharu Oh

text: Oh batted and threw left-handed and primarily played first base. Originally signed with the powerhouse Yomiuri Giants in 1959 as a pitcher, Oh was soon converted to a full-time hitter. Under the tutelage of coach Hiroshi Arakawa, Oh developed his distinctive "flamingo" leg kick. It took Oh three years to blossom, but he went on to dominate the baseball league in Japan. He was a 15-time home run champion and was named to the All-Star team 18 times. More than just a power hitter, Oh was a five-time batting champion and won the Japanese Central League's batting triple crown twice. With Oh at first base, the Yomiuri Giants won 11 Japan Series championships. Oh was named the Central League's Most Valuable Player nine times. In addition to the world career home run record, he held Japan's single-season home run record with 55, until Wladimir Balentien broke the record in 2013.


title: Sadaharu Oh

text: Oh played his entire professional career with the Giants and was their manager from 1984 to 1988. He also managed the Fukuoka Daiei/Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks from 1995 to 2008. He was the manager of the Japanese national team in the inaugural World Baseball Classic. The Japanese team defeated the Cuban national team for the championship. He is currently the chairman of the Hawks.


title: Sadaharu Oh

text: Oh was born in Sumida, Tokyo, as the fourth of six children of a Japanese mother Tomi Oh (née Tozumi ) and a Chinese father (王仕福 "Wáng Shìfú") from Tsingtien County (Qingtian County), Chekiang (Zhejiang). Oh was the youngest of four children during most of his childhood, as his twin sister died when they were 15 months old, and his younger sister died shortly after she was born. Although born in Japan, Oh is a citizen of the Republic of China (ROC), as his father had left for Japan when the ROC still governed Mainland China and chose to retain his ROC citizenship.


title: Sadaharu Oh

text: Oh managed to make his high school team, and, in 1957, made it to the Spring Koshien Tournament with the second-year Oh as its ace pitcher. Before the tournament started, Oh suffered serious blisters on two fingers of his pitching hand. Oh pitched the entire first game at Koshien and his team won. The next day, Oh pitched another complete game and earned the victory, but the blisters worsened. Oh faced the prospect of pitching two more games on consecutive days for the championship with injuries. Oh pitched and won another complete game, enduring the pain.


title: Sadaharu Oh

text: Oh was able to just make it through his fourth complete game in four days, squeaking out a one-run victory. Oh won the championship, though was not allowed to play in the Kokutai due to being Chinese.


title: Sadaharu Oh

text: In 1959, he signed his first professional contract as a pitcher for the Yomiuri Giants. However, Oh was not a strong enough pitcher to succeed professionally, and soon switched to first base, working diligently with coach Hiroshi Arakawa to improve his hitting skills. This led to the development of Oh's distinctive "flamingo" leg kick. His batting average jumped from .161 in his rookie season to .270 in 1960, and his home runs more than doubled. His performance dipped slightly in both statistical categories in 1961, but Oh truly blossomed in 1962, when he hit 38 home runs.


title: Sadaharu Oh

text: In 1964, Oh hit 55 home runs, a single-season record he owned for 37 years until it was tied by Tuffy Rhodes in 2001. Oh surpassed 50 home runs in a season two other times, in 1973 and 1977.


title: Sadaharu Oh

text: Oh became friends with Hank Aaron, his contemporary in Major League Baseball. The two squared off in a home run derby before an exhibition game at Korakuen Stadium on 2 November 1974, after Aaron eclipsed Babe Ruth's home run record. By that time, Oh was running away with the Japanese home run record, having become the first Japanese baseball player to hit 600 career home runs that year. Aaron won, 10-9.


title: Sadaharu Oh

text: His hitting exploits benefited from the fact that for most of his career he batted third in the Giants' lineup, with another very dangerous hitter, Shigeo Nagashima, batting fourth; the two players forming the feared "O-N Cannon". In his autobiography, "Sadaharu Oh: A Zen Way of Baseball" (), Oh said he and Nagashima were not close, rarely spending time together off the field.


