The passenger pigeon, or, wild pigeon was a species of bird, "Ectopistes migratorius", that was once common in North America. It lived in enormous migratory flocks — sometimes containing more than two billion birds — that could stretch one mile (1.6 km) wide and 300 miles (500 km) long across the sky, sometimes taking several hours to pass.
Some estimate that there were three billion to five billion passenger pigeons in the United States when Europeans arrived in North America. Others argue that the species had not been common in the Pre-Columbian period, but their numbers grew when devastation of the American Indian population by European diseases led to reduced competition for food.
The species went from being one of the most usual birds in the world during the 19th century to extinction early in the 20th century. At the time, passenger pigeons had one of the largest groups or flocks of any animal, second only to the Rocky Mountain locust.
Some reduction in numbers happened because of habitat loss when the Europeans started settling further inland. The primary factor emerged when pigeon meat was commercialized as a cheap food for slaves and the poor in the 19th century, resulting in hunting on a massive scale. There was a slow decline in their numbers between about 1800 and 1870, followed by a catastrophic decline between 1870 and 1890. Martha, thought to be the world's last passenger pigeon, died on September 1, 1914, in Cincinnati, Ohio.
In the 18th century, the passenger pigeon in Europe was known to the French as tourtre; but, in New France, the North American bird was called tourte. In modern French, the bird is known as the pigeon migrateur.
In Algonquian languages, it was called "amimi" by the Lenape and omiimii by the Ojibwe. The term passenger pigeon in English derives from the French word "passager", meaning to pass by.
Sergei Eisenstein
Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein (; January 23, 1898 – February 11, 1948) was a Soviet Russian movie director and movie theorist. He was known mostly for his silent movies "Strike", "The Battleship Potemkin" and "". He was also known for his historical epics "Alexander Nevsky" and "Ivan the Terrible". His work had a major impact on early movie directors because of his creative use of and writings about montage.
Eisenstein was born in Riga, Latvia but his family moved a lot in his early years. Eisenstein continued to move often during his life. Eisenstein's father Mikhail Osipovich Eisenstein was of German-Jewish and Swedish descent and his mother, Julia Ivanovna Konetskaya, was from a Russian Orthodox family. He was born into a middle-class family. His father was an architect and his mother was the daughter of a wealthy merchant. Julia left Riga the year of the 1905 Revolution. She brought Sergei with her to St. Petersburg. Sergei would return at times to see his father. His father would later move to join them around 1910. His mother soon divorced his father and moved to France away from the family.
At the Petrograd Institute of Civil Engineering, Sergei studied architecture and engineering, the job of his father. At school with his fellow students however, Sergei would join the military to serve the revolution. His father did not support his joining the army. In 1918 Sergei joined the Red Army with his father, Mikhail, supporting the opposite side. This brought his father to Germany after defeat, and Sergei to Petrograd, Vologda, and Dvinsk. In 1920, Sergei was transferred to a command position in Minsk, after success providing propaganda for the October Revolution. At this time, Sergei studied Japanese. He learned some three hundred kanji characters which he cited as an influence on his pictorial development. This also allowed him to see Kabuki theatre. Because of his studies, he traveled to Japan.
In 1920 Eisenstein moved to Moscow, and began his career in theatre working for Proletkult. His productions there were named "Gas Masks," "Listen Moscow," and "Wiseman". Eisenstein would then work as a designer for Vsevolod Meyerhold. In 1923 Eisenstein began his career as a theorist, by writing "The Montage of Attractions" for LEF. Eisenstein's first movie, "Glumov's Diary", was also made in that same year. Dziga Vertov hired at first as an "instructor" for the film The movie formed part of his theatre production "Wiseman".
"Strike" (1925) was Eisenstein's first full-length movie. "The Battleship Potemkin" (1925) was well liked by critics throughout the world. Because he was known throughout the world, Eisenstein was able to direct "" (also known as "Ten Days That Shook The World"). The movie was part of the tenth anniversary celebration of the October Revolution of 1917. He then directed "The General Line" (also known as "Old and New"). People in the outside world praised the movies. However, in the Soviet Union, Eisenstein's focus on structural issues such as camera angles, crowd movements and montage, was not liked by the much of the Soviet movie community.
In the autumn of 1928, Eisenstein left the Soviet Union for a tour of Europe. He was joined by Grigori Aleksandrov and cinematographer Eduard Tisse. The trip was supposed to allow Eisenstein and others to learn about sound motion pictures. It would also show the famous Soviet artists to the capitalist West. For Eisenstein, however, it was also an opportunity to see landscapes and cultures outside those found within the Soviet Union. He spent the next two years touring and lecturing in Berlin, Zurich, London, and Paris. In 1929, in Switzerland, Eisenstein supervised an educational documentary about abortion directed by Edouard Tissé entitled "Frauennot - Frauenglück".
In late April 1930, Jesse L. Lasky, working for Paramount Pictures, offered Eisenstein the chance to make a movie in the United States. He accepted a short-term contract for $100,000 and arrived in Hollywood in May 1930. However, this agreement failed. Eisenstein's approach to filmmaking did not work with the style and way movies were made in American movie studios.
Eisenstein proposed a biography of munitions invester Sir Basil Zaharoff and a movie version of "Arms and the Man" by George Bernard Shaw. He also made plans for a movie of "Sutter's Gold" by Jack London. But the studio's producers did not like the plan. Paramount then proposed a movie version of Theodore Dreiser's "An American Tragedy". This excited Eisenstein, who had read and liked the work, and had met Dreiser at one time in Moscow. Eisenstein completed a script by the start of October 1930. Paramount disliked it completely. They also found themselves intimidated by Major Frank Pease, president of the "Hollywood Technical Director's Institute". Pease, an anti-communist, started a public campaign against Eisenstein. On October 23, 1930, Paramount and Eisenstein declared their contract canceled. Eisenstein and his movie partners were given return tickets to Moscow, at Paramount's expense.
Eisenstein was faced with returning home as a failure. The Soviet movie industry was solving the sound-movie issue without him and his movies. His methods and ideas were becoming increasingly attacked as 'ideological failures'. They were called examples of formalism. Many of his theoretical articles from this period, such as "Eisenstein on Disney", have been found decades later as important scholarly texts. These are used in movie schools around the world.