Gordon was born in London in 1833, where his father was a major in the Royal Artillery. While still a very small child the family moved to Dublin so his father could work on modernising the guns at the Pigeon House Fort. In 1837 they moved to Edinburgh when his father was posted to Leith Fort. The family were then sent to the island of Corfu where his father had to arrange for the guns to be placed in new positions. Gordon 's parents wanted him to have an English education so he was sent to Fullands School at Taunton. When he turned 14 he attended the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. He was often bullied, and he would become quiet and withdrawn. He go for several days without speaking to anyone. He would stand still and stare at the bullies until they felt uncomfortable and stopped. Gordon was accused of having bullied other students, and was punished by having to stay at the college for another term. He passed his exams and joined the Royal Engineers on the 23 June 1852.
Gordon worked as an engineer repairing various army buildings in Chatham, and repairing the fort at Pembroke. In 1855 he was sent to the Crimean War and took part in the siege of Sebastopol. After the war, Gordon was sent to survey and map the border between Russia and the Romanian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. In May 1857 he was sent to map the border between Russia and Turkey. He was awarded a Turkish war medal and the French Legion of Honour. Gordon returned to England at the end of 1858, where he was promoted to major, and took up a post at Chatham.
At the end of the Second Opium War in 1860, Gordon was sent to China with a force of soldiers to protect British interests. In 1863 he was put in charge of the "Ever Victorious Army", a mercenary army under the command of European officers. This army was to fight the Niang rebellion against the Manchu, and later the Taiping Rebellion. Gordon was able to create a highly disciplined and successful fighting force. By careful planning he was able to lead the Ever Victorious Army to victory of the rebels. The Chinese Emperor made him a Field Marshall in the Imperial Army and presented him with China's highest award, the peacock feather. The British Army promoted him to Lieutenant Colonel and he was made a Companion of the Order of the Bath. He returned to England at the end of 1864.
Gordon was made Commandant of Engineers at Gravesend. He had the job of repairing the forts guarding the Thames at Gravesend and Tilbury. Gordon was horrified by the number of poor people, especially old people and children. A man of strong religious belief, Gordon felt is was his duty to God to help provide food, clothing and education for these people. He spent about 90% of his army pay on the poor. The poor boys he called "Wangs", after the Chinese Princes of the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace.
Rhythmite
A rhythmite is layers of sediment or sedimentary rock laid down in a repeated pattern. This pattern may be varves, which are an annual pattern, or shorter or longer-term rhymites. Tides in some places have left rhythmites.
Rhythmites can show long-term prehistoric events, such as periodic floods, sea level changes, glaciation changes, earth's orbital variations, and other periodic climate changes.
Many rock formations show repeating patterns of strata. For example, clay layers may alternate with sandstone layers; or carbonate layers alternate with shales. This is usually caused by repeating cycles of climate. In warmer times the sea rises, and carbonate rocks are deposited in shallow subtropical seas. Later, ice builds up at the poles and the sea level drops. Then the same area is close to shore, and gets sand and mud washed down by rivers.
Deposits on land show patterns for similar reasons. A low-lying area will be a lake or a swamp during hot, wet periods, and maybe a desert or a mudflat during dry periods. Erosion takes place during the dry periods, and deposition takes place during the wet periods.
However, temperature and sea-level changes are not the only causes of rhythmites. In volcanic areas a pattern of deposition in lakes may be regularly interrupted by eruptions of volcanic ash, so that in the record of the rocks shales and mudstone alternates with tuff.
Varve
A varve is a pattern in sediment which is made by annual processes (deposits which vary during the year). Varves are amongst the smallest-scale events in stratigraphy. They form only in fresh or brackish water. Varves are important in palynology, and can be fossilized as rhythmites.
The classic varve archetype is a light/dark-coloured couplet deposited in a glacial lake. The light layer is usually silt and fine sand deposited when spring meltwater brings sediment into the lake.
During winter, when meltwater and its sediment is reduced and the lake surface freezes, fine clay-size sediment is deposited forming a dark-coloured layer.
Varve formation needs the absence of bioturbation (lake bottom disturbed by animals). Therefore, varves usually form under anoxic conditions.
Sundown town
A sundown town is a town that is or was purposely all-white. The term is widely used in the United States in areas from Ohio to Oregon and well into the South. The term came from signs that were allegedly posted stating that people of color had to leave the town by sundown. The minority people could not visit after sunset or spend the night in the town (even as a paying hotel customer). Such towns are also sometimes called “sunset towns” or “gray towns”.
Some towns placed signs at the town's boundary with statements similar to the one posted in Hawthorne, California, which read "Nigger, Don't Let The Sun Set On YOU In Hawthorne" in the 1930s.
In some cases, keeping minorities out was official town policy, through restrictive covenants written in land deeds, or by agreement between the real estate agents of the community. In others, the policy was enforced through intimidation. For example, law enforcement officers could stop all minorities found after sunset.
Though no one knows the number of sundown towns in the United States, the largest estimate was that the nation had several thousand. The highest proportion of confirmed sundown towns are in the state of Illinois. It is difficult to confirm sunset towns because the towns did not keep, or do not want to show, official documents stating their status as sundown towns. For example, "One Hundred Years of Progress: The Centennial History of Anna, Illinois," although more than 400 pages long, never mentions Anna's 1909 expulsion of African Americans, the sundown signs at the northern and southern city limits in 1954, or anything else about race.
Since the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and especially since the Civil Rights Act of 1968 prohibited racial discrimination concerning the sale, rental, and financing of housing, the number of sundown towns has decreased. However, as sociologist James Loewen writes in his book on the subject, it is impossible to precisely count the number of sundown towns at any given time, because most towns have not kept records of the ordinances or signs that marked the town's sundown status. His book, "Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism", notes that hundreds of cities across America have been sundown towns at some point in their history.
Loewen's book mentions that sundown status meant more than just African-Americans not being able to live in these towns. Essentially any African-Americans (or sometimes other groups) who came into sundown towns after sundown were subject to harassment, threats, and violent acts—up to and including lynching.