title: Sadaharu Oh

text: Sadaharu Oh retired in 1980 at age 40, having amassed 2,786 hits (third after Isao Harimoto (Jang Hoon) and Katsuya Nomura), 2,170 RBIs, a lifetime batting average of .301, and 868 home runs.


title: Sadaharu Oh

text: Sadaharu Oh was the assistant manager of the Yomiuri Giants between 1981 and 1983. He became the manager of the Yomiuri Giants between 1984 and 1988. He led the Giants to one Central League pennant in 1987. He was asked to retire as Giants manager after the 1988 season.


title: Sadaharu Oh

text: In 1995, he returned to baseball as the manager of the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks (later the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks). Oh led the Hawks to three Pacific League pennants in 1999, 2000 and 2003, and two Japan Series titles in 1999 and 2003.


title: Sadaharu Oh

text: In 2006, Oh managed the Japan national baseball team, winning the championship in the inaugural 2006 World Baseball Classic over Cuba.


title: Sadaharu Oh

text: On July 5, Oh announced that he was taking an indefinite leave of absence from the Hawks to combat a stomach tumor. On July 17, 2006, Oh underwent laparoscopic surgery to remove his stomach and its surrounding lymph nodes. The surgery was considered to be a success. Although the tumor was confirmed to be cancerous, it was caught in early stages. He returned to coaching the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks, although he announced he would retire at the end of the 2008 season as manager (but remain as Hawks' GM). He retired as a manager in 2008.


title: Sadaharu Oh

text: On three occasions, foreign-born players challenged Oh's single-season home run record of 55 and faced Oh-managed teams late in the season. On each occasion, Oh's pitchers refused to throw strikes to them.


title: Sadaharu Oh

text: In 1985, American Randy Bass, playing for the Hanshin Tigers, came into the last game of the season against the Oh-managed Giants with 54 home runs. Bass was intentionally walked four times on four straight pitches each time. Bass reached over the plate on the fifth occasion and batted the ball into the outfield for a single. After the game, Oh denied ordering his pitchers to walk Bass, but Keith Comstock, an American pitcher for the Giants, later stated that an unnamed Giants coach had threatened a fine of $1,000 for every strike that any Giants pitcher threw to Bass. The magazine Takarajima investigated the incident and reported that the Giants front office had likely ordered the team not to allow Bass an opportunity to tie or break Oh's record. For the most part, the Japanese media remained silent on the incident, as did league commissioner Takeso Shimoda.


title: Sadaharu Oh

text: In 2001, American Karl "Tuffy" Rhodes, playing for the Osaka Kintetsu Buffaloes, hit 55 home runs with several games left. The Buffaloes played the Oh-managed Fukuoka Daiei Hawks on a late weekend series in Fukuoka. Rhodes was intentionally walked during each at-bat. Hawks catcher Kenji Johjima could be seen grinning as he caught the intentional balls. Again, Oh denied any involvement and Hawks pitching coach Yoshiharu Wakana stated that the pitchers acted on his orders, saying, "I just didn't want a foreign player to break Oh's record." Rhodes completed the season with 55 home runs. Hawks pitcher Keisaburo Tanoue went on record saying that he wanted to throw strikes to Rhodes and felt bad about the situation.


title: Sadaharu Oh

text: In 2002, Venezuelan Alex Cabrera hit 55 home runs with five games left in the season and his team played Oh's Hawks. Oh told his pitchers to throw strikes to Cabrera, but most of them ignored his order and threw balls well away from the plate. After the game, Oh stated, "If you're going to break the record, you should do it by more than one. Do it by a lot." In the wake of the most recent incident involving Cabrera, ESPN listed Oh's single-season home run record on its list of "The Phoniest Records in Sports".


title: Sadaharu Oh

text: Wladimir Balentien, a Curaçaoan born player, broke Oh's home run record on September 15, 2013, by hitting his 56th and 57th home runs of the season in a game against the Hanshin Tigers. Balentien ended that season with 60 home runs.


title: Sadaharu Oh

text: Oh was married to , and had three daughters with her. She died of stomach cancer, the same disease he had in 2006, in December 2001 at age 57. Their second daughter, Rie (born in 1970), is a sportscaster and presenter on the J-Wave radio network.


