The sexual revolution was prepared by a "first wave" of pioneers who campaigned against the sexual repression which was common in the 19th century. This change began, roughly, at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th century. One impetus came from the pioneers of birth control and family planning. The books and publicity of Marie Stopes in England and Margaret Sanger in the United States, changed the lives of many women.
Attitudes towards homosexuality and masturbation were altered by the publications of Havelock Ellis. Ellis was the first person to say in print that masturbation was normal, and did not cause any medical problems. The ideas of Sigmund Freud were also influential. He believed that people's strong instincts toward sexuality were repressed in order to meet the constraints imposed on them by civilized life.
Peter Martyr d'Anghiera
Peter Martyr d'Anghiera (2 February 1457 – October 1526) was an Italian-born historian of Spain and of the discoveries and explorations in the Americas.
The international form of his name is Pietro Martire d'Anghiera. In different languages, his name is written:
He was born on February 2, 1457 at Arona, near Anghiera (called now Angera) on Lake Maggiore, Lombardy, Italy. He went to Rome in 1477, at the age of twenty, and there he met important persons of the Catholic Church. In 1486, Anghiera met the Spanish ambassador in Rome, and with him to Spain in August, 1487, to the court of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella of Castile.
He wrote in Latin the first accounts of explorations in the Americas in a series of letters and reports that were published from 1511 to 1530 in chapters called "Decades". The first three "Decades", together with a description of his experiences in Egypt, were published in 1516 under the title: "De orbe novo decades cum Legatione Babylonica" or, for short, "De orbe novo" ("On the New World").
He was the first writer to use the word "Hispaniola" to name the island that Columbus named "La Española". He also wrote that the Taíno name of the island was "Quizqueia", a name that no other historian of that time mentioned. Quizqueia is used now as "Quisqueya" or "Kiskeya" for the whole island (in Haiti) or for the eastern part (in the Dominican Republic).
He died in October 1526 at Granada, Spain.
Wilhelm Reich
Wilhelm Reich (March 24, 1897 – November 3, 1957) was an Austrian-American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. In the 1920s he was a pupil of Sigmund Freud in Vienna and made important contributions to psychoanalysis ("Charakteranalyse" 1933; engl. 1945ff). His work was rediscovered by the activists of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.
During the 1920s Reich became involved in the social struggles of the time. In 1927 he joined the Communist Party. There he founded "SexPol", short for Sexual Politics. In 1933 he was kicked off from the Party, and in 1934 from the organisations of Psychoanalysis. At this time he started his own research on the biological foundations of psychoanalysis, later on called "orgonomy". Orgonomy was to be the science of orgone, a "primordial energy" Reich claimed to have discovered.
The other side of Reich's story is that he was blamed to have invented a pseudoscience method for treating cancer. He was exposed as a fraud in 1947 articles by journalist Mildred Edie Brady, published in the magazines "Harper's" and "The New Republic", the latter titled "The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich," with the subhead, "The man who blames both neuroses and cancer on unsatisfactory sexual activities has been repudiated by only one scientific journal". The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decided that they were dealing with a "fraud of the first magnitude".
Finally, in 1956 Reich violated an injunction got by the FDA, and was arrested. All his research equipment including his books was destroyed. He was sentenced to two years prison. Reich died on 3 November 1957 (aged 60) in the United States Penitentiary, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, Opinions about him remain very divided.
Reich had founded "Orgonon" in Rangeley, Maine after immigrating to the US. It was his home, laboratory and research center, and also Reich's burial place. It is now open to the public as the Wilhelm Reich Museum.
Jules Massenet
Jules Massenet (born Montaud nr. Saint-Étienne, 12 May 1842; died Paris, 13 August 1912) was a French composer. He is most famous for his operas, although he wrote a large amount of other music as well.
Jules’ father had a business making agricultural tools. His mother gave him his first piano lessons. In 1847 his father retired and the family moved to Paris. When he was ten years old he went to the Paris Conservatoire for piano and solfège studies. Over a period of ten years he studied there, gaining many prizes. He was taught composition by Ambroise Thomas who was an excellent music teacher.
Jules earned enough money to keep himself by giving piano lessons. He also played timpani in the orchestra of the Théâtre Lyrique. This helped him to get a good knowledge of French composers such as Gounod (especially his "Faust") as well as music by Gluck, Mozart and Beethoven. He was also very keen on the music of Berlioz and Wagner.
In 1863 he won the Prix de Rome (it was his second attempt). This allowed him to spend two years in Italy. During this time he travelled a lot but hardly composed anything.
In 1866 he returned to Paris where he married. He gave piano lessons. At this stage he had hardly written anything important. However, soon he was to start writing many famous works. He became friends with other composers: Saint-Saëns, Bizet, Delibes, Lalo, Fauré, Duparc and others. Several of these people competed in writing operas for competitions. Massenet wrote several works, but he found writing operas difficult. His operas never won any prizes.
In 1870 he served in the National Guard during the Franco-Prussian war. After the war he continued to compose, and he became professor of composition at the Conservatoire. He spent many years working on an opera "Le Roi de Lahore". This was a great success and helped him to become internationally famous. For many years he spent the winter in Paris and the summer in various places in the country where he could compose. His pupils at the Conservatoire included Pierné, Koechlin, Hahn, Enesco. In 1884 his opera "Manon" was produced at the Opéra-comique. This made him clearly the most famous opera composer of his time. It was an opéra-comique with some speech over the music. During the next 28 years he composed another 20 operas. Another opera that was particularly famous was "Werther". It was first performed in 1892 in Vienna and a year later in Paris. It was soon being performed in all the big European opera houses.
Some of his greatest operatic roles were written for the young American soprano Sybil Sanderson. This includes the main role in his popular opera "Thaïs". The story is set in Egypt and is about a monk who tries to persuade Thaïs to give up her life as a prostitute. However, he soon finds he is falling in love with her himself. This mixture of religion and salvation became an extremely popular subject for operas at that time. The "Méditation" from "Thaïs" is a short piece for violin solo. It is one of the best-loved of all Romantic violin solos.
He continued to compose lots of music even when his health was failing during his last years. He was a quiet, family man who hated it when people made a fuss about him. He liked best to spend his evenings quietly at home, or in the countryside during the summer. He continued to compose in a Romantic style to the end of his life, even though many composers around him (e.g. Debussy) were writing music which was more “modern” sounding.
Tokyo Game Show
The Tokyo Game Show is one of the biggest conferences for video games in the world. held in the Makuhari Messe, in Chiba Prefecture, Japan.
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