title: Yukta Mookhey

text: Yukta Inderlal Mookhey is an Indian civic activist and the winner of Miss World 1999. She is the fourth Indian woman to win Miss World and was previously crowned as Femina Miss India World in 1999. She is a former model and actress, and has worked in Hindi films.


title: Yukta Mookhey

text: Mookhey was born in Bangalore in a Sindhi family and was raised in Dubai until Mookhey was seven years of age. Her family moved back to Mumbai in June 1986. Her mother Aroona used to run a grooming saloon in Santa Cruz, Mumbai and her father, Inderlal Mookhey was a former Managing Director of a clothing company. After school, she studied zoology at the V. G. Vaze College in Mumbai. She has a diploma in computer sciences from Aptech and has studied Hindustani classical music for three years.


title: Yukta Mookhey

text: In 1999, Mookhey entered herself into the Femina Miss India contest, where she was shortlisted as a contestant. In the semifinal round during the grand finale, she was asked a question from the judge Viv Richards - “How do you define a true sports person?”, to which she answered:


title: Yukta Mookhey

text: Mookhey proceeded to the succeeding round, where all her fellow Top 5 delegates were asked the same question - “In the context of the recent controversy, if you were Chelsea Clinton, what is the single most important advice, you as a daughter would you give to your parents Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, and why?”, to which she stated:


title: Yukta Mookhey

text: At the end of the event, she was crowned as Miss India World 1999 by the outgoing titleholder Annie Thomas, giving her the right to represent India at the Miss World 1999 contest.


title: Yukta Mookhey

text: The 49th edition of the Miss World pageant was held on 4 December 1999 at Olympia, London and 93 delegates from around the world competed for the title. During the pageant's question and answer round, she was asked if she could be anyone in the world who would she want to be. Mookhey replied - “It would have to be Audrey Hepburn. It was her inner beauty, compassion and her aura. The calm that she had inside her reflected.”


title: Yukta Mookhey

text: At the end of the event, Mookhey was crowned as Miss World 1999 by her predecessor Linor Abargil from Israel. The first runner-up title was won by Martina Thorogood from Venezuela, followed by the second runner-up, Sonia Raciti of South Africa. Mookhey also won the Asia & Oceania's Queen of Beauty Award during the Miss World contest. Mookhey became the fourth woman from India to win Miss World after Reita Faria in 1966, Aishwarya Rai in 1994 and Diana Hayden in 1997.


title: Yukta Mookhey

text: After Mookhey's tenure as Miss World, she involved herself in various social and charitable causes. She has worked for the people affected by HIV/AIDS, breast cancer and thalassemia. Mookhey has pledged to donate her organs. In connection with this, she stated, “This step will benefit someone, once I leave this world”. She also works as an educationist and provides motivational counseling in various platforms. She partnered with an NGO to guide young girls from the slums, nudging them towards self-contemplation, understanding their needs and help them to become aware of their bodies, through counseling.


title: Yukta Mookhey

text: She has voiced against illegal child labour carried out in India's firecracker industries, which is an offense under the Indian law. She has also aided the people with hearing impairment, from marginalized and low-income segment of the society. She expressed - “I have spent my time learning the Indian sign language because I feel that hearing impaired people have so much latent creativity and are hampered only by their inability to communicate. I would like to help them by drawing attention to this issue.”


title: Yukta Mookhey

text: Mookhey is an environmental activist, and has participated in various clean drives and social movements to prevent deforestation. In 2018, she joined a campaign to prevent illegal tree cutting talking place at the Salim Ali Bird Sanctuary, to pave way for road and metro constructions. During the movement, she stated - “I don't see any reason behind constructing road and metro from the sanctuary. The metro can be constructed underground and the road can be made elsewhere. Humans are not capable of making of what ‘Mother Earth’ can do. So we are just asking to stop the works and also stop cutting the trees.” She also consigned a letter to the Pune Municipal Corporation's Heritage Cell, to include the bird sanctuary in the list of national heritage sites.


title: Yukta Mookhey

text: She supports the Swachh Kalyani Nagar initiative in Pune, and had campaigned the households to process their waste effectively through segregation and recycling, ensuring minimum to zero garbage generation from individual societies.


title: Yukta Mookhey

text: On 7 September 2008, Mookhey got engaged to Prince Tuli, a New York-based businessman and financial consultant at a ceremony held at the Grand Maratha in Mumbai. The marriage was held on 2 November 2008 in a traditional Sikh ceremony at a Nagpur Gurudwara followed by a reception. They have one son together.


title: Yukta Mookhey

text: Her brother Kanwal Mookhey is a businessman and is married to Indian television actress Karishma Randhawa.


title: Yukta Mookhey

text: In July 2013, Mookhey accused her husband and in-laws of subjecting her to domestic violence and harassment, and a FIR was registered under Sections 498A (cruelty) and 406 (criminal breach of trust) of the Indian Penal Code. She also accused Tuli under IPC section 377 (unnatural sex). In June 2014, the couple obtained a consensual divorce.


title: Yukta Mookhey

text: Mookhey entered the film industry in 2001 through the Tamil movie "Poovellam Un Vasam", where she appeared in a song titled "Yukta Mookhey". She made her Hindi film debut with "Pyaasa" in 2002 starring with Aftab Shivdasani. The film proved to be a flop at the box office. Mookhey was cast in "Market" but had to drop out due to an injury. In 2003, she signed "Kab Kyon Kahan" and "Hum Teeno", but both films where later shelved. She was later signed up in the 2004 release , but had to drop the project. In 2005, she acted in two films "Memsahab" and "Love in Japan" and in 2006, she appeared in the music video "Kathputali".


title: Hachimaki

text: A is a Japanese headband, usually made of red or white cloth, typically featuring a design of kanji at the front. It is worn as a symbol of effort or courage by the wearer, especially by those in the military, or to simply keep sweat off one's face.


title: Hachimaki

text: The origin of the is uncertain. The most common theory states that they originated as headbands worn by samurai, worn underneath armour to stop cuts from their helmets and to make wearing their helmets more comfortable.


title: Hachimaki

text: are typically decorated with inspirational slogans, such as . They are also typically decorated with the rising sun motif, usually in the center of the headband.


title: Frida Kahlo Museum

text: The Frida Kahlo Museum (Spanish: "Museo Frida Kahlo"), also known as the Blue House ("La Casa Azul" for the structure's cobalt-blue walls, is a historic house museum and art museum dedicated to the life and work of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. It is located in the Colonia del Carmen neighborhood of Coyoacán in Mexico City. The building was Kahlo's birthplace, the home where she grew up, lived with her husband Diego Rivera for a number of years, and where she later died in a room on the upper floor. In 1957, Diego Rivera donated the home and its contents in order to turn it into a museum in Frida's honor.


title: Frida Kahlo Museum

text: The museum contains a collection of artwork by Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and other artists along with the couple's Mexican folk art, pre-Hispanic artifacts, photographs, memorabilia, personal items, and more. The collection is displayed in the rooms of the house which remains much as it was in the 1950s. It is the most popular museum in Coyoacán and one of the most visited in Mexico City.


title: Frida Kahlo Museum

text: The house/museum is located in Colonia del Carmen area of the Coyoacán borough of Mexico City. Coyoacán, especially the Colonia del Carmen area, has had an intellectual and vanguard reputation since the 1920s, when it was the home of Salvador Novo, Octavio Paz, Mario Moreno and Dolores del Río. Today, the area is home of a number of the borough's museums. The house itself is located on the corner of Londres and Allende Streets, and it stands out for its cobalt-blue walls, giving it the name La Casa Azul (The Blue House). Like most of the other structures in the area, the house is built around a central courtyard with garden space, a tradition since colonial times. Originally, the house enclosed only three sides of this courtyard, but later the fourth side was added to enclose it entirely. The house covers 800m and the central courtyard is another 400m. As it was built in 1904, it originally had French-style decorative features but later it was changed to the plainer façade seen today. The building has two floors with various bedrooms, studio space, a large kitchen and dining room. The entrance hall was decorated by a mosaic in natural stone by Mardonio Magaña of the Escuela de Pintura al Aire Libre in Coyoacán, inspired by the murals done by Juan O’Gorman at the Ciudad Universitaria.


title: Frida Kahlo Museum

text: Originally the house was the family home of Frida Kahlo, but since 1958, it has served as museum dedicated to her life and work. With about 25,000 visitors monthly, it is one of Mexico City's most-visited museums, and the most-visited site in Coyoacán. The museum is supported solely by ticket sales and donations.


title: Frida Kahlo Museum

text: The museum demonstrates the lifestyle of wealthy Mexican bohemian artists and intellectuals during the first half of the 20th century. The entrance ticket to the Casa Azul allows for free entrance into the nearby Anahuacalli Museum, which was also established by Diego Rivera. According to records and testimony, the house today looks much as it did in 1951, decorated with Mexican folk art, Kahlo's personal art collection, a large collection of pre-Hispanic artifacts, traditional Mexican cookware, linens, personal mementos such as photographs, postcards and letters, and works by José María Velasco, Paul Klee, and Diego Rivera. Much of the collection is in display cases designed for their preservation. The museum also contains a café and a small gift shop.


title: Frida Kahlo Museum

text: The museum consists of ten rooms. On the ground floor is a room that contains some of Kahlo's mostly minor works such as "Frida y la cesárea", 1907–1954, "Retrato de familia", 1934, "Ruina", 1947, "Retrato de Guillermo Kahlo", 1952, "El marxismo dará salud", 1954 (showing Frida throwing away her crutches), with a watercolor "Diario de Frida" in the center. This room originally was the formal living room, where Frida and Diego entertained notable Mexican and international visitors and friends such as Sergei Eisenstein, Nelson Rockefeller, George Gershwin, caricaturist Miguel Covarrubias, and actresses Dolores del Río and María Félix.


title: Frida Kahlo Museum

text: The second and third rooms are dedicated to personal effects and mementos and to some of Rivera's works. The second room is filled with everyday items Frida used, letters, photographs, and notes. On the walls are pre-Hispanic necklaces and folk dresses, especially the Tehuana-style ones that were Frida's trademark. Paintings in the third room include "Retrato de Carmen Portes Gil", 1921, "Ofrenda del día de muertos", 1943, and "Mujer con cuerpo de guitarra", 1916.


title: Frida Kahlo Museum

text: The fourth room contains contemporary paintings by artists such as Paul Klee, José María Velasco, Joaquín Clausel, Celia Calderón Orozco, and a sculpture by Mardonio Magaña. The fifth room contains two large Judas figures, “mujeres bonitos” figures from Tlatilco, State of Mexico and figures from the Teotihuacan culture. The large papier-mâché Judas figures and other papier-mâché monsters were traditionally filled with firecrackers and exploded on the Saturday before Easter.


title: Frida Kahlo Museum

text: The sixth and seventh rooms are the kitchen and dining room. Both are in classic Mexican style, with bright yellow tile floors, blue and yellow tile counters and a long yellow table, where Frida's stepdaughter Ruth stated that Frida spent much of her time. The two rooms are filled with large earthenware pots, plates, utensils, glassware, and more which came from Metepec, Oaxaca, Tlaquepaque, and Guanajuato, all known for their handcrafted items. Decorative features include papier-mâché Judas skeletons hanging from its ceiling, and walls with tiny pots spelling the names of Frida and Diego next to a pair of doves tying a lovers’ knot.


title: Frida Kahlo Museum

text: Off the dining room was Rivera's bedroom, with his hat, jacket, and work clothes still hanging from a wall rack. Next to this is a stairwell that leads from the courtyard area to the upper floor. This area also contains a large number of folk art items and includes about 2,000 votive paintings from the colonial period to the 20th century, other colonial era work, and more Judas figures.


title: Frida Kahlo Museum

text: The two rooms of the upper floor which are open to the public contain Frida's final bedroom and studio area. This is located in the wing that Rivera had built. The original furniture is still there. In one corner, her ashes are on display in an urn, which is surrounded by a funeral mask, some personal items, and mirrors on the ceiling. On her bed is a painted plaster corset she was forced to wear to support her damaged spine, and under the canopy is a mirror facing down which she used to paint her many self-portraits. The head of the bed contains the painting of a dead child, and the foot contains a photo montage of Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Mao Zedong. The pillow is embroidered with the words "Do not forget me, my love." Her wheelchair is drawn up to an unfinished portrait of Stalin, on an easel which is said was given to her by Nelson Rockefeller. Stalin became a hero to Kahlo after the Red Army victory over Nazi Germany on the Eastern Front in World War II.


title: Frida Kahlo Museum

text: The tour of the museum ends at the large courtyard garden which is completely enclosed by the four sides or wings of the structure. The courtyard area is divided by a stepped pyramid, a fountain, and a reflection pool. These were built in the 1940s when Rivera first moved into the house and built the fourth wing enclosing the house. This wing's walls which face the courtyard are decorated with marine shells and mirrors. There are also sculptures by Mexican artist Mardonio Magaña. One side of the courtyard contains the inscription "Frida y Diego / vivieron en / esta casa / 1929-1954" (Frida and Diego lived in this house – 1929–1954).


title: Frida Kahlo Museum

text: The house was constructed in 1904 in Colonia Del Carmen in Coyoacán, which was established on lands that belonged to the former Hacienda del Carmen, a property of the Carmelites in the colonial period. At that time and during the first half of the 20th century, Coyoacán was officially part of the Federal District of Mexico City, but was still relatively rural and separate from Mexico City's urban sprawl. Since the late 19th century, a number of Mexico City's wealthy had built country homes in the area, often imitating the colonial designs of the past. Colonia del Carmen became popular with artists and intellectuals starting around the 1920s, due to the promotion of it by Francisco Sosa and the establishment of the Escuela de Pintura al Aire Libre (Open Air School of Painting) at the former San Pedro Mártir Hacienda in 1923. Originally, the exterior of the house was decorated in a French-inspired motif, which was popular in Mexico in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.


title: Frida Kahlo Museum

text: Frida Kahlo was born in this house in 1907, and it remained her family home throughout her life. She spent her last thirteen years of it here as well. Frida was the daughter of Wilhelm (Guillermo) Kahlo, who immigrated from Europe to Mexico and native Mexican Matilde Calderón y González. Frida spent her childhood in this house. She stated that during the Mexican Revolution, her mother would open the windows of this house in order to donate supplies to the Zapata army when it was in the area in 1913. She also spent large amount of time in the house convalescing, first in 1918 when she was struck with polio which would leave one leg shorter than the other. When she was 18, a trolley accident left her badly mangled. She spent about two years confined to her bed in casts and orthopedic devices. It was then she began to paint as a way to pass the time. One of the works from this time has Frida on what appears to be a stretcher, her body bandaged and located to the side of this house.


title: Frida Kahlo Museum

text: Frida met Diego Rivera while he was painting murals at the Secretaria de Educacion Publica building and invited him to the Casa Azul to see her work. Rivera soon began to be a regular visitor to the house. Other notable artists followed, making the house one of the area's meeting places. After marrying Rivera, Frida moved from her childhood home to an apartment on Paseo de la Reforma, but Rivera paid off the family's mortgage on the Casa Azul. For most of the 1930s, Frida lived in other places in Mexico City or abroad, but visited her family in the home frequently and it appears in a painting done in 1936 called "Mis abuelos, mis padres y yo" also called "Arbol genealógico".


title: Frida Kahlo Museum

text: Because of intervention by Kahlo and Rivera, Russian Leon Trotsky obtained asylum in Mexico. Trotsky and his wife, Natalia Sedova, were first housed in La Casa Azul starting in January 1937. The windows facing the street were closed in with adobe bricks for Trotsky's safety as he was under a death sentence from Stalin. A high wall was built between this house and the adjoining one as well. From January 1937 to April 1939, Trotsky lived and worked here, writing treatises such as "Su moral y la nuestra" and his regular political articles. This would often cause security problems in the area, due to the hostility of Trotsky's political enemies. During all of this time, the house continued to be a meeting place for intellectuals, especially those associated with Communism. In April 1939, Trotsky and Sedova left the Blue House after Trotsky had a falling out with Rivera over ideology and Rivera's criticism of Trotsky's writings, moving to a nearby house on Viena Street.